It wasn’t a long walk but there were snipers and I had to be careful. The birds were usually singing. The sound of birdsong never changes. Mustafa told me this many years ago. And whenever the bombs were silent, the birds came out to sing. They perched on the skeletons of trees and on craters and wires and broken walls, and they sang. They flew high above, in the untouched sky, and sang.
