The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  His mother dressed herself in a black robe, then brought Adam and Noora to the kitchen.

  “When we go outside,” she said, “you may see things you do not want to see. You may hear things you do not want to hear. But I will be with you, and you must stay right by my side and do exactly as I say. Do you both understand?”

  What things? Adam wondered. But he nodded.

  The wide, dun-colored streets of Jarabulus were shaded in places by locust and pine trees. Alternating blocks of black and white paint had been applied to the curb that lay between the sidewalk and the street, and as Adam walked to the roundabout in the center of town, he tried to step on only the black blocks.

  “Adam!” his mother snapped when he got too far ahead.

  It was a strange thing, Adam thought when they got to the square. Two men had been tied to wood crosses that in turn had been tied to telephone poles. According to his mother, the men on the crosses were sleeping. How anyone could sleep when tied up like that, Adam did not know, but his mother told him they had been working all night and were very tired.

  Because there were so many people crowding into the roundabout, it was hard for Adam to see. Soon he found himself bored and staring at the pant legs of a man in front of him.

  “Praise be to God! We ask God to grant us victory!” yelled a man near the center of the roundabout. Then, “The Prophet said you have to swear allegiance to a caliph before you die. And here today, you have the honor of swearing allegiance to the Prince of the Faithful, the Caliph of the Muslims, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi! Takbir!”

  “Allahu Akbar! ” roared the crowd.

  When his mother muttered Allahu Akbar! as well, he looked up at her, surprised, but she just glared at him, so Adam went back to staring at the legs of the man in front of him, wondering when they could go back home.

  The man up by the roundabout started talking about two criminals who were apostates, but Adam did not know what an apostate was. Then the man who was yelling said all the children should come forward because they should see what happens to apostates.

  Adam tried to push forward, but his mother stopped him with one hand and Noora with the other.

  “We wait here,” she said.

  One of the men with guns insisted that they come forward though, so they did.

  Adam saw three men. They were kneeling on the pavement. Green blindfolds covered their eyes. Directly behind the blindfolded men stood three more men, dressed in black. Even their faces were wrapped up in black fabric. Each man held a sword. In the center of the roundabout, two men held the black flag with the white writing on it.

  Adam needed to pee.

  “I want to leave,” he told his mother.

  “Shh,” she said. “Whatever happens, you must not scream, do you understand me?”

  “What are they doing?” he asked, but then, as the three men who stood behind the blindfolded men raised their swords, his mother covered his eyes with her hand. He heard thumping, then gasps.

  “Let them see!” someone cried.

  When his mother took her hand away, Adam observed that the three kneeling men had fallen to the ground and that their heads were no longer attached to their bodies. Blood had pooled around the pavement in front of their severed necks.

  “With the help of God Almighty, we will free this land from Assad and the infidels and apostates!” yelled a man in black in front of the bodies. “And know you all, young and old, that if any of you harbor the enemies of God who would take up arms against us, you will be considered an enemy and apostate yourself! But if you should help us, and cast the enemies of God from your home and onto our swords, it will be taken as a sign of your allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham and to the Caliph of the Muslims, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and you will prosper!”

  Adam peed in his pants and felt great shame because he had not done that since he was his sister’s age. He glanced at his sister. He wondered whether she had peed in her pants too and hoped she had.

  “Are they sleeping?” he asked, but he was crying when he spoke because he knew they were not.

  “No,” said his mother.

  One of the men held up a head and showed it to the crowd. Everyone was forced to walk past the bodies. As Adam walked by, one of the soldiers asked him, “What do you want to be, a jihadi or a martyr?”

  Adam did not know what to say.

  “Jihadi, I think,” he heard his mother whisper as she gripped his hand so tightly that it hurt. She tried to pull him away, but the man indicated she should stop.

  “And you, my little jihadi,” he said, addressing Adam. “How many enemies of God do you know?” And then, “How many men live in your house?”

  Adam’s mother said her husband was a doctor, but he was working in Aleppo. And he was a devout Muslim, who would surely welcome the arrival of the caliphate.

  “Let the child answer,” said the soldier. “Adults lie with too much ease. With children, it is different.” Bending down so that he was closer to Adam, he asked, “How many men live in your house?”

  Adam swallowed.

  “One, two?” asked the soldier. “You must tell me the truth, or surely, God and the Caliph will take your mother from you.”

  “My sister has a husband,” said his mother. “But he is in Aleppo as well.”

  “Let him speak!”

  “It is as my mother says,” said Adam. And then, “I have learned the shahada.”

  The man stood to his full height. “This is true?”

  “There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God,” said Adam.

  “What is your name, little one?”

  “Adam.”

  “You are very smart, Adam. If you see any enemies of God, you will tell me, will you not?”

  Adam nodded. The soldier let them go.

  Back at the house, Adam’s Uncle Rafiq was sitting cross-legged on the orange carpet in the reception room. A rifle that looked like the ones the soldiers outside had been carrying lay near his feet. Aya turned on the reciprocating fan and knelt next to Rafiq and ran her hands through his hair. He explained that battle for the town was over. ISIS had won.

  “Everyone is scared to fight them,” he said. “A few of us tried. The rest ran.”

  chapter 25

  Sami found his mother, Maryam, in the courtyard of Beit Qarah, sitting at a wicker table, drinking black tea and smoking. Her long hair was wild and had an orange tint to it, the result of an insufficient supply of dye. She wore large, old hoop earrings and a bright green kimono-inspired robe. Two women, both dressed in black abaya robes and headscarves, accompanied her.

  Three pointers with rubber tips lay on the table—to be used for moving playing cards to and from the center of the table.

  When Maryam saw Sami, she startled, looking guilty for a moment, then recovering.

  “I did not,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and raising her eyebrows, “expect you home until tomorrow evening.”

  It was hot in the courtyard, the air stagnant and heavy, and no water flowed through the marble fountain’s bronze seahorse spouts. To the left of the fountain, a one-legged man sat in a plastic chair, huddled over a radio listening to a soccer match. A woman of perhaps twenty faced away from him as she nursed a baby.

  Sami turned to his mother’s table companions. “Sisters,” he said. “So good to see you.”

  “And you, Abu Adam.”

  “You are both well?”

  They said they were.

  “I need the Mercedes,” Sami said to his mother. “There has been an incident.” He pulled a pill vial out of his pants pocket and placed it on the table. “Your blood pressure medication.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  As Sami explained, his mother picked up her cigarette then put it back down. Her friends lowered their gazes in respectful
silence.

  “No one need leave Beit Qarah,” Sami added. “There will still be room for everyone.”

  The house had become a homeless shelter of sorts. For relations and friends who had lost their homes in the war, for the wounded who had been discharged from the M2 but had nowhere to go to, for a mother and her daughter who were recovering from a sarin gas attack in Khan al-Asal . . .

  Maryam’s hands shook as she pocketed her vial of blood pressure medication. “The keys are in my wardrobe. You will have to buy petrol. The tank is nearly empty.”

  Sami kissed his mother on both sides of her cheek. “Thank you.”

  “Be careful.”

  The mustard-yellow 1989 Mercedes turbo diesel sedan was parked two blocks away in a garage that opened onto one of the few roads in the old city that was wide enough to accommodate cars.

  It had belonged to Sami’s father, and after his father died, his mother had refused to part with it. Too many memories, she had said—of the three of them driving across the Bosporus Bridge on their way to Greece, of racing through the Syrian desert on their way to Baghdad, of trying to find a parking spot in Jerusalem.

  Sami had paid to have the battery replaced shortly before the war and was grateful that he had, given that his own Mercedes had been abandoned in the University of Aleppo Hospital parking lot, on the regime-held side of the city.

  The car started on the first try, roaring to life and belching black smoke as he revved the engine.

  Outside the city he raced north on the M4 highway, stopping only to buy diesel dispensed out of plastic jugs by roadside vendors and to present his Free Syrian Army papers at multiple rebel checkpoints. The reckoning approaches, O you dogs of Assad, read graffiti that had been painted on the front window of a roadside restaurant.

  He turned left off route 216 before reaching the Euphrates. The dry rolling hills were barren save for scrub brush and clusters of olive trees, and they were crisscrossed by dirt roads.

  The ISIS checkpoint he encountered just outside Jarabulus wasn’t so much a checkpoint as it was two armed men harassing people by the side of the road. The black flag that flew from the back of their pickup truck was ringed with gold fringe, making it look a bit like an unattractive carpet.

  Sami turned on the radio, fiddled with the old dial until he came upon a station that featured a nonstop recitation of the Quran, then pulled to a stop when instructed to do so.

  The soldier who demanded to know where he was going spoke Arabic, but with an accent Sami didn’t recognize. Tunisian, Sami guessed. Maybe Egyptian. The ISIS fighters came from all over the Middle East. From Europe too.

  “I work at the M2 hospital in Aleppo, but I have family in Jarabulus,” Sami said. “So, I visit the hospital in Jarabulus when I come to visit my family. I am going there now.” He explained that he fought for no army, was affiliated with no militia group. When they demanded to know whether he was Muslim, he said, “Of course, brother.”

  “How many rak’ats are compulsory for the fajr prayer?”

  Sami’s mother was a lapsed Catholic descended from French bureaucrats, his late father a lapsed Sunni Muslim. So Sami had never been taught to pray, but Tahira and her family were practicing Sunnis, and he had witnessed them praying on countless occasions.

  “Two,” he said.

  “And how many for the zuhr prayer?”

  Sami knew the answer to that one as well, but he harbored doubts about the asr afternoon prayer. “Four. Brother, would you permit me to ask you a question?”

  “What question?”

  “May God protect you, but when the sand flies that are biting your toes and crawling up your pants infect you with the parasite leishmaniasis, how many milligrams per kilogram of body weight of the medicine I am carrying should I administer to you?”

  The soldier looked down at his toes, which were exposed because he was wearing plastic sandals. And indeed, a few flies had gathered around his feet. Not sand flies, but Sami doubted the soldier could make the distinction.

  “I am bringing this medicine to the hospital in Jarabulus,” Sami added, pointing to the cardboard box that lay next to him on the seat. When the soldier instructed him to open it up, Sami did, exposing his stethoscope, several syringes, and a collection of tightly packed vials.

  “This leishmaniasis,” Sami said. “I am certain you know the disease, if not the name. The parasites, they get into the body, they cause the skin to blister, and the nose to run and bleed. Some grow very sick. I am sure you know some of your brothers who suffer from this illness. Surely the Caliph would not want Muslims to suffer with disease? Surely he would want me to complete my mission?”

  “Open the trunk,” said the soldier. “And get out of the car.”

  Sami did. They found no weapons, and they let him go.

  The only thing different Sami noticed about Jarabulus, apart from the fact that there were fewer people on the street than usual, were the heads on spikes in the center of the roundabout.

  The ISIS militants had left the heads there, tilted at odd angles, eyes closed, mouths agape. One man’s tongue was sticking out. Surprisingly little blood, Sami noted, or signs that the heads had once been attached to neck. It was as though the necks had receded, turtle-like, into the victims’ skulls.

  There were no militants to guard the heads, just a couple of teenage boys, gawking and pointing.

  When Sami arrived at the house where his family was staying, his children greeted him with ebullient bursts of “Baba! Baba! Baba!”

  He let them grip his legs before hurrying them all—Tahira, Noora, Adam, Aya, and Aya’s two children—into the Mercedes. Tahira and Aya had already covered themselves head to toe in black, leaving only their eyes exposed.

  Then Rafiq showed up. With his AK-47.

  Sami had never much liked his brother-in-law. But he considered that Rafiq still had two children to care for and that the patchwork of private roads around Jarabulus would likely allow them to evade the checkpoint outside of town. Besides, the Mercedes was almost certainly faster than anything the militants were driving.

  “Get in the trunk,” he said, adding, “If we are stopped and searched, do not wait to start shooting.”

  Much to everyone’s relief, they arrived back at Beit Qarah without incident.

  Before leaving for the M2, Sami retrieved a book from an alcove in the reception room and brought it to the courtyard where Adam was sitting on the pinkish marble floor, in the shade of a small pistachio tree. Although Tahira had pulled a plastic slide and a tricycle out of storage, Adam was focused on an old green vacuum that had stopped working a year ago. Brow deeply furrowed, he was raising and lowering an inner lever with his pudgy little hand.

  “Have you fixed it yet?” Sami asked.

  “Not fixing, Baba.”

  “Not fixing?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing to it?”

  “Building.”

  “Hmm,” said Sami.

  He took a seat on the cool marble, leaned back against the fountain, and considered that when he and Tahira had first looked into buying Beit Qarah, the courtyard walls had been covered with ugly gray stucco. Tahira had been right about what had been under them—sturdy, honey-blond limestone, bisected by bands of black basalt. Hewn stone that was as beautiful as it was thick.

  These were the walls that would now have to protect his family until the war, at least for Aleppo, was over. Which would be soon, he hoped. A few months.

  “I have something for you,” he said to Adam. “This is a special book to me. Do you know why?”

  Adam glanced at the book and shook his head.

  “When I was a boy, not too much older than you are now, my family moved from Damascus to Aleppo. I hated moving. All I wanted to do was move back to my old house in Damascus and go to sleep in my old room, play with my
old friends. But we could not move back, because my father had taken a job at a hospital here in Aleppo. So, I was very upset and very worried. But then my mother, your Mémère, bought me this book and taught me how to fold birds and animals, and it was very calming for me. It became my favorite book.”

  Sami started to explain what origami was, and that if Adam had been disturbed by what he had seen earlier in the day, the act of concentrating on something like origami might help to alleviate his mental pain. But before he could finish, Adam went back to fiddling with the vacuum.

  Sami sighed then placed a hand on his son’s shoulder. “I can see you are busy but know that the book is yours if you want it. I will leave it in your room.”

  Back at the M2, Colonel Antar was waiting for him in the entrance foyer, demanding to know where he had been and that Sami account for the condition of his brother.

  “There is this, this—thing—sewn to his stomach. I can see inside it! This is not acceptable. You should never have left him like this!”

  Sami scowled. “I instructed you not to enter the intensive care unit.”

  “I do not care what you instructed me to do, Doctor. This man is my brother. You must tend to him. Now!”

  “Your brother,” said Sami coldly, “came to this hospital not only with a ruptured liver, but also drained of blood and hypothermic. When I deem that he is strong enough to survive the next round of surgery, that is when I will perform it.”

  “When will he be strong enough?” the colonel demanded.

  “When I say he is.”

  “And when you do operate on him, the bag—”

  “Will be removed, of course. It is there to prevent infection while he gathers strength for the next operation. Your brother has a good chance of making a full recovery, Colonel—provided that you have not infected him—but I must be allowed to do my job as I see fit, just as you must do yours as you see fit.”

  Sami ascended a few steps then turned. “ISIS has taken over Jarabulus,” he said. “When do they come to Aleppo?”