City of Jasmine

by Olga Grjasnowa

  Three days later, they let Amal go. The sky is clear and cloudless. Birds are singing, people are out shopping, on their way to work, taking their children to school. She feels nothing but the shuddering of her legs, and she looks no one in the eye as she makes her way home barefoot. It’s a three-kilometre walk. Amal was only three kilometres away from home. The city’s sounds are horribly loud, their echo pulsing against her temples. She keeps getting dizzy and having to lean against walls. Passers-by keep well away from her.

  ‘Good morning,’ says Youssef. He’s standing outside Amal’s front door, wanting to come in.

  Amal has a blanket over her shoulders. Her body is strewn with bruises. Her cheeks and arms are covered in scrapes and her feet look like they belong to a vagrant. Her face resembles a desolate landscape. Her head aches. The pain returns at ever shorter intervals and unfurls anew with a fresh force that seems to know no mercy.

  ‘Please let me in,’ Youssef says gently.

  She carefully unlatches the door chain and takes a tiny step aside so that Youssef can come in. He looks at her, uncertain what to do, then reaches a hand out to stroke her back, but she forbids him from touching her. He’s clutching a bunch of flowers. Amal looks at them and bursts into tears; loud sobs that seem never to stop and eventually give way to a throaty staccato. Youssef tries to embrace her but she pushes him roughly away and goes into the living room. Youssef follows her.

  ‘I know where you were,’ he whispers in Amal’s ear.

  ‘Go away,’ Amal manages to press out between sobs, and she doesn’t recognize her own voice as she says it.

  Youssef longs to hug her. She doesn’t move.

  ‘It’ll pass,’ Youssef whispers.

  Amal runs out of the room and locks herself in her pink-tiled, perfectly clean bathroom, leaving Youssef pale and alone. He knocks cautiously at the door but she doesn’t react. He sits down on the floor and waits in silence. He spends two hours there.

  Once Youssef has finally left, Amal emerges from the bathroom. She throws the flowers in the bin and unplugs her landline, then she switches her mobile to silent and her doorbell off. She’s full of unsaid words and she knows she’ll never speak them, not as long as Bashar al-Assad and his accursed family are in power. She prowls around her flat, not finding anywhere to settle down, not on the sofa, not in the kitchen and certainly not on the veranda. She can’t call anyone because her phone is definitely being monitored, and she doesn’t dare to go out. She closes all the windows and draws the curtains. The only light she can bear is a tiny nightlight.

  Late that evening, Luna opens the door with the spare key that Amal gave her for emergencies. She couldn’t get hold of Amal while she was in prison, so she began to worry. A few days ago, she decided to go to Amal’s flat. Since then she’s been there regularly, sitting in the kitchen for a while, gazing out of the window, checking her emails and daydreaming about her lover, who still hasn’t left his wife.

  Luna sits down on the couch next to Amal with two steaming cups of tea. When Amal continues staring into space after drinking hers, Luna tries to inject some enthusiasm into her voice and says cheerfully, ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘I’ve got no food in the house,’ Amal answers, devoid of all emotion.

  ‘Shall I order something?’

  Amal shakes her head. A little later she’s in the kitchen kneading dough while Luna flicks through an Italian Vogue, not letting her friend out of her sight. The worktop is covered in flour, sugar and crumbs, open containers of date syrup, rose-water, honey and rose petals everywhere. It smells of melted butter and a heavy sweetness that wipes away all thoughts. The oven is hot, two baking sheets are cooling on the floor and two more are waiting their turn. Amal’s gaze is turned inwards, rejecting any contact. Luna has given up trying to draw her into conversation and opened a bottle of whisky instead, which is rapidly emptying. But Amal is very aware that Luna hasn’t even asked where she’s been for the past few days, and suddenly she’s not sure whether Luna is simply afraid to ask or if she thinks she deserved it.

  Two hours later, Amal and Luna have their feet up on the coffee table, in front of them a huge, porcelain platter of sticky sweets, which they put silently and methodically in their mouths, one after another, until Amal jumps up, very pale, and rushes to the toilet. Luna runs after her and holds Amal’s hair away from her burning-hot face as she vomits.

  Every day, people are buried in white shrouds. Facebook and YouTube are flooded with videos of the dying and the dead and their grieving parents. The state TV stations repeat the tale of alleged terrorists and show images of martyrs who died for Assad’s glory. The West does nothing, still nothing.

  Via his brother Naji, Hammoudi has made contact with the opposition. They try to meet regularly and exchange news on the events in Deir ez-Zor. One of them is a young doctor, Mariam, who says the secret service is now monitoring casualty departments. If demonstrators are admitted, she says, the hospital directors tell them not to treat them; if they do, the doctors are shot.

  Hammoudi suspects the revolution has failed. There will be no new Syria. Something terrible will take its place, and yet he still feels better. These meetings have saved Hammoudi; he no longer feels isolated and he can finally forget Claire for a while. For the first time he can really make a difference. At least that’s how it feels. And that’s why he agrees to break into a hospital to gather evidence of the regime’s crimes. They’ll be sent on to international newspapers; the reports from Syria are now so appalling that they come across as implausible.

  He wants to see the demonstrators’ dead bodies before the military police dispose of them. He knows from Mariam that the secret service tortures detainees on the top floors, but no one can get up there without being arrested first.

  Hammoudi puts on a doctor’s coat, walks into the Al-Noor Hospital and through the casualty department without alerting attention, then takes the lift to Pathology. He’s scared, his fingers are clammy but he keeps going; keeping going is all he has left.

  The refrigeration units are overcrowded, meaning many corpses are still in the middle of the sparsely lit room. Hammoudi tries not to breathe in but the stench is overpowering. The murdered bodies are littered with traces of torture: burns and bruises, skin cauterized by chemical substances, deep cuts, welts from electric cables, blood still barely congealed. One body is missing its left eye; Hammoudi sees it must have been ripped out. Others have had limbs amputated and teeth kicked in.

  Hammoudi feels a sudden hand on his back. He turns around slowly. Behind him is the consultant from the interview he had a while ago. He has suntanned skin, a high forehead and a bald pate. He says nothing, the two of them merely contemplating the bodies in silence through their glasses.

  After a while that feels like an eternity but is only thirty seconds long, the consultant says, ‘The only thing I can do for you is not report you. Take your jacket and go straight home. Make sure the military don’t see you.’

  The windows are open, fresh air and the scent of jasmine flooding into the room. The distant sounds of traffic, voices and car horns make Amal feel alive. It has always taken her a long time to get up in the morning, and now she turns on her front in slow motion and then onto her back, like a lumbering beetle, and stretches her limbs. She pulls herself together and gets up.

  With a silk dressing gown over her nightclothes, she gets her Italian coffee out of the freezer, makes an espresso in a pot also imported from Italy and pads onto her veranda with her coffee cup. Out there, she encounters a tall man in a balaclava and full martial gear. The man is calmly smoking a cigarette on her property, looking into the distance. He has already set up his long-barrelled sniper’s rifle, aimed at the busy square opposite her building.

  When the sniper notices Amal he wishes her a good morning with a broad grin that comes across as insolent. He has a friendly round face and the morning really is extremely sunny.

  Amal nods at him and asks, ‘Has something happened?’
<
br />   ‘No.’

  ‘Aha.’ Four more snipers are positioning themselves on Amal’s roof and the neighbours’ roofs look like they’re crawling with cockroaches in some kind of biblical plague. She gives the man on her veranda a questioning look. He stares back, extinguishes his cigarette on her floor and fishes a piece of chewing gum out of his pocket.

  ‘Will you be here long?’ Amal asks.

  ‘We don’t know, but it would be nice if we could use your toilet. I’ll make sure nothing gets stolen.’ His voice is friendly, almost apologetic.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Amal murmurs and hurries into her bedroom, where she draws the curtains and gets dressed. Then she starts pacing to and fro. When she notices how ridiculous her behaviour is, she stuffs all the cash and jewellery she has at home into a handbag and leaves the flat in a rush.

  Youssef comes to the door half naked, his hair a mess and his eyes still red from the shower. He’s clearly surprised to see Amal; they haven’t spoken since the bathroom incident. Amal shakes her head in response to his unspoken question and they embrace. She goes into his flat, throws her jacket onto a chair and her high-heeled sandals into a corner. Now it’s Youssef’s turn to tidy up, relocating an impressive collection of used coffee cups into the kitchen.

  They spend the day listening to old records and drinking bad Lebanese wine, until at some point there’s a Twitter announcement that Bashar al-Assad is going to give a speech to parliament.

  ‘He’s not going to step down,’ Amal says.

  ‘Of course not, but he could at least apologize for the crimes in Daraa.’

  ‘Or fire his cousin.’

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ says Youssef.

  ‘Now I know why they sequestered my terrace, at least.’

  They sit down in front of the TV. It’s an old model with a convex rear and random colours on the screen. Bashar al-Assad talks for a long time and yet says nothing, or at least he doesn’t utter a word about the revolution or Daraa. Instead, he talks about a conspiracy targeting Syria as a whole. Every now and then he laughs at his own jokes. At the end of his speech, a parliamentarian leaps up with a mildly insane expression on his face and announces that Bashar should rule not only Syria, but ideally the whole world.

  Youssef throws an ashtray at the wall. The bulky, crystal dish shatters into hundreds of small crystals and Youssef yells that the president should curl up and die.

  ‘I never liked that ashtray,’ says Amal.

  Youssef doesn’t react, instead launching into a tirade of curses against the president, his father, mother, brothers, uncles and wife.

  ‘It’s no use cursing! The neighbours will hear you!’ says Amal.

  ‘Fuck the neighbours!’ Youssef yells, albeit at a slightly lower volume.

  ‘Pour me a drink instead, or don’t you give a shit about me either?’

  Youssef glares at her but at least he stops talking.

  ‘I want to have a party,’ Amal says after a long pause.

  Youssef raises an eyebrow and then laughs out loud. ‘I’ve got a feeling it might be the last one,’ he says thoughtfully, once he’s finished laughing. ‘When, then?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Amal gathers her hair up in a bun, smokes one last cigarette, puts on an apron and starts work. It’s going to be a huge feast for more than forty guests. Amal has a lot of friends, perhaps so that she doesn’t have to get close to anyone in particular. Her kitchen is spacious and open-plan, with large white cupboards, a granite worktop and a kitchen island where her shopping is lined up in countless plastic bags: thin crispy flatbreads typical of Damascus, large tubs of yoghurt, labneh and tahini, pine kernels and walnuts, fresh herbs, whole chickens, a leg of lamb, a small sack of rice, piles and piles of fruit and vegetables, two gigantic watermelons.

  Youssef is sitting at the kitchen table with his legs crossed, flicking through Amal’s collection of Persian and Arabic cookbooks and waiting for her instructions. Amal mixes a yoghurt and tahini marinade for the lamb, which she then puts in the oven; she fries aubergines and the flatbreads, layering them in her favourite blue bowl with chickpeas and yoghurt and tahini to make fatteh, removes a portion of stock from the freezer and uses it as a basis for frike; she makes fattoush by frying more flatbread, washing and chopping herbs and vegetables and mixing it all into a salad; she purees chickpeas for hummus, adding tahini, salt, lemon juice and a little garlic. While Amal cooks she forgets Bashar al-Assad, the revolution and the prison, torture and Syria; forgets they exist. She even smiles at Youssef.

  Youssef watches her slender hands working, her face concentrated and her forehead damp with beads of sweat. Once the mezze are done she moves on to the Persian main courses, which she only prepares for special occasions. She gets Youssef to chop the herbs and vegetables while she puts fine threads of saffron in a small bowl, pours boiling water over them, covers the bowl with a saucer and sets it aside, then washes the rice and melts the butter. She makes khoresht-e fesenjan, a stew of chicken, pomegranate syrup, ground walnuts, turmeric, salt, pepper, paprika, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Plus another kind of khoresht with tender veal and large amounts of parsley, fenugreek, wild leek and dried limes, also stewed for hours. The dishes are served with simple saffron rice and sour cherries.

  The scent of cooking fills the whole building. Now Amal takes her shortcrust pastry out of the freezer, bakes it blind for the tarte au chocolat, melts the dark chocolate with cream and a little butter, squeezes lemons for the tarte au citron, then whips egg white for the pavlova, which Youssef is allowed to decorate with fresh berries later, under close supervision.

  Amal finishes shortly before the guests arrive. She asks Youssef to open all the windows while she takes a shower. The table is covered with small mezze plates and the heavy cast-iron pans Amal brought specially from France. The air smells of cardamom and cinnamon, of anise, saffron, cloves, sumac and cumin. The scent of the spices and steaming dishes mingles with that of the fresh flowers Youssef brought along – jasmine and of course Damascene roses.

  Youssef follows Amal to the threshold of the bathroom and knocks cautiously. She lets him in and opens the shower cabin door. Warm water pelts down on her damaged body and Youssef looks at her, looks closely and studies her bruises, the scraped skin and the prison now inscribed upon Amal’s body, and then Amal pulls him close and he buries his lips in the nape of her neck.

  At the end of the meal, the guests dunk scraps of bread in the emptying dishes to get at the very last remains, the empty arak bottles crowd each other out and belt buckles are loosened. The evening has been extravagant but not nearly as out of hand as the parties in the months and years before. It seemed as though the guests were just looking for an opportunity to argue, but the rich food calmed their tempers.

  Amal has been in bed for some time, with Youssef by her side – Luna has generously taken over the hostess’s duties for the rest of the evening. She’s in a magnificent mood because her lover has finally moved out of the apartment he shared with his wife and children.

  In bed, Youssef strokes Amal’s hair and whispers in her ear that he’s joined the resistance. He won’t be fighting, he tells her, but he is smuggling medicine, bandages and food to the front, where their former fellow students and friends are fighting Assad’s troops.

  ‘Promise me you won’t fight,’ Amal says.

  ‘Am I that important to you?’

  ‘I don’t want our revolution to fail,’ Amal answers after a while.

  Two doctors, a veterinarian, a pharmacist and two nurses are sitting on cushions. Hammoudi and Mariam contacted them because they had seen them at demonstrations, so knew they could count on their support for the revolution. Mariam passes between them with a tray of tea and pastries. Hammoudi admires Mariam’s slim figure and her blue eyes, rather like sapphires. She smells of flowery perfume and generously applied oud, a scent Hammoudi never could resist. The curtains are drawn.

  Hammoudi is the first to speak, starting by thank
ing Mariam for letting them use her flat and then everyone else for coming. He feels insecure about the meeting; he thinks he’s the wrong person for the job because he spent the past few years outside of Syria, but the others are so warm and affectionate that he soon forgets his concern. He tells them he’s planning to set up a secret field hospital.

  The pharmacist, a woman with a grey headscarf and dark eyes, says, ‘It’s getting worse and worse. When doctors, ambulance staff and nurses try to help injured demonstrators they’re treated like criminals. They’re risking their lives.’

  ‘Someone was shot dead at a checkpoint the other day just because he had painkillers with him,’ says a dentist, a chain-smoking man in a navy-blue suit that can’t hide his spindly figure.

  ‘I can’t imagine that,’ says Mariam.

  ‘They’d never go that far!’ the vet next to her agrees.

  ‘We have come that far,’ the nurse says.

  ‘We have to get organized,’ Hammoudi says. ‘We could distribute medical kits all over the city. That would be a start, and when a demonstrator is injured a nearby doctor could be informed via a telephone list. That way we’d minimize the risk.’

  ‘Right,’ the pharmacist nods. ‘I’ll take care of the medical kits.’

  ‘We need blood,’ says the head of the municipal hospital’s orthopaedic department. Hammoudi looks puzzled so she adds, ‘The central blood bank is under government control and no blood is “wasted” on demonstrators.’