After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  Holding Pah Poe’s hand resolutely, Mu Naw crossed the street when a pickup truck stopped at the stop sign, walking carefully between the white lines as she had done two days before at the Austin airport. She watched the driver nervously the whole time, the exhaust from the engine filling her nostrils, but he waited for her. She put her hand on the metal bar of a door plastered with brightly colored advertisements that Mu Naw didn’t even try to decipher. Boldly, she pushed the glass door open.

  There were stacks and rows of things that neither of them had ever seen, entire aisles full of items that Mu Naw’s eyes slid past because she did not understand them. She smelled coffee that had been left too long on the burner, unwashed bodies and smoke, the metallic scent of air-conditioning, the sweet smell of cakes. She wanted cake.

  Pah Poe let go of her mom’s hand and raced toward the chips, ones in the same kind of crinkly bag they sold in the hut store at Mae La camp, asking in a higher-pitched voice if they could have some.

  “Let’s get some!” Mu Naw told her, grabbing bag after bag. She had no idea how much they cost, how to even measure the numbers on the small signs in front of the items in relation to the $100 in cash she had in the envelope in her purse—it would be weeks before she understood the words for “dollars” and “cents.” She held the chip bags close to her body with her left hand and reached for other items that looked familiar: packaged cakes and juice boxes. There were no fruits or vegetables and she did not know what the other cans or the other bags held in them.

  She and Pah Poe took their armfuls of items to the front, waited in line behind a woman buying a Coke and a pack of gum, and then spilled their purchases onto the counter in front of the startled clerk. He said something to Mu Naw, and she neither acknowledged his remark nor asked questions. She took the cash out of the envelope inside her bag and slid it to him. He asked another question and she looked back at him expressionlessly. She would not show fear. Without another word, he began to swipe over the items with a black plastic box in his hand; a red light shone on each chip bag and, when it pinged, he would set it aside in a small plastic bag. When he was done, he said something to Mu Naw again. She gestured tersely with her chin, pointing at the money in a pile on the counter beside him. She prayed silently that the money was enough. He handed her back several bills and a handful of coins, which she tucked carefully back into the envelope.

  Pah Poe carried one plastic bag and Mu Naw carried four as they walked back carefully hand in hand. Mu Naw knew she had arrived at the right apartment because there was nothing in front: no plants or towels or bikes or shoes. She set down her bags to open the door.

  Saw Ku threw the bathroom door open quickly, his hair still damp from spending so long in the cool water.

  “Did you leave? Where were you?” His voice was startled and relieved.

  “Pah Poe and I went to find food.” She gestured with her chin at the bags she had brought in as she set them down on the table.

  “Food! Where did you find food? Did they come back and bring it to us?”

  Mu Naw told Saw Ku about walking along the sidewalk and recognizing the word “food” on the store sign; Pah Poe punctuated the story with her own contribution: “I saw the chips!”

  They sat down at the dining room table and pulled item after item out of the bags and ate with no preamble, stuffing themselves with the chips and cake, washing it down with the juice Mu Naw had found for her family. When Saw Ku smiled at her, a potato chip crumb clung to the corner of his mouth. She laughed and he swiped at his mouth, spreading more crumbs across his cheek. The children giggled and Saw Ku blew out his cheeks at them, waggling his eyebrows and his ears. Pah Poe folded over with laughter and begged him to do it again and again. Every time he agreed, until their laughter faded into comfortable, homey silence broken only by the crinkle of foil wrappers and the rustle of cellophane.

  Chapter 5

  HASNA

  DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011

  The morning of March 18 was like any other Friday before it, the sunlight coruscating through the grape leaves over the courtyard, causing dappled shadows on the table where Hasna and her family gathered for their usual Friday morning meal. Hasna normally made her own bread, but that morning she hadn’t—Jebreel took Rana with him in the morning to their bakery to pick up the pita bread, the humid warmth fogging the plastic bag wrapped around it. Rana hugged it to her as she walked, holding her father’s hand, through the streets that were filled with fewer cars than on weekdays. Rana was a coltish twelve-year-old with big eyes and a smile always set to please her mother and sisters. Rana loved Friday mornings, the leisurely breakfast, the chance to walk alone on the street with her father, looking forward to the large afternoon meal when the whole family came over.

  Hasna made ful for Yusef, Khassem, Rana, and herself, a staple of their Friday breakfast; she diced tomatoes and scooped them carefully into the center of each of the bowls, a bright balance to the fava beans. Khassem was home for the weekend from Damascus; he had arrived Thursday night, as he did every week, and he would go back that night in time for work on Saturday morning. Khassem pecked her cheek and took the bowls of ful from her hands to the table; she went back to the kitchen to finish setting the table.

  They ate, their conversation desultory. Afterward, her men left as they normally did for Friday prayers, kissing her on the way out and leaving a lingering scent of shampoo and aftershave. She cleared the table, did the dishes, pruned the plants, listened to Fairuz, sipped her coffee. Hasna danced slightly as she moved around the house, her heart light, her body moving through her beloved home without really seeing the familiar objects, as she had done every morning for years. The meal only seemed remarkable later, the last normal meal in their house.

  When the call to prayer sounded, she wished—as she did occasionally—that she could be at Friday prayers. She would not want to be in the Omari mosque with Jebreel and Yusef, that big mosque frequented by the officials and police officers and many of the important people in Daraa, but she would like to go to the smaller neighborhood mosque that Malek attended. She could picture him now, as she washed her right hand three times and then her left—the sheikh imam would be standing in front of his congregation, men on one side, women on the other, and beginning the salah with “Al-salamu alaykum,” wishing them peace.

  When she thought of going to a mosque, she remembered attending as a young girl with her grandmother. She could still smell the lotion her grandmother used on her hands, the musky dry scent of the well-used Quran her grandmother always carried. She centered herself within that memory as she tugged on her prayer covering, the elastic waist of the leopard-print head covering and skirt lying lightly over her clothes—imagining herself in the mosque with her grandmother and the other women she had grown up with helped her stay focused when she made prayers.

  She walked to her navy rug spread out in her prayer corner, the arrow pointed toward the Holy Kabah in Mecca. She stood at the edge of the rug and made sure the folds of fabric covered her completely. She put her hands to her ears, began with “Allahu Akhbar,” then crossed her arms right over left on her chest to pray the Surah al-Fatihah. During the four repetitions of the midday prayer, when she knelt and praised God the Great, “Subhana rabi alazeem,” her hands were on her knees. When she prostrated herself and praised the God above, “Subhana rabi alaala,” her hands remained just below her chin on the rug beside her. At the end of prayers, she prayed for Abraham and Mohammad and finally wished peace to the angels, whispering “Al-salamu alaykum” first over her right shoulder and then her left. Then she remained kneeling, hands on her knees, and presented her petitions to God: prayers for her children and grandchildren, and especially for Khassem as he journeyed back to Damascus that night.

  When she had removed her prayer covering, she hurried to finish her dishes. After her prayer time, she would only have a few minutes before Amal arrived. Hasna had every intention o
f enjoying her Friday without working all day. They would begin preparing the large meal in the early afternoon, as the men came home from the mosque, but the late morning was one of the few leisurely times she had during the week with her girls.

  * * *

  —

  They heard the shots first. Amal had been there for over an hour, her feet up on a chair to keep them from swelling, chatting with Hasna over tea while Rana played with little Noor. At first, they thought that someone must be having a wedding; there was always someone shooting off guns in celebration of weddings on Fridays. They barely registered the shots until they heard the angry voices. Those were not the celebratory yells of happy wedding guests, they were the outraged, determined shouts of a mob. There were more shots—direct, repeated, intentional.

  Hasna and Amal ran outside. The air was filled with the voices of the women in the street, the metal clanging of gates up and down the street as more women came outside. They clumped together in front of her neighbor’s house, where there was a good view of the main road; the women talked in low voices as they waited for the men to come home.

  Jebreel, Yusef, and Khassem were with the first group of men to make their way up the street, shoulders hunched, heads down, their desire to avoid trouble evident in their determined walk. Samir was not with them. Hasna could feel Amal’s body stiffen. As the men joined them, the clump of women dissolved. Amal did not move from her post by the road.

  Hours later, Samir made it back to his in-laws’ house. A few minutes after Samir, Malek and Laila slipped in; Laila clutched baby Hamad. Hasna pushed coffee and tea on everyone, set out plates of cookies and fruit. No one ate; their drinks cooled in their hands. The gate was open and neighbors and relatives came in and went out all evening, repeating what they had heard and seen. The walls in Syria might have ears, but what had happened was so portentous, her normally nonpolitical neighbors now spoke openly.

  Over their collective renditions, Hasna pasted her own perceptions. Soon the tale was fused so firmly together that it became a thing in its own right, a monument to this day and the days that would come, fabricated from scraps of gossip and layered with whispers spoken behind closed doors, a story with weight and heft that she would carry with her to every new place, that she would center the rest of her life on.

  At the Al-Abbas mosque, as the sheikh imam was finishing his khutba, he spoke the final blessing, the same as the first: “Al-salamu alaykum,” so they could begin and end their time together with peace. “Al-salamu alaykum,” they should have replied, and some of them did, the words barely leaving their lips before thirty men rose as one and answered his blessing decisively: “ALLAHU AKHBAR!” It was not what they said—Allahu akhbar, Allah is greatest, which could be breathed out in recognition of Allah’s manifold goodness a thousand times a day or sighed in response to a story or spoken out in praise. It would be the prayer on the lips of thousands of people in the next few days. In the Al-Abbas mosque, it was the way they said it: When the sheikh imam stood, hands raised to bless his congregation, and received back the fierce, guttural response of a multivoiced act of defiance, the sheikh knew, they all knew, what it meant.

  It was a battle cry.

  The men marched out of the mosque, down the street, yelling loudly, “ALLAHU AKHBAR! ALLAHU AKHBAR! ALLAHU AKHBAR!” Their voices rang out with the boldness of those who had been utterly wronged, who were done being silent, who knew that all good men would join them in their cause. The men made their way down the streets from the Al-Abbas mosque to the Omari mosque, where Jebreel and Yusef and Khassem were walking out into the sun. The protesters wanted to end in the clearing beside the large Omari mosque, so that the government officials and mukhabarat officers who regularly attended it on Fridays would be forced to reckon with their accusations.

  At first, Jebreel told Hasna, he, too, thought it was a wedding. Then they saw the first marchers turning the corner, into the clearing, their faces set in anger, their fists raised, and they realized it was a demonstration. Jebreel, Khassem, and Yusef ducked down a back road to home. They were walking quietly, heads down, when they heard the first gunshots. A man running past them told them two men had already been killed.

  But it was the story of why the men had protested that day that was the most unbelievable to Hasna—the reach of it felt too vast, too unlikely. She hoped fervently that they were all wrong, that all of this would blow over in a few days.

  * * *

  —

  The events of that Friday in March began, in many ways, almost exactly three months before in another country. A shopkeeper named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in a market in Tunisia on December 17, 2010. He was protesting his treatment by a government official, a protest born out of unshakably hopeless poverty. It was the spark that ignited a region. By December 19, police in Tunisia were using tear gas to disperse hundreds of young men in the city of Sidi Bouzid, protesting high unemployment and lack of promised political reform. After ten days of violent clashes, the president of Tunisia appeared on national television to promise, “The law will be applied in all firmness” to all protesters. Two days later, protests began in Egypt: On January 1, 2011, a Coptic church was bombed, and Christians took to the streets. Six days later, on January 7, 2011, it spread to Algeria—the protesters demanded access to jobs and affordable food like their Tunisian and Egyptian counterparts. On January 9, protesters in Tunisia were setting fire to cars and engaging in violent scuffles with police. On January 13, a man in Algeria lit himself on fire like Mohamed Bouazizi, while rebellion in Tunisia flared beyond anyone’s ability to measure, much less control.

  Riots started in neighboring Libya and Muammar Gaddafi took to the national airwaves on January 14 to tell protesters to stop. His warnings were overshadowed by the triumphant news that the Tunisian president had fled to Saudi Arabia, an early victory that only increased the spread of the Arab Spring. Yemen’s protests spiked on January 23. The morning of January 25 saw massive protests in Lebanon and Egypt, followed by thousands of protesters in Jordan and in Palestine on January 28.

  Despite the repeated efforts of the many repressive leaders, the people were undeterred. Leaders whose legacies had seemed secure just weeks before were falling: Tunisia, then Yemen. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak hovered on the brink. In February, protests flared up in Algeria. Bahrain. Morocco. Iraq. The region was succumbing quickly.

  Syria was one of the last places where the Arab Spring had not ignited. And Bashar al-Assad, celebrating ten years in power after taking over the country at his father’s death in 2000, was determined that it would remain that way. The Assad regime would not be toppled by unruly young men. He had watched his father during the raids on the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama; Alawite leaders who had retained power despite their minority status for years were all around him. They knew what to do; he had already issued orders that every spark from the Arab Spring would be stamped out immediately, irrevocably.

  * * *

  —

  In a region governed by dictators, there had initially been signs Bashar might be a benevolent one, certainly less cruelly strategic and more accepting of the outside world than his father before him. Bashar’s older brother, Bassel, had been groomed for the presidency from an early age, getting a PhD in military studies and cutting his teeth on his father’s brand of warfare through Syrian involvement in the Lebanese Civil War in the late 1970s and ’80s. Bassel was a reckless womanizer with a fast and loose reputation; privately, Syrians worried about his taking power. Bashar was off at school in England to become an ophthalmologist in 1994 when Bassel was killed in an accident, heading to the airport in Damascus—he had been driving too fast. Bashar spoke fluent English and decent French. He married a beautiful Sunni woman, which signaled to his people that after his father’s insular, Alawite-only regime, things might change. His wife, Asma, had been raised in the United Kingdom and retained her British citizenship, which the world took to mean
the isolated Syrian government was now interested in being part of the global community again. Even if these things were not true about Bashar, how much damage could one eye doctor do?

  Bashar al-Assad carefully curated his image to the outside world as an educated, cosmopolitan family man who just wanted to do right by his people. He hired a Western PR firm to help his reputation in the outside world—Brown Lloyd James, founded by Peter Brown, who had once managed the Beatles. Brown Lloyd James wooed travel and fashion journalists to cover the country at the time, to show that people were happy and the leader was a savvy man of the world. With an eye toward bringing in tourists, they worked to sell the beautiful countryside, the ancient landmarks, the culture and language that stretched back unchanged over thousands of years. They invited a long list of celebrities to come and have their pictures taken with Bashar and his family: John Kerry and Sting, Angelina Jolie and Nancy Pelosi.

  In December 2010, Joan Juliet Buck, once the editor of French Vogue, traveled to Syria to write a cover story on Asma al-Assad for Vogue, attempting to peer beneath the surface of the image the Assad regime was aiming for. She could sense a Syria that, she said, “oscillated between untrustworthy rogue state and new cool place.” Toward the end of their visit, Buck was treated to a Christmas concert with the president’s family. The concert was clearly Christian, and included Arabic rap and some Broadway show tunes, another display of inclusive worldliness. In the middle of it, the president leaned over and whispered to Buck: “This is how you fight extremism—through art. . . . This is how you can have peace!” Unable to fully articulate or prove the rigidity beneath the surface, Buck wrote the piece she was sent to write. By the time the article came out in Vogue in February 2011, Bashar al-Assad’s statement would be profoundly ironic.