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Ezra

I watch my wife write what happened;

A child’s hand reached out to me from beneath the bodies, its henna blurred beneath the blood.

Jihane’s next sentence is slower to come.

But the only place to take the girl, was the burning hospital.

Tomorrow the manuscript leaves the apartment. Jihane’s publisher is expecting it.

Tonight is meant to be the end: a cup of mint tea, the file sent, the hard part behind us.

Next to her laptop lie the notes she pencils down as memories work themselves loose from wherever she buried them. The notes make me uneasy. Jihane has never believed in merciful omissions, not in her writing and not between us. But I cannot let her carry the book alone for two years and then ask her to silence it for my comfort.

She does not look up. No music. No television. Only the radiator ticking under the sill and the soft plastic tap of keys.

Outside, Berlin is wet and grey. A tram slides past. Bicycles hiss over the road. The sun has just gone down, but there is still some light in the sky. Across the street, the bakery is getting ready to close. By now, the cardamom buns would be gone. Jihane always pulls one apart while it’s still too hot, then pretends the sugar has not burned her fingers.

She turns the heat up when absorbed in her work, as though a sentence might stiffen in the cold. The room is too warm and I want to crack the window.

In another country, in a room whose walls had cracked under airstrikes, Jihane told me she wanted a place to write by a window.

And I wanted a chair. “A proper chair,” I told her. “Ugly. Brown. Comfortable.”

“Just for you?”

“Just for me. To sit in while you write by your window.”

“You won’t sit there and judge my sentences?” she said.

“Only the bad ones. That's why it needs to be comfortable.”

She laughed. “So rude.” Then she kissed me. Years later, she found the chair: ugly, brown, comfortable and too large for our Berlin apartment.

Now she has her window, and I sit beside the bookcase while she writes.

The chair’s cushion bears the shape of someone who has used it badly and often. One of her cardigans hangs over the arm. A small white sock is caught beneath one wooden leg.

She makes another pencilled note, puts the pencil back down and reads a paragraph aloud, barely moving her lips.

Outside, a bicycle bell rings twice.

She flinches.

Then laughs without making a sound.

I tell myself I do not want to interrupt. She turns toward my chair, but not directly to me.

“You always think people can bear less than they really can.”

I want to tell her I have been at her side the whole time.

Instead, I go quiet.

The radiator ticks beneath the window.

Her mouth tightens. She turns back to the manuscript.

Across the street, the baker begins lifting the unsold pastries from their trays. Cinnamon rolls. Apple turnovers. Éclairs. Small bright things arranged at careful angles. The baker lowers them into a black bag, one after another.

Jihane sees it now.

The baker folds the top of the bag closed with both hands.

Jihane watches until it disappears beneath the counter.

Her gaze drops to the paragraph.

Her mouth shapes a name.

Mariam.

The room leaves her eyes. I know that look. Soon she will be moving through the book again, line by line, and all I can do is watch.

She will not allow the pages to make the past more forgivable than it was.

I just wish she wouldn’t make herself live it all again.

But Jihane goes right back to the beginning.

Jihane

Last night, Mama divided the last can of beans among five bowls. The rice tin was empty.

When the air-raid sirens blared through the walls, swallowing the scrape of spoons against bowls, no one looked up.

But this morning, I woke to absolute silence. I lifted the blanket’s frayed edge to one ear and rubbed it. Its coarse threads scraped my fingertips, but I heard nothing. I tried the other ear. Still nothing.

Had I gone deaf in the night?

I lay beneath the layered blankets with one hand pressed flat to my chest. My heart struck against my palm. But I couldn't hear anything. I waited for sounds to rush in: the sirens, the violent rumbles rushing into the room and finding my ribs, the shiver of the window’s cracked glass in its frame, the quickened breathing of Mariam next to me pretending not to hear. My body refused to believe what my ears were handing it: nothing. None of those sounds came.

For a moment, I wanted the sirens back. They told me exactly what I needed to do.

Beside me, Mariam sighed and rolled deeper into the blankets. The sound reached me, soft but unmistakable. I let my hand fall from my chest.

Last night Mariam had been telling Baba about the faqqu'a iris.

“Why is it called faqqu'a?” Baba had asked.

“Because of the village. Each stem grows only one flower, right at the top.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“The whole hillside flowers Baba.”

He had listened with the solemn attention he gave any of his children, whatever they were telling him.

"Baba, promise me you'll take me."

He promised.

She was still describing the flowers when her voice thinned and stopped. She collapsed onto the living-room rug, her head missing the coffee table by an inch. The rest of us froze. Mama and Sami carried her to bed without speaking.

Now she lay with one hand tucked under her cheek. Hunger had sharpened her cheekbones and hollowed the skin beneath her eyes. Even asleep, one corner of her mouth curved as though she were keeping a joke from us. I eased my half of the blanket over her shoulder.

The silence held. If I moved quickly, I could leave the apartment and bring back bread for Mariam before the next siren. But my body had learned what my ears could not tell me: silence did not mean safety.

I listened, but only the small sounds came. The small sounds of life. A spoon struck the pot in the kitchen. The sound softened through the closed door and reached our room as three small taps. Mama always called us once the water was hot, but the taps told us first. I heard Baba’s cough from the living room, muffled into his fist. Mama moving quickly, cupboards opening and closing, her steps clipped and purposeful. I kept listening until the silence became crowded with ordinary things, and that was worse. Somewhere outside, faint and uneven, a child laughed, and far away, so far I didn’t really believe it, a bird.

The silence must have begun during the night after all. Everyone had gone to sleep speaking of it, perhaps hoping that repetition might pin it in place till morning. Mama had spoken of it with the fierce authority she used when she wanted the world to obey her. Baba had only nodded, his arms folded together, the battery lamp on the floor throwing light across the top half of his face and leaving his mouth unreadable in the shadow.

“Baklawas by lunch,” Sami said. “That is all I am asking for.” Mariam laughed. I almost told them the bakery might be rubble by morning. The words reached my teeth before I saw Mariam’s face, bright as she turned toward Sami. I closed my mouth. Only Sami was watching me. The joke had left his face. He had heard what I had not said.

Realism had begun to feel like the most useful thing I could provide our home. None of us had left the apartment for three weeks. Mama said there would be a queue for bread by morning. Queues for everything, Baba said. I had said nothing. A queue could form and still empty before any of us reached the front. Joining that kind of wishful talk is like standing up too quickly on an injured leg. You could do it, but why trust the leg not to buckle?

Mariam kicked half her blanket onto my side and slept with her mouth open, the tip of her nose reddened from the cold. Six years younger than me, annoying and teasing and loved.

Bread first. If I stayed any longer, the last loaves would be gone before I reached the front of the queue.

I pushed back the blanket and sat up.

My fifth of the beans had not lasted the night. My body had spent it on breath and the work of keeping me warm. By morning, the body had come back holding out its bowl. It asked with a slow pull beneath my ribs. I wished I could explain there was no more. That Mariam had fallen last night. That hunger should know who needed feeding first. But hunger seemed to not care who I loved.

The beans had been last night’s arithmetic. Morning brought harder sums: the likely length of the bread and water lines, the number of people ahead, the point at which waiting became useless. Mama would stop to talk. Baba would let older people go first. Mariam would bring home a friend. Sami would return with a single pastry, or whatever else had caught his eye. But me? I knew when to abandon one queue for another. I would count the people ahead and know which faces meant the bread would be gone before I reached the front. Once, that had been a small skill. Now it was a necessity.

The moment my feet touched the floor, cold climbed through my socks. I tied back my hair and checked the room as I did after every airstrike. Nothing had shifted. The curtain rod still leaned where one screw had worked loose; the folded card Mama had wedged around it had slipped halfway free. The plastic chair beside the wardrobe on Mariam’s side still held yesterday’s clothes in the heap only she understood. Above the wardrobe, years of damp had raised the paint into pale blisters.

I crossed to the window.

I could see a lot from the fourth floor, but I had not expected to see laundry. Across the road, a line had been strung between two balconies. It held a child's blue trousers and a white abaya pinned up by its sleeves, rising and falling like a flag. The fronts of the buildings on either side, which had not been as lucky as ours, had come away in slabs.

Rooms stood open to the morning: there was a mattress tipped against a wall, a cupboard with one door hanging loose, a child's pink bucket on a shelf no one could now reach.

The last piece of laundry hung off the end of a steel rod jutting out of a concrete wall. It was a grey curtain, torn almost all the way down the middle. Unlike the abaya and the blue trousers, it hadn't been hung out this morning. It had lived out there long enough to be bleached at the folds and frequented by the birds. When the wind caught it, it twisted around the rod and then tried to violently snap free. I wondered when it had last been whole.

Its owners must have hung it out on some other hopeful laundry day, thinking they would collect it that evening.

Behind me, Mariam shifted. She did not wake.

“Jihane. Mariam. Tea.”

Mama’s voice carried from the next room, louder than it had in weeks.

I pulled the blanket to Mariam’s chin.

“I’m going for bread,” I said.

I stepped into the living room and Mama looked up at once.