The rest of us, about thirty or forty people, left our seats and trooped down to the basement. We sat on the floor, with our backs against the rough plaster of the wall. People got out their newspapers, books, cushions: I hadn’t thought to bring anything. It was the eve of Célia’s wedding, after all, and I simply hadn’t allowed for air raids. Once more I sat between Célia and James. He had tilted his head to stare at the ceiling. I didn’t like it when people did that. If you took no notice of ceilings, I maintained, they were less likely to come down on you.

Around us, the crowd got restive. I began to think we might as well go home like Edouard. Ten to one he was back at his flat, fuming. He could have finished the Poème by now. He could have played the whole thing over again. How I would have loved that. “Here they come at last,” someone said, and the room fell quiet.

“Italian,” James murmured. “Maybe a Kingfisher.” I didn’t like it when people tried to identify aircraft, either.

I listened, waiting for the engine noise to rise and fall away again as it did when the planes passed to the north on their way to the harbor. But the roar grew harder and flatter. It had appetite.

The noise mounted up on itself. One, two seconds and it was overhead. Now another sound, this one too big to hear. Only to feel.

—

The blast hit the inside and the outside of my head simultaneously. The pressure was unsurvivable. I pulled Célia against me but had no time to tell her I was dying before the floor bounced under the next bomb and we screamed into each other’s ears.

The planes followed one by one. Another bomb and another. Pieces of my life started to peel off and float loose. I reached up aged ten to pick an apricot from the tree in the garden at Muntaza. Simultaneously a wasp stung my finger, and my old dress, the only one I loved, tore from the armpit to the waist. Another bomb, and I lay on my side aged fourteen with the muscles of my innards clutching in spasm at my fresh appendectomy wound, yelling, Dieu, aie pitié de moi, God have mercy on me, as each convulsion nearly tore my stitches out. Again and again they came. Oh, I screamed then and now, Dieu, aie pitié de nous, God have mercy on us.

And all this time James was holding my hand, his fingers squeezing mine.

—