Free Bone Ash Sky by Katerina Cosgrove

pillowslip with a sharp, decisive flick. Rouba, too, was defiant in almost imperceptible ways. Gnarled and misshapen, another foolhardy tree.

BEIRUT, 1995
    I left the city at sixteen during the height of civil war, and I can recall that dreary afternoon as if it were yesterday. One of the wettest winters on record, the Armenian quarter flooded by relentless rains. Trees twisted and buckled under the onslaught of shells, rotting trunks exposed bruise-yellow and blue in the downpour. Some took on fantastic shapes: stripped limbs, coupling bodies in a death embrace. But I was too young to understand this, or any of what was going on: a city turning on itself.
    The airport had long since been bombed and reduced to rubble by the Israelis. I was booked on a UN diplomatic flight to the States, beneficiary of the machinations of an Armenian businessman of my grandfather’s generation, genocide survivor made good. Yes, you’ve guessed. Sarkis.
    He’d grown rich on something to do with oil, a new company with offices all over the Middle East and the Caucasus. Was it black market oil, terrorist links and shady arms deals? I liked to think so. It reinforced my perception of him as sinister, untrustworthy. My godfather in America, he called himself now. Lilit said Sarkis had been in the death camp with my grandfather, that they helped each other escape. I didn’t believe it. Why wouldn’t Minas have said so? Why was Sarkis never invited to our home when he was alive? There was something more to the story, something unnameable.
    Ever since Minas’s death, Sarkis visited us at Christmas and Easter with packaged food from London, duty-free whisky for Siran, a girlish gift for me. It was always wrapped perfectly, and something told me a shop-girl had twirled the ribbons, not him. He didn’t look like he could fold anything straight.
    â€˜Say hello to your godfather,’ Lilit whispered.
    â€˜But he’s not my godfather,’ I began to say.
    â€˜Look him in the eye when you speak; there’s a good girl.’ I saw the reprimand fire her eyes. Siran had already opted out, a crooked shadow in the corner. Sarkis always left early, pleading business commitments, but not before pressing damp American dollars into my reluctant palm.
    â€˜We have money,’ Lilit told me, as she did every day. ‘Enough to get you overseas and into a good school.’
    I cried, anticipating my inevitable departure. Lilit remained unmoved. ‘Study. Go to university. We’re modern now. No men to look after us.’
    I sobbed, burrowed my head into her lumpy breasts. ‘But how am I going to leave you?’
    She patted me on the back, hiked up my greasy pullover, kneaded my ribs, massaging my spine with weakened hands. I relaxed against the softness of her stomach; I was safe now, at least. I always loved her most. More than my mother, or my father.
    There are so many moments, milestones, tragedies, small joys – all gone, unrecorded. This moment is lost, too, but in my mind’s eye it’s so clear, so familiar. I can see the dark, low-ceilinged room of my childhood, multicoloured rugs on the floor around the hearth. And the lake Lilit always remembered, even in the midst of the desert or the ravaged city: the Armenian lake where she was born. She talked to me about it so many times: that lake with its colours of bone and ash and sky. And I still haven’t seen it.
    When the time came to leave Beirut, I’d grown into what Sarkis called a young lady. I flinched from such undisguised admiration in his face, his outspread hands. Chucking me under the chin, brushing against the tendrils of hair at my temples. His fingers smelled faintly of fish, and so did the money he continued to give me. He limped as he walked, his body looked as if it had been broken long ago then awkwardly put back together again. There were bright scars, still fresh-looking, on his nape and neck. My arrogant teenage