The Stray Cats of Homs

by Eva Nour

  Rasheed was Syrian but had grown up in Germany and moved back to Homs a few years earlier. To do business, he said. He dressed in a pale linen suit and made sure they had a modern office with green plants, an ice machine and air-conditioning. They complemented each other. Where Sami preferred solving the technical challenges, Rasheed was the extrovert who talked to customers and made business contacts. He had a round friendly face and a good way with people. It worked well most of the time, but Rasheed, who had wanted to escape German bureaucracy, hadn’t yet grasped the hidden bureaucracy of his home country.

  ‘Why do we have to pay those two people at the electrical state office?’ Rasheed asked once again. ‘My mum has good enough contacts.’

  ‘Just trust me on this,’ Sami said.

  They only advertised once, by handing out flyers Sami made on the university’s photocopier. They had barely signed up their first two customers – Ali’s computer shop and a nearby internet café – when word about their network began to spread. It was both cheaper and faster than the state-provided one. They laid cable after cable from their tiny server hall in the city centre. People offered Sami and Rasheed tea and biscuits to show their appreciation. People he didn’t know said hello in shops and cafés. It was like when he was little, walking down the street with Grandpa Faris. He pictured the company growing, providing internet to the entire city, even the entire country. A Syria where everyone was online and connected. Where you could pay bills, look for work and do admin digitally, without a single bribe.

  Their first profit was invested in hiring an electrician. Younes was five years older than Sami but his street-style clothes made him seem younger. He had a shaved head and wore baggy jeans and a checked sweater with the sleeves rolled up to show the tattoo on his left upper arm. Esther. His girlfriend in Tel Aviv, whom he talked to and texted several times a day.

  ‘My mum got mad when she saw it.’ He grinned. ‘“My son, why ruin your body with ink? When you die and God sees your unclean skin, you will burn in hell.”’

  Younes held out his mobile and showed a picture of Esther wearing dark sunglasses and standing in front of the Eiffel tower.

  ‘She’s pretty. But that’s not Tel Aviv?’

  ‘She’s half French, so she travels to Paris sometimes.’

  ‘Have your family met her?’

  ‘Let’s put it like this. Mum says: if you had to make a bloody-hell tattoo, why not choose your own dear mother’s name? Why a girl you’ve known shorter than a blink of an eye?’

  Sami laughed and Younes shook his head. He was certainly good at talking away the time, but he was efficient when he worked.

  The business did so well that they were even able to pay themselves modest salaries. Sami used his to buy his first car or, rather, half a car. Muhammed agreed to pitch in the other half, saved from the small amount he had earned during military service. Especially when he saw the colour.

  ‘We have to name her the Pink Panther!’

  The car was certainly pink – bubble-gum pink – but there was nothing panther-like about it. It didn’t matter. The car was a beauty, with its curved bonnet and classic outline: a 1952 Volkswagen Beetle.

  Not a day went by without heads turning in the street. Police officers asked to see their licences just for a chance of a closer look. The Pink Panther sounded like a retired old lady with a racking smoker’s cough and didn’t have enough horsepower to get up steep inclines. But Sarah loved it, and on the weekends they drove to Damascus and hung out in cafés, sipping mint lemonade and sharing meze.

  Sarah was drawn to everything that alleviated the feeling of dreary everyday life. Aside from reading and going for drives, she liked horror films and TV soap operas. The highpoint was during Ramadan, when several new TV shows were always introduced, since people generally slowed down during the fasting period and spent more time in front of the TV. Sami said it was a waste of time. She said he was the one wasting time, what with all the late nights he was spending at the office.

  University seemed less and less important. Sami was often ahead of his course mates and he found it more stimulating to work on concrete tasks. Two of his teachers knew about his business and offered conflicting advice. One warned Sami about the consequences if the government ever found out what he and Rasheed were doing. The other teacher helped solve the various technical problems that cropped up.

  As it was, Sami was concerned about more immediate perils, like laying cable in a nine-storey building in Homs’ business district. Using a safety harness never crossed his mind. He and Younes gave the janitors a small financial incentive to let them into the apartment buildings, and they climbed out on to the roofs and laid the cables down as best they could. Sami was untroubled by vertigo, so long as he didn’t look down. But the sun and the blue sky could make the world start spinning, and brought to mind what had happened once to a sparrow that couldn’t fly.

  Their cables stretched like a spiderweb through the streets of Homs. On one occasion, during the annual festival in the desert city of Palmyra, which tempted the crowds with concerts, horse racing, craft fairs and car races, they were even praised by senior politicians. Take a look at these ambitious entrepreneurs, one minister said, providing our country’s third-biggest city with reliable internet!

  Poetry or not, apparently, computers can be as radical as words. If he and Rasheed had contented themselves with their original network, with what they had already achieved, then perhaps nothing would have gone wrong.

  10

  AS TIME WENT on, they were ready to take the next step. Sami had been working at the company alongside his university studies for almost three years, and now he and Rasheed wanted to put their money into wireless internet.

  But one February morning in 2009, their network unexpectedly shut down. Sami’s phone started ringing around lunchtime and continued nonstop until evening. Only then did people realize it wasn’t just their network that was down. Friends and relatives in other cities told them they were offline too. In fact, all of Syria seemed to have gone offline.

  Since they were unable to work, and since he and Rasheed felt on the verge of burning out – ‘Don’t overdo it,’ Nabil had told him every time they had talked to each other in the past year – they decided to drive the pink Beetle to Latakia and spend a day by the sea. The weather was warmer by the coast and the breeze would clear their heads and do them good. They planned to bring pierogi, parsley salad and arak and have a quiet time playing cards to the sound of the waves.

  Sami packed a cooler and arrived at the office before lunch to pick up Rasheed. He parked and opened the car door, which gave a displeased sigh. That was when he saw them: a group of about ten men, dressed in civilian clothes and armed with Kalashnikovs, standing around the entrance. Sami assumed it was the secret police’s monthly visit to Rasheed’s mother’s company next door. She ran an agency placing nannies and maids from other countries, primarily the Philippines. Working with foreign countries always aroused suspicion that you were handling smuggled goods or even spying, but in the case of Rasheed’s mother it was more likely that her venture was so profitable the secret police were asking to have their palms greased. They certainly showed no signs of caring about the nannies who worked under slave conditions or had their passports confiscated.

  Sami considered turning around, but the pink car had attracted attention.

  ‘Hey, you, show me your ID.’

  Sami crossed the car park, pulled his wallet out of his pocket and handed over the card. The man studied it over the edge of his sunglasses. Sami could see his own anxious face reflected in the lenses.

  ‘Sami. Do you work here?’

  ‘I work in the building, but not for the agency.’

  The man turned his head to the side, seemingly to stare into space but probably to talk into an earpiece.

  ‘He’s here now.’

  The man gestured for Sami to enter the building. Some of the officers had stepped in behind him, others were keeping a
n eye on the street. Sami noticed curious faces peeking out from behind curtains in the block of flats opposite. Cars slowed and rolled down their windows. Whatever happens, if something happens, at least there are witnesses, he thought, and went inside.

  The fluorescent light was harsher than usual. Rasheed and he rarely turned on all the ceiling lights at once but today the office was bathed in light. The decorative palm trees drooped and he made a mental note to water them. Sami looked around and felt vaguely annoyed at the mess, the way you notice a toothpaste stain on your shirt instead of taking in that your girlfriend just told you she feels you should take a break from one another.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ she’d said, the night before. ‘You’re working too much.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it next week, when we’re back from Latakia.’

  ‘I’m not going, it’s just going to be you and Rasheed.’

  Sarah’s words were rushing through his head, or maybe it was the sound of the ceiling fan. Ten more members of the secret police were moving about the office. They were packing papers and binders in black bin bags, carrying out boxes full of routers and cables, grabbing armfuls of computers and antennae.

  ‘There you are,’ said an older man, who introduced himself as the colonel.

  His white hair matched the pinstripes of his suit. In his breast pocket was a pack of cigarettes with the red Alhamraa label. The colonel was shorter than him but Sami nevertheless had the feeling the colonel was looking down at him. He had clear, intense eyes behind round frames.

  ‘I apologize for disturbing you in this manner,’ the colonel said. ‘Let’s step into one of the offices so we can talk privately. Don’t worry, my colleague will look after your bag.’

  They sat down in Rasheed’s room, which looked the same as before, except that Rasheed wasn’t there. The pictures of his wife and daughters felt out of place with the colonel behind the desk.

  ‘We’ve heard a lot of good things about your company. If it were up to me, we wouldn’t be here today,’ he said by way of starting the conversation. ‘But, as I’m sure you know, what you are doing is illegal.’

  The colonel folded his hands on the table to let this fact sink in. ‘Where is Rasheed, by the way?’

  Sami ran his hands up and down his jeans, fidgeting with a few loose threads where the fabric had worn thin by the knee. Rasheed: he was the one with all the important contacts who could get them out of this situation. He swallowed and asked to go out in the hallway to make a call, which the colonel allowed.

  ‘Are they in the office, are we in trouble?’ Rasheed said breathlessly on the other end of the line.

  ‘They just want to know what we do, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Rasheed’s voice was high-pitched and shrill like metal, and cars were honking in the background.

  ‘Completely sure,’ Sami said. ‘We pay and answer a few questions and that’s it. But if you try to go on the run, that’ll obviously look suspicious.’ Was it him Sami was trying to save, or himself, or both? He wasn’t sure of anything.

  Rasheed arrived at the office an hour later, with sweat beading on his forehead.

  ‘Where were you going?’

  ‘Lebanon,’ Rasheed whispered.

  The colonel bade him welcome and asked them both to take a seat. He seemed genuinely curious about their business, how they went about installing cables and finding new customers and the speed of their network. After thirty minutes of chitchat, he leaned back in the office chair – the only furniture aside from empty cabinets and the desk that remained in the room, now that the secret police had confiscated what they wanted – and lit a cigarette. The colonel took a long drag and apologized for having to borrow their equipment. They seemed to be serious entrepreneurs. Truly driven individuals, he had to say, and wasn’t it strange that despite their obvious intelligence – he dragged the word out – they didn’t understand that they needed permits to install cables and networks?

  ‘Consider what this looks like. From our perspective. Given how quickly your network has grown, it’s likely only a matter of time before you expand into Israeli territory. But you’d almost think you didn’t want to be noticed. Almost as if you were trying to set up a secret communication system …’

  He said it kindly and unassumingly. Rasheed jumped to his feet and objected, his face white as a sheet.

  ‘That’s not how it is at all, not at all. We’ve even been singled out for praise at the Palmyra festival.’

  The colonel raised his hand and waved away a tendril of smoke.

  ‘Yes, the minister,’ he said. ‘He’s why I’m here, to make sure everything is above board. You have two options, the way I see it. Either you come with me now or you come in tomorrow to answer some questions. It’s up to you.’

  Once again, he made it sound like it was all a formality, a friendly visit. The colonel dropped his cigarette on the floor but didn’t put it out – a chemical smell spread from the hole in the plastic rug. Sami thought about Latakia’s beaches, about the sound of never-ending waves breaking, swirling up shells and pebbles, and he nodded.

  ‘Rasheed?’

  ‘Of course, absolutely. We’ll come with you.’

  People had gathered outside in the pale sunlight to see what was going on. Others continued watching from doorways, across the street and nearby offices. The colonel invited Sami and Rasheed into the back seat of his own car, a black Land Rover, driven by a private chauffeur. When the colonel noticed they were being patted down, he waved his hand to signal that there was no need for that. The Pink Panther looked sad and alone on the other side of the car park, and Sami found himself wondering whether the food would stay fresh in the cooler.

  Two motorcycles led the convoy, clearing the way. They were followed by two cars with tinted windows, the Land Rover Sami and Rasheed were in, then two more cars. The drive to the secret police headquarters would normally have lasted around half an hour, but since the driver had his foot permanently on the accelerator and the other cars made way for them, it took less than fifteen minutes.

  Sami and Rasheed sat quietly in the back. When they drove into a courtyard and the black steel gates shut behind them, their thoughts were swirling like seaweed in a current.

  11

  THEY WERE QUESTIONED together and Sami slowly grew frustrated with his friend. In the interrogation setting, the differences between their strategies and personalities became starker. Most of what Rasheed knew about his native country, where he had only spent a couple of years as a child, he had heard from horror stories told by Syrians in exile. But he believed the country could be changed, and that a change was best effected through cooperation and openness. That was why he had suggested using flyers to advertise and initiating collaboration with government employees. If they were open and honest and invited Baath sympathizers to join them, everyone would be a winner.

  His friend’s idealism had appealed to Sami, but he had advocated an alternative strategy: to work in secret and silence. Which was a kind of innocent idealism too, since in practice no one could work under the radar of the regime.

  During their questioning, Rasheed’s answers were long and exhaustive, even though Sami did his best to make him be brief. It was always better to keep it brief. Never lie or say more than you needed to; that was a recipe for tripping yourself up. Lies always led to more lies and, in the end, it was impossible to remember what had and hadn’t been said. But Rasheed was stressed and nervous and embellished his replies with names and details. When the colonel leaned forward and gave him an interested smile, Rasheed took it as a sign that he was on the right track.

  ‘Remind me, did you have a lot of customers?’ the colonel said.

  ‘Some,’ Sami said vaguely.

  ‘Three hundred,’ Rasheed specified, not without a measure of pride in his voice. ‘And one customer could be an internet café, so the users were many more. Probably thousands.’

  ‘Is it true you smuggl
ed in materials from Lebanon?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Sami said.

  ‘Sure,’ Rasheed replied. ‘We paid a guy in Beirut who did deliveries every other week when he went to visit his grandmother, who …’

  The only time Sami volunteered information was when the colonel was joined by two new interrogators, who were mainly interested in the technology they used. The questions were impossible to answer since they were along the lines of: how do you set up a router in a shower? How would you get unlimited download speeds? How would you set up the signal to listen in on your wife’s phone calls?

  ‘You don’t put routers in showers,’ Sami said. ‘And the maximum download speed depends on a number of factors, not least the provider.’

  That evening yet another interrogator, who was more direct, took over. Were they Israeli spies? Or terrorists from the Muslim Brotherhood? Thus the questioning ebbed and flowed and they were accused of being everything from spies to terrorists to regime critics to idiots.

  After night fell, Sami was allowed to leave. Rasheed was kept until midnight.

  ‘One last thing,’ the colonel said before they were released. ‘You can’t leave the country for a month.’

  It turned out the Mukhabarat had raided at least two other companies in Damascus and Aleppo. One of them was run by a teenager who had hacked the internet provider – in other words, the regime – to make cheap international phone calls.

  A week later the internet was back but with some adjustments. The regime had lowered the price of subscription by a tiny amount. Information was sent out to internet cafés that registration would be required to use wireless networks. Users were also reminded that it was illegal to hack the system to visit banned websites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

  And now, were they supposed to carry on as though nothing had happened? Sami and Rasheed cancelled their trip to the beach. To anyone who asked, Sami said it had been a routine matter and that they had been treated well. He wouldn’t have even mentioned it to his parents had not Ali, whose computer shop was near their office, already told them what he’d seen and heard.