A Brighter Fear (2 page)

It was February and the minutes and hours and days and weeks forced us ever closer to the inevitability of which no one spoke.

I was scared. I thought we all were, silently, and I buried myself in my studies, determined to do well, filling my head with facts and figures, hoping to leave no space for worries, hoping to tire my thoughts enough for sleep at night.

I clung to normality and routine, points of reference that held my life together; going to school, seeing friends, strolling around the markets, peering in shop windows.

And as I walked home from school with Layla one day, we talked of our plans for the future; which university to apply to, which course, without admitting to ourselves that these dreams of ours may come to nothing, may turn to dust in front of our eyes.

We spoke of careers we aspired to, and achievements we dreamed of – mine to become an architect, hers to be a teacher – and when we reached our homes, we waved and smiled to each other and went our separate ways. And as I dropped my bag in the doorway and strolled through to the kitchen for food, I found Uncle Aziz and our neighbour Ali, Layla’s father, standing in the kitchen with Papa, serious looks on their faces and spades in their hands, an old map spread across the table, held down at its edges by cups or glasses.

I looked to Aziz and he winked at me. I still see it now, that look, frozen in time in my memory, and I feel that warmth it gave me. He could always make me smile; a rotund man with a laugh to match and a bald head that reflected the sun so much I’m sure he must’ve polished it. He was younger than Papa, although he looked older, with the fuzz around his face making up for the lack of hair on his head. And when he smiled his face would split in two and his eyes would dance with the mischief you would see in boys daring each other to steal fruit from the market place.

He beamed at me, his piano-key teeth still stained with the tobacco he gave up two years ago. ‘Lina!’ He grabbed me and hugged me, the air squeezing from my lungs. ‘Look at you. You’ve grown so tall and thin.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘Uncle Aziz, I saw you two days ago.’

‘Yes, my dear, yes. But you’re looking thinner. You must be working too hard, studying too hard. You need exercise, fresh air, to build your muscles up. Come.’

What I should’ve done at the sight of those spades was retreat to my room, with stories of homework and exams, but I’d been caught now, and escape was unlikely. And I liked playing along with Aziz. He made me feel younger, feel a child again. He led me to the back garden, Papa a few paces behind, an unaccustomed smile tickling his face.

‘We start here.’ Uncle Aziz stuck the spade into the ground and stood firm with his hands on his over-sized hips. ‘Dig.’

I picked up the spade and jabbed it at the ground, barely a dent made. ‘What are we looking for, Uncle?’

‘Water.’ He smiled.

I glanced to Papa leaning against the wall, his smile disappearing, Ali standing next to him. My spade hit the ground again, and as I teetered on the blade, I looked to Aziz. ‘Somebody bigger would be better at this,’ I dared to joke.

His face parted at the mouth, his eyes creasing. He boomed a laugh, and flicked me off the spade like a troublesome fly.

‘Yes, your old Uncle has more muscles.’ He winked at me again as I picked myself up off the ground.

For the next hour, I watched and fetched and carried. Bringing water and food, or towels to mop brows, as they dug holes across the garden. Though they’d failed to find water, they’d succeeded in making an anti-burglar device – should anyone try to sneak in to the house through the back garden at night, they’d have broken an ankle before making it to the door. Papa, Aziz and Ali dropped the spades to the ground; defeat finally admitted. I inspected the holes. At first I was surprised by the black treacle reaching up and choking the ground, then I understood.

In how many places on this earth would you be disappointed to find oil in your garden?

This dig for water, it turned out, was one of Papa’s preparations for war. A colleague of his at the university had a map of old water wells in the city, one of which, it appeared, was directly below our garden. Only it didn’t appear. Next, they told me, they’d try Ali’s garden, in case the map was inaccurate. I thought to warn Layla of the work that lay ahead of her.

Papa and I did many preparations for war together in the weeks that followed. While taping up windows we didn’t say a word to each other, but I was fuming at being kept off school to do something so tiresome. By the time we’d finished there was so much tape on them you could barely see out, and the inside of the house was nearly as dark as the basement beneath us.

He said nothing about why we were doing these things, just “you’re staying at home today to help me”. But I wanted to go to school. I wanted to see Layla, and Raneen, and Zenab and my other friends. I wanted to chat with them, gossip, have fun, go for a walk after school. I wanted to see if Aliya had managed to talk her mother into getting her the shoes she wanted, if Anita had failed the maths test, if our teacher had had her baby yet.

And I wanted to study.

I didn’t want to dig holes, tape windows or cart food supplies into the basement. I didn’t want to stand for hours at the gas station filling cans with fuel for when we ran out. I didn’t want to go round market stalls with Papa, tripping over sandbags piled next to shop doorways, selling old things to raise enough money to buy a generator.

Always Papa would stop at second-hand shops, though, or at market stalls selling jewellery, and I saw his eyes scan over the necklaces for sale. Someone’s once cherished possessions sold for cash to survive the war. I wondered, at first, what he was looking 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 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.