The Pianist from Syria

by Aeham Ahmad

  “Why?” I asked, startled.

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  At first, I thought that maybe he didn’t want me to be a part of all this. But an inner voice told me that his advice came from the heart. You better forget about that. The words echoed in my head. Why did he and his wife work here if this place was so terrible? I had the feeling he wanted to tell me more. We decided to talk at my place, after school.

  When he showed up at five on the dot, right after school, I was surprised. In Yarmouk, “after school” can mean anything from four in the afternoon until one in the morning. Raed seemed to respect other people’s schedules.

  While Tahani served him a cinnamon coffee, I asked him why he had taken videos of the children. “Isn’t that dangerous?” I said. “I mean, who knows where the footage might end up? What if state security gets their hands on it? God only knows what they might do with it!”

  “But what can I do?” Raed said. “It’s my job.” He told me that he had to take video footage of just about everything, and then upload it all onto the internet. The school was funded by a wealthy foreign donor, and the donor wanted to see what the teachers and students were doing all day. So Raed had to film everything: the classes, the administration, the children at lunch. The donor wanted to know that his money wasn’t going to waste.

  “Who’s the donor?” I asked.

  “The only one who knows him is Abu Saussan. No one else has any idea. All I know is that my wife and I are paid next to nothing.”

  Then Raed told me that, just a few years ago, he had bought a set of strings in our store. My mind wandered back in time. I remembered how busy our store had been a few years back, how much work we had. I liked Raed. Soon, I called him Abu Rur, a term of endearment. I longed for somebody I could talk openly with. Someone to share my bitter days with, someone to help me ease my burden. Raed had an open, honest way about him.

  “How come you have internet at the school?” I asked.

  He laughed. “That’s the simplest thing in the world. All you need is a router and a little bit of electricity.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “You just have to find a phone line that still works. Then you can dial in.”

  “What? That’s insane!”

  “Do you need internet access?”

  “Of course, that would be incredibly helpful.”

  “I’ll be back in three days with a router. I’ll see if I can get it to work.”

  “That would be fantastic.”

  “You just need a battery. Do you have one?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Then I remembered my old Rama, an electric moped, made in China. Right now, it was in storage at Alaa’s carpentry workshop, hidden underneath all kinds of junk. I had bought it five years ago. At that time, traffic in Damascus was exploding. There was an incredibly high tax on any new car, and many people chose to buy electric mopeds instead. All you had to do was plug them in and charge them for a few hours, then you could zoom through the city at around twenty-five miles an hour. You could also charge the Rama by pedaling, but that was only useful in case of emergencies—the vehicle was heavy and clunky.

  “You have a Rama?” Raed said. “Great! The engine has five good batteries. You should be online in no time.”

  Unbelievable! Internet! Electricity! At last, I would be able to chat with my cousins and uncles in Damascus again!

  After three days, Raed came back. He tapped a distribution box in my street, pulled out a cable, and connected his router to a battery that he had brought along. Suddenly, my cell phone had internet reception. I cheered. We went over to the carpentry workshop to take the batteries out of the Rama, then we strolled over to Yarmouk Street to take a selfie, which I uploaded to Facebook.

  Finally, a sign of life, after so many months.

  I got countless comments. “You’re so thin!”—“What, Yarmouk Street is so empty! I don’t believe it!”—“Over there, on the right, that’s where I used to eat falafel. Damn, I miss it!”

  * * *

  In the end, I played at Abu Saussan’s school two or three times. But he had been right that music wouldn’t be on the schedule. Abu Saussan was curt and had a high opinion of himself. But I have only good things to say about him. He would run his underground school for another year and a half, with money from Europe. Until ISIS came. His school was a ray of hope: What else could the children have done the whole day? Sit around at home? Play on the street? Brave people like Abu Saussan made life in Yarmouk possible. Without him, things would have been even bleaker.

  Raed turned out to be my guardian angel. I remember one particular moment, after we had already known each other for a while, when we were at my place, sitting and talking. The afternoon’s last rays of sunlight fell onto his eyes, making them sparkle. I can’t remember what we were talking about, I just remember the amber glow on his face, and his bright eyes. It seemed as though God was pointing his finger toward him, and suddenly I had a thought: You’re the best friend I’ll ever have.

  Whenever I was able to upload videos of myself or my beloved Yarmouk in the following months, and afterward, when I gave interviews to Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Guardian, and later, when I organized live concerts via Skype—transmitted to Belgrade or Beirut—Raed operated the cameras, the batteries, and the lights. I owe it all to him.

  — CHAPTER EIGHTEEN —

  Fall was coming. Tahani, little Ahmad, and I had moved into one of the neighboring apartments belonging to Abu Abed, the helpful man who had brought out mattresses, pillows, and blankets for us during our first night at the workshop. He had fled Yarmouk a long time ago and on one of his visits back had offered that Tahani, Ahmad, and I could move into his apartment. Later he had given us the keys to another neighboring apartment as well.

  When the fights in Yalda subsided, we took the large dolly and went there to assess the damage. We could see even from a distance that my parents’ apartment had been hit. There was a hole in the outer wall, and the windows were missing. The staircase was still intact, but when we unlocked the metal door to the apartment, dust rained down on us. A grenade had exploded inside the apartment, tearing out a supporting beam and blasting concrete off the walls, all the way down to the supports. No one would have survived this.

  A wall had collapsed and half my father’s library was buried under the rubble. I described to him what I saw: “The left side of your bookshelf is completely gone.” “What luck,” he said. “My Braille books are to the right.” He felt their spines and took out a few volumes, including a book about geography and one about dream interpretation, which he wanted to read during quiet evenings in the workshop.

  We carried my parents’ double bed downstairs to bring back to Yarmouk so that they wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor anymore. We also took the flat-screen TV and the fridge so that they wouldn’t be stolen, as well as dishes and spices. My wedding photos. A childhood picture of Alaa and me. My mother sighed when she took it off the wall. Most important: six canisters of olive oil, which my mother had once bought to stock up. Twenty-five gallons of good, smooth olive oil. A treasure.

  We went back and forth twice. We also stopped by the apartment Tahani and I used to share. Everything was intact—only the windows were missing, and one of the outside walls had a hole. We took photo albums and CDs, the fridge and television, pacifiers and bottles for the baby. We had been lucky.

  One day, a man approached me, offering to sell rice and sugar, one large sack of each. He wanted to leave the neighborhood, and praised my falafel stand, adding that he knew one of my uncles. He asked a fair price, not the astronomical sums that were common on the black market at the time. I gratefully accepted.

  From then on, those two sacks were our last reserves. Once a week, we allowed ourselves some rice. Only Ahmad received a tiny plate full of rice every day. And a bottle of warm sugar water.

  All of Yarmouk continued to suffer from extreme hunger. Hardly a week passed without
us learning of a new “martyr of hunger.” It was always the weakest among us who died, the most emaciated ones, the babies and the old folks. They died from contaminated water or a virus or some other disease, sometimes from a combination of them. A local human rights organization recorded the following:

  Mahmoud Alaa al-Din, died on October 26, starved to death.

  Aya (baby), died on October 28, starved to death.

  Abdelhay Yousef (4 years), died November 2, starved to death.

  Omar Hussein (child), died on November 10, starved to death.

  Malik Jumaa (baby), died on November 10, starved to death.

  Mahmoud Mohammad al-Aydi, died on November 20, starved to death.

  One time, they found the spindly corpse of a very old man who had died in his bed, forgotten by everyone. He looked like a mummy. We didn’t even have coffins anymore—wood had gotten too expensive. The bodies were brought to the cemetery on a stretcher. During the funeral processions, people carried the body on their shoulders and chanted, “Yarmouk, Yarmouk is neutral! Open your gates, oh Yarmouk. Yarmouk is here!”

  The newspapers in Europe wrote that Yarmouk was a “death camp.” Only eighteen thousand people—out of six hundred and fifty thousand—were said to be alive there.

  One thing was still abundantly available: the Asian spice mix. The needy drank gallons of water mixed with the salty spice mix. It gave you the illusion that you weren’t hungry anymore, at least for a few hours. Unfortunately, it seemed that the chemical powder was bad for your health. People’s stomachs bloated and they became increasingly haggard, yet they looked swollen at the same time.

  Or perhaps it was the clover? We were constantly eating yellow clover, which grows wild from England to Iran. Farmers use it to feed their animals. It has a lot of protein, but it also contains trace amounts of cyanhydric acid. Which is why it is deadly to snails. How bad is it for people who’ve had no other food for months? I have no idea. I only know that many of us got terrible diarrhea from eating all that grass.

  For me and my family, the horned clover was an everyday delicacy. My mother cut up the greens and soaked them twice in salt water, then we cooked them with red lentils. Yes, we still had those. That’s what we ate six days a week. Yellow clover with lentils and the Asian spice mix. It was disgusting. If the stems hadn’t been soaked enough, they were incredibly bitter. But no matter how much we soaked the stuff, we still kept biting into bitter parts, and it turned our stomachs.

  Every few days, I took my bike to Yalda to harvest clover on deserted farms. One of them was subdivided by a row of small cairns. A sniper lurked on the other side of that line, and just recently, someone had been shot. We all knew to stay away from the line, no matter what.

  One morning, there were six or seven of us out in the fields, crouching in the grass as we cut clover. A man approached us whom I’d never seen before. He saw that the field looked much greener and juicier on the other side of the line. “I can see radishes over there!” he said. We warned him not to go, pleaded with him, told him it would be his death warrant. But the growling of his stomach was more powerful than our warnings, so he took his basket and went over.

  Half an hour passed. He came back, his basket filled with radishes. “And that’s not all!” he cried. “There’s radishes everywhere!” What could we say?

  He went over a second time and crouched down to pick radishes. Then we heard a shot, a popping sound, like a melon bursting open. We threw ourselves to the ground and when we looked up, we saw the man was lying in the grass, covered in blood. The sniper had hit the man’s head with an explosive bullet, blowing off his lower jaw. A gruesome sight. My stomach turned.

  We discussed what to do. We couldn’t just leave him there. One of us got up to look for an iron bar; another man searched for a blanket. Then one of us pushed the bar up the dead man’s pant leg and pulled him toward us. Then we laid him on the blanket. Four men were carrying him. I pushed the victim’s bicycle. We took him to the makeshift hospital in al-Hajar al-Aswad, where the carpenter had recently patched my fingers up.

  We left the dead man outside. If he had relatives who were searching for him, this would be the first place they’d come to look.

  Back home, I told Tahani, “This man died for a few radishes. Can you imagine?” Deeply disturbed, we both grew silent.

  * * *

  Being hungry makes you moody. The starving people of Yarmouk shuffled morosely through the deserted streets, or huddled around some campfire, burning clothes and plastic bottles.

  People were aging in fast motion. Before the siege, my mother had still seemed young, but now she was gray and haggard, her face lined with deep wrinkles. She had lost a lot of weight—“And all without a diet or gym,” she said sarcastically. She still had a scale from her previous attempts at weight loss, and from time to time I would weigh myself. Formerly, I had weighed 143 pounds; now I was down to 108. I could see my rib cage under my skin.

  We weren’t the only ones who had changed. I knew a large, burly boy in our neighborhood who lost weight so fast, it was as if he’d had his stomach reduced. Or the bodybuilder who used to work as a security guard at one of the large jewelry stores, a guy in a black suit, with shiny shoes, sunglasses, and a stud in his ear. He became as thin and crooked as a burnt match. Soon, he had a long beard, but not because he had found God. No, it was just due to fatalism and lack of shaving cream.

  There was only one commercial area left: Oruba Street. Previously, it had been the flea market of Yarmouk; now it became an apocalyptic shopping mall. Some people sold wood, which had been taken from sofas. Other household goods had been stolen from warehouses and shops, like the sacks of cinnamon sticks that had been looted from a spice depot. There were days when a large flat-screen TV was sold for a cigarette, or a cigarette exchanged for a refrigerator or a washing machine. A persistent rumor was that you could get a fifty-five-pound sack of rice for a kidney. With pale, sallow faces, people stumbled from one booth to the next. And no matter where you went, you could never escape the terrible stench of burning plastic bottles.

  One day, Tahani and I were walking down Oruba Street, and we heard a woman’s panicked screams: “The boy has to get out of here! He’ll die! His mother has no milk! He will starve!”

  We approached. “What’s going on?” Tahani asked.

  The woman said that her five-day-old grandson was dying. She told us that his mother was completely exhausted and had nothing to eat anymore. Tahani asked for the address and we went straight there. Tahani entered while I waited outside. When she came back out, she told me that the mother had grabbed her breasts and said, “They’re empty. I have nothing left to give him!” Then the mother came outside, carrying the baby. I still remember the little boy’s face. All I could see was his wide-open mouth. He could hardly move. Tahani bent down to listen to his breathing, which was very weak. She promised to return, and brought the woman two pounds of rice. We never learned what became of the baby boy, whether he survived.

  It was early November. I was frying falafel again, when a man named Abu Mohammed approached me. He was in his mid-forties, large and heavy, with a receding hairline. Before the war, he had been one of my voice students, a baritone who worked hard and was always on time.

  “Hello, Aeham!” he said.

  “Abu Mohammed!” I called out. “You’re still in Yarmouk!”

  “Yes, just like you. And now you’re selling falafel. I like that.”

  We talked for a while and finally he said, “Aeham, I would like to start a choir. We need someone to accompany us on the keyboard. I was thinking of you.”

  “People are starving,” I replied. “In times like these, who cares about music?”

  “Let me worry about that. I’ll get a group together. We even have electricity.”

  My ears pricked up. Almost no one had power by then. And if they did, there was usually some political party or militant group behind it. “No offense, Abu Mohammed,” I said, “but you know tha
t I don’t want to be anybody’s puppet.”

  No, no, Abu Mohammed assured me, the group was completely independent. He wanted to call it Samed—steadfast. He said he’d take care of everything. “You just bring your keyboard, I’ll get some people together, and then we’ll sing. Just like in the old days.”

  I liked him, and I felt like making music again. So I agreed.

  Two days later, Abu Mohammed picked me up at the agreed-upon time. I shoved my keyboard under my arm and we were on our way, walking until we ended up at the headquarters of the Fatah movement, the largest Palestinian party, founded by Yasser Arafat once upon a time. I recognized their unmistakable yellow symbol—two rifles, a hand grenade, and the outline of Palestine—and immediately wanted to turn back.

  But, of course, that was impossible. In a place like Yarmouk, it was all too easy to put your foot in your mouth and get into trouble. So I discreetly took Abu Mohammed aside and politely asked him, “Didn’t you say that your choir was nonpartisan?”

  “Yes,” he insisted. “We’re not affiliated with anyone. We’re just using a rehearsal space here.”

  “Sure, and in the end, those guys will want us to do their bidding.”

  “No, believe me.”

  “I have my doubts.”

  After a while, I gave in, deciding to take a leap of faith and not worry about this questionable partnership. In the meantime, eleven men had shown up to sing with us. We all introduced ourselves.

  Then the man who had unlocked the door for us turned on a generator. The room lit up and the diodes on my keyboard began to glow. So we began, singing scales, a simple la-la-la to see who could hit the notes. It was all right, but no more than that. My right hand was in pain, the men were humming out of tune—but it still was fun to sit at a keyboard after all those months of serving falafel.

  After an hour—bang!—the lights went out. The generator had run out of gas. But the men were happy. “Finally, I know how to sing,” one of them said. “Thank you, Professor!”