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 against the cold. The sound reached me, soft but unmistakable. I moved my hand from my chest.
Last night she had been telling Baba about mummy-unwrapping parties in colonial Britain. He had listened with the solemn attention he gave any of his children, whatever they were telling him. Then 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. Baba 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. Only the small sounds came. The small sounds of life. A spoon clicking against glass in the kitchen. 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. 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. Seven 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 life had become a kind of arithmetic: 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 you 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 from the wall. The plastic chair beside the wardrobe on Mariam's side still held yesterday's clothes. 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: 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 torn buildings reminded me of the opened faces I'd seen during a street fight when I was sixteen. I'd walked home a different route than usual that evening. The comforting scent of sweet jasmine at the night market was replaced by the sharp metallic hum of blood loss. Back then, I thought that was the worst thing I would ever see.
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, darkening at the hem 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.
If I brought it down, it would not have to outlive us all. Perhaps everyone who saw it had meant to retrieve it later but no one had managed to live long enough to follow through. They should have just gotten on with it. Or maybe I should.
Behind me, Mariam's knee struck the bedframe. 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.
"Coming," I said.
Before the tea cooled, I needed to know where the bread queue had formed.
I stepped into the living room and Mama looked up at once.
"You heard?" she asked.
