It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, Ihate more than anything" Tariq nodded knowingly.
It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, butthe seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief andinterminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. Thewaiting. Like a defendant¹ about to hear the verdict.
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at thetable. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened tothe whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths.
Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-blackwindow, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling.
Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion ofbreath and the knowledge that they had been spared for nowwhile somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke,there was a scrambling², a barehanded frenzy³ of digging, ofpulling from the debris⁴, what remained of a sister, a brother, agrandchild.
But the flip⁵ side of being spared was the agony of wonderingwho hadn't. After every rocket blast, Laila raced to the street,stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely this time, itwas Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble⁶ andsmoke.
At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden whiteflashes reflected in her window. She listened to the rattling⁷ ofautomatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining⁸ overhead asthe house shook and flakes⁹ of plaster rained down on herfrom the ceiling. Some nights, when the light of rocket fire wasso bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came.
And, if it did, Laila's dreams were

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