“This is going to be a very short story,” thought Laila. She looked at her watch, she tilted her unnaturally thin wrist towards the window in front of her in the wall above the ragtag desk in the corner of the attic, and she saw—reflected in the glass of the thin watch face, through the small window with its edges giving off large splinters—the red glow of the burning sky outside. She could hear the planes getting closer, coming for them in Neuköln in Southern Berlin now. “The bombs will be here in a few minutes,” she thought. She could already feel the heat of the flames approaching, but she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t want to run. She didn’t want to hide.
Her literature teacher had told her that stories were eternal, the day before they found him hanging in his apartment, covered in gin. He was going to be drafted; the war had been going on for a year and a half already. Laila had wanted to tell him that she knew the war would be over, that she knew that if he joined, they would make him an ambulance driver, and two months after getting out of basic training he would be shot in the groin and they would send him home humiliated, but still a man with many stories to tell, many important things to tell the world, which, if he played his cards right, could have made him a famous playwright. But instead, he had given himself over to oblivion; he had no family and they buried him in a numbered grave outside a prison.
But he was brave, she saw that now. That was something it had been so hard for her to be, given the dreams she had. Not that they seemed real: unlike the dreams of many people, they never seemed real, they seemed more than that, they seemed like an impossibly vivid recollection of something that had already happened long ago, that the black smudges on the sidewalks and the roughness of the hastily poured concrete, the chips from bullets on the columns of the city’s nicest buildings, were not the future, but a sort of past whose marks made her bones sore in the morning, and made her feel old. But sooner or later, the dreams always came true. She had seen this moment before; as surely as she knew she would make it through the first war, she knew that she would not make it through this one. She had seen before the thin silvery hands of her watch slowly turning against the eerie red of the reflection of the sky in the glass watch face. She had seen the blank page before her. And she had heard the bombs coming closer.
They are using incendiary bombs now. You can feel the air warming up, you can see the few grey leaves that remain on the street outside rustling around, soon to be swept up by the great updrafts that the fires produce.
She had never been able to be brave, because she saw most of it. She knew the day her father was going to have his finger crushed in the tank factory, and she begged him not to go. She knew the exact time her uncle, lying in the mud, would be snuffed out by the impact of a mortar in the early days of Verdun. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.
Laila mused that perhaps she had never done the right thing. She had not completely fought against the chains of destiny, she had not jumped in the street, nor feigned madness that day so her father would not go to work. Nor did she ever give into the sadness and anger and deny what she saw, and thinking herself insane, refuse to believe in the visions of the future, and just live, stupid but happy, in the world she saw by daylight.
But perhaps it was only that she had never let herself just live her life. She had never wanted to admit to herself that she had this gift, and so she had not taken determination to have free will and create a life for herself in the spaces between the visions that were left to her; that is, writing her own story. Maybe that was what she could do. Write a story for herself in the spaces, in the margins.
There was still time, because she was past time already. She stopped looking at her watch, for she was past the point that she could see clearly, the bombs were close now, but she didn’t care, for there would be no more futility. She threw her watch out into the street. She gazed as, seemingly in slow motion, first the leather band compressed, making it bounce a little, and then it landed face down and the glass shattered, the tiny shards scattering, dancing briefly in the wind, and then lying inert on the street. The wind, the drafts, swept them away a short time later, but this is not something that she saw.
She sat down to write. One small piece of beauty that she could create: something worthwhile, some small piece of eternity that might make her life of futility worthwhile. She put into it all the books she had ever read, and she glanced at most of them as she did it, the great shelves of titles nearly lacking covers now that got her through these last few months of shortages and bomb blasts. It was redemptive. She wrote very quickly, and stopped paying attention to time; she went to her shelf and ripped out the blank pages at the end of her books for more paper, and when she was finished with that, she ripped down old newspapers from the sloping ceiling, papers that she had been using for insulation, and to patch the holes in the roof, for lack of good wood.
She wrote of all the castles and forests of Germany, of all the fields and streams that she had never been able to see, trapped in this grey city of smoke staining bricks black; she wrote of daring princesses and gallant princes, of fierce queens and evil kings; of cunning witches, talking animals and thousand year curses. And at the end, all is well. In the end of the story, that is.
She walked to the window, She took a final affectionate look at the street where she had lived for the last eleven years. She could feel a strong updraft, and she cast her pile of papers out the window, and watched as they rose up into the burning sky.
A few minutes later, Laila and all her earthly possessions were destroyed by a bomb dropped by an American pilot idly smoking a cigarette in order to disguise his fear.
……………………………….
You could have been forgiven for thinking it was snowing in the streets, in the streets of Homs in Syria seventy years later. Small irregular pieces of hot ash rained down from the sky, but that didn’t do a lot against the cold, the terrible creeping cold of the night, which was why Akhmed, 14, and Ilias, 10, were out walking in the street. Their mother Zaina was still huddled in the cellar of their building, for she had given birth only half an hour before. As the boys walked, looking for some sort of insulation, something to keep them and their new baby sister off the concrete floor, a way to prevent them from freezing– already they had needed to burn their blankets– they tried again not to think of their father, who had gone off to fight with the FSA two years ago, and who they hadn’t seen since.
They could barely hear each other anymore. This round of shelling had only been going on for a few days, but if you took into account the bombardments of the past few months, that sometimes lasted for weeks, both of the boys should have been deaf already. And yet, they both tried. Akhmed understood the need to talk, the need to say something, if only to keep himself company. Who knew what he could do for Ilias; his brother had hardly known anything except war, and it showed in his vacant eyes, his air of solitude, and long silences which so unbecame his age.
The boys had been huddled in a smashed-in shopfront on a street corner for the last five minutes, after hearing a mortar blast land on the block to their east when they had made it only two blocks north of their cellar. Finally they could hear the bombs abating; it seemed the shelling was receding, or at least, that it was moving further east.
“Are you alright?” asked Akhmed.
Ilias just looked at him, and the boys stood facing each other for a moment, Ilias’ arms limp by his sides, his large head gazing up at Akhmed, as they paused, barefoot on top of broken glass on top of the concrete and dirt and rubble of the abandoned shop. The boys looked around at the empty shelves for a moment. They and their neighbors had long ago taken everything that Mr. Baquir and his wife had left in their shop when they fled so quickly for Turkey in the early days of the war, except the poster of a famous Lebanese singer which still hung incongruously on the back wall, the deep indigo of the background faded and dusty. Akhmed noticed that someone had ripped x marks where the eyes had been.
Then the boys began to shiver again. They were no longer huddled together, after all, and they were cold. Akhmed noticed the thin weeds beginning to poke out through the rubble on the sidewalk outside. “That might do something,” thought Akhmed—they would keep walking, and collect as many of those as they could. Allah please let it be enough.
The boys walked a few blocks, visiting places where they found things before: an old trash heap behind a restaurant, a few more empty caves that had once been convenience stores, but everything was bare. The weeds they collected hardly got beyond a few fistfuls. Little more could they collect, even after looking in every building besides the few basements in which their neighbors still cowered.
Eventually, the shelling seemed to pick up again, and it was getting dark, so the boys started to head back. Akhmed cut his foot on a piece of rebar– it wasn’t bad, but he knew he should get back and wash it, if they could spare the water. Both of them were sad, as they stepped out into the street. For a long time, all they had felt was numbness, but now they felt sad.
They crossed the first block shimmying tight against the wall, in the shadows of a building that still conserved its first three floors. As they stepped out hesitantly into the bright streetcorner, illuminated by the red setting sun, setting against the burning sky of falling ash that they had learned to call their own, they heard a whistling, and they saw shadows on the ground. The boys looked up, expecting to die.
Instead, the boys witnessed as a cascade of pieces of paper floated down from sky, a brilliant, heroic tan illuminated by the sun, somehow more like light brass or copper than paper. The pieces were mostly small, but some were larger, and they were covered with a foreign script.
Akhmed would have smiled if his face had still known how. He had been preparing to die for years now. The moment of relief it brought to Ilias was even briefer. But the boys felt something like a warmth inside, a small, but certain relief. It puzzled them, how it mismatched the cold of the night. They picked up the papers, quickly because who knew who was watching them in the sunlight, and hurried home.
Their new baby sister was sound asleep on Zaina’s chest when the boys arrived. They still hadn’t thought of a name for her. Akhmed wondered what her life would be like. If there would only ever be more of this.
“What are we going to name her?” asked Zaina. “Maybe Laila, like your grandmother?”
“Laila’s a nice name,” said Akhmed. Ilias was already curled up in the corner of the basement, wrapped up in his share of the papers they had brought home, on top of the crumbling concrete of the basement’s raised corner, a miserable excuse for a cushion.
Akhmed took Laila from Zaina, who was exhausted, and somehow, without waking the baby, went and curled up besides Ilias in the corner. He fidgeted left and right for a time, trying to get some of the papers between him and Laila and Ilias and the floor without waking either of them, until he managed it. He fell asleep, shortly after that.
That night the three of them slept soundly through the awful sound of distant explosions, dreaming of the peaceful fields, talking animals, castles, princesses, and princes of Germany.