The war started on a Sunday. Amer told me this, and he knew it with such certainty because his family was in the mountains on a traditional Sunday outing the day the fighting started, a trip I now recall as if it were mine. Alaine and I rode in the backseat and squealed when the taxi driver let go of the steering wheel. The car wound higher and higher until the land that stretched away from the road was empty but for white rocks and brittle, humming grass. It was a time of beauty, of earth and rock and the sweetness of summer, and the hills were quiet under the sky. We spread the blanket under lofty pine trees, the blanket a soft bed on the thick brown needles carpeting the ground, and Uncle Ara built a fire and prepared one of his famous meals with Daddy’s help. Astrig and Mummy reclined in the shade, smoking cigarettes, and Alaine and I chased each other in the woods, and our pockets bulged with acorn shells for whistling. I have photographs of such picnics. But in the late afternoon as we drove back to the city, dazed with food and sun, soldiers paced at blockades that had not been there before, and the traffic moved along cautiously, bumper-to-bumper, taut with fear. Amer said there was a certain mood of innocent excitement that everyone slipped into that day, thinking it was only temporary.

In Beirut, before the war was real, Mummy took me to the butcher and I hung back shyly by the door, and his son who was in my class at school swept the floor grinning cheekily at me; I thought I would marry him, but later Mummy and Daddy put me in a different school because of the bombing. On our way home we came to a stone house with a staircase to the front door and I asked to visit a friend, but Mummy gave me another bag to carry and said it was impossible. I whined, dragging my feet, until Mummy stopped and said, His father disappeared, he disappeared and he won’t come back, so there’s no playing, and after that I carried the bags without complaint and kept my eyes in front of me, walking with my toes turned slightly out as I had learned in ballet.

The grown-ups kept saying the war would end the next week, but it did not, and one night a bomb exploded. It was the loudest, most terrifying sound the war had made so far. It undid sleep instantly, as if I had always been awake with the bomb in my arms and legs and eyes, all of me rigid and aftersound trickling down from the sky. I moved without moving, I peeked over the edge of the mattress to the lower bunk. It was empty. I did not know this part of the night. The night crackled fire, swelling like thunder. Men shouted in the streets. I made my body move and the numbness crawled form my legs.

Through the living-room window I saw Mummy and Daddy on the balcony and Mummy’s arm was shielding her face, her body bent backwards a little. Orange and yellow light opened and closed the darkness, washing over their faces. I came out and slipped between them, but I could not see over the concrete ledge. Holding my breath, I pulled myself up and glimpsed men running on the street, but then I dropped back to the floor. Uncle Ara and Auntie Lupsi’s store was on fire, I had seen that much. No one was paying attention to me. When I jumped again, this time I saw the smoke rolling out of itself in giant balls, like cotton, and I saw that the apartment windows above the store were engulfed. I started to cry, thinking my great-uncle and aunt were dead in their little house with the long hallway and the piano Daddy was always asked to play. They were stumbling around through the smoke, suffocating, falling over. Then Mummy’s hands lifted me and she whispered in my ear, They’re not dead, Marianna, as she carried me back to my room.

I waited on the edge of my bed for Mummy or Daddy to come back and hug me but only Alaine appeared. She beckoned form the doorway, her thick, tangled hair giving her head an eerie shape against the lights from outside. I crept after her because she was nine and I was seven, and she always knew the right thing to do. She led me to the front door, which was open, and she said, Look. I did not know what I was supposed to see but when I turned to ask she was gone.

I took two steps onto the landing and stared down the winding staircase banisters, down into the black basement where the janitor lived. The air was thick with soot, and I cupped my hands over my nose and mouth. Our building felt so empty and quiet compared to the thundering noise outside. I wondered where everyone was. The windows along the stairwell had shattered and glass slivers pricked my bare feet so I stopped moving. I was too nervous to be frightened, waiting to see what Alaine had seen, straining my eyes through the weird lights. A massive bursting sound came from the store as it collapsed inward, and I could not move for fear that the whole building would fall across the street onto me. Through the broken window I saw the fire, not the flames high up that disappeared in sparks, but the real fire close to the earth, and its voice was different. It was deep and powerful and deadly so that I did not hear Mummy come up behind me. She pulled me back inside and I felt its heat reach for my face before the door closed us into cool darkness.

Copyright © 2003 by Patricia Sarrafian Ward. All rights reserved.