A Thunderous Whisper (17 page)

“You sure?” I asked, staring up at the cloud-filled sky. I felt as if I were five again, afraid of thunderstorms and wanting Papá to tell me that everything would be all right.

“No.” He stood and stretched. “But we need to see how bad things are while there’s still some daylight.”

“I know.” I took in a long, deep breath.

“I just hope everyone made it into the bomb shelters,”
Mathias said before tossing his
makila
over the edge of the ditch.

Would Mamá have gone into a bomb shelter? She always ignored the alarms, but maybe after she saw those first planes, she would have sought refuge.

As I stood there trying to absorb the new reality around me, Mathias pushed away a stack of sandbags and pulled himself up and over onto the flat ground.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Thoughts of what might have happened to my home, to my mother, paralyzed me. I didn’t move.

“Ani.” Mathias thrust his hand back into the ditch to help pull me out. “Let’s. Go.” This time he spoke to me like an annoyed parent whose two-year-old wants to stay at a party for a few more minutes.

Yet something in his tone snapped me into action. I pushed his hand out of the way. “I can do it myself,” I said, wanting to shake off my helpless feeling.

“Didn’t say you couldn’t.” Mathias stood up again and looked down at me still in the hole. “Just thought you might want a little help.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said, grabbing a fistful of grass and pulling myself over the side of the ditch.

I wanted to be angry. I needed to be angry … at someone, anyone.

“Hurry up!” Mathias called out. “We have to get home.” He was walking faster than I’d ever seen him move.

In the distance I could see a black cloud of smoke hanging
over the entire city. The mountainside was also spotted with flames and smoke snaking its way up to the sky.

Everything I’d ever known could be gone … including Mamá. I shook my head. I couldn’t think like that. I just needed to get down there to help whoever was hurt.

“You can’t even bother to wait for me to climb out of the ditch?” I yelled, racing down the road to where Mathias was crouched next to something.

“I thought she might need help,” he said, starting to stand up.

I looked and saw a woman, facedown in the dirt with arms sprawled at odd angles. The back of her dress was riddled with bullet holes, and the ground around her had taken on a dark color.

“Oh!” I quickly looked away.

“She never had a chance,” Mathias muttered. “Just shot her in the back.”

I could feel the bile rising in my throat. I was going to be sick. I took a few steps to the other side of the road and vomited. Closing my eyes, I tried to take a deep breath, but the air still reeked of smoke and death. I gagged and threw up again.

After a few moments, the shock of seeing a dead body wore off, and I wiped the corners of my mouth with my sleeve. I had to toughen up … quick.

I looked down the road toward Guernica and saw that Mathias had already resumed his fast, stumbling pace and left me behind. Our families needed us.

Catching up to Mathias required a full sprint, but once I reached him, I slowed down.

“Next time, you can wait a few seconds for me,” I said, now trotting alongside him. “I was sick back there, and I’m always waiting for you.”

“We have to get down there fast. Plus, I’ve never asked you to do that,” he snapped, hobbling along with his
makila
as fast as he could.

“I didn’t say you
asked
me to. How would you like it if I just ran into town right now and left you here?”

Mathias’s eyes flashed with anger. “Then go! I certainly don’t want to hold you back!” he said without breaking his stride.

“What if I did take off?” I said, grabbing at his shirt, causing him to momentarily stumble before stopping. “How’d you like that, huh?”

Mathias threw his hands up in the air. “Don’t do me any favors.”

“Fine! You’re on your own.” I started running … a slow jog, waiting for him to call me back.

“Just. Go!” he yelled. “We’re all on our own now anyway!”

There was nothing else for me to say or do here. I turned to face my burning city, knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.

THIRTY-TWO

T
he smell of burning buildings and a gray haze of dust filled the air. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to see. Destruction was everywhere. Part of me wished that nightfall would come quickly so I wouldn’t have to see it.

My welcome into Guernica was the littered streets of my neighborhood—full of bricks, rubble, broken pieces of furniture, and people digging through it all trying to reach loved ones who might be buried underneath.

I looked up at the crumbling back wall of my building. My entire apartment was gone. For a moment I thought of the things I’d lost. The radio that Papá had bought for us, Mamá’s Bible in the top drawer of her dresser, the books I had in my room … everything had disappeared. Some of it might be in the heap of debris in front of me, but I didn’t care. I wanted to find Mamá, and she wouldn’t have been in the apartment.… She’d have been at the marketplace. There was still hope.

My feet crunched the broken glass and splinters of wood and cement that seemed to coat every path that led toward
the center of town. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see people … injured, bleeding, crying out, and searching for each other. None of it really filtered through to my brain. Even the sight of dismembered bodies being pulled out of the wreckage around me didn’t seem to fully register. All I knew was that I had to find Mamá. Once we were together, we’d figure out what to do next. Where to go and wait for Papá. She and I would be like those homeless refugees who had been crowding Guernica. Only now we would have to be the ones invading someone else’s town … running away from this.

But we had Mathias’s family.… They’d help us. We’d start over somewhere else, and Papá would join us when this war finally ended.

I tried to focus.… I had to get to one place … the market in the center of town.

After a few blocks, I spun around trying to get my bearings. There was so much chaos and screaming that I wasn’t sure where I was. It was like no place I could imagine or describe. The sky around me glowed with fires from burning buildings, and craters carved up the streets and sidewalks. I had slipped and fallen into hell.

Up ahead, the cupola of the church seemed to rise above all the destruction. That gave me a point of reference, so I knew which direction to run.

I couldn’t tell if it took me hours or seconds to get there, but before long I was standing near the crumbling walls of the church. The market should have been right there.

I glanced at the few buildings that still stood, confirming that I was in the right place, but all that was left of the market was heaps of rubble and a huge crater in the ground. By one of the buildings there was a pile of bodies that had already been covered with a few blankets. I quickly turned my head away from it. I could not think of Mamá being there.

“Mamá!… MAMÁ!” I screamed, my voice joining the roar of other survivors calling out for their loved ones.

I headed toward a bomb shelter … the one near the school.

A young woman hastily walked toward me carrying a screaming toddler. I blocked her path.

“The bomb shelters around here, are people still in them?” I desperately asked her.

She didn’t answer me, and it seemed she couldn’t hear me over the child’s wailing.

I asked again, this time yelling it at her.

She stood there for a moment, giving me a blank stare as if I were speaking some foreign language.

“Speak up!” she shouted. “I can’t hear you!” Tears started to flow down her face. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear anything!” she cried out before running down the street.

“Everyone’s out of the bomb shelters,
mija
,” a police officer said as he hurried past me toward one of the burning buildings. “Go see if your family’s gone home,” he hollered as he rounded the corner.

There was no home for me to go back to, and Mamá was certainly not there.

I stumbled along the piles of debris back toward the market. “Mamá! Mamá!” I called out, trying to pull beams and iron bars from the piles that littered the path.

Then, in a corner, thrown against a building’s remaining wall, something familiar caught my eye.

Twisted metal that, even though it was covered in gray dust, still had the slight glimmer of brass.

I ran over and picked up the mangled scale. A small brass weight lay beneath it. I didn’t know if I should pray for it to be the one I usually carried. I grasped the single weight, slid it into my pocket, and took a deep breath. Slowly, I flipped over the balance. My heart seemed to drop out of my chest. The truth was right there in the etched letters of our last name. This was Mamá’s scale.

A hand grabbed my ankle.

I twisted around to find an old woman holding on to me.
“Lagundu iezadazu,”
she mumbled. “Help me,” she repeated, barely able to lift her head off the ground.

In my rush to get the scale, I hadn’t even noticed her.

I looked down to see blood pooling around her and bloody streaks where she had dragged herself along the building’s edge. I felt dizzy. Then I focused on her face.… The wrinkles of a lifetime of laughing, singing, crying, were all there. I knelt next to her, setting the broken scale down by her feet.

“I—I—I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I can go get someone.…” I began to stand.

“
Ez nazazu utzi
. I don’t want to be alone,” she pleaded, her eyes locking with mine.

I reached for her hand and squeezed it gently. “I’m sorry, but I have to find my mother.” I gave her a sorrowful smile.

“I’ll get—”

But before I could finish my sentence, her eyes drifted to the side, and I felt her fingers go limp in mine. I froze, not knowing what to do next. Death was all around me, but now I was holding its hand.

A familiar voice whispered, “You’ve done enough. She didn’t die alone.”

I placed the old woman’s hand on the cobblestones and inched back as Padre Iñaki bent down to close the woman’s eyelids. He made the sign of the cross over her body and began to say a prayer.

“My moth—” I said as I stood up, getting ready to start my search again.

Padre Iñaki raised a finger for me to wait until he was done.

“But I need …”

He made the sign of the cross once again, stood, and turned to me. “I’m so sorry about your mother.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “The market was one of the first places they bombed. I saw—”

I jerked away. “No, she would’ve run. She might not have even been there.” I glanced at the broken scale by the dead woman’s feet and shook my head. “Maybe she was in one of the shelters. You don’t know.”

Padre Iñaki bit his lips. “She was there when the first bomb hit. It was one of the last things I saw before running into the church.” He looked away for a moment as if trying
to find the right words. “I saw the damage it did.” His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “Nothing was left. No
one
was left,” he muttered.

“NO!” I refused to accept what he was saying. “You saw someone else.”

“It was her … the
sardinera
,” he said softly.

“I want to see her. I want to see for myself!” I yelled.

“There’s nothing left.” Padre Iñaki’s eyes glistened. “It wasn’t like some of the others. The bomb destroyed everyone and everything in the market. The people … they disappeared.” He took a deep breath. “The ones that were trapped in the rubble are the ones they’ve put over there.” He pointed to the small pile covered with blankets that I’d seen earlier. “It’s best to remember her as she was.”

My skin became cold and I started to shiver. Yet beads of sweat formed at my temples, and I felt the world spinning under me. My knees buckled and I crumpled to the ground.

I wanted to cry, scream, pass out. Something to make this all go away. But I didn’t. I sat there doing nothing.

“I’m sorry, but I have to keep going.” Padre Iñaki glanced down the street. “I can’t stay here.” He put a hand on my shoulder as if trying to infuse me with strength. “Will you be all right?”

I nodded without knowing what he was saying, holding on to the concrete sidewalk for support.

“Come to the church. We’ll find you a place to stay.” He stood up, as someone was already screaming for him. “I’m so sorry for your loss. She was a fine woman.”

A fine woman? She may have been many things, but I’d
never thought of her as that. Yet no matter what her faults were, she was
my
mother and I wanted her alive.

Minutes passed and I remained sitting next to the body of the old woman whose name I never knew. A few people asked if I was hurt as they ran up the street to help put out the raging fires, but I only shrugged. No one really stopped. I was alone.

Then I remembered. I wasn’t alone. Standing up, my arms and legs trembling with my own weight, I took a deep breath and I ran.

THIRTY-THREE

N
ight fully cloaked the remains of the city as I made my way through the streets. Burning buildings cast a strange glow upon the faces of those trying to make sense of it all. I no longer noticed the smell. It felt as if my nose had rejected the entire situation. But my eyes still worked, and they took in sights I could barely describe.

I had survived, but so many had not. Bodies and body parts were scattered with the debris from what were once quiet neighborhoods. Most of the streets were blocked by mounds of brick, cement, and splintered beams. I had to constantly take detours to make my way to the theater … and then I saw it.

The Guernica Tree. It still stood!

The greatest symbol of Basque culture had come through the bombing unscathed. It had to be a sign.

Rushing ahead and rounding the next corner, I saw
the devastation on Mathias’s street. Half the buildings were piles of rubble, and the few that stood looked as if they would collapse from a light gust of wind. It didn’t seem as if anyone could have survived, but of course, some people had. I hoped Mathias’s parents were among the lucky ones.