The Stray Cats of Homs

by Eva Nour

  Sami agreed that the remnants of everyday life were unbearable. The children’s coats on the hooks, covered in dust, in the empty houses where they were looking for food. School backpacks, workbooks and felt-tip pens. Death was ever-present, breathing in their stead, an endless wait. When it stepped in and snatched away a life, it left a black hole that was soon filled with more waiting.

  Even so, the airstrikes, too, became a sort of routine, predictable: twice or three times a week the aeroplanes approached. You had to do your errands at the right time of day, in the right place, and keep an eye out for scouting drones.

  They tried to continue teaching as usual despite the airstrikes, to distract their students from the world around them. To let the classroom be a reminder of what everyday life used to be. But it was only possible up to a point. Even if the school remained a haven, they couldn’t protect the children for ever.

  In the last days of January 2013, after taking pictures in the area, Sami ran into two of the children from school, Mona and Amin. The snow had melted and they were playing next to a blocked-off intersection near their house.

  ‘Look at my bike,’ Amin said proudly and climbed on the saddle.

  ‘What do you mean, your bike? It’s our bike,’ said his big sister.

  ‘That’s great. Where did you find it?’

  They pointed in unison at a house whose façade had collapsed.

  ‘OK, but it’s dangerous in there. Bricks can come loose and fall down.’

  ‘How much does a brick hurt?’ Amin asked.

  ‘It depends on how big it is, obviously,’ Mona told him.

  While they argued about the brick and who should have first go on the bike, Sami got out his camera. It was the hour before sunset and everything was golden. The evening light was filtered through the spokes, drawing lines of shadow on the asphalt.

  ‘Take our picture,’ Amin said and leaned one arm on the handlebar.

  Mona picked up a white kitten with a black tail, which had come to them in hope for food. Sami snapped a few pictures and said it was getting late; their parents were probably waiting for them.

  ‘We’re just going to play for a bit longer, sir.’

  The mortar shell hit half an hour later.

  The shockwave had broken the windows in the adjacent buildings and no people could be seen in the concrete cloud that rose after the explosion. Searching the debris, they found the bike, whose red lacquer finish was blanketed by grey dust. Then they found Mona’s shoes, next to her braid with the pink hair tie. Amin’s body was warm when they dug it out, his jeans soaked with urine.

  Their father cried when he saw the picture Sami had taken of the children, the moment when everything was still possible. When the black and white cat was trying to wriggle out of Mona’s arms. When Amin was balancing on the tall saddle with his tiptoes on the ground.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  The children’s father shook his head.

  ‘Post the picture. Let the world see.’

  Sami thought about Nizar Qabbani, who had written about his wife’s death and expressed his grief and rage in poetry, in a poem that had outlived its author. But to what avail? It was still just words, as meaningless as the verses his grandmother had sung to him when he fell off his bike and broke his finger a long time ago. A life was a life. It could never be recreated in words or pictures.

  Leyla told the other students about Mona and Amin’s death. She said there was a fixed number of souls on this Earth and when someone dies a metamorphosis takes place, through which the soul from the deceased passes to a newborn baby.

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ Sami asked her afterwards.

  ‘It was something my parents used to tell me,’ Leyla said.

  ‘Do you really think that’s how it works?’

  ‘What does it matter what I think? What matters is what the children think.’

  29

  ‘WHERE DID IT hit? Around yours?’

  ‘No. And you, is everyone on your street OK?’

  Sami let out a sigh of relief when he heard Leyla’s voice but then they fell silent. Someone else had been hit instead, in one of the myriad airstrikes that had finally forced them to close the school, in the beginning of summer. Someone else was lying in the dark, staring up at a ray of light and a corner of blue sky, a window in the debris.

  He ran outside and forgot for a moment where he was going. There, the silvery cypress trees. There, the sun shimmering over the rooftops, over the houses that still had rooftops. There, the wooden fence and, behind the fence, the park with its swings and patch of greenery. Sami had played there as a child, swinging higher and higher until he almost reached the sky. One time Sami had challenged his little brother to jump from the top, after he himself had made a perfect landing in the dust. Malik tried and scraped both knees, and Sami made him promise not to tell their mum. But even though Malik was hurt, he was the one who joked about it, so Sami wouldn’t feel bad.

  ‘Better practise,’ Malik said and dusted off his wobbly knees.

  ‘Practise for what?’

  ‘For when God throws us out of heaven.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sami laughed. ‘You’ll go to paradise, I’m going to hell.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But someone should keep you company, right?’

  Other times, Sami and Muhammed used to go to the playground in the evenings, sharing a cigarette, his friend’s pale face and curly hair illuminated by the soft glow. All this seemed so long ago.

  Sami took a step forward and felt a pain rise when his foot hit a brick. That was when he remembered – the missile.

  After helping to dig out the dead, they buried the bodies in the former playground. Sami recognized one of the women he had seen as recently as the week before. She had been hiding in a stairwell, kissing a rebel soldier she had met at a checkpoint. She wore the same red headscarf now as they put her in the ground.

  That night, Sami and Malik made a fire to cook soup, and the next day Sami went out and chopped down the fence by the playground. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before; the fence was dry and old and would burn well.

  Sami chopped wood once or twice a day, usually at dawn before the airstrikes began. It might be old chairs, kitchen tables or thick limbs from damaged trees. Every other or every third day he scavenged for food, usually after a bomb raid when there was reason to expect a moment’s peace.

  The mortar shells, on the other hand, rained down on them both day and night. Sami brought his camera and took pictures, then returned before nightfall and hung out with friends until late.

  He felt both relief and sorrow when the room began to grow lighter. It was all going to start over again. The future was narrowing until it was no wider than the barrel of a rifle.

  I dunno if u were brave or crazy to stay, Sarah wrote.

  Neither, he answered. I was feeling guilty.

  But guilty over what, exactly? That he hadn’t done enough or that he’d done too much? Or guilty to have survived so far, when so many others hadn’t?

  After a while, Sami forgot his own smell. He reeked in the heat but there was no way of differentiating his own body odour from the smell of dirty and unwashed clothes. Sami washed when he could, but the choice between drinking water and clean clothes was a no-brainer. He boiled the water to kill the worst of the bacteria but his bowels were chronically unsettled.

  It might have been the food they ate. Rice that had lain on the floor of bombed-out shops for over a year was collected and rinsed. Unripe fruit was eaten, peel and all. ‘Bread’ consisted of wheat husks they did their best to separate from rat droppings, glass and stones, kneaded together and baked over embers.

  ‘One day, we’ll be eating rats,’ Muhammed said.

  That was the line in the sand; the day they had to eat rats, it was over. Sami couldn’t bring himself to eat cat either. At the start of the siege, when there was still food to be found, he had given the stray cats expired tins of tu
na. They still gathered outside his door and meowed when they saw him, long after he had stopped feeding them.

  One time, he saw a man aiming into the foliage of a tree.

  ‘Shh,’ the man said and looked up at two almond-shaped pupils.

  ‘Shame on you, you can’t shoot a defenceless cat.’

  ‘My stomach’s not ashamed. Would you prefer I shoot you? Great, now it got away.’

  During another one of his careful walks, Sami heard his name being called from across the street. He looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes. It was Younes, the electrician who had been arrested shortly after the raid on their IT company.

  Four years had passed since they last saw each other. Sami looked around and dashed across the street, and Younes embraced him. It really was him. And he looked the same, if skinnier and with his hair grown out and a scar across his forehead. There had been no trial, Younes said. They asked questions about Esther, his half-French girlfriend in Tel Aviv, and his work for the IT company, and then they read out the sentence: terrorist and spy for Israel. He was taken to a prison outside Aleppo and subjected to torture. The scar on his forehead was from a cable. His back looked even worse, he said. He thought he would die in his cell, as so many prisoners had done before him. But then, one day, he heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions and unfamiliar footsteps in the hallway. The Free Syrian Army had taken over the prison. They spent a week going through the prisoners’ files, then Younes and other people they considered innocent were released.

  ‘And now you’re here,’ Sami said.

  ‘This is freer than I’ve been in four years.’

  Younes carried a belt of cartridges over his chest and said he had joined the Free Syrian Army. He didn’t have to pretend his street style any more, Sami thought.

  ‘And Esther?’

  The same moment he asked, he regretted it. What were the chances of them staying in contact over the years? But Younes smiled.

  ‘She’s good. We keep in touch. She was the first one I contacted when I came out of prison.’

  A couple of days later, on Muhammed’s birthday, Sami invited Younes for dinner. On the menu was, incredibly enough, pancake. Muhammed had managed to buy a batch of flour from a regime soldier – on a few occasions during the siege, a temporary smuggle path would open across the red line. Buying food from the enemy didn’t make sense but he was a good contact and Muhammed trusted him.

  They gathered on the sagging sofas. There was Sami and his little brother, who had turned fifteen and didn’t seem so little any more. Younes was half lying on the couch, texting someone and smiling. Leyla, with her scarf tied round her head, talked with Anwar about opening a new school in the besieged area.

  And there was Muhammed, who was the chef for this special occasion. He wrapped his scarf like an apron around his thin waist and borrowed Anwar’s bandana to keep the curls from his face, and started cooking. Flour, water and oil. The smell was heavenly, bordering on magical. Their lips turned greasy and their cheeks rosy. They laughed and talked about what Muhammed should make with the rest of the flour. Round, fluffy khobz to fill with hummus. A sponge cake stuffed with nuts or fruit. Such wild wishes.

  They ate until their stomachs ached, everyone except Malik, who was running a fever and had lost his appetite. They played poker for the last piece of pancake. Anwar won and devoured the last few bites while they enviously looked on. Sami licked his plate and felt a touch of vertigo.

  Then they all went silent and watched Muhammed’s hand move towards his breast pocket. He pulled out a packet of Winston Blue and shook out the miracle: a cigarette. Not a cigarette rolled out of newspaper or a torn-out book page, filled with tobacco extracted from butts picked out of bins or hoover bags. Not dried grass, leaves or whatever else you could smoke to pass the time and quell your hunger. No, a real, American cigarette.

  Muhammed took the first drag, which was only right. They watched the blue flame of the match, watched the fire take hold in the paper and reach the tobacco. His lips closed around the filter, he breathed in and exhaled the first of the smoke. Then it was Sami’s turn. He pulled smoke into his lungs until his eyes watered – the room suddenly seemed to be moving, as though they were on a ship – and exhaled. They all monitored each other as they took their turns. Millimetre by millimetre, the glow moved up towards the filter, until it fizzled out.

  That night, the nightmare began. The cramps came in waves, pulsing like electric shocks through his body. Sami put a plastic bucket next to the sofa and threw up into it until his dizziness had abated. By morning, his blanket was wet and he hadn’t slept a wink. Eventually, sheer exhaustion pulled him into a deep sleep.

  When he woke up, night had fallen. The cramps had subsided but his body was stiff and empty. His little brother was sitting on the edge of his bed, dabbing his forehead.

  ‘The others have been at the field hospital all night,’ Malik told him. ‘The doctors say Anwar almost died.’

  Sami leaned over the bucket but nothing more came up.

  ‘How are you doing yourself?’ he asked his little brother.

  ‘It was lucky that I wasn’t so hungry.’

  Malik’s eyes seemed larger than ever, sunken in their holes, in the yellowish skin. Sami had a sudden feeling of wanting to embrace his little brother, but didn’t. Instead he cursed himself for taking such an unnecessary risk. Food from the regime, what were they thinking? What would happen to Malik if Sami wasn’t there?

  ‘Come on now,’ Malik said, helping him to stand up. ‘Let’s take you to the hospital.’

  ‘Where have you been?’ a doctor asked when he finally made it to the field hospital. ‘You’re lucky you all shared your friend’s food, otherwise you wouldn’t have made it.’

  ‘What was in the flour?’ Malik asked, since Sami could barely speak.

  ‘Probably arsenic,’ the doctor replied.

  On the way out, they passed a room with eight more people, all with stomach pains. It turned out Muhammed had been kind enough to make a pancake for their next-door neighbours. He himself was lying on one of the gurneys, writhing in pain, his curly hair flat with sweat.

  To get their friends’ strength back, Sami sent his brother out to buy a kilo of honey on the black market, even though he loathed the men who made money off the war. They were people who avoided taking sides, who only cultivated contacts to further their business interests. Who hoarded food until people’s hunger peaked and then sold tinned goods to the highest bidder. The honey went for the equivalent of three hundred pounds, while a kilo of tobacco was two thousand and rarely available at all.

  But the honey did them good. It lasted two weeks, and gave Sami enough energy to move further than a hundred yards without stopping for a rest.

  Sami had barely recovered from the poisoning when he was asked by a healthcare worker to come back into hospital.

  ‘Hurry, come over.’

  There had been one large field hospital and two smaller ones, until one of them was bombed. After that, one big hospital and one small hospital remained. The smaller field hospital was housed on the ground floor of a private residence and had five beds. It was always chaotic; people smoked and shouted at each other, and the staff worked in wellies because there was so much blood. As soon as a patient’s most acute injuries had been seen to, he or she had to leave to make room for incoming ones.

  The larger field hospital had twenty beds and a couple of trained doctors, a few medical students and a veterinarian. There was also a self-taught mechanic who had learnt how to extract bullets and suture wounds – sometimes people jokingly referred to him as the doctor. The hospital was located in al-Hamidiyah and under constant attack. But as it was housed in the basement of a former office building, it was as safe a place as any other.

  A thick smell of blood and disinfectant greeted him. At the start of the siege, there had been morphine and drugs of all kinds, but now the stores were empty and most surgeries were performed without anaesthetic. A young
woman on a gurney propped herself up on her elbow and asked Sami to hold her newborn child while she got to her feet. He held the infant girl in his arms; she couldn’t have been more than an hour old and was no bigger than a kitten. The woman took her baby and thanked him, and Sami took her place in the hospital bed.

  He was pricked in the arm and studied the bar fridge they stored the blood in. After a while, the medic patted the half-filled bag and said that was enough for today.

  ‘You probably need to recover for a bit longer.’

  Sami continued to take pictures and chop wood. It saddened him to see people chopping down the healthy trees. The trees had spent so many years growing and now they were cut down with a few well-aimed strokes of an axe, even though they were much too fresh and damp to even make good fuel. Some of the trunks bore traces of hand-carved hearts and names of long-forgotten lovers. Maybe there was a tree trunk that said Sarah and Sami, which was just now being thrown on the embers and turned into sparks and heat.

  30

  THE SKY HAD taken on new meanings. Clear blue meant good visibility for the pilots, overcast meant impending rain and a chance to gather water in tubs.

  The siege of Homs had lasted more than a year. As time wore on, the conflicts between different leaders became more conspicuous. Sami and the other media activists formed a union to strengthen their voice relative to the military council.

  In the autumn of 2013, Muhammed asked Sami and Anwar if they wanted to follow the rebels on a raid. The soldiers usually filmed themselves with their mobiles, but those images were used for propaganda and to strengthen morale among the rebel troops. Sami and Anwar, on the other hand, would be able to document the battle as it was, without embellishing.

  Several of the rebels were hesitant, but thanks to Muhammed’s powers of persuasion they were given the green light. It was going to be a night raid, an attempt at taking over one of the regime’s most important outposts in the Qarabis neighbourhood: a clutch of high-rises that before the war was home to families but was now occupied by two hundred regime soldiers.