When I heard that the battles raged fiercely and every front was an inferno, I felt calm. It meant that my perimeters were fixed by these walls, that nothing which my mother hoped for me could find a place inside them. … From that point on I never allowed anyone to peep in through the narrow opening by which I viewed the world outside. I blocked off every aperture through which anyone might try to reach or touch me. (125-26)
Beyond whatever abomination of sound and sight that had been drawn in Zahra’s household lay a whistling of missiles and a clutter of bombs. Indifference to pain, however, was something Zahra was already painfully familiar with.
The fact that Zahra’s mother and father eventually left the apartment for a safer place is of no surprise to the reader. Zahra drew security and calm from what other people feared and dreaded. With the same respect, it was almost as if Zahra feared human contact; what most people during a time of war find necessary. As the fighting progressed, and the thought of loss of human life loomed into a reality, Zahra’s indifference progressed to a complete state of distress, in which she questioned: “How is it that death has come to rule over half the street, directing that a child will fall, a man or woman will fall, each with a bullet in the brain….” (132) The realities of war soon breached even the walls of indifference which represented Zahra’s house. “My brother Ahmad … has returned wearing combat uniform and carrying a rifle. … Yet can it be the same boy who used to steal my chocolate, who used to bite and then kiss me?” (130) The upbringing of war and violence in her house, pitting Zahra face-to-face with the evils around her, leads Zahra to lament, “Those who speak of war in platitudes have never seen a war. Those who have only seen wars and hospitals in movies have nothing of the truth.” (135) Ahmad, along with his friends who visited, appeared to Zahra a transformed race who found no injustice in their wrongdoings. “They belonged to a world that was not my world, not a world for those who dared not lift a gun. … I could never understand their logic. It was a logic which confused war with life.” (143)
Why then, the reader must ask, considering this theoretical separation of race, was Zahra driven into the arms of the sniper, an entity composed of war? The visit by Zahra’s Qarina had left an indelible sense of a man’s weight on her body. This weight, symbolizing Zahra’s lack of human contact, drove her outside and into the arms of the war. The same metamorphosis led Zahra to risk her life. The fact that she chose the sniper as her man of contact may signify a renewed indifference in Zahra. The desire to be with him was so strong it superseded the sights and sounds of war around her, and the risk of death. She asked herself, “Was it a normal thing I was doing, closing all doors of escape behind me?” (147) After the physical meeting of two bodies which Zahra had never completely experienced, the contrast between the war outside and Zahra’s life became even more transformed and Zahra found this instrument of war, the sniper, to be as imperative to life as air. “Days become long during wartime, buy my days of war grew short. Each morning I would think about the afternoon and of meeting my sniper. Each night I would think of the warmth of his body on mine.” (151) For Zahra, seeing as how she knew little of the world around her, the sniper came to be the war which tore her apart. On one hand she had a relationship of sex and love that she had once thought impossible, on the other laid her conscience which was invariably being itself torn apart.
“He was no longer a fantasy. … I became obsessed with the sniper, obsessed with noting down the numbers of those killed by him. I began to hold myself responsible for their deaths. I thought constantly of contacting the radio station or the Al-Nahar newspaper. But how could I contact them? I didn’t even have a telephone.” (156)
The same phenomenon, which had brought Zahra to hate her brother and the evil his Kalashnikov rifle and beret represented, now breached the outside world from Zahra and brought security to her. “My days had beginning and end. I felt secure, even though the rockets still screamed and roared with unabating vigor.” (160) While this war has turned the rest of the world upside down, while “this war has made beauty, money, terror and convention all equally irrelevant” (161), Zahra has found a consolation in it’s solace.
It begins to occur to me that the war, with its miseries and destructiveness, has been necessary for me to start to return to being normal and human. The war, which makes one expect the worst at any moment, has led me into accepting this new element in my life. (161)
The phenomenon of war, which for Zahra is a savior, now has severed all remnants of her family. It is strange, however, that her brother still remains evil to her. “Oh, war! Why, in coming to my rescue, do you make me reject Ahmad?” (164) To both Zahra and Ahmad, brother and sister, the war is a necessary influence in their life. Without fully realizing her own need for war, Zahra questions,
Why was he so afraid of the war ending? Because he would then amount to nothing? Overnight, he would become a ghost stalking the streets in which, on the day before, he had been a living presence whose footsteps in the darkness and whose rifle could be used to obtain some bread or a few liters of petrol. After that the gun would lie forgotten in some corner, conveying only memories. (165)
Ahmad’s distorted words, “my sister, I fight for all the under-privileged. I stand with the minorities” are contradicted by all the various contraband he receives without answer to Zahra’s probing questions. “Where was Samir R? Did he still live? If so, did he wonder about the fate of his gold watch?”, or “If the duck could speak, would it tell me to leave it alone? Would it ask me to set it free, so it could fly back to where it came from?” (171) The same occurrence that has levied disgust for Ahmad has neutralized the torments of Zahra’s family. “My father’s leather belt no longer holds any fears for me. The war has made it powerless.” (173) The faltering strength of her father’s belt represent the ties severed between Zahra and her family brought on by the war.
