We’re still some distance from Urum al-Kubra
when I see blue smoke-haze hanging like cobwebs
around the trees rambling up the hills. Bushra walks
close to Dayah as we near the town. Alan climbs off
Baba’s back and slips his hand into mine.
“What’s the smell?” he says.
“Burning,” I say.
As we get nearer, the first of the red-roofed homes
trail up the hillsides. There are no columns of smoke,
no dark clouds staining the blue, but already we see
blackened, broken buildings. The burning smell gets
stronger as the road drops into the town. There are no
Kurdish Protection Units in this part of Syria. Baba is
watchful. His wariness frightens me. My skin tightens
on my bones. We could be walking into anything.
66
“Who controls the town, Baba?” I say.
“Syrian army.”
“Will they kill us?”
“We’re no threat to them. We’re just passing
through.”
The first of the town houses look empty: win-
dows shuttered, doors locked, vegetable gardens
overgrown and untended. There are no cars or vans
on the streets.
“I hope we find somewhere to stay,” Bushra says.
I hope so too. It’s been such a long walk.
We turn a corner. A tank blocks the width of the
road. Three soldiers of the Syrian army lean against it.
They swing their guns around, snap into action, but
quickly relax when they focus on us. My heart pounds
as we near them. I keep my eyes on the ground. Look
back to see where Dayah is. She touches my shoulder.
“Relax, Ghalib.” Her voice is soft.
We squeeze past the tank. The smells of hot
metal and of the soldiers’ sweat catch in my throat. I
thought when we left Kobani and Aleppo, we would
see no more fighting. I thought it was behind us.
We pass by. I don’t look back. We turn onto an
empty street, with no soldiers or tanks or hot metal
smell. Only old smoke and abandoned houses.
67
“Can we get water to drink in one of these houses?” Bushra says.
“Those are people’s homes,” Baba says. “We have
no permission to enter.”
“It’s only water,” Bushra says. But she mutters it
under her breath so only I hear.
Near the town center we find a small shop.
Dayah and Dapir buy bottles of water, oranges and
pastries.
“The shopkeeper’s wife has room in her house,”
Dayah says. “He says we can stay tonight.”
“Alhamdulillah,” Bushra says. “We will be safe.”
The shopkeeper lives in a two-story house out-
side town, with weavings and wall hangings that
remind me of home. In the separate kitchen at the
back, his wife pours basins of hot water for us to
wash. Baba cleans and dresses my feet. Some blis-
ters have burst and stuck to the bandages. Tears run
down my face.
“You’re brave,” Baba says.
Afterward, the shopkeeper’s wife serves us home-
grown vegetables, fried chicken and bread, and hot
sweet tea. The food tastes wonderful.
“It’s been so long since we’ve had fresh vegeta-
bles,” Dapir says to our hosts. “And meat.”
68
Bushra, Alan, and I roll out our bedrolls and blankets on the floor in the front room. Dayah and
Baba sleep in a small recess off the kitchen, while
Dapir has a proper bed upstairs.
“Our first night away from home, Bushra,” I say.
“A good place,” Bushra says. “A safe place.”
It’s certainly peaceful here, with no bombs or air-
strikes. Even so, I can’t sleep. I listen to the sounds, so different from home: snuffles and rustling of small
animals, the odd cluck from the woman’s hens.
The cockerel crows the next morning when it’s
still dark. The woman fills our water keg with fresh
water, serves us hard-boiled eggs from her hens, and
gives Dayah a loaf of her bread, wrapped in a clean
cloth, for the road.
“The border is two days away,” she says. “You
might find somewhere to stay in Tal Al Karama, a
village near the Roman road. You should reach there
this evening. A quiet road through pine woods and
bare hills.”
Baba pays the shopkeeper, who loads his wheel-
barrow with our bags and walks us to the road that
leads to Tal Al Karama. He blesses our journey; we
thank him and walk on.
69
7
“Carry me, Ghalib,” Alan says.
“I can’t carry you and the bags.”
“I’m tired. My leg hurts.”
We’ve been walking a long time. It’s late after-
noon. Apart from short rests and a break for lunch,
we’ve hardly stopped since we left the shopkeeper’s
house in Urum al-Kubra. Now the bedroll Alan’s
been carrying on his back hangs off his shoulder.
His face is f lushed and his bad leg throws a spit
of dust with every step. I put down my bags to
fix him.
“Don’t stop, Ghalib,” Baba says. “We’ve a way to
go yet.”
“Two minutes,” I say.
“Come on, Alan, you’re a big boy,” Baba says.
“You can rest later.”
70
I straighten the straps on Alan’s bag, pull out his T-shirt from where it bunches at his shoulder. The
cloth is damp. I give him a drink from my water
bottle. He twines his arms around my shoulders and
raises his leg, getting ready to climb into my arms.
“I can’t carry you with the bags,” I say again.
“Leave the bags,” he says. “Just carry me.”
I laugh. “The bags have our clothes and food.
They’re important.”
“I’m more important.”
I take his hot hand in mine. “We’ll walk
together.”
Dayah and Dapir are in front of Baba and Bushra.
Dapir walks slowly but doesn’t stop. She hasn’t
stopped since we started. She carries her own bag and
plods on. She walked everywhere in Kobani, even
when Dayah had money for a shared taxi home from
market. I look at her now as she leads us through this
wild place. She doesn’t complain about the heat or
the distance or her tired legs.
“Let’s show Dapir how good you are at walk-
ing,” I say to Alan.
Half a dozen steps ahead of us, a stone hops
straight up from the dusty road. It tumbles down and
clatters against its neighbors. I stare at it. A distant 71
crack echoes through the hills. I’m still figuring what happened when another rock farther away shatters
in a shower of dust and splintered stone. It too is
followed by a sharp blast. The unmistakable sound
of gunshot.
“Sniper!” I shout.
I drop our bags. Fling myself onto the dirt road.
Dragging Alan with me, I roll into the dry ditch.
With a shock of terror, I squeeze my eyes shut and
am instantly back in the bombed-out building in
K
obani, sucking in hot burning air and hunting for
Hamza. Panic surges through me.
Alan howls for Dayah. I snap open my eyes. I’m
in a ditch beside the dirt road. Snipers are shooting
at us.
“I’m here, Alan,” I say. “Are you hurt?”
He shakes his head. Tears run down his dusty
face. “I want Dayah,” he says.
A hundred paces away, the rest of the family
huddles in the dirt in a tight little knot, half hidden
by rising dust. I wish we were next to them. They’re
a long way from where we’re hiding. If I hadn’t
stopped to fix Alan, we would be beside them now.
Baba shouts at us. “Are you hurt?”
I call back to him. “We’re fine!”
72
“Keep down. Stay low.” He reaches for the bags to pull around them. I want to do the same, but can’t
move. I’m paralyzed with terror. Alan sobs. He’s get-
ting himself worked up to howl. I think fast.
“See if you can see the shooters,” I say.
He snivels and squints into the distance, search-
ing the stony brown hills. I try to work out who
might be shooting. The shopkeeper’s wife said there
would be no trouble along this road. ISIS is nowhere
around. Kurds live in these villages. Why would
someone shoot at us? We don’t look like rebels or
armed forces. We carry only clothes and food.
The crack of a gun explodes through the hills
again. Alan screams and clings to me. He trembles.
This time there are no explosions of pulverized rock.
No hopping stones. The shooters have hit nothing.
Three times now they’ve missed. How could they
miss six people on an open road?
“They’re not trained shooters,” I say.
“There, Ghalib!” Alan says.
He points to a cluster of ruins on the flank of the
hill rising from the road. A couple of broken houses.
Fields with collapsed stone walls. I watch until—
there! A small figure peers briefly from behind a
wall. Not a man. Not an adult. ISIS child soldiers
73
are as skilled as adults, but I already know this sniper can’t aim. It’s not ISIS. It’s not the Syrian army. It’s just one small and ineffective sniper.
My courage rises. It pushes back my fear. It gives
me strength.
On the other side of the road, halfway between
where we’re huddled and where Baba and the oth-
ers are, is an abandoned house: stone walls, no roof,
no doors. Tangled garden. I heft myself onto my
haunches.
“Where are you going?” Alan says.
“We can’t stay here.”
“Stay there, Ghalib!” Baba says. “It’s too
dangerous.”
But I’ve already decided the under-sized shooter
can’t hit anything. I grab Alan by the hand. He
pulls back.
“Baba says it’s dangerous,” he says.
“Baba can’t see what we see,” I say. “Come on.
We’ll run together.”
We leave our bags. We stay low and dash the
short distance to the ruin. Alan limps and scampers.
He has forgotten his exhaustion and his sore leg. We
dive through the gaping doorway as the sniper fires
off another couple of shots. The crack of the gun
74
rings loud and frightening in the hills. Baba shouts in panic, but we’re safe behind solid stone walls. And
as I guessed, the bullets don’t hit anything.
“We’re fine,” I say. “It’s better in here.”
We can stand up now. Move around, safe and
protected. I dust off our clothes. Wipe tears from
Alan’s grimy face. “You were really brave,” I tell
him. “He can’t shoot us in here.”
“Will he kill us?”
“Not if I kill him first,” I say.
My words sound braver than I feel. My heart
pounds and my hands shake, but I won’t let a sniper
beat me. At the open window, we peek out at the
rest of the family. Alan waves at Baba.
“You can make it,” I say to Baba. “It’s only one
shooter. He misses every time.”
But Baba won’t leave the others, even when he
sees the shooter peek from behind his hillside hide-
out. Bushra makes the first move. She locks her eyes
on the sniper. She waits for the right moment.
“Come on, Bushra!” I say.
And she’s off. Without saying anything to
Baba, Bushra pelts from the ditch and races toward
us. Keeping a smooth stride, she even manages to
snatch up a bag on her way. My blood sings to see
75
her run. Fireworks explode in my belly when she bursts through the door of the little ruined house,
eyes shining, face beaming.
“I made it!” she says.
Alan jumps up and down. We cheer with excite-
ment. “The sniper didn’t fire,” I say.
“Maybe he’s reloading.”
We hunker down and wait. There is silence for
a long time. Dapir, Baba and Dayah are still in the
ditch.
“They’ll still be there tomorrow,” Bushra says.
“Come on!” Alan says. “It’s easy!”
After a while, Dapir shifts.
“She’s coming before her son!” Bushra says.
This is not good: Dapir isn’t swift like my sister,
though she has the same brave spirit.
But she doesn’t try to run or even to move fast.
She is Dapir. She walks with the grace and stiffness of
an old lady, stepping deliberately and carefully across
the stony road. I hold my breath the entire time;
Alan buries his face in my side. Bushra crouches fro-
zen next to me. There is no gunfire, no hopping
stones. The sniper holds off. We run to the door to
greet Dapir. To draw her into the shelter of our little
ruined cottage. To hug and kiss her.
76
“That sniper knew there was no point shooting old bones like mine,” Dapir says.
When I hold her hands, they tremble. In spite
of her brave deed and fighting words, she was
frightened.
In the end, Baba and Dayah are shamed out of
the ditch. Dayah runs first, holding her dress and
grabbing a bag as she saw Bushra do. The sniper
shoots wide and wild as Dayah is almost at the door
of the house. We scream.
I grab Dayah’s hand and pull her to safety. Dayah
yelps and ducks inside. As before, the bullets ring
hollow and hit nothing, but we’re not any less fright-
ened. We’re still hugging Dayah, to comfort and
reassure her, when two more shots split the air. I
spin around as Baba lunges through the doorway, the
water keg and medical pouch in his arms.
“You made a run for it!” I say.
Giddy with relief, we cheer and laugh.
“It’s not funny,” Baba says. Sweat stains his shirt.
“Maybe a little funny,” Bushra says. “That
shooter can’t hit anything.”
“He’s practicing hard,” Dapir says. “He’ll get it
right yet.”
“What if he comes here?” Alan says.
77
That sob
ers us up. Now that Alan has put it out there, I can’t relax thinking the sniper might come
after us. I peek out the gaping windows. Peer up the
hillside where we saw the figure. Scan the empty
land all around.
“Nobody there,” I say.
“We’re safe for now,” Baba says. “We won’t move
from here.”
We hunker down in a shady corner to wait it out,
sitting quietly within the solid walls. We listen for
anyone approaching but the only sounds in the bar-
ren countryside are a lark, high overhead, and the soft
breeze whispering past the walls of the little house.
“How long do we wait?” I say. I keep my
voice low.
“However long it takes,” Baba says.
Which is not really an answer at all. I say noth-
ing. The unexpected rest is welcome anyhow.
“Who’s hungry?” Dayah says. She rummages in
the bags, unwraps the fresh bread from the shop-
keeper’s wife, and breaks it apart. She lays out hard-
boiled eggs, cucumber, tomatoes. Dapir cuts wedges
of sheep’s cheese. There are no more gunshots.
“If there wasn’t a shooter trying to blast us apart,”
Bushra says, “this would be a nice picnic.”
78
“Maybe he’s gone,” Alan says.
After I’ve eaten, I peep out the rear windows
again.
The hills are still wild and empty. I shimmy to
the door and look out. Nothing moves. Fifty paces
back, our bags are scattered on the road where we
flung them.
“I’ll get one of the bags,” I say.
“You’ll stay here!” Dayah says.
“It’ll test if he’s gone.”
“And if he’s not?” Dayah says.
“He can’t hit anything anyway. He’s tried hard
enough.”
“And he’s probably out of ammo by now,”
Bushra says.
“We’ll find out,” I say.
“Ghalib,” Dayah says. Her words ring with
warning.
“We can’t wait it out here forever, Dayah!”
Dayah looks at Baba. “Tell him not to go.”
“None of the shots came near us, Gardina,”
Baba says.
Dayah says nothing, which I take as tacit approval,
though it could also be that she’s annoyed with Baba.
Bushra nods her support to me.
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I make my move. Slowly I emerge from the open doorway, checking up and down the empty road.
I aim for the nearest bag. If any shots are fired, I’ll
dive into the ditch. I brace myself. One, two, three.
I sprint down the road. I skid to a stop over loose
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