It happened at a crossroads. We had been on the bus a long time. Stopping. Waiting. Moving again. The arguing had stopped. I had not heard silence in so long. The people all were quiet, all silent, watching the Nissan draw to a halt in the middle of the convoy. Where the coaches were filled with the old and the sickly ones.

The soldiers had left us. Mother said that they would be back before sundown but they never did. Father was not with us then. He had died long before the worst of it. The siege and the starvation and the squalor and the rats. To look at it all now, it is hard to choose the worst of it. But it is not difficult to talk about because it all seemed to have happened to someone else.

It was me and mother and uncle and aunt and my brothers and my sisters. We had been waiting to leave for a long time. We stayed with my aunt for a long time. I see her house now in my dreams. The rooms are small and we are many. We are told, ordered to stay indoors all of the time. Mother did not want us outside. Outside was death. Bullets and barrel bombs and a thousand crueller things.

All I had were mothers words to soothe me.

She tells me there are still great fiery serpents in the northern mountains, far past the desert. She tells me every story she knows. She invents her own. She tells us our futures. All we want is to go to Germany. Germany is blue and there are mountains and castles and lakes and snow and donuts. You can leave the light on and in the morning it will still be shining. Here all the bulbs have burnt out.

To dream of it now is to breathe the air of those rooms again.

I hear different talk at night. Because the house is small and because I am curious about the things the grown ups do not say to us because we are not grown. Their arguments are soft furious whispers in the night. Mother says she is too afraid to leave. Uncle says that this is the end, the end of all things. He says when we are all gone the world will be a better place. Mother and Aunty pray for us, pray to God for mercy. Uncle says prayers are for fools. He says the world has forgotten us. Their murmurings are barbed things in the darkness. The world has forgotten us but we are in the world.

They say to get to Germany is hard. And it is far. Farther and more dangerous than the desert. And they say they can not take us all and a marriage will have to be arranged and I do not want to be married. They do not say the word sale but that is what will come to pass. Mother says it will be fine it will be fine it will be fine.

The coaches take us through the city. There has been fighting and the city is ruined. There are not a lot of tall buildings standing and if they are you can see all of their insides. The things left behind. Bookshelves. Television sets. The sides run out of the buildings like wet paper.

Before the explosion I had not heard of a white helmet before. Mother tells us before our prayers that there are angels and they say the white helmets are sent by the angels and help all people, no matter who. There were no white helmets that day.

Once there were paler soldiers in the neighbourhood streets. From the small attic window I have seen the soldiers of the president and from the crazies and the turks and now these pale ones. Russians, uncle says. Unbelievers. Russia is close to Germany. I asked uncle once if the Russians will bring us away in their helicopters but he told me only a Russians would go to Russia.

Mother says one day the guns will have gone away like before but I cannot remember a lot of before. I remember a football game with uncle and father. I can remember being on father’s shoulders and honeyed almonds and people cheering and nothing more.

I had seen a dead body four times, before, when we were still in Aunties. I did not count that day. Our bus had pulled to the side of the road and the old ones had told us we should get off and stretch our legs and others said no, we should stay sitting.

They were almost shouting at one another when an old man hissed them all to silence. The white van drove up slowly and circled slowly and came to a quiet stop, close to the middle coach. And the people standing around thought at last help has come.

Look, look, the red crosses on the door panels.

Hot Food.

Medicine.

And now laughter and cheers rise, sporadic among the crowd as they clamour to be close. The driver has soft eyes and he is sweating. But he is no longer nervous, he is assured. He nods his head once. To what, who can say? And the sky fills with coral fire. Screams. Burning tyres. Scalded metal. Burning hair. And from the silence rise  lamentations.

It has been as in remembrance of a dream where, on waking only shards and dark flashes remain. There is no easy tapestry is to be found. In Berlin I have been kicked and beaten and groped and told to piss off home. I live in squalor, worse than anything I ever knew as a child in that city. My sisters have been married to strangers. They speak to me on the phone and ask to come but I am ashamed. My parents lie in dust, in untended graves. Far from me.

It was raining hard. The grey city streets teem with sheets of water, broken now and then under the wheels of passing traffic. She watched the drops hit the grey concrete slabs. Explosions in miniature. She pushed open her umbrella and stepped from the doorway of the café and moved among the evening crowds. Apathy in every face she sees. That I could only still these sorrows.

She was looking for the stairs to the metro when she saw a man coming the opposite way. He was smiling. She lifted her head as he passed her and as he passed he spat onto her veil. She flinched as it struck her cheek. Then he was gone and she was alone in the rain.

# # #

Stephen O’Donnell has had short stories published in The Bloody Key Society Periodical, Gambling the Aisle and Panoply.

Photo: Thomas Young

**Originally published with The Avalon Literary Review