After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  * * *

  —

  Now every day was passed in a fever pitch of hoping that Yusef and Malek might come home. Hasna spent all day on the road in front of her house, sitting with the neighborhood women, watching from the red plastic stools that served as extra seating in everyone’s houses. They began within an hour of the sun rising. They spent their days keeping vigil together beside the wall she shared with Um Ibtihal. If their boys came into the neighborhood, they would see it from this vantage point. She left her stool only to take Rana to school and to cook quick meals for all of them.

  Hasna was sitting on the stool near the road one morning, leaning her back against the wall, when she saw a group of women gathering just down the block from them, in the entrance to the neighborhood, preparing to walk down the wider road toward the warehouse with the soldiers.

  They were all wearing the long black dresses and hijabs that most women in Daraa wore. They leaned into one another for a moment, and then they turned. They pulled out cardboard signs from beneath their long dresses and coats and held them up. Hasna’s heart lurched—there in the front, the small form with a sign held up high, was Laila.

  She felt paralyzed for a second as their voices rang out: “Free our boys! Let them go! Peace, peace, we want peace for Daraa!”

  For a few moments, it felt as if nothing would happen. The women shouted and their voices resonated with conviction and indignation. Hasna ran to follow them, staying back so it was clear that she was not with them. The group moved as one down the street. Time suspended as they yelled the grief of all of the mothers, daughters, and wives who were waiting.

  Then a contingent of soldiers turned the corner. Soldiers were thick behind the first group, as if the entire army had been waiting for these women. Soldiers poured and poured and poured into the streets. Tanks turned the corner, two of them, their ambling progress toward the clump of women all the more menacing because they were slow.

  To Hasna, they looked like a colony of ants racing toward a crumb. And that crumb was her daughter.

  She ran faster than she had ever imagined running in her life. There had been women behind Laila, but Hasna saw only her daughter. Laila stood, alone, her cardboard sign still held high above her head, shouting out her explosive rage in the face of soldiers thundering toward her.

  Hasna snatched her arm, pulled her rapidly back into the neighborhood, into the gate of a neighbor’s house, through that side gate to another and another, through the honeycomb of gates designed to allow women in hijabs to visit during the day, now serving for the second time in their lives as a secret passage to safety. She did not even give Laila a chance to speak but pulled her by the arm through house after house.

  Her own internal gate was barely closed and locked behind her before she was stripping Laila like a child. She pulled her hijab and her dress off her body as if they were toxic, snatched her cardboard sign and folded it savagely into tiny squares, stuffing it at the bottom of the pile of clothes in the basket of laundry, and shoving the black dress inside the middle of the pile. She found Laila’s pajamas, bunching the shirt in her hands so Laila could put it on over her head swiftly. When she pulled it down over Laila’s naked torso, she realized her daughter was weeping silently.

  “Enough. Enough! You have to look like you’ve been asleep. Quick! Get into bed!”

  She swatted her daughter’s bottom as she turned, the swift spanking of an exasperated mother to her little girl.

  Hasna made herself take a deep breath. She waited until she heard Laila’s bedroom door click shut before walking, deceptively nonchalant, out her front door. She gathered her stools as if she were utterly unconcerned with the soldiers who were breaking up into groups and running to knock on the doors of the houses around her.

  The neighborhood women saved Laila’s life. The soldiers said they were really only looking for the one woman who organized the protest, the small one in the front. Um Ibtihal said she had no idea who that was, that none of them did—perhaps she was a dissident from outside the neighborhood who came to cause trouble for them. Theirs was not the only neighborhood where young men were missing; all across Daraa, mothers and sisters and wives waited for men to come home. Hasna joined her voice with those of the other women in telling the soldiers—none of the women here would protest, they were patriotic Syrian citizens and would never speak out against their government. It was truth; Hasna would never have dreamed of protesting against her government. Hasna invited some soldiers to search her home, where her sick children slept, but they declined, convinced by the women’s tones that it had been outside protesters.

  When Hasna finally went back inside, Laila was asleep, holding Hamad, who had napped the entire time his mother was bringing the soldiers down on all of them. Hasna pulled a blanket over them both.

  * * *

  —

  The informant who told on Laila was a girl who had never liked her. She was the daughter of the man who owned the small grocery store used by everyone in their neighborhood and her insecurities made her sharp; she was constantly spreading gossip and rumors about other girls in school. The girl was thrilled that the soldier who came to her house was the handsome one she had been making eyes at for weeks. She happily told him what no other woman in the neighborhood would: “Oh, of course I know who that was! That was Laila al-Salam. She lives just down the way—her family’s gate is near the main road. I’ll show you if you’d like.”

  “No, thank you, I know which one you’re talking about. I’ll go check on it now.”

  And Fahad al-Homsi went straight to Hasna’s house.

  * * *

  —

  “You’re lucky it was me she told,” Fahad al-Homsi concluded, this time sitting at the table. “No one has accused Um Hamad but the girl down the street.”

  Laila walked into the courtyard silently, her hijab fixed firmly in place, and listened.

  Fahad al-Homsi went on as if she weren’t there, but his tone shifted, became more formal. “There is nothing we can do, nothing we will do, since it is evident that the girl who informed on your daughter was wrong and that the person who led that protest is from another neighborhood. But we wanted to let you know that these false rumors were being spread by someone in the neighborhood, just so you are all aware.”

  Hasna’s voice was as formal as his. “We take these rumors very seriously. When my husband gets home, he will go and speak with that girl’s father. Clearly it was not my daughter, who was sleeping all morning with her infant son; they have both been sick. The grocer’s daughter is a known liar. Her father will discipline her for it. We will make sure of it.”

  Fahad al-Homsi nodded and got up to leave. Laila walked with him to the door and this time, she spoke the words of farewell: “Peace be upon you.”

  Fahad al-Homsi turned his face fully toward her when he responded, “And peace be upon you.”

  Hasna offered to keep the baby for a few minutes.

  The story became legend in the neighborhood by that night. Laila walked resolutely over to the grocer’s house, knocked on the door, and walked in when the daughter opened the gate.

  Then, without saying a word, she beat the girl up savagely.

  The grocer tried to pull Laila off his daughter, but she spat in his face: “You should be ashamed to call yourselves Syrian.”

  And Laila left as swiftly as she had come.

  After that night, no one in the neighborhood went back to that man’s grocery store again.

  When Laila came the next morning to sit with Hasna and the other women in their prolonged vigil on the red stools, they made room for her, patting her shoulder and her knee.

  * * *

  —

  Fahad al-Homsi sauntered up to the women gathered outside on the fifteenth morning without Yusef and Malek. “Good morning, Um Yusef. Peace be upon you.”

  “Peace be upon yo
u.”

  He looked up as if he were checking on the weather. “There is a small chance that there will be a bus of prisoners coming back from Damascus today, and that it will come at the end of this street, perhaps within the next few hours.”

  He walked away casually. She did not have the words to speak the usual blessings of peace. She sat down again.

  Within hours, the whole neighborhood joined the red-stooled vigil keepers. Even the men joined them, everyone waiting in the streets, all pretense of casual loitering gone. It was a dangerous game, to gather like this, but they could not bear to miss the moment when the boys came back.

  * * *

  —

  The bus pulled up, stopping with a mechanical sigh. The doors opened and a handful of people got off—women in hijabs, older men, some children.

  And then they were there, nineteen young men, limping off the bus.

  Hasna ran. Jebreel ran. The whole neighborhood ran, as one, to welcome them home.

  The soldiers stood on the main road and watched them.

  Hasna hugged Yusef and he was crying and she was crying and she could see how filthy his face was by the tracks his tears made on his cheeks. She pulled him close to her, cradled his thin body against hers, and then he was holding his dad, and then he was pulling his mother back to him.

  After a moment, she stopped to look for Laila and saw her, chin on Malek’s shoulder, their son nestled between their bodies. Laila’s eyes caught her mother’s and they did not have to speak the forgiveness they felt for each other. It was already granted and gone, washed away in the joy of having Malek and Yusef safely home.

  After several minutes, the neighbors left the street. Laila saw the grocer, standing back in the welcoming crowd, and she walked up to him and spat in his face. “You do not deserve to be here.”

  No one said a word as Laila walked with her husband back to her mother’s home.

  * * *

  —

  That night, all of the neighbors and relatives brought food over to Hasna’s house. Yusef and Malek showered and changed and their hair was still damp when they came out to join the party. Amal and Samir came and Hasna’s daughters and nieces helped her serve coffee and tea to everyone who walked in; she borrowed cups and teapots from Um Ahmad and the veterinarian’s wife and other neighbors. They could not make enough coffee and tea. Her neighbors brought huge heaping portions of chicken and basmati rice, falafel, hummus and pita, dolmas, baklava. She turned on the lights strung from the pillars when it started getting dark, softening everyone’s faces so the stress and sleepless nights were no longer visible.

  The house was full, as Hasna loved it to be; people packed the bench surrounding the courtyard and the table was overflowing. While she was pouring coffee for one of Jebreel’s cousins, Hasna overheard someone telling Malek the story of how Laila had faced down the soldiers, and how Hasna had saved her. It was the first time Hasna could remember any of them speaking so openly about sedition, but she was caught up in the fervor like the rest of them. When the story was finished, Malek joked that they should start calling Hasna “Lebweh”—The Lioness. The neighbors loved it; they passed the name around. Hasna was embarrassed and pleased. A lioness knew when to watch and wait, and when it was time to strike. A lioness was cunning, able to ascertain the situation effectively, watching for potential danger, sensing the undercurrents around her. A lioness was fierce in protecting her children, moved on instinct without thought for her own safety, and when she moved there was no one who would dare stand in her way. Hasna caught Malek’s teary eyes across the courtyard. He smiled at her, holding Laila’s hand with one hand and baby Hamad in the crook of his arm.

  Hasna knew even then that this evening might be the last celebration in her home for a long time. She was not the only one who wiped away tears when they threw candy in the air and watched the children scramble to get it. She was not surprised that the neighbors lingered later into the night than usual. They all wanted the respite from stress, all wanted the happiness to stretch out as long as possible before they had to face the days to come.

  Before it was fully dark, Hasna slipped out to take candy and baklava to Fahad al-Homsi and the men standing watch on the street corner.

  That night, Laila slept in her own home and Yusef slept in his room. And Hasna slept fully for the first time since Khassem had come home with his warning. If only she could have had Khassem home, the evening would have been perfect.

  The next morning, she awoke with one thought—she would do whatever it took to get her children to safety. She would prove her nickname right. They needed to leave—there was too much suspicion already cast upon them by Yusef’s detention and the informant’s aspersions against Laila. They could be detained again, or disappeared. She could not bear to have any of her children in Syrian jails ever again. She and Rana would have to wait until Rana’s school year was over, because even in the midst of the escalating revolution, Hasna clung to her tenacious desire for her girls to be educated. But her focus narrowed to the single goal of saving her family.

  Chapter 12

  MU NAW

  AUSTIN, TEXAS, USA, SEPTEMBER 2007

  Mu Naw rounded the corner toward her apartment door where she saw a sheet of paper hung precariously by a single piece of tape. The walk through the arid heat was one of the most excruciating parts of her day. Little Naw Wah sat blandly in the umbrella stroller, sweat beading along her hairline, watching the world move slowly past while Mu Naw shuffled behind her and stood with the other mothers waiting for their children. The kindergarten classes came out and Mu Naw waved at the teacher as Pah Poe spotted her. They would walk home together, Mu Naw slowing perceptibly as they neared home.

  The late summer heat refused to break. Day after day of temperatures in the high nineties or low hundreds sapped what little energy Mu Naw had left. She woke up every morning thinking she might go to English class, but she could barely move off her couch or bed. The hour-long commute both ways was overwhelming. Everything made her throw up, but cars and buses were the worst. She hated the fumes that spewed out of them, the fact that there was no air that did not reek of them; riding in them had become an almost insurmountable hurdle. At home in the dark apartment, she and Naw Wah could sit for hours and watch the television or spend time with their neighbors, her distractions from grief and nausea.

  It had been several weeks since she had told Saw Ku that she was pregnant. The squatty red buildings now held several Karen families. More came every few days. Not all of the families from Myanmar were Karen; some were Karenni and a few were ethnically Burmese. Many other refugee families moved in, too—tall women in flowing headscarves from Somalia; effusive families from Burundi. She smiled at them when she passed the same women in her walks to and from school. Sometimes their presence helped her feel less alone; sometimes their inability to communicate with one another contributed to the heaviness of her depression.

  The other Karen families were her only source of joy. To hear her language spoken, to eat familiar foods, to catch up on news from home—she could forget, for a few minutes or even a few hours, everything that she had lost. She had become good friends with the woman who lived in the apartment just behind her, Meh Bu, who spent many afternoons at Mu Naw’s house watching TV. They ate lunch together and helped each other with the paperwork that defined their lives.

  Mu Naw had come to rely on Meh Bu’s translation skills; though Mu Naw had come here first, her new friend was confident and assertive with the English she had learned back in her camp in Thailand. Mu Naw was happy to defer to Meh Bu on most things. In turn, Mu Naw shared what she had and what she had learned about navigating their new world: She gave Meh Bu food stamps, took her on Monday nights to get boxes of nonperishable food from the church next door, taught her which buses took her to the refugee services office or to English class. There were some things that she noticed about Meh Bu—the way she po
intedly helped some of the families and not others, her tendency to criticize many of the women—that did not sit well with Mu Naw, but she had already become family within a few days in the way that people did when they had no family nearby and no one else they could speak to.

  Mu Naw had grown up the daughter of the camp pariah; she assumed without question that the same gossip and whispering that had followed her around Mae La camp would come with her to the United States. But it did not. No one here knew that her mother had divorced her father and remarried someone else. No one else looked at her every move as proof that Mu Naw, like her mother, was “not a good girl.” To be the closest friend of the most educated woman in the apartment complex was surprising to Mu Naw, but delightful nonetheless. She felt unworthy of Meh Bu.

  It felt perverse that the apartment manager had come during the one hour she was gone to leave a note. Mu Naw pulled it down, leaned over to unbuckle Naw Wah, used the door frame for support while she fumbled with the lock. She rushed inside, the children moving aside as she scrambled for the bathroom. Afterward, she flipped the TV on for them, lying down for several minutes before she felt ready to look at the note in the manager’s scrawled handwriting.

  Everything related to the apartment was her job, a designation that never bothered Mu Naw because Saw Ku was the one going to work every day. He went five or six days a week—as many as they would let him schedule—to a restaurant where he and his brother scrubbed piles of pots and pans for hours. The bus route to get to their job was circuitous and the buses notoriously unreliable. He had to take multiple buses to get from his apartment to the restaurant, which meant many days he spent as many as twenty-four hours gone from his home. The posted bus route times seemed more of a suggestion than an actual schedule; he had missed his bus a few times in the beginning and then missed all of his subsequent connections. In order to make it to work in the morning on time, he had taken to sleeping some nights at the bus stop, curling up on his backpack with his jacket pulled over him. Mu Naw worried about him on those nights sleeping rough in this new country, but there was nothing they could do. The alternative—losing the job because he missed the bus—was unthinkable.