Prologue
EZRA
I watch my wife write what happened:
A child’s hand reached out to me from beneath the bodies, its henna blurred beneath the blood.
Jihane’s next sentence is slower to come.
But the only place to take the girl, was the burning hospital.
Tomorrow the manuscript leaves the apartment. Jihane’s book publisher is expecting it. Tonight is meant to be the end: a cup of mint tea, the file sent, the hard part behind us.
Next to her laptop lie the notes she pencils down as memories work themselves loose from wherever she buried them. The notes make me uneasy. Jihane has never believed in merciful omissions, not in her writing and not between us. But I cannot let her carry the book alone for two years and then ask her to silence it for my comfort. She does not look up. No music. No television. Only the radiator ticking under the sill and the soft plastic tap of keys.
Outside, Berlin is wet and grey. A tram slides past. Bicycles hiss over the road. The sun has just gone down, but there is still some light in the sky. Across the street, the bakery is getting ready to close. By now, the cardamom buns would be gone. Jihane always pulls one apart while it’s still too hot, then pretends the sugar has not burned her fingers.
She turns the heat up when absorbed in her work, as though a sentence might stiffen in the cold. The room is too warm and I want to crack the window.
In another country, in a room whose walls had cracked under airstrikes, Jihane told me she wanted a place to write by a window.
And I wanted a chair. “A proper chair,” I told her. “Ugly. Brown. Comfortable.”
“Just for you?”
“Just for me. To sit in while you write by your window.”
“You won’t sit there and judge my sentences?” she said.
“Only the bad ones. That’s why it needs to be comfortable.”
She laughed. “So rude.” Then she kissed me. Years later, she found the chair: ugly, brown, comfortable and too large for our Berlin apartment. Now she has her window, and I sit beside the bookcase while she writes.
The chair’s cushion bears the shape of someone who has used it badly and often. One of her cardigans hangs over the arm. A small white sock is caught beneath one wooden leg. She makes another pencilled note, puts the pencil back down and reads a paragraph aloud, barely moving her lips.
Outside, a bicycle bell rings twice.
She flinches.
Then laughs without making a sound.
I tell myself I do not want to interrupt. She turns toward my chair, but not directly to me.
“You always think people can bear less than they really can.”
I want to tell her I have been at her side the whole time. Instead, I go quiet.
The radiator ticks beneath the window. Her mouth tightens. She turns back to the manuscript.
Across the street, the baker begins lifting the unsold pastries from their trays. Cinnamon rolls. Apple turnovers. Éclairs. Small bright things arranged at careful angles. The baker lowers them into a black bag, one after another.
Jihane sees it now. The baker folds the top of the bag closed with both hands. Jihane watches until it disappears beneath the counter. Her gaze drops to the paragraph. Her mouth shapes a name.
Mariam.
The room leaves her eyes. I know that look. Soon she will be moving through the book again, line by line, and all I can do is watch. She will not allow the pages to make the past more forgivable than it was. I just wish she wouldn’t make herself live it all again.
But Jihane goes right back to the beginning.
