After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  But that relief was short-lived. A few days later, another relative brought word from their cousin in Damascus about Khassem’s imprisonment. In an instant, the shortness of breath and irregular heartbeat that had plagued Hasna during the fifteen days of waiting for Yusef and Malek returned. Hasna and Jebreel were plunged again into panic, but this time they felt more alone: They did not wait with the entire neighborhood, did not have a friendly soldier giving them word about whether Khassem might return.

  The neighbors who had filled her home on the night when Yusef and Malek returned were slowly exiting Syria. The neighborhood already felt empty. Hasna left to take Rana to school and to do her essential shopping; she did not go outside unless it was absolutely necessary.

  For the next few weeks, the government only doubled down in its attacks on the city of Daraa. Every day, rumors passed that outside forces were on the brink of intervening—Jordan, which could not want war at its doorstep; Israel, which must be concerned at the missiles so near their country; the United States, which had interfered in Iraq because of the hint of chemical weapons; the UN peacekeeping forces, which would not allow these atrocities to stand. Hasna held out hope that these rumors were true.

  She woke up in a sweat most nights dreaming of white phosphorous bombs. Sometimes the soldiers in her dreams were from Hezbollah and sometimes they were Syrian—once it was Fahad al-Homsi who fixed her with a look of profound maliciousness, tossed a grenade into her home, and laughed while the walls melted.

  She could not shake her terror. Her home felt like a deadly trap and the only safe place. It was filled with so much goodness and warmth and she could not imagine a world without this haven where she had lived for almost four decades. Its basalt walls still held the bouncing echoes of her children and her neighbors and the traffic in the streets, which all now seemed infinitely precious, which she wanted back with a desperation that came from the deepest parts of herself.

  * * *

  —

  Soldiers banged on the door of Hasna’s home one morning in late April. Rana was already at school; Jebreel had returned home from taking her and was gathering some tools in the shed on the side of the house before heading out for a construction job. Yusef was still asleep. Every morning, they let Yusef sleep in if he could. He often woke up screaming and shaking, with dreams he would never tell his mother about. The bouts of insomnia after those dreams were often worse than the nightmares. She knew some essential part of her son had been altered in those two weeks in Damascus.

  When she heard the pounding on her door, her heart stopped for a moment. She held on to the back of the chair, then ran to the door, spurred by the thought that Yusef would wake up to the voices of soldiers. Perhaps it was Fahad al-Homsi or another soldier she knew and she could send them away. Perhaps they were looking for someone else.

  Hasna lost all hope the minute she opened the gate. Soldiers with guns aimed at her face and at her heart stood on her doorstep. She backed slowly inside. She glanced down once to see if any of them held grenades in their hands but could not tell for sure.

  “What do you want?” Her voice sounded steadier than she felt; without taking her eyes off their guns, she tugged her dress away from her shaking knees so they would not know how scared she was.

  The commander barely glanced at her. “None of your business.” He strode in as if it were his home, his boots thudding on the tile floor. He nodded at his men; almost fifteen of them filled her courtyard. A few kept their guns on Hasna, others on Jebreel, who was standing in the doorway into the courtyard.

  “Who is in the house?” The officer’s voice was clipped.

  “Me, my husband, and my son, who is sleeping.” She indicated the closed door to Yusef’s room, visible from the courtyard inside the shadowed hall. Soldiers were already spreading out; she could hear them opening drawers and cabinets in her kitchen and bedroom. She prayed silently that Allah would keep them from the bookshelves where her gold was hidden. She could hear one man going through her wardrobe, shoved over the open space between the rooms. If he moved the wardrobe to look in the back, he would discover their stash. She willed herself to keep calm.

  The officer moved toward Yusef’s door.

  “No!” Hasna ran and put her body in front of the door. There was a sharp rush as the guns moved to her. “I’m not going to let you in there with those guns in your hands.” Her voice was so calm—how was that possible? She was quivering inside.

  The officer was lazily unconcerned. “We have orders. If you don’t let us in, we’re going to shoot him. You know that, right?”

  “Yes, I know, and I know you will do it. I’m asking for you to let me wake him first. You can talk to him, but you cannot go in there.”

  He moved toward her and without thinking, she put her hands on his shoulders and shoved.

  She heard the safeties go off on the rifles around her, the multiple clicks perhaps the last thing she would hear.

  And then Jebreel’s calm voice sliced through the tension: “No, my sons. This is your country. We are your people. You are good sons of Syria and you cannot do this to people who love our country.”

  The officer stepped back. She had felt the warmth of his shoulders with her palms, under the same thick uniform cloth as the one Khassem wore. She flashed back to what it was like the last time she hugged her second son. She wondered, in a stomach-dropping instant of despair, if Khassem was still alive, and if she was going to lose her oldest son today, and what it would be like to go from being a mother of two living sons to a mother of none.

  Behind her, Yusef opened the door.

  The guns trained on her now turned swiftly to him and she stepped in front of him without thinking.

  The officer’s voice rang out. “Have you been asleep this whole time? How could you possibly sleep, with all of us shouting outside of your room?”

  Yusef’s voice was insolent. “There are so many fireworks every day, what’s one more?” Hasna almost moaned out loud. Yusef managed to imply that the officer was all noise and no danger. Hasna wanted to turn and take Yusef’s face in her hands—this was her quiet and reserved son, who was always polite and easygoing. What had happened to make him talk back with such rudeness and rage? What had he lost in that prison?

  The officer looked at his soldiers and almost laughed: “What do you think, should I shoot him? Who is going to stop me?”

  Hasna’s voice was quiet. “Your patriotism.”

  The officer looked at her, head cocked slightly to the side, giving no indication of what he was thinking as he contemplated her answer. Time suspended as they all waited for the officer to move.

  “Sir!” A soldier who had been searching the room beside hers, the one with the open space and the hiding place with the gold, came in. “Sir, we found this in the closet.”

  He held up Khassem’s military coat.

  “Where did you get this?” The officer’s tone was accusatory and Hasna knew he was insinuating she had killed a soldier to have the coat.

  “My son is a soldier in Damascus.” When the officer looked skeptical, she quickly gave Khassem’s officers’ names. As she kept talking, the officer leaned back slightly, putting his weight on his heels rather than the balls of his feet. She allowed her voice to waver only for a moment, a sliver of vulnerability slipping into her words: “What do you imagine it would be like if my son went into the home of your mother and threatened her like you are threatening me?”

  Now he was backing up, his shoulders nonchalant, suddenly uninterested in her: “Other people, when we come to their house, they offer us breakfast and lunch, but you treated us like enemies from the moment we walked in.”

  She responded, still keeping her body in front of Yusef: “When you come as guests, I will offer you hospitality, but when you enter like enemies, I will treat you like enemies.”

  “Next time treat us as guests, and
we will not respond like enemies.” She almost retorted, but Jebreel was by her side with his hand on her arm and Yusef was behind them and the officer was opening the front door, taking his soldiers with him. Jebreel was gracious and diplomatic, his voice carrying over their boots echoing in her home: “Peace be with you, my sons.”

  And, as abruptly as they had come, the soldiers were gone.

  Two days later, Yusef was with his sister and brother-in-law in Jordan.

  * * *

  —

  Yusef left just in time. In late April, a month after the attack on the Omari mosque, following the “Great Friday Protests” that spread from Daraa to all of Syria, the Syrian army completely surrounded Daraa. The phone, electricity, and internet that had been restored to some areas of the city, including Hasna’s neighborhood, were cut off once again. The government shut off humanitarian supplies and all communication with the outside world, beginning a full-scale military operation against the city.

  They brought a rumbling line of tanks, driving with malicious carelessness, tearing through houses and over streets. Amal was huddled with Samir and Noor at her in-laws’ house when they heard a tank crash through their garden wall. The tank destroyed half of the wall, backed up, and left. Samir took Amal to live with Laila as soon as they could safely cross the border into Jordan.

  The government set up a ground-to-ground missile base in the soccer field at the north of town, in the same field where they had rounded up the men of Daraa. The city of Daraa was built in a valley that had sustained life for generations; by positioning the tanks and missiles on the ridges around the city, the Syrian army was able to control it easily. At the time, the protesters were still carrying rocks and cardboard signs. There was no organized resistance—these were grief-stricken people who had nothing left to lose.

  Days later, government forces massacred people from the surrounding towns who had come to bring milk and bread to the citizens of the besieged city. They were from other parts of the Horan region, villagers and farmers with relatives or friends in the city. That day, many people had their phones out in what would become one of the hallmarks of this twenty-first-century revolution: They filmed the entire battle and later put it on YouTube. It was one of many battles that would make it out to the world not through a free press, but from the phones of the witnesses. As the war in Syria progressed, everyone became a journalist.

  Two boys were arrested in what came to be called the Massacre on Saida Bridge—Hamza al-Khatib and Thamer Muhammad al-Shari. They were tortured and killed in the same mukhabarat headquarters as the al-Banin schoolboys. Hamza’s and Thamer’s bodies were released to their families, who shared their photos on social media. Soon the images of their battered, swollen, bruised bodies were on protest signs around the country. The government forces intended for the siege of Daraa to finally put an end to the protests in the country; instead, they poured gasoline on the fire of their citizens’ rage, giving the people a pure cause to rally behind.

  The unrest that had been escalating around the country exploded. Hasna’s blood pressure did not go down. With Khassem in jail, Yusef, Laila, and Amal in Ramtha, and Rana going to school every day in a war zone, Hasna’s life felt fractured. She tried to find solace in the fact that three of her children had made it to safety, but there was no comfort to be found in the entire country.

  Surely, she told herself every morning, this could not go on much longer.

  * * *

  —

  For a few weeks, Hasna wavered on what to do about her youngest daughter: Was it time to send her with her sisters and brothers to Jordan? To do that meant taking her out of school; there were no guarantees that she would have access to school in Jordan.

  The government imposed a curfew that made it almost impossible to do any shopping or work; food and fuel became increasingly scarce. Missiles rained down with a regularity that was mind-numbing—they were loud, but they did not fall in the streets around Al-Salam Square, centering more in the neighborhoods where the protests had begun.

  Life started up again. Many soldiers who were kind to them, like Fahad al-Homsi, commented on the obstinate strength of the women of Daraa who still fed their families, took their children to school, and shared tips about the best routes to take to get around checkpoints and which streets were under siege that day. They somehow made an impossible situation livable.

  Hasna never thought of Jebreel leaving; someone needed to stay to protect their home and try to earn money for the family so that they had someplace to come back to when this all passed. Their neighbors who remained talked through the same sort of calculated decisions; most of the men stayed and sent their wives and children out of the country if they could. Um Ibtihal had left already and Hasna invited her husband over often to eat dinner in their home. Um Ahmad stayed because her husband worked for the government; sometimes she quietly shared news with Hasna. Everything Hasna heard pointed to the fact that this siege would end sometime soon, perhaps by the end of the summer if not earlier. If everyone left, looters would take their valuables and the things they had worked so long to accumulate over the years. And a lifetime of keeping their heads down and their mouths quiet had instilled in Jebreel and Hasna an odd sort of confidence—they had done nothing wrong. Hadn’t the government released Yusef and Malek? Surely when the government had taught whatever lesson it wanted to the protesters, they would end these attacks.

  And Hasna could not think about leaving while Khassem was still detained. So they stayed on, evaluating every day whether that was the right decision.

  * * *

  —

  There was a checkpoint outside Rana’s school that she could see from her classroom window, a kiosk where soldiers stopped and checked every car or motorcycle that passed. Rana was watching it out of the window of her fifth-grade classroom one day when a motorcycle drove too fast toward the checkpoint kiosk. The driver did not stop. Rana watched, horrified, as the driver blew himself up.

  She saw the whole thing like a movie, framed by the window. One minute, the air was clear. The next, it was filled with black, billowing smoke, and shrapnel from the explosion—bits of metal, wood from the kiosk, the arms, legs, and fingers of the people whose bodies had been decimated.

  The teacher yelled for everyone to duck down. Rana moved just in time. A stray bullet from the fighting that erupted outside struck the radiator pipe right above her head, missing her by inches.

  In her kitchen, Hasna heard the massive explosion and dropped everything to run to the school. It was her first real taste of the fighting she had heard about but had avoided for weeks. Bullets flew around her. She kept her head low and kept going.

  As she ran, she saw the other mothers she knew from school pickup, dodging in the shadows by the walls, ducking in the entryway of houses as soldiers chased resistance fighters down their street. The mothers nodded at one another but did not stop, their black dresses billowing around them like vengeful angels—Allah help anyone who got in their way.

  Hasna found Rana with her teacher, huddled in the classroom. Hasna held her daughter for a few minutes until Rana stopped sobbing, pulling her head close so that Rana could feel her calm breathing, murmuring blessings and prayers. As Hasna kissed Rana’s head, she could smell the sour sweat under the smoke. She would bathe her, Hasna thought, as she had when she was a little girl. She would pull out her best shampoo, let Rana apply the expensive rose-scented lotion she always wanted to use. She would put on her softest pajamas, tuck her into her own bed. If they could make it home first.

  Hasna watched all around them, waiting for pauses in the shooting to make it a few feet at a time. They picked their way over shrapnel from the blast. Everywhere were body parts—fingers and feet and globs of flesh.

  Hasna noted the body parts coldly, her mind in that strategic mode she had discovered when the mosque had been attacked and when Laila had protested alone. She was the L
ioness again. Through her cunning awareness, they made it a few streets over, ducking and racing, before she could hear the gunshots coming closer, around the corner. Men’s voices shouted and she ran to the nearest metal gate, clutching Rana’s hand. Banging on the gate, she put Rana in front of her so that if the soldiers came, Hasna’s body would shield her.

  The gate opened. A woman Hasna had never met did not hesitate—she pulled them in as if she had been expecting them and they ran to join the family huddled at the wall farthest away from the windows. They could hear people being killed just on the other side of the wall. Hasna held Rana’s head to her, her hands wrapped firmly around her ears to muffle the sounds of guns and the screams of the dying men. Rana did not make any noise; silent sobs racked her body.

  They spent the evening huddled with the family. Later, when the fighting moved on, the woman of the house made them coffee. She offered them food, but both Rana and Hasna felt too sick to eat. They exchanged information as they sipped the strong Turkish coffee the woman served them—Rana knew the woman’s children by sight from school. The caffeine combined with the adrenaline shooting through Hasna’s body made her hands shake so that she could barely hold the small plate beneath the porcelain teacup. As quickly as felt polite, they left—she and the woman hugged as if they had known each other for years. Afterward, Hasna would not remember her name.

  She and Rana moved swiftly through the night, shadows in the street. They were out after curfew, but Hasna could not bear for Jebreel to wait another minute. The snipers must have been looking elsewhere, or angels protected them—they made it home safely. When she unlocked her gate, opening it slowly so that it did not creak, she found Jebreel sitting alone at the long table, tears pouring down his face. He could not speak when she hugged him; he clutched at Rana and Hasna.