“But they say that the water soaked up so much ink that it changed color,” he continues.
The books bled into the river, a metaphor for the abiding resistance of words, even when destroyed.
His account takes me back to another, more contemporary moment in history, which I share in turn. The Bebelplatz of Berlin. It was May 10, 1933. In one night, Hitler’s government burned thousands of dissenting works seized by Nazi troops. Among the paper victims were the so-called subversive writings of Stefan Zweig, Karl Marx, Bertolt Brecht, and also Sigmund Freud. That night, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, gave a speech on the creation of a new world. A world in which books hostile to the regime would no longer have the right to exist.
Years later, in 1995, the Israeli sculptor Micha Ullman, whose parents had fled Berlin, returned to that square. He created a ghost library under the pavestones in memory of the book burning. Covered by a glass ceiling, buried in the ground, the space is deliberately empty. Impossible to access. You have to stand above it, lean over, to contemplate this space—fifty square meters filled with white, empty shelves. The installation is known as Versunkene Bibliothek: the Sunken Library.
Will Daraya, like Berlin, have its own Bebelplatz one day? What will remain of its underground library tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, in half a century? Once its many devastated houses have been razed to the ground, will the rebel suburb, once famous for its delicious white grapes, be transformed into a military base, as rumors say? Bashar al-Assad’s goal was to disfigure the city. Burn its fields. Make its landscape unrecognizable. Erase all of Daraya’s pages, empty sentences of their remaining words.
I tell myself that, whatever may come, these young Syrian heroes have an indestructible story to share. Facing the destruction of bombs, they didn’t just save books. They created a new vocabulary—shelli, karkabeh—and played with the rules of grammar. Day and night, they never stopped believing in the power and invincibility of speech. They broke the silence and took up the story. With their books and slogans and magazines, their graffiti and literary creations, they resisted the rigid verses of war, beating out a cadence that wasn’t cannon fire. Words versus violence. A language of peace and survival for the next generation.
EPILOGUE
Istanbul, August 26, 2017
I often have the same dream, which is both sweet and odd. It’s story time. Samarra and I are skipping across Istanbul’s cobbled alleys. Taksim Square and its simit seller watch us go by. Above our heads, seagulls fly off in the direction of summer. At the Istiklal Avenue entrance, the main door of the French Institute is now blocked. To access the building, we have to go through a security gate, located on an adjacent street. But we still enter the library from the back of the main garden. Along the ramp of the staircase that descends into the arena of books, someone has put up mandalas, along with the word “hope.”
Julie the storyteller is waiting for us at the bottom of the steps, index finger against her lips. “Surprise!” she exclaims. We enter. Across from the children’s bench, three adults have taken their places. I immediately recognize the figures as Ahmad, Shadi, and Hussam. “We’ve come to tell you the extraordinary story of a secret library,” they whisper to their young audience, which is immediately won over. At the end of their account, the little spectators receive a gift—books with empty pages. All are invited to write or draw the story of Daraya.
In my dream, the contours of these young men’s faces are incredibly precise. Never, during our countless virtual conversations over these past few years, had I been able to make out the texture of their skin, the delicateness of their features, the color of their eyes. But in the dream, every detail is here. Voices. Gestures. Expressions.
My dream is no longer a fantasy, inspired by brief exchanges between one explosion and the next. My dream is now a continuation of reality, of reunions on Turkish soil that we hadn’t dared to hope would happen, of face-to-face encounters that have strengthened our unique friendships.
One year has gone by since their hurried departure from Daraya. One year of trying to distance themselves from the nightmarish absurdity of what they lived through. A year of staring life right in the eye, looking at the world through something other than a smartphone screen. Of traveling, too. One after the other, they slowly broke the shell, some venturing beyond the Syrian border.
Shadi was the first to set foot outside Syria. In October 2016, he arrived in Reyhanli, in the province of Hatay, in southwest Turkey. The Turkish government, which has welcomed over 2.5 million Syrian exiles into its territory, granted him a travel permit to have an operation on his hand. He offered to meet me in a coffee shop in the small Turkish town, where many Syrians had found refuge. When I arrived, I immediately identified Shadi by the bandage covering his left arm. He had a leather jacket and short, slightly slicked-back hair. The encounter was strange—this was our first time meeting in person, and yet it felt like we had just spoken the night before. The waiter, a Syrian from Aleppo, led us to a small table, setting down two glasses of tea. With his right hand, the uninjured one, Shadi opened a bag he’d been carrying over his shoulder. One of the few belongings he’d brought from Daraya. He took out an object and set it on the table: his camera. The one that had saved his life. I didn’t say anything. I looked at the charred lens as you would a survivor. In one slow movement, he swept off the dust still covering the device.
“How are you?”
It was as if he hadn’t heard my question.
“Daraya was a symbol,” said Shadi. “This camera was the witness. Sadly, the entire world has abandoned us…”
Sitting at this café table, face still worn by exhaustion, he was carrying the pain of his city. I asked him if he’d seen the video of Bashar al-Assad in Daraya.
“All a show!” he replied.
He bent over his bag again. It was full of hard drives: all the photos and videos saved during four years of siege.
“These are the images of Daraya that I don’t want to forget,” he insisted. “Images of a united, bonded group. Of a common desire to build the future. To defend new ideas in development. We were one and the same. The same feeling of solidarity, of camaraderie. A unique experience that could have served as a model for other towns. Daraya isn’t just a place, it’s a philosophy of life.”
Shadi was lost in his memories, gaze tinged with nostalgia. He talked about Daraya as if it had been an adventure. If he had to do it over, he continued, he wouldn’t hesitate a second.
“Today, Bashar al-Assad is trying to make us the losers. For me, the fact that we were able to hang on for four years during such a cruel siege is already a huge victory.”
Behind us, a customer opened the door to the little café, which also served as a pastry shop. Arms full of presents, she hesitated, debating out loud between a cake inspired by Frozen and one by Cinderella for her daughter’s birthday. Shadi smiled.
“The hardest,” he said, “is afterward. Now we have to learn to live normally, to watch planes go by without trembling, to fall asleep in silence.” Shadi, used to the fleetingness of life in Daraya, where everything had been dictated by falling bombs, seemed unmoored.
“Suddenly, everything’s permanent again, like it’s going to last forever. Our notions of time, space, everything, have changed. Life is organized, there’s no fear, no dangers. Everything’s so disconcertingly simple.”
A few weeks later, I called Shadi to see how he was doing. The surgery had gone well. He had begun to regain some motor function in his fingers and the doctor had prescribed physical therapy sessions. During his convalescence, he had temporarily moved to Istanbul, where his parents migrated a few years ago. His mother stuffs him with fish and his father is dissuading him from going back to Syria. Shadi remains persuaded that his place is still there. For now, he’s taking Turkish lessons and plans to resume his studies. Once a month, we meet up over coffee, and we shelli in memory of Daraya.
* * *
After countless fail
ed attempts at virtual conversations during the Daraya blockade, Ustez and I finally saw each other face-to-face in Istanbul in January 2017. He had come to Turkey to recharge his batteries for a bit. Sitting in a restaurant in Taksim Square, Muhammad Shihadeh was exactly how I had imagined him: calm, poised, generous with his time and his words. For three hours, he talked about how civic engagement began in Daraya. About this unique experience that stretched back to the nineties, and for which he had been one of the driving forces. About his favorite books. About the poems of Mahmoud Darwish and the self-help works he was so fond of. As I listened to him, his powerful influence on the young people of Daraya became even clearer to me. When I told him just how grateful they had been to him, he blushed. “Oh, they’re the ones who taught me. I’m a very serious person. They were far funnier than I was. When I was with them, I would forget my worries.”
But now the traumas of the siege are eclipsed by other concerns, paradoxically harder to overcome: How to view the future? How to understand the divisions ripping Syria apart? How to avoid sinking into pessimism when the fate of the 2011 revolutionaries is becoming even more elusive?
“Despite the difficulty of the siege, we were living with the stubborn hope of something better. Suddenly, a new reality is setting in, full of uncertainty.”
And then Ustez said something that I’ve never forgotten:
“The siege paradoxically protected us from any attempt at radicalization. It allowed us to keep the spirit of Daraya alive. For four years, it was just us. It wasn’t easy all the time, but we always settled our differences through dialogue. There was no external invasion. No attempts at manipulation. No foreign intrusion. A singular experience.”
This is far from the case in other regions of Syria, where foreign and regional powers are defending their factions, interests, and parcels of land. At the whim of shifting alliances, groups are formed, disbanded, transformed, radicalized. One year after the fall of Daraya, the country is on the verge of partition. As Daesh clings to the remaining areas under its control, and the Kurdish minority tries to protect its enclave, Bashar al-Assad is doing his best to reconquer the last moderate rebel bastions one by one with the support of his Russian and Syrian allies. After Daraya came East Aleppo, Al-Waer, and then Barzeh. The region of Idlib, to where thousands of civilians and fighters from the Free Syrian Army, forced to surrender, were evacuated, has once again become the end of the line of the anti-Assad revolt.
Despite the uncertainty weighing on his country’s future, Ustez went back to northern Syria in the spring of 2017. In May, good news brightened his return. His wife and children, refugees in Damascus since the closing of the last access point into Daraya, in early 2016, were able to join him in Idlib. And for the first time, he kissed the youngest of his three children, born during the siege.
* * *
Hussam is doing well, true to his optimistic nature. In late 2016, he crossed the border with the help of a smuggler and settled in Gaziantep, in southern Turkey. Shortly after arriving, he gave up his pseudonym in favor of his original name, Jihad. This is a common name in the Levant, without any specific religious affiliation. In January 2017, he contacted me from Istanbul. He’d arrived in the city the day before to visit Zeina and meet his future in-laws. Jihad was staying in a little hotel on Istiklal, the legendary pedestrian avenue where the French Institute is located. I met him in a café, a few feet from the sidewalk targeted last year by a suicide bomber. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to spoil his enthusiasm. Jihad was in awe of everything. The perfectly aligned monuments. The quality of public transportation. The electricity working without a hitch. In only one day, he had already found all the best places in town. He had eaten a pizza at Eataly and made a round of the secondhand bookshops, where he splurged on a dozen books, including Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s famous novel about the institution of marriage in England in the early nineteenth century. His passion for reading, born during the blockade, drew him to the historic, recently renovated, Beyazit State Library. He even found the time to dart into Pages, an old wooden house turned into a bookstore frequented by young Syrian artists and intellectuals, in the heart of the Fatih neighborhood, the “Little Damascus” of Istanbul.
After two strong espressos in the café on Istiklal, Jihad stood up. He had to take care of a few “administrative issues.” I went with him. During these meetings full of sleight of hand and bills slipped into jacket pockets, I recognized the resourceful and risk-taking “Hussam” from Daraya. A few hours later, his visa had already been extended, with a guarantee he would receive his residency card. Then we took a taxi to the official Syrian consulate, perched in a chic neighborhood, where he had to renew his passport. Jihad was anxious, haunted by an intense fear of being watched by the regime. A cousin living in Damascus had given him the name of a civil servant that he could whisper in the ear of a government employee. Jihad had barely crossed the entryway when he was welcomed with a warm hug and the promise of new papers in less than a month. The benefits of wasta, string-pulling Middle Eastern–style, even between the worst of enemies.
“After the nightmare we lived through, nothing surprises me anymore and nothing scares me anymore,” Jihad said, laughing, as we left the meeting.
That same evening, he was already on an overnight bus to Gaziantep, where he was scheduled to take an exam the next day in the hopes of joining an NGO. His resilience was rewarded. Despite the exhaustion of traveling, and the masses of technical information to absorb in a short amount of time, the test went well. His new life could begin. But without Zeina. A few weeks later, Jihad discreetly broke off his engagement with his fiancée. He wanted, no doubt, to rebuild himself before starting a family. Even with the best intentions in the world, a four-year siege can’t be processed in a few months.
Omar, aka Ibn Khaldun, lives in memory. In thought. In conversation. In the videos and photos kept by his comrades. Following the evacuation of the city, in late August 2016, the negotiation committee was able to recover his body as part of an exchange of remains between the Free Syrian Army and the Fourth Division. Omar was finally buried alongside his own people, in the cemetery of martyrs in Daraya. A hole in the dust, a name engraved on a headstone, and a few flowers as a final tribute. There, on the land for which he fought, in this small bastion of insurrection at the gates of Damascus, the Syrian sleeper in the valley rests for eternity, like Rimbaud’s soldier. He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his chest. Peaceful. Feet in the gladiolas. Body in a shroud of ruins.
Like Abu el-Ezz and Abu Malek al-Shami, Ahmad chose to stay in Idlib, his new home, for lack of options. He shares a small house with his siege comrades in a small town on the Turkish border. He reads a lot, volunteers to help displaced populations, and finds solace in walking through olive groves and listening to the Amélie soundtrack on repeat. And yet this is far from a refuge. In late 2016, like an endlessly repeating nightmare, Ahmad vicariously lived through the end of another siege, this time of the rebel suburb of East Aleppo, as he watched Idlib be flooded by a new wave of displaced people, faces dazed and dreams broken from a similar deluge of bombs. In April 2017, the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun, in the province of Idlib, also reopened the wounds of Daraya.
“I was paralyzed when I heard the news. It’s like someone pressed the replay button. I was reliving what we endured in 2013,” confides Ahmad.
A few days later, the new U.S. president, Donald Trump, retaliated with strikes on positions held by the Syrian regime. Then the resumption of the Astana talks brought an end to Russian-Syrian aerial bombings. In accordance with a still-vague deal signed in May 2017, Moscow, Tehran, and Ankara have gambled on making Idlib one of four new so-called de-escalation zones to establish a lasting truce there between pro- and anti-Assad factions.
But anxiety over an uncertain future settled over the relief brought by this semblance of a truce. Initially welcomed as heroes, Daraya’s activists are growing disenchanted. “We wanted to embody a third path,
to show that an alternative to the regime and Daesh was possible.”
But in northwestern Syria, the mood is different and the situation more complex: “In Daraya, activists and combatants interacted. Here, military factions want to control all civil initiatives.”
While there may still be an active moderate armed opposition, the most radical groups, such as the jihadists of the former al-Nusra Front, are imposing their law. They tear down the opposition’s flags. Tag walls with religious slogans. Repress demonstrations. Forbid women’s voices from radio broadcasts.
These pressures are only distancing Ahmad from religion even more. He shaved his beard, opposes the idea of a compulsory veil for Syrian woman, and condemns the hypocrisy of extremists.
“Those people don’t represent Islam. The other day, a guy close to al-Nusra asked me to help him fix his cell phone. The Islamic profession of faith was plastered across the screen. But his files were full of pornographic movies…”
In reality, Idlib province is a big karkabeh, he admits. There’s no longer a precise goal, a defined objective. Dozens of factions and local councils are engaged in stiff competition. There’s also the omnipresent fear that the regime will make this the site of its final sweep. That the sole remaining bastion of the rebellion will be the theater for the last battle against the insurgents.
Yet Ahmad wants to remain hopeful. Convinced that the long night of the Syrian people will be followed by a rebirth. In what form? He doesn’t know. In the meantime, he harbors the dream of creating a mobile library for the children of Idlib. On nights of doubt and uncertainty, he thinks back to the unique experience of Daraya.
A few days ago, Ahmad dug up a video on his smartphone. On August 27, 2016, two hours before leaving the besieged enclave, he crossed the ruins of his city alone, filming his steps along with all the destroyed houses and buildings that now resembled construction sites laid to waste. The video ends with a shot of the shell-battered facade of the library.
The Book Collectors Page 11