The Pianist from Syria

by Aeham Ahmad

  We approached the first checkpoint. We were driving in the military lane normally reserved for army vehicles. I hardly dared to look. But Abu Jolan just lowered his window and held up an ID card—and the soldier waved us through. Tahani and I looked at each other in surprise. The same thing happened at the second and third checkpoint. And so on. What was that magical ID card?

  I had taken this route hundreds of times, sitting on the bus to the university early in the morning, next to me a backpack full of violin strings and instruments, listening to the Taksim Trio’s romantic songs through my earbuds. At that time, I’d dreamed of starting a family. I looked around. Now my family was sitting next to me, Tahani, Ahmad, and Kinan. But this wasn’t how I had imagined it. I’d never thought that we’d be sitting in an SUV, trembling with fear, trying to flee our own country.

  Five hours later, we reached Homs. There was a checkpoint at a large circle that was operated by Air Force Intelligence, the most powerful of the four Syrian intelligence services. Once again, Abu Jolan slowed down and held up his ID card.

  The officer looked at it. Then he looked through the window, glaring at each of us in turn.

  “We’re on a military mission,” Abu Jolan explained.

  “Really? A military mission? With children in the back?” the officer asked, stretching out each word.

  Abu Jolan became defensive. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?”

  “Yeah, I know,” the officer said, his voice dripping with contempt. “We’ve been waiting for you all morning.”

  Then he tore open the door, grabbed Abu Jolan by the collar, dragged him to the ground, and started kicking him. It was as if he’d lost his mind. “You’re a war profiteer, is that it?” the officer shouted. “This is how you make your money? Is it? You son of a bitch!” Abu Jolan was curled up on the ground, whimpering. The soldier kicked him in the stomach, the face, the back. “How dare you? You son of a bitch!”

  Tahani started to cry. Almost immediately, a soldier tore open the passenger door, where Raed was sitting. He grabbed him by the T-shirt and made a fist, as if he was about to hit him. “Show me some ID!” he shouted. “Come on! Get out of the car!”

  We got out, our hands raised. “Where were you headed?” the soldier snapped. I saw five more uniformed men, a few steps back, their fingers on the triggers of their weapons.

  “To a wedding in Hama!” we said.

  “Liars!” the soldier shouted. He punched each of us—each of the men—in the face. Now the children burst into tears. “Where are your papers?” the soldier asked.

  Then he began searching the vehicle. As he flipped down the visor above the passenger seat, our documents fell out. Abu Jolan had taken them at the start of our journey. Four military certificates tumbled to the ground. According to these documents, we were volunteers headed to the front, to fight against ISIS. That’s why the soldiers had waved us through. They thought we were cannon fodder. And that’s why we’d been allowed to use the military lane.

  Abu Jolan was still on the ground. His lip had burst open and blood was trickling from an open wound beneath his eye.

  “We’ve been waiting for you, you bastard!” the officer shouted at him again. “We know what you’re up to!” Turning to Raed, he said, “Come with us!”

  When Raed came back ten minutes later, his cheeks were red. Apparently, they’d slapped him left and right. “Just tell the truth,” he whispered to me.

  Tahani and I were holding our crying kids in our arms. We entered a room. We were told to stand in front of a wall. The officer approached us, coming uncomfortably close. “Where were you headed? And don’t lie!” he shouted.

  I couldn’t speak. I felt dizzy. I knew it was over. There were only two options left: Either I’d disappear in a jail cell, like my brother, or I’d have to go to the front, as a soldier. My only hope was that they’d spare Tahani, Ahmad, and Kinan.

  “We’re from Yarmouk . . .” Tahani began.

  “Yarmouk?” the officer shouted. “You’re with the FSA?”

  “No, no!” Tahani said. “We were starving. That’s why we fled.”

  “You’re headed to Turkey, aren’t you? Over to Erdoğan? Admit it!” Much of the Syrian opposition’s infrastructure was based in Turkey—anyone headed there was a suspected resistance member.

  “We just wanted to get out, no matter where,” Tahani said.

  The officer turned to me and snapped, “Were you with the FSA?”

  “I’m a—” I began, but I bit my tongue before the word “pianist” slipped out. Instead, I quietly said, “I’m Aeham Ahmad.”

  “Where were you headed?”

  “To a wedding in Hama!” I said.

  “You’re lying!” the officer snarled.

  What could I say? What had Raed told them? How much did this guy know? I was grasping at straws. “It’s true what my friend said!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the officer grumbled. “We know all about you. Get out!”

  Outside, the soldiers tied us up with cables. We climbed back into the SUV. The officer got behind the wheel and took us to the Air Force Intelligence headquarters, just a few blocks away. We all waited in the courtyard, in the shade of a tree, until Tahani, the children, and I were called into a sparsely furnished interrogation room, where two soldiers were waiting for us.

  “Take out all your money,” one of them said, staring menacingly at us. “If you have dollars or euros, you’d better hand them over, or there’ll be trouble.”

  Getting caught with a foreign currency in Syria could lead to a charge of subversion—which meant you had to spend years in jail.

  “If I find any money, you’re in trouble,” the man said. “You’d better hand it over now.”

  There was little we could do. I wondered if we had hidden our money well enough. Would he be able to find the bills? On a whim, I decided to take a chance. If he found the money, I’d simply say this wasn’t our bag. I would just keep denying it. Even if they hit me. And if all else failed, I could claim that it belonged to the driver. He was already lost. It made no difference anymore.

  “All right, we’ll start searching you,” the soldier snapped. “If we find anything on you, you’ll be in a lot of trouble.” Then he unloaded a barrage of insults.

  He took everything Tahani and I had on us. Our wedding rings, our watches and cell phones. Tahani’s jewelry, the two golden bangles she had bought with her dowry, which, even in the days of our deepest hunger, she had been unwilling to exchange for a sack of rice. The USB stick that I had put in my pocket, full of interviews and videos. I cursed myself for being so careless. Then he searched me, my pants pockets, the seams of my jeans, my shoes and socks. Then the children. And then he kicked us out. We sat down in the shade again.

  “It’s over, my friend,” I said to Raed.

  At that moment, the soldier approached us with a small pack of diapers. “Hey!” he snapped at me. “Don’t you want your things back?”

  Where had those diapers come from? They certainly weren’t ours. “No, sir!” I said. “These aren’t our diapers!”

  “Are you kidding?” he snarled. “They’re yours, all right!”

  “No, they aren’t. Why would we have two bags of diapers, sir?” I tried to imitate his Alawite accent.

  He grew impatient. “Take your damn diapers! What are we supposed to do with them?” He threw the bag in my face.

  Suddenly, it became clear to me: Those diapers must have been left by some unfortunate soul who was here before us. When the soldiers found the bag, they thought it belonged to us. Yes, that was it! Now I could claim that these were, in fact, our diapers—and not the other bag, the bag with the money. If they ever found it.

  Shortly afterward, Raed and I were led down into the basement, three levels deep. The soldiers unlocked a cell door. The air was heavy and damp; there was a disgusting smell of mold, sweat, and urine. In the darkness I couldn’t see the other prisoners, but I sensed that the cell was full.
Raed and I sat against the wall near the door. I rested my head on his shoulder and dozed off. Half-asleep, I thought about how viciously they had beaten the driver. What, then, would they do to us?

  Three hours later, a soldier opened the door and called us out. When the light fell through the open door, I saw that there were at least fifty men in the cell, sitting or standing. Outside, we had to climb into a minibus, together with Tahani and the kids. Inside the bus were six men in combat uniforms. They were tied up and blindfolded. I had already given up all hope, and imagined myself in a uniform, with my rifle, in some godforsaken battlefield. I knew I couldn’t survive something like that.

  We were taken to the National Security Building, and then into an interrogation room, along with our luggage. A man in civilian clothes interrogated us. He had a folder in front of him, probably our file. But I didn’t say much. We were searched again. I had to take off my belt and shoelaces, which were put in a bag. They searched my shoes, and I had to take off my pants and underwear for inspection. Then we were brought down to the basement. To some kind of dungeon.

  Tahani and the children were put into a women’s holding cell; Raed and I were next door, penned in with the men. The air inside the room was moist, and it stank. Water was dripping from the ceiling. It was pitch-black. Every forty-five minutes, a bright light was turned on. This was to happen day in, day out. There must have been about a hundred prisoners there, unwashed, terrified, sitting or standing around idly. From the neighboring cell, I could hear Ahmad and Kinan screaming with hunger and fear. It was unbearable. Here and there, I felt myself dozing off. It was as if I retreated deep inside myself, as deeply as possible.

  I spent the next few days in a kind of haze. All my senses and needs had been cut off, it seemed. All hunger, thirst, and even the urge to go to the bathroom. I simply lay there, motionless. Maybe it was the lack of oxygen. We were in an unventilated room far underground. If you stood up, you got dizzy, that’s how bad the air was.

  Under the door was a two-inch crack. I could feel a breeze coming in through the corridor. That was the most popular place. The men would lie there and breathe the fresh air.

  From time to time, inmates were taken from the cell, or new men were brought in, some of them covered in blood. Many of the prisoners had a bad cough, and several of the men seemed already dead.

  Twice a day, the soldiers brought us dry bread, half a pita per person. Raed tried to wake me up. “Leave me alone, I want to sleep,” I groaned. The soldiers put a tub of water in the cell. Some of the men tilted it up a little, then they began to drink from it. Others dipped their dirt-caked hands in it. It was disgusting.

  I was even more disgusted by the toilet. It was no more than a hole in a filthy, foul-smelling corner of the room where the wooden floor was soggy and covered in mold. Around it stood several pairs of worn-out soldiers’ boots. I had no idea why.

  Next door, little Kinan couldn’t stop crying. Tahani later told me that he’d been wearing his dirty diaper for two whole days. When she finally took it off, he began crying from the cold. It was freezing down there, even though outside, the August heat was stifling. Like the men, Tahani and the others were given only bread and water.

  After two days, she pleaded with the guards, “Please, let me change my son’s diaper.”

  The other women in the cell took her side: “Give the woman a diaper!” Apparently, the guards felt sorry for her, and she was allowed to briefly rummage through our luggage, looking for diapers. She also grabbed some towels for the kids to sleep on.

  On the fourth day, we were taken out of the cells. I hugged Tahani and the boys. They seemed sick, and scared to death. I looked intently at Tahani: Had she been beaten? No, apparently not. At least that. We didn’t speak; we just looked into each other’s eyes.

  We had to climb into another minibus, and were taken to the police headquarters near the al-Waer district, a rebel bastion. The upper floor had been eaten away by artillery fire. All around the building, I saw armored personnel carriers, heavy machine guns, and mortars. When we arrived, soldiers were firing grenades toward al-Waer. The neighborhood was already completely destroyed. A little while later, we heard explosions nearby, probably in response to the artillery fire.

  Once again, we were searched from head to toe: First they shone a flashlight into our mouths, then the men had to undress. After we had taken our clothes off, we had to bend forward and cough. But I was relieved that they left Tahani and the children alone.

  We were all taken to holding cells downstairs. The men’s was somewhat smaller than the previous one, but not too crowded, with about forty men. Sometimes we heard screams from the floors below us, where they were torturing people. For three days and three nights, we brooded in silence.

  Every once in a while, we were taken to the central prison for questioning. There was no point in lying. They knew everything about us. “We’ve been waiting for you,” the officer at the checkpoint had yelled at the driver. Clearly, someone had betrayed us. Or perhaps someone had fallen out of favor with someone else, or the smuggling business had been taken over by a different group. I had no idea. And so I told my whole story. Where my family and I came from, where we wanted to go, what we had paid for the trip.

  The next day, we were brought into the courthouse for a hearing. We entered a sparsely furnished room. I saw only one man there, who looked like a typical paper-pusher. He had sallow skin and neatly parted hair, and spoke in a flowery Standard Arabic. He must be the judge, I thought. We sat down across from him. Raed and I told him everything, from beginning to end.

  When we were done, the judge burst out laughing: “And that’s how you wanted to get out? We busted those guys long ago!”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “I know who you are,” he said to me. “You’re Aeham Ahmad, the pianist from Yarmouk. Half of Facebook is looking for you.”

  I was afraid.

  “We’d like to release you,” he went on. “You’ll need to sign an affidavit that you won’t try to escape.” He looked at us. “But I know you’ll be lying. I know you’ll try it again.”

  I became more and more nervous—why in God’s name was he telling us that? Maybe he was just bored. Bored to death. He must have seen stories like that play out thousands of times. Maybe he was just sick of it by now.

  “I know what you’re going to do,” he went on. “I know you’ll go straight to the Palestinian quarter in Homs. You’ll spend a few days with friends or relatives, and then you’ll find someone else to take you to Hama. . . .”

  This was insane! It sounded almost as if he was giving us advice. We were utterly baffled. “Go on now. Sign it,” he said, breaking the silence, and handed us the form.

  Tahani began to cry. “Sir, I swear! We’re not going to try and leave anymore!”

  The judge only waved his hand wearily. “Yes, yes. Sign here.” He sounded like a man at peace with himself. Or at least a man who didn’t want to deal with this nonsense anymore. Inside my head, a tiny voice whispered that maybe he liked what I had done in Yarmouk.

  “All right. You can go,” the judge said to Tahani and me. We had to sign an affidavit that we would never try to leave Syria again. Even Ahmad and Kinan, who had been in tears throughout the hearing, had to leave their fingerprints on the paper.

  Finally, the judge said sternly, “Don’t get caught again. If you do, it’s not going to get resolved in a week. Then you’ll be stuck here.”

  He turned to Raed and said, “You have to stay!” He charged him with violating the building code back in 1992. Back then, Raed had allegedly built an unpermitted annex, and he’d never paid the fine of twenty-five thousand Syrian pounds. In the last twenty-five years, the sum had doubled. Until he was able to come up with fifty thousand Syrian pounds, he’d have to stay in jail.

  Seriously? Here I was, a known deserter, and I was allowed to go? But Raed had to stay in jail for something so trivial, something that happened long ago? It
made no sense to me.

  I hugged him good-bye. “I’ll get you out of here, my friend,” I whispered in his ear. Then he was taken away.

  To this day, I don’t understand why I was released, along with my family. I hadn’t done my military service. The hard drive in my bag was full of videos of me singing about the misery in Yarmouk. We’d been caught by state security! Those guys are like a state within the state: they have top-notch IT systems, vast files and blacklists—they’re the managers of this war. How did I manage to get out of this? Meanwhile, my brother, Alaa, who had served in the military and had never done anything wrong, had disappeared in their dungeons.

  Honestly, I can’t explain it. Maybe God was looking out for us. Maybe God didn’t want to take my blind father’s other son from him.

  We got our travel bag back. From the courthouse, I called Samir to tell him that his driver had been busted. I let it ring a few times. Oddly, someone else picked up the phone and said Samir wasn’t there.

  I explained the situation. The man called back a few minutes later. We were supposed to wait by the courthouse. A man named Mohammad would help us. Why didn’t Samir want to talk to me?

  We stepped out into the sunlight, completely exhausted. Those seven days in jail had been brutal. Ahmad and Kinan were scared and sick. Tahani was at the end of her rope.

  After a short wait, a young man appeared and introduced himself as Mohammad. Samir had sent him, he said. We could stay with him and his mother, in Aidin, the Palestinian quarter of Homs. We started walking.

  But it wasn’t over yet. When we reached the Palestinian area, we saw a checkpoint.

  “IDs and military booklet,” said the soldier in a bored voice.

  “Oh, I don’t have it with me right now,” I lied. Without another word, he put our bag on a table and began to search it. He tore out everything. I watched him in silent despair. Of course, he found my military record booklet. He opened it. Anyone could see that I was supposed to report for duty back in 2011.