for, but soon I realised.
And I knew what it meant to him that it wasn’t there – that it must still be with her, somewhere, that green necklace with the filigreed gold.
I could do nothing to help him, and, selfishly, I wanted to get on with my life.
Why so much food? I wanted to ask. Why do we need bottles of water? Why a generator? But my papa was not one for conversation or for answers.
I was desperate to know what would happen when the war began. There was no ‘if’ any more, every sunrise bringing more inevitability. I didn’t follow the news as I suppose I should’ve, and people didn’t say much, but I watched the streets and the people and I felt the mood. Fear on people’s faces was the easiest emotion to read, and the news gave no answers, even if you dared to think the questions. I wanted to know, was desperate to know, what would happen and how long for. What about school? My hopes for university? What about my friends? What about Mama? What would it be like after?
What would be left?
Who would be left?
Would I?
On that day in March, which so many of us will never forget, Papa and I closed the windows, locked the doors, turned off the lights and – with a last look around – headed into the basement.
We sat on a mattress together, leaning up against the wall, surrounded by boxes and cartons, bottles of water and food, all sorts of everything. Papa looked at me with his arms outstretched and I curled myself into his embrace and waited for the bombs to come.
At the top of one of the walls was a tiny window, barely large enough to be of any use for anything, but while we waited, our eyes never left it. What we were waiting for, I’m not sure, and as the minutes ticked on, I wondered if it would happen at all. Were all the preparations for nothing? All the anticipation and dread and worry?
I felt it before I heard it. A rumble. A plane approaching? The window rattled. The ground shook under me, grumbling, then a bang.
No, not a bang – an explosion, a torrent of sound. Then another, the noise tearing through the air, ripples and echoes following it. I felt my body tense, leaned in to Papa. He stroked my hair, his breath even on my face.
And the window lit up orange.
And the basement rocked.
And the world was torn to pieces around us.
I squeezed closer to Papa and I felt his breath quicken, his heart race. I looked to his face and saw what I didn’t want to see. I saw fear in his dark eyes. He rocked me back and forth, watching the window. And I glanced up to it, and in a second it filled with white.
Time paused.
Silence.
Then I blinked. A green blur flashed in front of my eyes in the darkness. Papa threw me to the ground, covered me with his body.
The ground shook, my home shook. The window blew out and the sound and the force hit us with a punch. I felt it with every part of my body. My lungs expelling air, my heart trying to beat out of my chest, the thudding echoing in my ears. My legs weak, my hands clenching, my nails digging crescents into my skin. Fear coursed through me and sweat dripped from me as I waited for the next and the next and the next. I waited for the death which I was sure was searching for me.
I think I screamed. I think I cried. I was a baby in my papa’s arms and I wanted him to protect me. To save me. To keep me from harm. I closed my eyes and wished I could block out the sound. But it continued. Torrential, consuming, raucous noise. I tried to pick out sounds: alarms rhythmic, blaring; the roar of explosions; aircraft tearing through the skies; gunfire too loud to be gunfire; constant thunder.
Then calm, and we would breathe. We would catch each other’s eye. Was it over? Was that it? Had we survived?
And it would start again.
Shattering of glass, cracking of walls, the shaking of our doors upstairs, chairs crashing over above us. My mind, my imagination, went wild. What was happening outside? What had been hit? What was on fire? What would be left? What about my school? I saw pictures, images in my head. I saw my classroom, my books scattered around the floor, the wall missing, concrete and rubble in piles, desks destroyed, fire approaching, burning, eating its way through the corridors, edging towards my work, then engulfing it, consuming it.
My head showed me my worst fears. I felt helpless. I saw Mama in prison, the walls caving in around her, burying her; the guards running out, laughing, leaving her. I saw Aziz in his taxi, desperate to drive his fare home before the bombs began, and the road disappearing in an explosion in front of him, the plume of smoke rising into the sky, eating its way through the air. I saw Layla in a hospital bed, bandages over her face, blood seeping through, her parents not at her bedside, alone. I rubbed my eyes, shook my head, desperate to keep my imagination under control, to stop my feelings of dread.
And then the morning would come, and with it, would come quietness.
Night after night, far too many nights for me to remember, or want to remember, the bombing continued. And with every bang, every crash, every explosion, I waited, expecting our house to be hit. For my world to end. I couldn’t think about tomorrow, that maybe next it was my turn to die.
And after a while, I no longer cried. But my body still shook, fearing for my life, for Papa’s life, for Auntie Hana and Aziz and their horrid children, for Layla and her family, for all my friends, for my teachers, for the shopkeepers and the market traders. For Mama.
Our small window, fixed again, gave us clues. We prayed not to see fire, we prayed for no explosions so close to us that we could see orange or yellow or white. We prayed for no rubble. And in the morning, waking us from the little sleep we may have had, dusty sunlight would filter through and we would stare at each other for a moment, run our hands gently on each other’s faces, checking we weren’t dreaming, amazed and thankful that we, at least, had made it through another night. And with dread weighing us down like lead, we would open the door to our house and prepare ourselves for what we would find.
With all the bombs, and noises, and explosions and ground-shaking, it seemed impossible that anything could still have been alive out there. Time after time, I stepped out from the basement thinking Papa and I would be the only ones left. Alone in a deserted, bombed-out, destroyed city.
It became almost habit. We would check our house for damage; we would check the water supply, the electricity, the doors and windows. The first night we lost our water, the second night, the electricity. Then we would open the door and step outside into the scars and damage the city had to show us. I would look over to Layla’s house to make sure it was still there.
One morning, after a terrible night of bombing, we left straight away to visit Uncle Aziz and Aunt Hana, desperate to know what had become of them.
The day began well: we were not dead, and Layla’s house was still standing. These things gave us hope.
We lived close to the centre of the city, where there were many targets for the Americans. And so on the way to check on Aziz and Hana, the hope we held high in our chests was eaten away as we saw horror upon
