The Book Collectors

by Delphine Minoui

  A few minutes later, at around 9:00 p.m. on May 12, this black farce takes an even more tragic turn: nine artillery shells strike the spot where Daraya’s residents had gathered to wait for the convoy.

  “Instead of long-awaited supplies, we got mortars!” rails Ahmad.

  The attack is deadly: it takes the lives of a father and his son. Betrayed until their final breath. Killed for daring to dream of filling their bellies.

  A few days later, Ahmad bounces back. The cruelty inflicted on his city, as tragic as it is absurd, inspires him to film a short video that he emails me on May 16. I open the file. A group of kids, barely older than the little girl in Abu Malek’s painting, are kneading mud on a mattress serving as a table. You can hear Ahmad’s voice behind the camera: “What are you making?”

  A girl responds, “A cake!”

  “And how are you going to bake it?” continues Ahmad.

  “Oh, by letting it dry in the sun!” explains another.

  Then the children spread the mixture in pie tins with their small hands, and decorate it with plastic flowers. Since they don’t have flour, they’ve made “works of art” to make fun of their misfortune.

  Surprised by my surprise, Ahmad says, categorically, “Do you know why we’re so creative? We have to find a way to convey our message to the international community, so they finally listen to us. Though if it was all up to me, I’d just sleep for a week straight.”

  But rest is a nonnegotiable luxury. Prevented from eating, the inhabitants of Daraya aren’t allowed to sleep, either. Two weeks later, at the end of May 2016, the truce falls apart. The sky above the “many houses” of the devastated city rages anew. A deluge of death-dealing barrel bombs rips apart the sky. Helicopters are once again running furious, unleashing their iron cargos, arrogant blades menacing all corners of the city. “Assad wants to drive us mad,” fumes Ahmad. After several failed attempts, I’m finally able to reach him on Skype. Exhaustion has etched bluish circles around his eyes. With the resumption of bombing, he is no longer sleeping. I’ve never seen him so worn out. Between explosions, he describes the horror to me, live. People buried beneath the rubble, volunteer aid workers overwhelmed with injured victims who need to be treated rapidly, lack of anesthetic. A feeling of déjà vu. The nightmare repeating. But worse.

  Ahmad sends me photos of the cemetery. In the visibly expanding square of martyrs, burials occur in an assembly line. No farewell prayers or tombstones. Simple mounds of dirt serve as graves. Pieces of cardboard bear the names of the deceased in place of tombstones. The city’s run out of shrouds. Now they’re fashioned from sheets, curtains, and tablecloths. “Sometimes, we bury the bodies but don’t have time to wrap them in cloth,” adds Ahmad.

  In Daraya, now 90 percent destroyed, they’re not even allowed a dignified death.

  As the city plunges back into hell, the shortages spread. Deprived of running water and electricity since 2012, the inhabitants have run out of everything else: gas, food, toilet paper.

  Even plastic bags and containers, which they had taken to burning to make fuel oil, have become scarce. To further starve the population, the regime has gone so far as to firebomb the surrounding fields.

  “The children born under the siege don’t even know what an apple looks like,” reports Ahmad.

  He breaks off. A dead silence. Then he grimly recounts the cases of malnutrition, the children who have stopped growing, the fear of a humanitarian disaster. His martyred suburb risks seeing the same fate as was inflicted on Madaya. Some thirty people in that city, also surrounded by government forces, died of hunger in 2015. Hidden from the cameras, seventeen other enclaves are scraping by under similar conditions: fifteen are under siege by the regime, and two others by the Islamist rebels of the al-Nusra Front. Hunger is a weapon of war. A particularly effective weapon. It can’t be seen. But it slowly eats away at bodies. A destructive strategy perfectly calculated to control men through their stomachs.

  On June 1, 2016, the first delivery of humanitarian aid finally reaches Daraya.

  “It’s about time!” writes Ahmad in a short message.

  The joy is short-lived. Instead of long-awaited food supplies, the five trucks brought boxes of shampoo and mosquito nets, as well as a few wheelchairs, medicine, and baby formula. To the people’s great dismay. The incident deals a final blow to the United Nations’ reputation. Accused of doing nothing against a government disinclined to cooperate, it has lost the little credibility it had.

  Since this latest fiasco, Ahmad has stopped waiting. He looks at life as it is, with no illusions whatsoever.

  “We can only count on ourselves. The entire world has abandoned us,” he says.

  How do you survive in a world of absurdity? How do you ward off hunger? Avoid succumbing to anxiety and exhaustion? Defy violence when it creeps into every corner of existence? Ahmad tells me that everyone in Daraya has invented their own survival mechanisms. Between bombings, Hussam studies relentlessly, nose glued to his computer and eyes fixed on an uncertain future. He recently enrolled at the virtual Roshd University, which offers remote courses. Shadi runs after the bombs: he insists on filming everything, documenting everything, obsessed by the need to archive, as they happen, the crimes committed by the regime. If he dies, he tells himself, at least some traces will remain. He and his partners on the local council have drawn a detailed map of the cemetery of martyrs, so they can identify every grave site in case it is bombed. The war has taught them to think of everything.

  And the library? It’s still there, confined to its modest basement, with its rows of books, overhead projector, and flower-patterned couches, intermittently open to the public. But there’s a big hole since Omar left to take his place at the front line full-time. Out there, anti-Assad soldiers have endured enormous losses and ammunition is starting to run out. It’s impossible to escape the combat zone, even for a minute. And yet Omar remains faithful to his books, preferring the company of Ibn Khaldun and Nizar Qabbani during his very rare breaks with a cup of boiling-hot tea. He’s got to be one of the last Daraya residents to have not given up on political essays. The other readers lack concentration. Enthusiasm. Even self-help books, once so popular, are no longer sought-after.

  Ahmad confides in me that, in these moments of endless distress, his only solace comes in reading accounts by people who have lived through similar experiences. He and his friends discovered a few books about the siege of Sarajevo on the library shelves. Too young to be aware at the time of the blockade imposed by the Serbian army on the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 1992 to 1996, they belatedly discovered this history, eyes wide open. Four years of incessant bombings, of hunger, of terror imposed on 350,000 inhabitants trapped in a hellish valley. Four years of blind violence that cost the lives of more than 11,500 people and splintered the city into a thousand pieces. Destroyed buildings. Gutted monuments. Including the grand library, where more than a million and a half volumes went up in smoke. Attacked by a rain of shrapnel, it was the foundation of Sarajevo’s cultural heritage. The people of Daraya are face-to-face with history itself. Like a mirror of their own history. Their tragedy, their pain. Their courage and their fight for freedom.

  “Reading about Sarajevo is a way to feel less alone. To tell ourselves that others, before us, lived through the same thing. In another country. Another context. But thanks to their accounts, I feel less vulnerable. I find an inner strength that pushes me forward,” says Ahmad.

  Atop the memories etched in these books come the words of a living collective memory. With the help of the renowned American war reporter Janine di Giovanni, who had covered both the Bosnian and Syrian wars, Ustez established a direct link to the survivors of the Sarajevo blockade. In the course of their exchanges, a WhatsApp group specially created for him gives rise to a survival tip here, an anecdote there, and even a pledge of support when the entire world seems to have already turned the page on Daraya.

  But for Ahmad, the greatest comfort goes by the n
ame of Mahmoud Darwish. Among the works by this Palestinian poet, who died in 2008 and is idolized in the Arab world, Ahmad knew his poems about the siege of Beirut, in 1982, and the siege of Ramallah, in 2002. Before the revolution, he had dismissed these texts on more than one occasion, remote as they were from his concerns. Since the siege has intensified, these two literary masterpieces have taken on greater meaning, prompting him to memorize entire passages. Every morning, he listens in a loop to the audio track recorded by the poet that one of his friends dug up on YouTube.

  “I listen to these poems like you’d listen to a secret voice whispering things you’re unable to express. The way someone sings what you’re incapable of singing. I find myself in every word, in every line. I identify with the experiences lived, the waiting beneath the shells, the time that becomes space, the martyrs that you’re unable to forget. I listen to the verses and think: that’s exactly how I feel!”

  Ahmad breaks off. His elation comes through the screen, floating above my desk. He tells me that if he had to choose between these two poetry collections by Mahmoud Darwish, his favorite remains the more recent one, State of Siege, which describes Ramallah when the Israeli army imposed a blockade on the Palestinian city. I ask him if he has a favorite part.

  “The beginning, of course,” he responds.

  And with a voice charged with emotion, he begins to read.

  Here on a hill slope facing the sunset and the wide-gaping

  gun barrel of time

  near orchards of severed shadows

  we do as prisoners and the unemployed do:

  we nurse hope.1

  Ahmad slowly lifts his head toward the screen, his lips frozen in a pained smile. Everything’s been said, set in writing in beautiful lines that defy the attrition of time and war. Writing that is alive, precise. The words that echo in this poem speak for him. For Daraya.

  Hope, despite everything. Hope grown in a makeshift vegetable garden in the corner of a courtyard. Hope in the sunflowers breaking free of the dry and polluted earth. Hope in a shrub planted in a crater left by a shell. I go over a new series of images sent by my correspondents in Daraya. They are poetry incarnated, showing exceptional ingenuity and that “inner strength” described by Ahmad that helps them resist. To avoid starving to death, the city’s residents have transformed their courtyards into plots in which they grow the ingredients of their modest daily meals: lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, potatoes. Along with bulgur wheat, taken from the city’s last reserves, these few vegetables are the foundation of their diet. Sometimes, when the harvest is bad, they have to make do with a simple soup of boiled tree leaves and roots simmered in a pot.

  “It’s disgusting!” says Hussam on Skype, making a face.

  I recognize his mischievous smile, a strategic shield against the horrors of daily life. Since he confided in me about Zeina, we’ve been talking a lot on WhatsApp. In perfect English, he tells me about his strong feelings for her, their lovers’ quarrels, the questions he asks himself afterward. A stranger’s ear undoubtedly offers him the perspective he needs. Before every conversation, I’m careful to push away my cup of coffee, to move the box of cookies out of the eyeline of my webcam. But this time, he’s the one who insists we talk “cuisine.” A way to curb his cravings, he says.

  “The meal that I miss the most? Grilled chicken!” He chuckles.

  He elaborates down to the smallest detail: the crackling of the skin, the sauce softening the legs and thighs, the distinct flavor of the drumstick …

  “In fact, speaking of hunger, it’s lunchtime.” Hussam maintains the routine, with his now familiar inclination to chase away the thick dust of dark memories.

  He stands up. His head is out of the frame, revealing legs as thin as baguettes. The young man pivots his laptop for a tour of his modest living room. With one hand, he indicates his couch and a shelf covered in papers. The image freezes, snagged by a bad connection, before landing on a gas stove. I cast a curious glance at the pans and dishes piling up in the sink. I feel like I’m actually in his kitchen.

  “May I invite you to share my meal?” he continues, in a joking tone.

  On the shelf, next to boxes emptied of all food, a simple bag of bulgur.

  “My daily feast!” he laughs, putting water on to boil.

  Hussam has made this his meal for weeks, once a day, relying on modest reserves to hold out another few months.

  “Bon appétit,” I answer ironically.

  A vapor cloud has invaded his kitchen, speckling the computer screen with small white dots. Hussam disappears again, then reappears, his plate filled with a beige mush. Before he begins his meal, the taste buds in his memory come alive, prompting other culinary confessions.

  “Sometimes, to fight our hunger, we all meet up at someone’s place and spend the entire night talking about food. Everyone will say his favorite meal—Grandma’s stuffed zucchinis, a meat broth, your favorite spices, the pistachio dessert you dream of finishing it off with.”

  Another tip, he says, is to linger over a bowl of soup, pretending to savor every spoonful, like a massive gourmet dinner relished until the last bite. Without bread, the exercise can only go so far. Up until 2013, the local council managed to keep the last bakery that hadn’t been bombed in operation. And then, one day all the flour supplies were exhausted, so they had to go without. But survival, once again, depends on humor: trying to compensate for the absence of something so popular among Syrians, Hussam and his friends make jokes, taking turns poking fun at the poor customers, elsewhere in the world, who agonize over choosing between a baguette, a brioche, and a whole-wheat loaf.

  “At least we’re spared such concerns,” says Hussam, smiling.

  And then on the evening of June 9, 2016, the fourth day of the fasting month of Ramadan, hope, true hope, finally knocks on Daraya’s door. This time, it crosses the blockade. Thanks to a minitruce lasting forty-eight hours, nine trucks enter the besieged city. They are filled with bags of flour, other dry goods, and medicine. The provisions are far from sufficient: it’s barely enough to last one month. But for the suburb’s roughly eight thousand starving inhabitants, it’s already a miracle.

  “Finally! We had stopped thinking it would happen,” says Ahmad enthusiastically, sending real-time updates.

  But the trap snaps closed as quickly as it was set. The next day, I learn from the news that regime planes are again raging in the sky, stopping the distribution of the long-awaited food supplies. There is a chorus of declarations of indignation from the international community, denouncing Damascus’s duplicity. In vain. The bombs dropping from the sky don’t care about words.

  I call Ahmad, worried. How is he? Was he able to find refuge in a relatively safe shelter? How is he holding up in this latest nightmare? At the end of the line, he’s unable to speak. He’s lost his voice. His throat is empty. I can tell that he is beaten, depressed. From all the time spent talking to him over the internet, I’ve learned to read between the lines, to anticipate his responses, to decipher his silences. This isn’t a normal silence. For the first time, he’s run out of words to talk about Daraya.

  June 12, 2016. It’s 5:00 a.m. and I can’t sleep. I search the internet for the slightest sign of life from Daraya. Ahmad is no longer answering my calls. All my messages sent via WhatsApp remain unanswered. They haven’t even been read: there is no ✓✓ signaling the messages have been received. I look through the list of my other contacts on my phone. Hussam, away. Shadi, away. Omar, away. A silence as blank as an empty page. I’m afraid I’ve lost them for good. Without the internet, the world has become vast again, increasing a distance we naively thought abolished. And to think that I had started to believe that our connection built over the Web offered them a pocket of safety. But now their distress calls are muted, their songs ignored; the entire planet is out of hearing range. The space between us and them has grown darker, swallowing their last words.

  A few miles from Daraya, a graveyard city mottled by barrel and clust
er bombs, propaganda-spouting loudspeakers promise to get rid of the “terrorists” once and for all. From up high in his palace, Assad the ophthalmologist dons even thicker blinders, hurrying soldiers to the gates of the rebel suburb so they can seize more territory. Far from the world’s cameras, the noose tightens. Without witnesses, I imagine the worst. A major military offensive. A deadly attack. An invisible massacre, like Hama in 1982, when online social networks hadn’t yet been created. I can’t stop myself from thinking of Ahmad and his companions: victims twice over, first of the bombs and then of the international inertia that adds to their suffering.

  Still no news from them, so I scan Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube in search of some trace, however minuscule. No pictures. Not one word. Amid this worrying blackout, I turn to their Instagram accounts. Ahmad’s has been inactive for several months. The last photo he posted is heartbreaking: a mother in a white head scarf burying her son, yet another addition to Daraya’s list of martyrs. I go backward, traveling through time, dissecting every shot, every detail, in the kaleidoscope of his daily life. I come across a photo of a red rose with the slogan “Make love, not war.” I stop on one of a kitten in the arms of a fighter. I spot Ahmad, Hussam, and Shadi’s boyish faces in a black-and-white selfie. They’re posing in front of the city’s ruins, the standard background for most of their shots. I recognize them again, this time in a photo, lounging on a living room rug. Viewing this companionable interlude amid chaos, I can’t help but think about the absurdity of war. Or rather of the normalcy that creeps in despite everything.