The Trauma of War Theme Analysis

I am scared of my wife’s eyes. She can’t see out and no one can see in. Look, they are like stones, gray stones, sea stones. […] Look at the folds of her stomach, the color of desert honey, darker in the creases, and the fine, fine silver lines on the skin of her breasts, and the tips of her fingers with the tiny cuts, where the ridges and valley patterns were once stained with blue or yellow or red paint. Her laughter was gold once, you would have seen as well as heard it. Look at her, because I think she is disappearing.

“We have to go, Afra,” I said.

“I’ve already told you. No.”

“If we stay—”

“If we stay, we’ll die,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Exactly.” Her eyes were open and blank now.

“You’re waiting for a bomb to hit us. If you want it to happen, it will never happen.”

“Then I’ll stop waiting. I won’t leave him.”

“There’ll be no bombs there,” he’d said, “and the houses won’t break like these do.” I wasn’t sure if he’d meant the Lego houses or the real houses, and then it saddened me when I realized that Sami had been born into a world where everything could break. Real houses crumbled, fell apart. Nothing was solid in Sami’s world. And yet somehow he was trying to imagine a place where buildings didn’t fall down around him.

But I don’t like their queues, their order, their neat little gardens and neat little porches and their bay windows that glow at night with the flickering of their TVs. It all reminds me that these people have never seen war. It reminds me that back home there is no one watching TV in their living room or on their veranda, and it makes me think of everything that’s been destroyed.

Although it’s only early afternoon I lie down next to her on the bed, and I let her put her arm around me and press her palm onto my chest, but I won’t touch her. She tries to hold my hand, and I edge it away. My hands belong to another time, when loving my wife was a simple thing.

I catch sight of my face in the mirror above the sink, and I pause with my hands by my ears. I look so different now, but I can’t quite put my finger on how. Yes, there are deep lines that were not there before, and even my eyes seem to have changed—they are darker and wider, always on the alert, like Mohammed’s eyes, but it’s not that; something else has changed, something unfathomable.

“What happened to her?” he said to me, and there was an unmistakable note of curiosity in his voice. I could suddenly imagine him collecting horror stories—real-life tales of loss and destruction. His glasses were fixed on me now.

“A bomb,” I said.

As I stood there with Afra and Mohammed and the other families, I felt lost, as if I was out alone in a dark cold sea with nothing to hold on to. This was the first time in a long time that I had felt any safety, any security, and yet in this moment the sky felt too big, the rising dusk held an unknown darkness.

And then, from the window, something catches my eye. White planes searing through the sky. Too many to count. I hear a whistle followed by a rumbling, as though the world has ripped open. I rush to the window: bombs are falling, planes are circling. The light is too strong, I shield my eyes. The sound is too loud, I cover my ears.

“[…]sometimes our bodies can find ways to cope when we are faced with things that are too much for us to bear. You saw your son die, Mrs. Ibrahim, and maybe something in you had to shut down.”

I began to feel that fear again, the kind that had consumed me in Aleppo, alert to every movement and sound, imagining danger everywhere, expecting that at any moment the worst would happen, that death was near. I felt exposed, as if people were watching me from the woods, and when the wind blew it brought with it whispers: murderer, Nadim is dead, murderer.

“You are lost in the darkness, Nuri,” she says. “It is a fact. You’ve gotten completely lost somewhere in the dark.”

I look at her eyes, so full of fear and questions and longing, and I had thought it was she who was lost, that Afra was the one stuck in the dark places of her mind. But I can see how present she is, how much she is trying to reach me.