After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  As the sobs bent her body nearly double, she held on to the roots of the tree behind her. She did not know when she stopped sobbing, only that her face in the morning was swollen and hot, and that it would be days before she would have consistent food and water again as they made their way back into Myanmar, into the heart of the war.

  * * *

  —

  Clutching the refrigerator in Austin and holding the dish towel to her face, Mu Naw remembered again the grass under her legs, the roots in her grip, the sounds of her great-grandmother and great-aunt breathing, the rustle of the wind in the trees. She had not wanted to go back into Myanmar without her parents, but her great-grandmother had held her hand while they walked. She had tethered Mu Naw along that journey, back to the village where their mother came from, where the Tatmadaw had gone and Karen people were once more living a half-life haunted by war. She had had her grandmothers around her to give her what her parents would not, though it was not and never would be enough. Looking back now, Mu Naw realized she had always known that this moment would come again—not in the United States, not by a refrigerator holding a dish towel with a slightly faded daisy on it. But she had expected and feared it all of her life.

  The intensity of her aloneness shook her. She wondered how she would know if she had drifted away, or if it had already occurred, if an essential part of her had stayed behind at the camp, had been lost in the journey to Austin.

  Chapter 7

  HASNA

  DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011

  Hasna did not feel like celebrating Mother’s Day on Monday morning. She was glad to see Khassem again, but his fevered drive and unexpected appearance late on Sunday night only spiked the fear that had coursed through her for two days. His warning felt worse because it was vague: What was coming? What would the government do? They had spoken late into the night, speculating freely in whispers as they rarely allowed themselves before, not even inside their home. Worst-case scenario, they all knew, was a repeat of Hafez al-Assad’s assault on Hama thirty years before. They could not decide what the general had meant, what they should do, whether they should say anything to anyone.

  More people had died in Daraa since Friday. Enraged crowds pulled down statues of Bashar al-Assad and his father. The fact that Monday was a holiday only gave the protesters license to destroy the city—by the end of the night, the courthouse downtown would be burned to the ground. That morning, Khassem begged his mother to get away for the day. At first she said no, but he was persuasive, smiling the sweet smile he reserved for her. After lunch, when he asked again, she raised her eyebrows, smirking, and then rolled her eyes.

  They went, as their family always did, to Lake Muzayrib. He skillfully guided the motorcycle around each of the curves, the potholes, the other drivers. Hasna clung to him. He was out of uniform that day, in a collared shirt and jeans, looking again like her son and not the property of the Syrian army. The edges of her long black coat flapped around her legs as they left town and he picked up speed. She laughed once and Khassem half turned his head, grinning.

  The first glimpse of Lake Muzayrib was her favorite—the water, held reverently between steep verdant hills, reflected lacy clouds above. Exuberant new grass asserted itself around winter’s scrubby landscape. The road rimmed the lake and Khassem slowed the motorcycle as they circled. They pointed out to each other again the sites they knew perfectly well. There was the road that led to Muzayrib castle. There was Rana’s favorite waterfall. There was the place they picnicked with the cousins from Damascus.

  Hasna looked and looked, taking it all in, turning her head like a child to see every sight anew. Eventually they stopped and found a place to sit by one of the sites where the water poured from pipes into the lake at an incredible rate. They were not waterfalls, not in the traditional sense, but they were beautiful and powerful and most of them had taken on a life of their own, the water leaving the pipes to create natural causeways. Somewhere on the other side of the lake, someone was playing a flute; over the thrumming water, she heard snatches of the minor melody when the wind shifted.

  Sitting in this ancient valley, one of the most beautiful and fertile in a region that had been the hub of civilizations since history began, Hasna felt she could come to grips with her place in the world. She was small, her family was small, her time in the world would come and go. The water underscored this notion coursing through her—this water did not care that her beloved city was falling, that her son was in an army she did not trust, that forces beyond her control were moving toward her at an inexorable rate.

  It was as if every color were crisper than she had ever seen—kelly-green grass bursting from buff rocks, opaque lake turned coral and fuchsia and lemon-yellow by the setting sun, cerulean sky bruising into indigo as the last light lowered behind the hill.

  When the sun was gone, she turned to Khassem: “Everything is about to change, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  They rode through the dark in silence. When it came time for Khassem to set out for Damascus, the grief she had managed to avoid all day caught up with her. She was almost sobbing when she hugged him good-bye, thanking him for a perfect afternoon. He clung to her for a moment and he was not ashamed of his tears when he kissed her fiercely on her forehead.

  It was the last time she would ever see Lake Muzayrib.

  * * *

  —

  Khassem went back to Damascus that Monday night. Tuesday passed in a semblance of normalcy—school and work punctuated by neighbors’ visits and reports of what was happening in town. The protests continued to center on the Omari mosque; Hasna avoided her usual market so she would not be caught in the streets. Wednesday was the same. She felt listless, tense. She baked bread and went to the market away from the protesters and listened, ears straining for she did not know what.

  In the middle of the night on Wednesday, she sat up in terror. For several seconds, she was not sure what had disturbed her sleep. Then she realized the usual light from the streetlight outside was gone, the gentle whirring of the refrigerator in the kitchen was silenced. She pulled out her mobile phone and saw that it was 1:00 a.m.—the phone was charged, but there was no service. The hairs on her arms rose as she sat up.

  Jebreel was stirring from his sleep. She heard Yusef’s door open, the sound almost alarmingly loud. Hasna put on her house robe, moving instinctively through the darkness, and checked that Rana was sleeping. She had to lean in close to see her daughter in the dim room. She brushed a lock of hair off Rana’s forehead and felt her own hand tremble; she noticed the fact almost objectively, as if she were removed from the trembling hand, from the lingering touch on her daughter’s face. She closed the door gently and said a prayer that Rana would continue to sleep. She could hear Jebreel and Yusef shuffling in their rooms, getting dressed. She thought of putting on her clothes, but she felt an overwhelming urge to see what was happening outside. She pulled her robe more tightly around her and went to the stairs leading up to the second story of their home.

  The stairs were bricked in with ornate cement blocks. The decorative holes in the blocks allowed fresh air and light to come into the stairwell but kept outsiders from seeing in; like the high-walled courtyard, the stairwell was designed to allow a woman without a hijab to move freely in her home while giving her access to outside space. Hasna wedged her fingers into the openings of the blocks at waist level, pushing her body against the wall so that she could turn her head to the right and the left.

  The skyline of her city was as familiar to Hasna as her mother’s face had been. From her vantage point, she could usually see the skyline partially, the face half-turned; the enveloping darkness gave her more sense than sight. But she did not need light to envision the Omari minaret that rose imposingly above the dun-colored buildings around it, its square shape formed by irregular, hand-built bricks and topped by a slim dome. Electric lines creased like wrinkles at every interse
ction; spiked wires protruded from the pillars of half-built walls where construction had halted on a building nearby. The wide bridges, the open soccer fields, the verdant Hameeda Altaher park, the ridge of mountains around them—all were too far away for her to see, but she could feel them, as if she were nestled against the shoulder of her city, as if it shared the shuddering rise and fall of her fear, their hearts racing as one.

  For one agonizing moment, all was still. The evening breeze toyed lovingly with her hair, the soft wisps around her face, the ends that hung lustrously down her back. She tucked her cheek against the bricks and breathed out a muffled sob.

  And then a flare below the Omari mosque lit the minaret from the side away from her, so that the tower was backlit, black and ominous. The sound was delayed by a full second, the boom coming shortly after the light. And then another flare, and another. Gunshots rang out from various points around the minaret. She could see flashes from the tops of buildings surrounding the mosque, a brief yellow spurt she thought she imagined at first until she saw it dozens of times—snipers had taken places all around the Omari.

  The night was instantly a cacophony—men screaming in the mosque, neighbors shouting in the streets, guns blaring, explosions. She could make no sense of the noise. The objectivity she had noticed when touching Rana returned—she felt as if she were removed from what was happening, observing herself as she observed the attack on her city.

  Down in the street, she heard a voice louder than the others: “Help! Help him! He’s hurt!” Without thought, she was moving down the stairs, wishing she had taken the time to get dressed earlier.

  The darkness of her room was deeper after the flashing lights outside; she dashed around the bed and opened the wardrobe, pulling on pants and a shirt and her hijab by feel, grabbing her coat as she went. There was no time to check on Rana because she could hear Jebreel in the courtyard calling her name. “Hasna! Hasna!” His voice rose sharply on the second syllable. Her husband’s audible fear shook her. He met her just inside their gate and gripped her arm: “Get some water boiling and bring some rags. We’re next door.”

  He was gone into the street before she could ask any questions. She filled three of her largest pots with water and used a match to light the gas burners; the pilot light went out with the electricity. When the water churned rapidly in the smaller pot, she wrapped the handles with an old towel and walked swiftly, keeping her elbows stiff so the water did not slosh. She tucked a bundle of old rags under her arm and went the way Jebreel had. People ran past her and she made her way next door. For a minute she stood in the doorway, watching. She could not bring herself to cross the threshold.

  A man was laid out on the table where Hasna had drunk countless cups of coffee during mornings at home with her neighbor, Um Ibtihal, whose husband was a veterinarian. Candlelight skewed the scene. Um Ibtihal’s husband held a towel to a man’s chest; his shirt had been ripped away. Blood soaked the edges of the towel. The veterinarian’s voice was firm as he directed Um Ibtihal, who stood at the end of their dining room-turned-operating table, and the men around him. Hasna could not see Um Ibtihal’s face through the shadows.

  The man on the table groaned and Hasna moved, taking the water to his feet where Um Ibtihal was using bleach and boiling water to clean the utensils her husband used every day on animals. Hasna laid the towels in a heap beside it and went back for the other two pots boiling fervently on her stove.

  That moment pausing in the doorway was the last time she stopped that night.

  The victims kept coming—some were already dead, but many others made their way to the veterinarian’s house as word spread that he could help. Some came propped up by their relatives or friends; some hobbled along, others were carried. Hands grasped armpits and knees, heads lolled against shoulders, eyes squinted and closed, mouths shrieked and bawled and exhaled.

  Hasna boiled water, ripped sheets into rags, filled glasses with water. She was mercifully free of feeling, her body an automatic thing that moved quickly, competently, while her mind watched dispassionately. Later, the horror of watching her neighbors’ sons bleeding on a kitchen table would wake her up night after night, but in the moment, her mind did nothing. Her body obeyed the orders of those who seemed to know what they were doing, supplying bandages and water for Um Ibtihal to clean the surgery tools and drinks for those whose throats were parched from smoke and from screaming.

  * * *

  —

  Hasna learned only much later that Khassem had gotten word the next morning when he woke up in the army barracks that the entire area around the Omari mosque in Daraa had been destroyed by the government forces that moved in at 1:30 a.m. The way his roommate mentioned it—casually, slyly—made it sound as if Daraa were completely obliterated, a repeat of Hama so many years ago. The soldiers in the rooms all around him heard his bellow of rage. They were witnesses to the uncontrolled torrent of anti-Assad profanities Khassem did not even try to control. His government-informant roommate was only too happy to pass on the exact words Khassem had used. He was huddled, weeping, in a corner of his room when the army officials came to take him in for questioning.

  The investigating officers let him call a relative who was a lawyer in Damascus; the phone lines into Daraa were all shut off. The lawyer tried to help, but the incriminating evidence about Khassem’s critical views of the government had already been sufficiently observed. It was too late to regret his actions later, when he eventually heard that his family was safe. The investigating officers interviewed Khassem on and off for two weeks before taking him to Sednaya Prison. Hasna was never sure how their lawyer relative even learned that information, whom he paid or what it cost him—very few people would get the same information about their sons who disappeared into Sednaya.

  A word-of-mouth communication system emerged quickly over the next few weeks. But it was hard to decipher truth from rumor. It would be weeks after Khassem was incarcerated that Hasna learned of the location of her second son.

  * * *

  —

  The morning after the attack on Omari, Rana woke later than usual. She was a heavy sleeper and her bedroom had thick basalt walls that had shielded her from the noise of the night before. She emerged tousle-headed to see her mother washing her hands vigorously in the kitchen sink. Hasna’s shock was only beginning to wear off; she jumped when Rana walked in.

  “Habibti, are you hungry?” She grabbed her daughter’s face, held her shoulders, hugged her, pulled back to examine her face again. Disconcerted by the force of her mother’s affection, Rana took a step back, but nodded. Hasna pulled a large bowl of ful from the refrigerator, closing the door quickly so that it did not lose its coolness. Rana watched her light the stovetop with a match.

  “Is the electricity out again? Am I going to school?” she asked warily.

  Hasna paused and looked at her blankly, utterly undone at the thought of explaining this night to her daughter. Finally, she gestured for Rana to sit down, chopped up half of a tomato while the beans heated through, and filled the bowl to the brim. She would feed her well first, she decided, and then tell her.

  Leaving the pot to simmer on the stove for when Yusef and Jebreel came back from helping to clean up at Um Ibtihal’s home, she carried Rana’s bowl to the table, her mind jumping unbidden to a few hours ago, when she had run swiftly through the dark courtyard with boiling pots of water. Her hands were shaking visibly again by the time she set the bowl in front of Rana. She watched Rana eat with an attention that clearly irritated her daughter.

  “What? What’s going on?”

  Hasna was trying to find the words to explain to her daughter what had happened when a loud banging noise began. Someone was pounding on Um Ibtihal’s gate next door. Hasna froze. She heard a deep voice ringing out, “Open up! In the name of Bashar al-Assad!” Hasna motioned for Rana to stay at the table and quietly slipped out of her own gate.

 
She had taken a few steps toward the veterinarian’s house when she saw soldiers emerging from the house leading some men, including Jebreel and Yusef. The soldiers carried machine guns and Jebreel, Yusef, the veterinarian, and a few other neighbors walked with their hands on their heads. Other soldiers were emerging from houses down the street, pushing men in front of them to form a group in the middle of the road. Hasna watched for a moment, then ran to her house to meet the soldiers walking in. She explained in as calm a tone as she could that her husband and son were already in line. She opened the gate and let the soldiers enter the courtyard and look around. Rana blanched, rushing to her mother. The soldiers did not tarry; when they exited the house, one barked at Hasna to point out her husband. Jebreel nodded, never moving his hands, and the soldiers moved on to the next house.

  Hasna caught Jebreel’s eye and held it. His eyes widened and he opened his mouth to say something but he stumbled a bit and Yusef dropped his arm to catch his father and a soldier snapped at them and they no longer looked at Hasna but away from her and whatever Jebreel had been about to say was lost. And suddenly she remembered her first glimpse of Jebreel from her window when the men came for their jaha and how they had walked like this in an imposing group of al-Salam men—strong men, good men, men who danced dabke and played backgammon and worked hard and took care of their wives and children and grandchildren, who held all the hope and promise and pride of their clan—and she knew now that she had loved him from that very first moment. Next to him walked their son who had not had the chance for his own jaha, their gentle Yusef who liked to draw and who never complained about helping his family.