by Dan Mayland
She leaned back into Oskar’s chest, eyes closed, allowing the cool water to cascade over her face.
“That was crazy!” he cried, half laughing and half crying because of the lingering effects of the gas.
Hannah agreed, but also felt exhilarated by what they’d done. Get out, Bashar, she thought. Get. Out.
She turned to face Oskar and explained how the crowd had pushed her into the center of the intersection and of her run-in with the Mukhabarat officer at the car.
Oskar told of how he’d lost her in the crowd when the shooting started. “When I couldn’t find you, I ran back here.”
She clasped her hands around his waist, grateful that they were both safe and began to recall where they’d left off in bed before the protest had erupted.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of knocking. Heavy, violent knocking that rattled the door. They both froze.
“Oh, God,” whispered Hannah, thinking it couldn’t possibly be the receptionist. “He must have seen me.”
“Who?”
She explained about the Mukhabarat officer who’d been in the intersection while she was trying to get back inside the hotel.
Oskar’s eyes widened. Then he cursed.
“We’ll show him the work slip for the car, tell him we walked near the protest by mistake,” Hannah whispered.
“If he sees your Syrian passport, he’ll arrest you anyway.”
Hannah was born and raised in New Jersey. But her father had been Syrian, and before coming to Aleppo she had applied for a Syrian passport so she wouldn’t have to deal with constantly having to renew a work visa.
Both her US and Syrian passports were in her purse.
“I’ll hide it,” she said.
“Where? He’ll search the room to make sure we don’t have any anti-regime stuff. And if he finds it and realizes we tried to lie to him—” There was more pounding on the door. Oskar bolted out of the shower, grabbed his clothes from where he’d left them on top of the toilet, and silently gestured for Hannah to follow him.
She did, then called, “Who is it?” loud enough so that whoever was on the other side of the door could hear her.
“Open up!” said a male voice, followed by more pounding.
“A minute of privacy, please,” said Hannah. “I must dress.”
Oskar threw on his clothes in a matter of seconds, padded silently to the street-facing window, threw open the lace curtains, and quietly raised the sash. A blast of humid air hit Hannah as she struggled to step into her panties. As she was forcing her wet arms through her blouse sleeves, Oskar stuck his head out the window and looked left, then right.
“Street’s empty,” he whispered. “Grab your purse and come right after me, I’ll catch you.”
“I don’t know about this . . .” Hannah whispered back.
“There’s a reason everyone runs from these assholes. We’ll just get a different hotel.”
“Are you sure it’s clear?”
Oskar took one more look out the window, flashed her the thumbs up, then awkwardly slipped one leg through the window followed by the other. For a moment, he lay with his belly half in the window, half out. Then he positioned his big hands on the sill, as though preparing to lower himself to the ground.
Instead of a controlled descent, however, he just fell. One second he was there, the next he was gone.
Another series of raps on the door sounded.
“Oskar!” Hannah cried.
She ran to the window.
The entire wooden sill had given way and lay on the concrete pavement. Oskar was a bit higher up, tangled up in the wrought iron fence and moaning. Protruding from a rip in his khaki slacks was what looked like a bloody bone.
“Oskar!” she cried again.
A key rattled in the door lock. Hannah turned from the window.
Paralyzed with indecision, she just stood there eyeing the door handle. Oskar weighed far more than she did. She couldn’t move him by herself.
Better to throw herself on the mercy of the Mukhabarat, she decided, than to try to attempt the impossible.
“Hold on!” she called to Oskar, then she threw on her pants, hid her Syrian passport between the box spring and the mattress, unlatched the lock, and yanked the door open.
It took her a moment to process just how foolish she and Oskar had been to panic.
For standing in front of her was the owner of the hotel; the same man who’d shown them their room when they’d checked in. His thick, calloused hands gripped a can of Coke and an onion.
“For the gas,” he said brusquely, but not unkindly, offering his gifts to her.
“I need your help,” she said.
Hannah ran down to the street and out the door, with the owner trailing in her wake. Upon seeing Oskar still tangled up in the fence, the owner’s eyes widened. “Ahh! Ahh!” he blurted as he dropped the onion.
Oskar was still moaning. Blood dripped down from his wounded thigh and was puddling on the pavement beneath him. Hannah noticed a smaller bloodstain near a rip in his light blue shirt.
“Help me get him down!” Hannah said. When the owner remained transfixed, she yelled, “Now!”
Hannah took Oskar’s good leg and heaved up on it as the owner lifted Oskar’s torso. Together, they slid him down to the sidewalk, at which point Oskar appeared to notice the extent of his leg injury for the first time and cried out in horror.
“Call an ambulance,” said Hannah. As the owner pulled out his cell phone, she applied pressure around where the bone had broken through his thigh.
Doing so prompted Oskar to scream, but she didn’t want to risk letting him bleed out on the sidewalk, so she kept up the pressure until the ambulance finally arrived.
chapter 3
Two hours later
Sami was in a foul mood.
Upon learning that Aya was determined to advertise her son’s funeral in a way that almost guaranteed it would be co-opted by protesters, he had tried to get his wife to intervene, or, at the very least, not to attend.
Did Aya not realize she was putting the whole family at risk? A private funeral for the family, yes, of course. But this? This spectacle?
Sami grieved for his nephew and was furious about what had happened, but he had children of his own to worry about. Surely they should not have to suffer because of what had happened to Omar.
By the time he began his final rounds at the hospital, he had learned that the funeral had gone ahead as planned and had indeed been marred by violence—but also that his wife was safe and Aya had not been arrested, at least not yet. Still, his nerves remained on edge.
It showed.
A woman named Mrs. Hadad, whose hip he had replaced and who was now recovering in a room packed with five other patients, wanted to know if Dr. Hasan could arrange for her to be given a hot bath. Because she very much thought that might alleviate some of the pain.
He most certainly could not, he informed her. Nor should she do so at home until the incision was fully healed. What Mrs. Hadad should do is follow the instructions she had already been given regarding her post-operative care. Had she read those instructions, as she had been told to?
“Of course, Doctor,” she said, which Sami knew meant exactly the opposite.
He directed her to read them now, without delay.
Two rooms down, a Mr. Qureshi peppered him with questions unrelated to his fractured tibia. What was the best remedy for bunions? And could foot fungus spread to one’s hand or mouth, because if it could, he was going to force his wife to sleep in another bed.
As Sami brusquely informed Mr. Qureshi that he was an orthopedic surgeon, not a Google search engine, he received a call from the emergency room: a twenty-six-year-old male suffering from a chest wound and compound femoral shaft fracture had just been admitted. Significant sof
t-tissue damage should be expected.
Sami cursed. Mr. Qureshi averted his eyes.
“Comminuted?” asked Sami into the phone, referring to the fracture.
“Not visibly,” said the ER nurse. “But I have not seen the X-rays.”
Sami exhaled. Over the course of the day, he had performed one planned hip replacement, one unplanned anterior cruciate ligament repair, administered five cortisone shots, and had conducted more evaluations than he could recall. All this on only a few hours of sleep. He was ready to go home.
“And his current condition?”
“Conscious. Vitals stable.”
“The chest wound?”
“It’s stable.”
Sami hesitated. A femoral fracture in which the bone had pierced the skin needed to be handled by an orthopedic surgeon. At least, if the patient ever wanted to walk normally again. Which meant either he did it or they asked Dr. Issa, the orthopedic surgeon who was on call that evening, to come in early.
But Dr. Issa had covered for Sami on multiple occasions. And the sooner they began debriding and irrigating the open wound, the better.
“Do we have a room?” he asked.
“7B.”
“I must wash, give me ten minutes.”
The patient had already been anesthetized, intubated, and fitted on a radiolucent table so that his broken left leg was exposed, his left hip raised slightly, and his left arm drawn across his body to provide Sami unimpeded access to the injury. The skin around the wound had been shaved and sterilized. Leaded blue blankets covered his genitalia and torso. His large head was shrouded behind a leaded screen where the anesthesiologist had set up a monitoring station.
The patient was ready for surgery.
But Sami, upon entering the operating room and reading that the patient was a Swede, decided he wasn’t ready.
“He smells of tear gas,” Sami informed the nurse. The smell was faint but undeniable when one got close; it lingered in the hair. Gesturing to the patient’s upper thigh, Sami added, “And this did not happen tripping on a sidewalk.”
He wondered whether it had happened at Omar’s funeral. The timing would have been right.
The nurse explained that the Mukhabarat had already cleared the patient.
“No one cleared it with me,” said Sami, prompting the nurse to crack open the operating door and call to another nurse. Minutes later, a uniformed Mukhabarat officer appeared, but advanced no further than the doorway.
“Ya Rab! ” he exclaimed upon observing the patient. And then, referring to the holiday when lambs were slaughtered, “Is it Eid al Adha?”
He laughed.
“You told him?” Sami asked the nurse.
“Yes, yes, we know.” The officer raised a surgical mask to his mouth, coughed violently, glanced at the patient’s leg again, grimaced, then said, “He was staying in a hotel near one of the protests, but he is not one of them. Swedish engineer, this one. Involved with building that park by the Qinnasrin Gate—he and his American girlfriend. It has all been investigated.” After another coughing fit, he said, “These foreigners, they panic. He heard the noise from the protest and got scared, that is all.”
“So, the operation is approved?”
“Of course.”
Sami frowned, as though he disapproved, but it was an act. He had known the Mukhabarat would not want to provoke the Europeans by withholding treatment from a Swedish citizen, even one who had attended a protest. But the assistance he had rendered to Omar, paired with the possibility that his sister-in-law, Aya, could be broken under interrogation were she to be arrested, meant that the opportunity to make a harmless show of loyalty to the regime was not one he could pass up.
“He does not look well, Doctor,” said the Mukhabarat officer. “I suggest you begin.”
On a stainless-steel table next to the operating table, the nurse assembled an array of instruments: scalpels, scissors, retractors, forceps, pins, brackets, long bars, short bars, wrenches, screws, a drill handle . . .
Sami donned his leaded gloves, collar, apron, and glasses. His focus narrowed; his worries receded.
After reviewing a CT scan of the Swede’s pelvis and confirming there was no femoral neck fracture and inspecting the chest wound to confirm it had been bandaged properly and could be safely addressed later, he began cleaning and irrigating, cutting away damaged tissue, and cauterizing blood vessels.
Once he was done with that, he and the nurse pushed and pulled on the Swede’s thigh until the bone had slipped back inside the leg and was at least close to the position in which it should be. More cleaning followed, then Sami cut holes through the soft thigh tissue and, using guide brackets, screwed large pins into the femur. The pins he attached to clamps, which he in turn attached to a guide bar.
As Sami fiddled with his external fixation device, his eyes darted from his hands to the fluoroscope monitor, allowing him to see the changing position of the bone. He yanked on the Swede’s thigh then whacked it with a rubber mallet. The swollen flesh wobbled.
“Pull,” he said to the nurse, and as she strained to do so, he tightened one of the several clamps on the guide bar. After checking the monitor, he said. “Pull harder!”
chapter 4
Forty-two-year-old Mukhabarat officer Rahim Suleiman trudged slowly up the steps that led to his third-floor condominium, holding his black helmet in one hand and resting the other on the grip of his holstered Makarov pistol. He had twisted his knee while kicking over a chair at the funeral protest, so he took a moment to rest on the second-floor landing, outside his brother’s open door.
His double-chinned mother was seated in the living room, fanning herself with a newspaper while watching his brother’s two young sons wrestle on the floor. “You are late. Ahmed already left,” she said, referring to his brother.
“I told him I would help him tomorrow.”
“He needed help today.”
Rahim waved her complaint away with his hand—Ahmed’s water heater had been dripping for a month, the world would not end if it dripped for another day—and continued up the stairs.
Upon entering his home and removing his shoes, he observed his wife standing in front of the kitchen stove, wearing a baggy, black, sleeveless blouse and looking squatter than usual as she stirred a pot of what smelled to Rahim like the lamb meatballs she used in her labanieh soup.
“May food such as this always be abundant,” he declared as he waved the scent to his nose, adding “Mashallah.” God has willed it.
She ignored the compliment, and when he attempted to kiss her, turned her cheek.
Shrugging, he opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of Cola Turka, drank a sip, and settled into a chair at the kitchen table.
“Why do you act like this?” he demanded after a minute of silence had passed between them.
She gestured with her chin to the living room. “I suggest,” she said as she stirred the pot violently enough so that it rattled on the stove, “you ask Adel.”
Too tired to argue, Rahim heaved himself up and padded to the living room, where his fifteen-year-old son, Adel, and his thirteen-year-old daughter, Zahra, were seated in the center of a couch that was sagging even more than usual. He should have paid for real wood instead of letting himself get talked into a pressboard frame, Rahim thought as he eyed the couch.
Adel wore an orange T-shirt that was too small for him and exposed his spindly arms. The hijab headscarf Zahra had worn to school had fallen to the floor by her feet. They were both staring at a small laptop, playing The Sims 3 video game.
Rahim told Zahra to pick up her hijab or wash it herself—was her mother a servant?—then turned to his son.
“Why is your mother upset?” His intention was to sound threating enough so that his wife would appreciate that he was taking the situation seriously, but he was too tired to
really pull it off.
Adel briefly made eye contact with his father.
“We will talk outside,” Rahim called to his wife.
“He is not to smoke!” she said as they were leaving.
They sat side by side at the base of the concrete steps behind the building, looking out over a weed-strewn garden. Rahim tapped out a Marlboro cigarette for himself then offered one to his son.
Adel took it and leaned in as his father flicked his lighter.
“She is angry about my math scores,” offered Adel eventually.
Rahim rested his forearms on his knees. “How bad?”
“Seventy-four percent average.”
“But that is not bad at all!”
“Yes, it is, Baba. I need ninety percent to qualify.”
Adel had been taking a summer course in algebra in hopes of being accepted into a government school for exceptional students.
“Then you should study harder.”
“I will.”
They smoked in silence for a time.
“And the photos?” asked Rahim quietly, as he looked past the steps to the weedy garden.
Adel took a drag off his cigarette, then pulled his cell phone out of his back pocket and showed it to his father. The screen was shattered. “Sorry,” he said.
It was hard for Rahim to hide his disappointment. Posing as a protester, Adel was supposed to have photographed real protesters gathering for a funeral in a neighboring district. Rahim had promised to bring those photographs to his commanding officer in Military Intelligence.
But he was also concerned.
“I told you to leave before the march started,” Rahim said.
Rahim had been clear on that point. Adel was not to be anywhere near the protest once it actually got underway.
“Yes, but after it was disrupted, everyone ran. I was bumped, but I should have been watching. It was my fault.”
Rahim draped an arm over Adel’s shoulders. “It is of no matter. You were brave to try.”
“I will do better next time,” said Adel. “When is the next protest?”