by Eva Nour
He enjoyed the wind and salt on his face, the frothy waves rising towards the sun. He threw himself into the water, stood up and dived back under. Underneath the surface, he opened his eyes and picked up stones and shells from among the metal and plastic on the bottom. Afterwards his eyes were red from the salt.
The water brought back a feeling he had forgotten: the feeling of weightlessness. He soared free in the deep blue. He was part of the sea and the sea was part of him.
It was after his short outing to the beach that Sami realized he had to leave Beirut. He couldn’t stay cooped up in the flat for ever. His money wouldn’t last long and in Beirut he couldn’t work, study or lead a normal life. Even if he wasn’t stopped at a checkpoint, a lot of Lebanese people looked askance at the Syrian refugees streaming across the border. Every third person in Lebanon was a refugee, primarily Palestinian and Syrian. They needed medical care, food and work and the poorest of them lived in enormous refugee camps on the outskirts of the cities. In many cases, they were people from the Syrian countryside, farmers and uneducated people, families with many children and elderly relatives, who couldn’t raise the money to go any further. He had heard about Syrians being attacked for no other reason than that they were refugees.
With the help of a friend, Sami managed to get from Beirut to Tripoli in northern Lebanon. Again he travelled through the checkpoints with a military escort who called him his cousin, his nephew, his future brother-in-law – he didn’t know any more. Except nameless and paperless, that was who he was.
Tripoli was a port city at the foot of Mount Lebanon. Calling it a safe place was an exaggeration but it was still easier to live there, farther from the Hezbollah. At least while he looked into the possibility of seeking asylum in another country.
Something about Tripoli reminded him of Homs. The two cities were roughly the same size, majority Sunni and had similar senses of humour. He missed his hometown, but he realized he had left in the nick of time. A couple of weeks after he crossed the six-lane motorway in the moonlight, the regime forces had reclaimed the city centre. He still hadn’t heard from many of his friends that were left behind.
‘You need to get out more,’ said Muhammed’s cousin. ‘Working will take your mind off things.’
‘But what work could I do?’
‘Any work. You’ll go crazy otherwise.’
He was right, of course. So during his autumn in Lebanon, Sami volunteered for an aid organization working in the refugee camps. The organization arranged activities and offered psychological support to women and children. Once a week he took photographs to document life in the camps.
The first time he went he had to stop for a minute to take in what he saw: the blue and white windswept tents, spreading out in their thousands. The camp was like a city, with streets and trade going on in some of the tents, and families doing what they could to gain a sense of privacy and regular everyday life.
That was where he met Leyla again. He knew she was working in one of the camps and asked if he could accompany her one day. He recognized her just from the way she walked, and when they embraced each other, neither of them wanted to let go.
‘Hey, little brother,’ she said and ruffled his hair. ‘I’ve never seen it this long before.’
‘The fresh saltwater winds do it good.’
‘Looks like it.’
She had cut her hair short and her features seemed softer, her cheekbones less accentuated. Oddly enough, it was easier to reunite with Leyla than with his parents or with Sarah. Leyla and he had been through so much together. They understood each other without having to explain.
‘How did you get out?’ Sami asked.
‘The same way you did, I assume.’
Like him, she preferred not to talk about herself. It was a way of avoiding having to feel. Instead, she told him about the activities in the camp.
The children painted to keep themselves busy and have fun, but also as a way of dealing with traumatic experiences. The drawings were of stickmen with weapons and aeroplanes dropping pinhead-sized bombs. The children weren’t sad while they were drawing, which made Sami even more sad. Many of them had no memories of life before the war.
There was painting for adults, too. Most didn’t want their picture taken or to talk about their experiences when Sami was around. But Leyla looked them in the eyes and made them relax, and some seemed to almost forget his presence.
‘You can’t take my picture,’ said one woman. ‘But I’ll tell you my story.’
Then the woman turned to Leyla and began to speak. Her name was Nadine and she was from Daraa. She had joined the protests during the first few days, together with her neighbour Rasha. When people were shot, she went to the hospitals and helped wherever she could. She had no medical training but in time learnt to extract bullets and put on bandages. Soldiers visited her family home and asked: where is Nadine? And her family answered: she’s not here. They came again and asked: where is Nadine? And her family cried and answered: she’s not here.
Until one day, she was there.
‘These are the terrorists,’ said the regime soldiers when they delivered Nadine and Rasha to the detention centre.
The women were separated and Nadine was brought to an interrogation room where an officer was eating pistachio nuts and casually flicking the shells at her. After a few hours, the interrogator asked if she wanted to see her friend. Nadine heard the screaming even before the door was opened; Rasha was lying on the stone floor inside. Two men were holding her arms and legs, while a third man moved on top of her with his trousers down. Oh god, oh god, Rasha screamed fitfully.
‘What do you want from me? Do you want me to confess?’ Nadine asked the soldier. The door was closed and she was brought back to the interrogation room. That evening, they led her down into a basement. Finally, I’ll get to sleep, Nadine thought. But then the door opened and four men entered.
‘I thought about Rasha and stepped out of myself. It was as though I left my body, as though I turned into a spirit who soared up to the ceiling and watched the pain from above. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. A nurse whispered and told me, shh, the doctor was going to do me a big favour and tell the soldiers I was dead. It was a big surprise: apparently, I wasn’t dead. For a long time, I lay on the gurney, trying to feel without feeling anything.’
Nadine showed them her painting: a white wedding dress on a bed of black blood.
‘I got married the week before I was arrested. My husband left me when he found out about the rape. Rasha killed herself after a few weeks in the prison, or at least that’s what I heard.’
Sami listened to the woman but was unable to fully take in her story, even less to say something that would calm her.
Later, Leyla put a hand on his shoulder. She told him some of the children had been conceived when their mothers were raped. Their trauma was double, in part caused by the war, in part by their mothers’ torn feelings about them. The women’s pain was double, too, caused first by the violence perpetrated by the regime soldiers and subsequently by being shunned by their families.
He didn’t know when he would see Leyla again but they said goodbye that day as if it wouldn’t be long. She was either going to stay in Lebanon or try to get to Turkey. In the meantime, the women and children gave her the strength to carry on. They gave her meaning amid the meaninglessness.
‘If you go to Turkey, I’m sure Younes will have a place for you,’ Sami said.
‘So he managed to escape too?’
‘Yeah, shortly after me. I heard that he crossed the northern border on foot and is reunited with his girlfriend.’
‘I’m happy for them,’ Leyla said. ‘Maybe we’ll all be reunited one day. Wouldn’t that be something?’
She smiled but looked sad, and Sami gave her a long hug.
Sami continued to visit the camps, to listen and take pictures, without knowing what to do with what he heard and saw. These were not his experiences and yet
they belonged to him: all these individual experiences formed part of their people’s memory.
Winter was coming. A year ago, the storm had howled outside his hiding place in Homs as he lay on the sofa, worrying about how long the firewood would last. In Lebanon, the winds from the sea were milder and heavy with moisture. But it wasn’t his home, it never could be. Waiting and watching were wearing on him. His friends asked him to stop jiggling his leg and pulling dry skin off his lips.
He wrote to the news agency he had worked for in Homs. Sorry, they replied, they couldn’t do anything, but they sent him the name of a contact of theirs at the organization Reporters without Borders.
The shortest day of the year came and went, and afterwards he could feel the change inside. He had a reply from Reporters without Borders, asking Sami to submit papers and evidence of his journalistic work. France was his best option, they said. They couldn’t fill out the paperwork for him or seek asylum on his behalf, but they could guide him through the process and attest to his being in danger on account of his work as a photographer. And so, one month after all the paperwork had been submitted, he was called to the French embassy in Beirut.
The waiting room was airy and there were only a few other people in it. There were people who had waited longer than him, months, years; there were people who applied again and again. But most of the refugees were not in the waiting room. They lived on the run in their own country, shut out of their streets and homes. A small number of Syrians, but still more numerous than the people who tried their luck at the embassy, set off on their own, primarily to neighbouring countries: Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Then there were some who dreamt of Europe. In France the people had risen up against a bloody regime once and declared liberty, equality and fraternity – they should understand.
Was it luck or fate, or just chance? Maybe his paperwork was enough, maybe the woman interviewing him was having a particularly good day. Sami knew several other journalists whose applications had been denied. But not his.
He didn’t have to live in a tent, hide in a lorry or climb into a leaky plastic boat to cross the Mediterranean; he was one of the lucky few who were welcomed before they even arrived. His passport was stamped and a date set for his journey. He had just enough money left to buy the ticket.
And so Sami found himself in an aeroplane for the first time. The whirling sound of the propellers, the vibrations in the body, everything was both new and familiar. Only before, the aircraft had been passing over him during the siege, leaving him in white horror.
When the plane took off, Sami felt his body press against the seat, felt it become heavier. And then came that same feeling he had had in the sea. Weightlessness.
Sami thought about the bird he and his sister had thrown from the roof, a lifetime ago. He was hurling himself out into the unknown now, and hoping his wings would carry him.
Epilogue
MARCH THE THIRTEENTH, 2015. The rain pattered against the windows as Sami looked out at a line of aeroplanes waiting to take off.
‘Bienvenue à Paris. Welcome to Paris.’ The air hostess held out a bowl of chocolate hearts wrapped in red tinfoil.
In the airport, people hurried to the baggage reclaim and Sami let the stream of muffled footsteps carry him. The speaker announced departures and delayed passengers and it struck him he wasn’t one of them. He was neither late nor early, nor on his way. He had arrived, in what was to be his new home country: France.
Sami figured someone would be there to meet him. That was how it worked at airports in the movies. People came home and embraced each other with flowers and kisses. But no one knew he was coming. He picked his bag up from the belt, tried to decipher the foreign-language signs and didn’t know where to go.
Reporters without Borders had reserved a hotel room for him in northern Paris for one night. They had also arranged a meeting with a refugee hostel.
He didn’t know anyone, didn’t speak the language and it was his first time out of Syria, not counting Lebanon. But it was going to be all right. It had to be. What are you waiting for, his Grandpa Faris would have said. The Damascus of Europe is waiting for you.
That first morning Sami woke to the rising noise of morning traffic. From the narrow hotel window he saw the trains pass by on elevated tracks; under the bridge, cars and mopeds jostled for space in a busy intersection. There were two canals, lined with cafés and trees in bud. Pigeons took off in cascades and spread out across the watercolour-grey sky.
Sami walked along the streets and zigzagged between the rain puddles. He thought of Muhammed, of their walks and races to school, and he thought of other friends from his childhood and the army and all through the siege. How deep and at the same time fleeting friendships could be. You never knew who would cross your path and change your life. They just showed up one day and decided to stay by your side, until one day they were gone. Was it the nature of war or were friendships always unpredictable like that? Sami wasn’t sure. He only knew that the war had separated him from his closest friends and he no longer knew where many of them were. And yet it felt like he was carrying them with him.
He moved into a refugee hostel housed in a former factory, with bare concrete rooms and windows that overlooked a cemetery. Sami unpacked his bag and studied each object in turn: the camera, the memory cards, the clothes and the miniature Quran his mother had given him when he started his military service. The first new item he purchased was a kettle so he could make himself a cup of maté when his insomnia became unbearable.
Sami was creating a context, even though everything was new and fragile. His biggest worry was that time seemed to be disintegrating. He had a hard time telling the months and days of the week apart. When people asked how long he had been in Paris, or which day he wanted to meet up, he was unable to bring himself to place the dates in his mind. Other people seemed to think of time as a straight line with fixed points for significant events, but for him everything blended together into a jumble.
When darkness fell, he listened to the monotonous ringing from his first target practice. He often found himself staring blankly at the concrete wall. Sometimes when he fell asleep, the scenes played in his dreams like in the cinema. The crackle of the projector starting up was automatic rifle fire. The red velvet curtains flowed like rivers of blood.
Sami thought about how some things here were the same as back home, and yet not. The biggest difference was the freedom: freedom to and freedom from. The freedom to act freely. The way people here embraced and kissed each other openly, and were allowed to vote and choose their leaders. And the freedom from oppression and restrictions. From worrying about arbitrarily being thrown in a dark cell and left to rot.
‘Would you like to try a video call?’ Samira’s message said. ‘We finally got hold of a new phone.’
At first his cracked screen went black, then it showed two people on a sofa. Who were these elderly people, Sami thought before recognizing his parents. Samira had deep wrinkles around her eyes. Nabil, who had been balding before, now had only a few grey tufts around his ears and new liver spots on his cheeks.
‘Why don’t you have a moustache, my son?’
‘But, Dad, I never had a moustache.’
‘Then it’s about time you grew one.’
Sami asked how the family was doing and said Paris was amazing, much better than expected. Everything was good with him. He was studying French, had a place to live and was hoping to find work soon. They said the same thing: they had a roof over their heads, food on the table and the power cuts were less frequent than before. Then they fell silent, as though it took time to find the words, the right, reassuring words that wouldn’t make him worry.
‘Everything is wonderful,’ Samira said. ‘Hiba and her family send their love. They’re good, too.’
‘And Ali?’
They were evasive but said that, inshallah, it would be OK.
‘What have you eaten today?’ his mother asked to change the subject. ‘And don�
�t lie.’
‘Falafel,’ he said.
Sometimes Sami longed for the smell of the kibbeh his mum made and the shish tawook from Abu Karim’s restaurant. He sometimes ate at a Syrian restaurant on his new block. He had made friends with the owner, a man from Aleppo who moved away long before the war broke out, and the food was good, but more than anything he felt at home in the warm kitchen. He enjoyed watching the knife slice through the big, rotating hunks of meat, the sizzling of the coriander-green chickpea balls being lowered into the hot oil. Raw, crispy onion that made his eyes water. But the smell of Karim’s roasted chicken remained absorbed in a painful darkness, like the other memories of his childhood and youth.
‘Just falafel, nothing else?’
There followed a series of reproaches. Samira said he had to put some meat on his bones and not go outside with wet hair, since he could catch encephalitis and die.
‘Do you have to be so dramatic?’ Sami sighed.
‘You’ve survived this far, my son. Do you really think I would let you die from wet hair?’
Nabil interrupted her. ‘Let me give him some pieces of advice, too.’
Nabil reminded Sami to be respectful towards strangers. In other words, to be honest, polite and just a little suspicious, yet trusting and respectful. Not envious and proud, but goodhearted, open, generous, and did he mention respectful?
When all the unimportant things had been said, Sami asked how they were again. His mother lowered her eyes and said they wouldn’t be able to rebuild the house. The regime had denied their application to move back, and one of the reasons was that their youngest son was wanted for evading military service.
‘They don’t believe us when we say Malik is dead.’
The regime was also asking for Sami and he felt a pang of guilt. Samira began to cry and Nabil took her hand. The new phones didn’t crackle but Sami still imagined crackling on the line. They were so far away, or maybe he was far away from them. Yes, he was the one who had left. If something were to happen to his dad again, he wouldn’t be able to take a taxi to the hospital and hold his hands, feel his warmth rise towards his face. Nabil coughed and took a deep breath.