It happens again. A grenade blast wakes me. The soldiers are pounding at the door, stomping their boots, shouting outside my window. Then silence. Then guns.
My mother is frantic. We scramble to the attic, where the air is musty. Her hands shake as she loosens two floorboards. She tells me to hide in a dingy space beneath the flooring.
Hurry Niam, she implores, her face creased.
I crawl forward, lying curled in foetal pose. The Mehdi are trashing the house, emptying drawers, smashing the ceramics.
When they leave, you must run to the bus station.
But, Mama ...
Mother is trembling. She tells me she loves me.
She shuts me in darkness, my toes squashed, my knees bent. I can hear them climbing the staircase to the attic. Banging walls, floor; breaking closets, yelling. Their words are bullets. I can hear my mother’s muffled screams, then a volley of gunshots. I’m terrified to breathe, but every few minutes a short thread of air leaves my stitched-up throat. Perhaps they hear me. Their incoherent shouts fade to a blur until there’s nothing left but silence.
I’m inhaling the dust, too afraid to disturb the roof of this dark prison. The silence is unbearable.
Outside, the only thing that moves is the shadow of a cypress. They’ve shot my mother. She is naked, beaten, her burqa ripped. Her blood seeps into the hand-woven rug. It drips through the floorboards down to the kitchen. She doesn’t look real. I stroke her blood-matted hair. Her body is mangled and heavy to hold.
Everything’s broken, shattered glass, my father’s shabbabah smashed. My father lies slumped in the corner of the kitchen like a sack of bruised tomatoes, his left ear sliced off, half-dangling.
The air is hung with a miasma of smoke. The sabeel is burning. The goats are dead. Lamis, our dog, lies in the dirt, her belly still warm.
I catch the changing whiff of death, sour and fresh. Everything is burning. People are screaming. I hear myself scream as I run from the house, running towards the screaming. I head for the wreckage of the town, past burning karams, more casualties, rubble, houses with broken doors, the vacant stare of windows. Embers float like dark confetti, falling in my hair, my cardigan. An old woman is wheeling a mattress in a trolley. It’s Khadija’s grandmother, crippled with rheumatism. Her eyes make no contact. And Jameel is here.
Niam, is it you?
My body begins to tremble. Jameel holds me. He doesn’t ask questions.
We scramble through the outskirts. We, the lucky ones. We drink the last clean water. We eat the last olives. The buildings blink with fires.
What can we expect? The camp, they say, is away from the shelling, safe from snipers in the desert. But there’s no one I can trust, not even the soldiers of the Liberation Army, because bad things can happen when men have guns. When they are drunk.
Sleep has no home, our narrow space nailed by artillery. We tramp across the desert, our feet blistered. Our clothes are torn; we smell like goats. Old grandfathers fall and cannot rise. They have no country, no passport.
My mother tells me she loves me. My mother, bright as a bed of dahlias. I can think of nothing else.
How many days pass? How many hours? My eyes no longer believe what they see. My eyes burn with despair.
Today is another day. We are crawling towards our future.
If we squint hard and long enough, in a distant haze there is a scrappy, shabby settlement of tents. And fifty metres from the border, there’s a photojournalist clicking his digital camera as Khadija’s grandmother collapses.
He tells us the world must see this.
Michelle Cahill is an Anglo-Indian migrant who writes poetry and fiction. Her collection The Accidental Cage (IP) was shortlisted for the 2007 Judith Wright Prize. Michelle edited Poetry Without Borders (Picaro, 2008). Her work has appeared in Muse India, Heat, Meanjin, Jacket and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and is forthcoming in Antipodes. Her forthcoming poetry collection Vishvarupa is themed around Hindu gods and other deities. She is also working on a fiction manuscript entitled ‘Riding Without Krishna’.