It happened at dawn, the thing they didn’t expect, the day like no other. All at once it seemed as if a rain of stars had tumbled from the sky. It was three a.m., the hour when the birds were asleep, when the fish in the canals drowsed in the shallows. The racket sounded like hail, and then like stones being thrown. But when the sky lit up, it was because bombs were going off out in the countryside. There were no falling stars—only this, this burst of weapons that dropped from above.
