The Stray Cats of Homs

by Eva Nour

  He stuck to his story from the night before but let slip a few seemingly important things that were useless in practice. He told him where the rebels kept their ammunition – that was no secret, since the regime attacked that particular house regularly – and he told them about the bus explosion.

  The official line was that it had been an accident. Around forty rebels died when a bus exploded in one of the besieged streets. Sami told him the truth, that the bus had been filled with explosives and that the plan had been to detonate it next to a house occupied by a regime-friendly militia, right next to the red line. For whatever reason, the bus exploded too early; at least that was the rumour.

  The bait seemed to work; the interrogation revolved primarily around the ammunition and the bus. Then Abu Riad changed tack. He pulled a stack of photographs from the breast pocket of his shirt.

  ‘Tell me, do you recognize any of these people?’

  Sami picked up one picture, then the next. A whirlwind swept through his stomach and he had to swallow hard not to throw up. The pictures were of dead people in prison corridors, bodies showing clear signs of torture. Infected wounds, marks from straps, blueish-black, swollen arms and legs. Even if he had known any of them when they were alive he wasn’t sure he would have recognized them. The pictures could have been of anyone: a neighbour or childhood friend, his brother or sister.

  ‘I don’t recognize anyone. Can I have some water?’

  ‘Are you sure? Absolutely sure?’

  Sami went through the pile again, studying a couple of pictures more closely for show, running his finger over the sharp corners.

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘That’s too bad for you.’

  The interrogation continued with trick questions and traps designed to uncover lies. Sami listened closely for allegations he hadn’t admitted to, which would become confessions if left unopposed. Like when he worked as a journalist— He hadn’t worked as a journalist, Sami broke in. But he had said so in his last questioning? No. What he had said was that he had visited a media centre, but when he realized they were enemies of the country he had broken off all contact. Abu Riad mentioned the name of an international news agency.

  ‘Did they pay you well for the pictures you sold?’

  ‘I never worked for them.’

  ‘So how come they were calling you so often? A nobody, an amateur who likes to snap pictures?’

  After hours of questions, Abu Riad leaned forward and aimed a smoke pillar at him, making him cough.

  ‘Your so-called information is useless. And do you know what that makes you? Useless.’

  Sweat broke out around Sami’s collar, curling the hair at the back of his neck. Abu Riad studied him with his chin tilted up and his nostrils flaring, as though something about Sami annoyed him but was at the same time too insignificant to waste time on – a mosquito, a pebble in his shoe.

  ‘I have orders to let you go but we’re not done with each other yet.’

  Abu Riad lit another cigarette and leaned back.

  ‘You have a week. Make sure you’re less useless next time.’

  Orders to let you go. That was all Sami heard.

  A stack of papers was brought out. Going through it and reading it was out of the question but he skimmed a few random lines. By signing it, he would be confessing to having been a terrorist and working against his country, and making a promise never again to do anything aimed at undermining the government. Sami signed it immediately.

  38

  HE DRIED HIS hands on his trousers and was led out, blinking in the sunlight. Abu Riad had given him one last chance. Not out of kindness, that much was clear. No, they let him go hoping he had more information to give, or that he would talk to his friends and convince more of them to hand themselves over. Abu Riad wanted to see him in a week’s time for another interrogation. One week. That was the time he had to plan his escape and leave the country.

  Sami’s contact drove him from the secret police headquarters to the neighbourhood where his grandmother Fatima lived and Samira had played as a young girl. It was like landing in a new world. Cars driving along unspoilt streets, people with clean clothes and faces. He saw students with school books in their arms. Women with bags of food. An old man walking his dog.

  As the anxiety started to leave him, Sami fell asleep, leaning on the car window. He woke up when the car braked. A checkpoint at the end of the road.

  ‘Let’s go this way instead,’ his contact mumbled and made a sharp turn.

  The first thing Sami noticed was the tree. In his grandmother’s garden, on a patch of green grass, stood a gnarled orange tree heavy with fruit. A similar tree had grown in the courtyard of his childhood home – before Nabil added an extra floor and before their house was hit by a missile. Samira had been sad about losing the orange tree, about chopping down something that was alive and bearing fruit.

  Oranges were brought to Europe by the Moors long ago, his paternal grandfather had told him during one of their walks to the market. Sami remembered how Grandpa Faris’s hands had already been full of fruit and vegetables and so he had been the one to hand over the money to the vendor. They bought five pounds of the sweetest kind and shared the sticky segments. He associated the taste of oranges with all things sweet: from the candied peel to the juice drizzled on to cakes and other pastries. The Spanish kept the Persian word for the fruit, Grandpa Faris continued.

  ‘Your grandmother was my media naranja. My orange half, my soulmate.’

  Sami climbed out of the car and felt an intense longing for something he couldn’t define. Maybe his childhood, when it had been possible to go to the market without keeping a watchful eye on the sky. When it had been possible to lie on a stone bench and look for signs in the cloud formations. When there was time to grieve for a chopped-down orange tree.

  The smell of overripe fruit was almost suffocating. Why did they let the fruit rot? There must be people who could pick and eat them. You could make preserves and jam and marmalade, squeeze them for juice …

  ‘We have more than we need,’ a woman’s hoarse voice said behind him.

  Sami turned to see his maternal grandmother, dressed in a black robe and hijab, and beaming at the sight of her long-gone grandson.

  ‘Oh, Sami.’

  She embraced him with the force and caution of someone who believed they had lost a dear object for ever and then found it again.

  ‘You are here! You’re really here.’

  She laid her dry hands on his face and the tears began to fall in small streams down her wrinkled cheeks.

  ‘Now let’s go in before someone sees you.’

  Sami could already see how different his and his grandmother’s lives had been for the past few years. During the siege, they had suffered food shortages, power cuts and fighting too, but they had still been able to go about their lives. Sami supported his grandmother’s arm, or maybe he was leaning on it, and they slowly moved towards the front steps.

  ‘You have no idea how many times I’ve prayed for you and … Oh, Sami, your little brother … I’m so sorry.’

  It was as if time had stood still in his grandmother’s house. The same flowery curtains in the kitchen, the same furniture in the same places. Fatima made his bed with clean sheets and put out a big bath towel. Sami breathed in the smell of clean fabric with not a trace of ashes or dust. In the shower, he turned the heat up until the steam rose and his skin almost burned; brown streaks pooled around the drain. Serves you right, jinn.

  The scent of the soap mingled with the smell of the food his grandmother had cooked, kibbeh labanieh. How did people eat again? He raised the spoon to his lips and filled his mouth with the oily yoghurt sauce, which tasted so heavenly he wanted to stick his head in the pot and drink himself full. But the moment the food touched his throat, he gagged. His body had grown used to feeling full on nothing but dreams of food – on imagining its smell, taste and appearance – and the real experience was overwhelming.

&
nbsp; Was that how people did it? Chewed and swallowed and let it all out in a different form? It couldn’t be human, this eating business. Just like it couldn’t be human to sleep through an entire night without waking up to the sound of imminent death.

  When darkness fell, he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked out at the orange tree, where the fruits were glowing like stars.

  The next morning, his parents came to the house. He saw them from the upstairs window and found he couldn’t move at first. Samira was supporting Nabil, who slowly set one foot before the other. Halfway up the path he paused and laid a hand on his chest, and the simple gesture caused the pain to rise in Sami’s own breast. When they knocked on the door he finally hurried to open it.

  My son, our beloved. Ya rohi. He didn’t perceive all that they were saying, only felt the warmth flowing towards him.

  His mum and dad embraced him at the same time, enveloping him with their arms and bodies. When he felt their wet cheeks against his, Sami didn’t know if it was he who was crying or his parents, or all of them at once.

  ‘I barely recognize you,’ Samira said. ‘Has Mother fed you?’

  ‘Of course I’ve fed him,’ his grandmother said and shook her head. ‘But the poor thing doesn’t eat much. I’ve set the table in the kitchen. Follow me.’

  Their reunion was warm and tear-filled, and yet it was as though he was looking at himself from the outside. This is how a son who has been separated from his family for two years should act, he thought, and tried to fill out his own contours. He sat down at the table and attempted to drink and to eat, but he knew they would ask at any moment. As soon as he found his breath, he would have to tell them.

  Nabil’s eyes were wet and he said very little, but as they sat there he continued to kiss Sami’s cheeks and stroke his hands. In the end it fell to Samira to tell Sami what their life had been like, all the things they had never been able to discuss over the phone.

  His parents had been staying with a relative in the countryside since the start of the siege, and avoided the worst of the airstrikes. Instead, they had watched through their windows as their neighbour’s house exploded in a sea of fire. Not even during iftar, when the fast was broken during Ramadan, did the regime’s bombs stop falling.

  And his sister and older brother? They only had sporadic contact with Ali. He was wanted by the secret police and was still in hiding. Hiba, her husband and two children had fled across an open field but had been spotted and shot at by regime soldiers. Hiba’s daughter was now in a wheelchair after being hit in the back by grenade shrapnel. Hiba had tried to cross the border to Turkey to seek specialist medical care, but the aid organization they had been in contact with had told them their daughter’s injuries were not considered sufficiently acute for humanitarian response.

  Then his mum grew quiet and Nabil looked at her, and she looked at Sami. She folded her hands on the table and his dad moved a cloth napkin to his nose. Sami knew then that the time had come.

  ‘We already know,’ Samira said, ‘but we want to hear it from you, in person. Tell us about Malik.’

  And so he began to tell them how Malik, their youngest and most beloved son and his little brother, had died. He told them about his last days. He told them about his unquenchable spirit. And he told them how he had given Malik’s shoes to someone who needed them more and then buried his body in the stony ground.

  The next day Sarah came to visit. He heard her voice from the open window, from under the orange tree where his grandmother was collecting fruit.

  ‘Is Sami here?’

  He opened the door and there she stood. Her cheeks were slimmer. Her eyes seemed brighter. Her hair had grown out and turned black; only the ends were still red.

  ‘Sarah.’

  They hesitated on the front steps as though they were each waiting for the other to set the tone for their meeting. Sarah had already told him she wasn’t leaving Syria, that she couldn’t go with him. Maybe things had ended between them two years ago, the day he chose to stay in Homs, at the start of the siege. But now, were they friends or lovers? To what extent had time and circumstances made them strangers? Then Sarah leaned in and kissed him on his cheeks, gave him a brief and hard hug. Friends. Something sank down inside him.

  They ignored the risk that someone might see them and sat outside on the warm stone steps with tea that Sami had made. Sami had to feel the sun on his skin, if only for a while. When he passed Sarah the cup, she smiled, and there was the dimple, the most perfect shape he had ever seen.

  ‘You have to come with me,’ he said.

  ‘I have to stay,’ Sarah answered. ‘I can’t leave the children I’m teaching.’

  She saw them almost every day, practised grammar and spelling, blew on their scraped knees and stroked the hair out of their eyes. She was their big sister and their friend. A light breeze rustled the leaves and when he looked her in the eyes, he realized they weren’t brighter but filled with a translucent darkness.

  ‘How has it been outside Damascus?’ he asked.

  She folded her hands around her cup. ‘Not easy.’

  Their neighbours had been suspicious of the city people seeking refuge in the villages. Since when had they ever cared about the countryside? Since when had the city people taken any interest in things like drought, water shortages and the other challenges farmers faced? It served them right to have to pay through the nose for rent and food now that the countryside was suddenly good enough for them.

  She talked until she was almost out of breath, then they sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Sami asked, finally.

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all. It’s just that … your cheeks, and your wrists – they look like they would snap like twigs.’

  Sami had changed. Of course he had changed. He had, for instance, lost twenty-five pounds, and he had been skinny before. But somehow he had managed to forget or deny it in the lead-up to her visit. He figured she wouldn’t be able to tell, that it wasn’t too bad.

  He tried to smile but he knew it was true. He took her hands in his and felt their warmth.

  ‘But aside from the physical I’m the same, right?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s like you’re not really here.’

  He looked straight ahead, beyond her and the orange tree. She was the same but moved more quickly than he remembered, and now she pulled her hair back and bit her nails. Maybe he had slowed down while her pace had increased, like two instruments playing to different beats. Maybe that was one of the more subtle effects of the war, that people lost their natural rhythm. Instead you vibrated according to external circumstances, attentive to the smallest shifts in atmosphere that might indicate danger, an approaching threat.

  ‘How is your family? Did your dad get out?’

  Sarah’s dad had been arrested in one of the mass roundups the regime performed before every round of negotiations with the opposition. They would arrest up to a thousand people in just a few days, on trifling or trumped-up charges, only to release them again as part of a deal. But Sarah’s father had not been released. He was from an affluent family, which made him a perfect subject for blackmail.

  ‘We sold everything we had,’ Sarah told him.

  ‘And they let him go?’

  She nodded and took out a photo from her pocket. A picture of her father lying in a hospital bed, his ribs showing through his skin, which was transparent and as thin as rice paper.

  Sami put his arms around Sarah and she leaned her head against his shoulder. He remembered the first electric feeling of her legs touching his in the university cafeteria. He remembered when they went to the festival in Palmyra and stayed up late, sharing candied nuts they had bought from the food stalls. The night sky in Palmyra had seemed bigger, starrier and a darker shade of blue than the one in Homs. It had been a different time. Everything had felt possible.

  Now the echo of that previous life fluttered against the walls of his chest like a trapped butterfly l
ooking for a way out.

  When Sarah got up to leave, the only thing Sami could muster was emptiness and a feeling of futility. She kissed his cheeks and went.

  Maybe he would have felt more if he hadn’t been so paralysed by fear about what was going to happen next. He had taken the leap into freedom only to end up in a new kind of imprisonment. The pain in his gut made it impossible to move, to eat, to sleep. He tried to have normal conversations but all he could see was long corridors with barred doors, and all he could hear were the screams of the men dragged out into the courtyard in the military prison. He thought about the scar on Younes’ forehead and the picture of Sarah’s emaciated, ruined father.

  That was what was waiting for him if he stayed.

  39

  BEFORE THE WAR began, the journey from Homs to Hermel, just over the Lebanese border, had taken thirty minutes, but with broken roads and checkpoints it was now expected to take several hours. Sami packed his backpack, put in a couple of ripe oranges and left without saying goodbye. It was safer if no one knew. It also made it easier for him to think he wasn’t leaving for good.

  The escape would cost him a thousand dollars, equivalent to about five months’ salary before the war. Why had he spent so much on tobacco in the siege, he thought regretfully. But he had lived only from moment to moment then, with no idea whether he had a future.

  A thousand dollars. Sami had brought nothing with him and his family had no money saved. However, he had the salary from the news agency he worked for. He hadn’t been able to get it until now, but through a complicated transfer, which went through different hands in the activist network inside and outside Syria, he got the money together.

  Sami had made enquiries with the contacts who had once smuggled computer supplies for him. He had let them know he was looking for smugglers to take him across the border to Lebanon, and he ended up with three.

  The first was an Assad supporter and a member of the secret police, who was pragmatic about politics if there was money to be made.