LITMIR.BIZ

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      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 horror.

      Unbearable suffering; sights you didn’t want to look at, but couldn’t peel your eyes away from. So much pain: quiet tears with angry faces. I felt guilty for being alive and unhurt. I felt constantly in shock, forever on the verge of tears that could help no one. We put our heads down and we walked, and when we arrived at Aziz’s house and saw it still standing, relief flooded our faces with tears.

      We stayed awhile, with little to talk about but war and its effects; shops that were closed, schools that were bombed, neighbours or friends who had died.

      “Will I still be able to go to university?” I asked Papa.

      Hana interrupted, tutting and shaking her head. “Don’t fill the girl’s head with nonsense,” she said.

      I knew Papa disagreed with her, I knew he wanted me to study, but he didn’t reply to her, didn’t argue or attempt discussion.

      And soon after, we headed home again.

      Our relationship changed as we sat together in that basement waiting for bombs. We talked. About war, about democracy, about what might happen to a country suddenly liberated. Papa told me he didn’t believe it would be over quickly. He spoke of people with aspirations of power and leadership, all vying for a place; of corruption and capitalism and oil and Vietnam and Russia and civil war.

      And along the way, I asked him questions, and I felt we were becoming more than father and daughter. Somehow, we were becoming friends.

      Once, when he had finished talking, and that awkward silence again filled the basement as we waited for the roar of the planes and the bombs, he took me over to where the stairs met the wall. He dragged a chair across and told me to stand on it, told me to pull away the broken bricks, put my hand down the gap in the wall. I pulled out a metal box.

      “It’s for you,” he sighed. “If I’m not here. If anything goes wrong. If Mama doesn’t come back. There’s fifteen thousand dollars. I saved it. In case there was a ransom for your Mama, but…” He shrugged. “If that never comes… If things are too bad, then you must leave, study somewhere else, somewhere safe.”

      I put my hand out to him, but he drew away.

      “Baghdad is a wonderful city, it used to be one of the finest places to study, with the best universities, but it won’t be safe for a long time and if I’m not here to look after you…”

      He didn’t finish his sentence.

      I asked him why we couldn’t both go now, why we couldn’t start a new life together, but he just looked at me and told me he could never leave her; that without her, there was no new life, there was no life.

      Three and a half years, and still he believed she would come back. And while he believed, so did I, because I could never break his heart.

      

      Sometimes the bombs were so loud, and the ground shook so much, I imagined the earth was splitting, a crack forming, chasing its way to me and Papa, stretching wider and wider as it sneaked towards us without us knowing. I imagined that with the next explosion it would reach us, the basement floor would open

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