by Dan Mayland
“Okay,” said Adam.
Noora, Sami observed, was getting tangled up in her shirt as she tried to strip it off.
“Leave it on,” he said.
He had seen the crater late the night before, on his way home from the hospital, but he inspected it more closely now for live electrical wires, sharp glass, or chemical contamination. Finding none—it was just brick rubble, slicked over by wet hands and wet feet—he waded in, wearing a collared shirt, plastic sandals, and long, black slacks. The water felt blissfully cool, especially in contrast to the heat that had settled over the city for the past several weeks. At its deepest it came to just above his chest.
“Come,” he said to Noora and Adam. “But you must be careful, some of the bricks are sharp.”
Before the war, Tahira had often taken Adam swimming. But his son had not been to a pool for years now, so when Adam approached the rim of the crater, Sami extended his arms.
“I will guide you,” he said.
Adam, however, just jumped in, splashing his father in the process.
“Careful!” called Sami, worried that his son would sink or cut himself on the rubble. But Adam was already laughing and dog paddling to the side.
Sami stayed with his children until late in the morning, taking advantage of the fact that two Syrian-American doctors had recently arrived at the M2 on a mercy mission. Tomorrow, he had promised the Aleppo Medical Council he would visit a smaller clinic while the Syrian-American doctors tended to the M2, but today was his own. He had not seen his children in a week, and he intended to spend much of the day with them.
On the way back to Beit Qarah, he held Noora’s hand, their shoes squishing with every step. The sun overhead was searing white. The Citadel gleamed.
Nothing had gone as he had hoped it would over the past year. ISIS had taken over half the city. Iran had come to the aid of the regime. The Free Syrian Army, once on the verge of victory, had splintered and was now floundering. But Beit Qarah stood in territory that was still controlled by neither the regime nor ISIS, and his family was safe. For a moment Sami allowed himself to hope that everything would soon right itself.
Upon returning to Beit Qarah, he found Tahira sitting in the shade of the iwan arch, sipping weak ginger tea. She wore a loose white robe and looked up from a book when he entered the courtyard.
They had both lost weight over the past year. Tahira’s skin was taut on her cheekbones, giving her a distant, regal air when she pressed her lips together as she did now.
Ever since Aya and her family had fled Aleppo to brave the refugee camps, Tahira had taken refuge in his mother’s collection of books—at least when she was not tending to the children or patients from the M2 who came to Beit Qarah to complete their recovery. Most of the books were in French, which Tahira did not speak, but there were Arabic translations of works by Gustav Flaubert, Colette, and Simone de Beauvoir. At the moment, she was reading Madame Bovary.
Before the war she had never been a reader, except for the romantic poetry of Nizar Qabbani.
“You were gone longer than I thought you would be,” she said, looking up from her book.
Sami told her about the swimming.
“And now that they know this is possible, they will want to go again tomorrow, and then the day after that, and then what?”
It was a rare day that the children were permitted to leave the house.
“There will be nothing to go to tomorrow. The water will be shut off.” Sami told the children to get out of their wet clothes. Turning back to Tahira, he asked, “Where is Mémère?”
“Her room. She was feeling lightheaded with the heat.”
The thick walnut door to his mother’s second-floor room was shut. Sami knocked quietly, waited a moment, then knocked again.
If it had not been so hot out, he might have simply let her be, at least for another hour or so. But given the temperature, and that she had been feeling lightheaded in the afternoon, he cracked the door open and poked his head inside.
She lay on top of the blue toile bedspread, head propped up on two pillows. A fan that had stopped working because the electricity was out sat on a nearby dresser.
Her mouth was open, as were her eyes. The air was perfectly still. As Sami observed the remnants of his mother’s life—the gilded antique mirror above her marble-topped rosewood dresser, the reproduction Hiroshige woodblock print, the Victrola she’d inherited from her parents, the origami menagerie he had made for her when he was a young boy—he was struck with the sensation that he had stumbled onto the set of a play and could not remember his lines.
Lightheaded now himself, he walked to her side, grasped the underside of her wrist and felt for a pulse. There was none.
No chest rising and falling.
He dropped to his knees at the foot of her bed and buried his head in the bedcover.
chapter 30
Copenhagen, Denmark
Oskar Lång was used to people not recognizing him, so he wasn’t surprised when the principal engineer for the Middle East and Southeast Europe Development Group at the European Development Service’s regional headquarters in Copenhagen received him with a skeptical frown.
“Can I help you?”
“I was told you were ready for me, Mr. Schultz?”
The principal engineer, a German in his fifties who split his time between Brussels and Copenhagen, wore rimless glasses and a thick mane of wavy salt and pepper hair. He did a double take, then smiled, shook his head, and said, “I must be losing my mind. Sorry about that, Oskar, it’s just the new look—haven’t gotten used to it yet.”
They spoke in English.
“Can’t say I’m used to it myself.”
“Easy to comb in the morning, I bet!”
Oskar laughed politely. “It is that.”
After Elsa had relapsed six months ago, Oskar had stopped using his hair-loss cream, at which point his head had begun to resemble a tree shedding its leaves in late fall. After her funeral two weeks ago, he’d shaved himself bald and started growing a goatee.
A new life, a new look.
Did he like his new look? He did not. But it was better than a comb-over, and he was too cheap to go the hair transplant route.
“Thank you for joining me today. Please, have a seat.” Shultz gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “You weren’t waiting long, I hope?”
“No, not at all.” He’d been waiting for a half hour.
“Now, I see you’ve done some good work coordinating with the field engineers on the Cairo project. Spot on cost estimates, and . . .”
Shultz spoke glowingly of the work Oskar had been doing of late, making Oskar wonder what it was all leading up to. He’d already had his performance review for the year.
“So,” said Shultz eventually. He placed both hands on top of his desk and exhaled.
“All of this is to say I have good news for you. You’re being promoted.”
Oskar was genuinely surprised. He hadn’t applied for a promotion, and he hadn’t heard one was in the offing.
“That’s fantastic. Thank you.”
“I thought you’d be happy.”
“If you don’t mind, sir—promoted to what?”
“Regional senior engineer. You’ll be spending some time in the field, but mostly it will involve managing and coordinating with the field engineers—and keeping us here in Copenhagen and Brussels up to date, of course.”
Us here in Copenhagen and Brussels? thought Oskar, his suspicions now raised. “And this position, sir. Where would it be?”
“Ankara, Turkey. We have an office there, as you may be aware.”
“I am.”
“You lived there for a time, no?”
“Ah—that was Antakya.”
A silence bordering on awkward ensued.
“It’s i
n southern Turkey,” Oskar added. “South of Ankara, near the border with Syria.”
“Well, great then,” said Schultz. “You’ll have the opportunity to explore a brand-new place. Human resources will walk you through the details. And there may be some hazard pay involved. Not that Ankara is hazardous, but you might get something extra out of it given the larger troubles in the region. Of course, if you have issues with existing leases you don’t want to break, or other financial considerations, be sure to bring them up with human resources. I’m sure they’ll find a way to work it out for you.”
“They’ve been good to me in the past.”
“Well then.” Shultz nodded, signifying it might be a good time for Oskar to leave.
Instead, Oskar said, “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, sir, and I really am flattered that you thought of me, but, ah . . . If I decided I wanted to stay put in Copenhagen, or move to Brussels even—would that be an option?”
He considered mentioning what had happened with Elsa, that he needed time to pull himself together in the wake of her death, but he didn’t feel that he could do so without losing his composure.
“Not a good one, to be honest. You see, along with the good news of your promotion is the perhaps unwelcome news that we weren’t planning on filling your current position once it becomes vacant.”
Oskar let the news sink in. “You’re saying my position is being eliminated.”
“That’s one way to put it. The larger truth is that it’s part of an organization-wide shuffle that isn’t eliminating positions here and in Brussels, so much as it is shifting them to the regional offices. Pretty soon they’ll be kicking me out the door too!”
Oskar very much doubted that.
“You’ll like Ankara,” added Shultz.
Oskar doubted that too. “I’m sure I will, sir,” he said. “Thank you for thinking of me.”
2015
chapter 31
Northern Syria
It was Hannah’s ninety-sixth medicine run. She knew the exact number because she had promised herself that she’d only do it until she got to a hundred. After that, she was going back to the United States to apply to grad school.
Her latest driver was twice her age, wore a kaffiyeh headdress and drove an old Isuzu van. They met on the Syrian side of crossing, which at first appeared to be little different from the Turkish side. Traffic and people clogged the roads. Animals grazed in adjacent fields. Markets were open. Checkpoints were manned.
But as they approached the outskirts of Aleppo, the veil of normalcy was lifted, revealing a landscape that reminded Hannah of black-and-white photos she had seen of World War II: the bombing of Dresden; the battle of Stalingrad. Pancaked buildings, burned papers drifting across pockmarked roads, twisted metal that looked like the remains of the Twin Towers.
The real death zone, though, was Castello Road, a narrow, hopelessly exposed rebel supply corridor that skirted ISIS territory but was surrounded by the regime. It was the umbilical cord keeping rebel-held Aleppo alive, and as they pulled onto it at dusk, the driver gunned the engine. On one side of the road, an earth berm had been constructed to protect moving vehicles from snipers. On the other side lay buses that had been flipped upside down, craters left by barrel bombs, uprooted trees, burnt-out cars, and decomposing bodies that stank. Smoke from bombs that had fallen in the city curled up above the long black silhouette of low-slung buildings on the dark, eastern horizon.
By the time they reached Aleppo, night had fallen. Even if the Isuzu’s headlights had worked, the driver wouldn’t have used them because of the threat from snipers and airborne attacks. Hannah was constantly bracing herself, anticipating the impact of what she kept thinking were imminent crashes as they tore through the dark rabbit warren of rubble-strewn streets.
Upon arriving unscathed at a clinic in the al-Marjeh district, she and her driver tried to be quick unloading their delivery. But when they heard the regime helicopter overhead, quick turned to careless, and the driver slipped while stepping down from the back of the van.
He attempted to cushion his fall by extending his right hand.
Hannah rushed over to him. He was fine, he said, as he picked up his cell phone, which had slipped out of his front shirt pocket and clattered on the pavement. Perfectly fine! Except perhaps for his wrist. Which he believed was broken.
Observing that it was bent at a grotesquely unnatural angle, Hannah pointed out that he wasn’t fine at all and insisted he be seen at the clinic.
The driver refused.
“This place is a butcher shop,” he said dismissively. “But at the next hospital, there is a bone doctor who is excellent.” After his cousin’s arm had been nearly severed by a grenade fragment last year, everyone had been certain it would need to be amputated. “At this clinic they would have chopped it off for sure. But for the bone doctor, it was no problem. Now my cousin is back to fighting. Do not worry,” he added, “I can make arrangements for someone else to take you back.”
The plan had been for them to make a series of quick nighttime deliveries then scoot back to Turkey before dawn.
“No,” said Hannah. “We stick together.”
chapter 32
Rebel-held Aleppo
“Can you save it?” asked the patient when Sami entered the operating room on the first floor of the M2.
Ignoring the inquiry, Sami turned to the nurse who was standing in for the anesthesiologist. “Why is she still conscious?” he demanded.
“Can it be saved?” asked the patient again, slurring her words. Her nose was bruised and misshapen, so her voice had a nasal inflection to it.
The answer, of course, was no. The bullet that had struck her leg had yawed and fragmented upon impact, so instead of passing cleanly through soft tissue and perhaps nicking bone, it had exploded like a fist punching through gelatin. Her tibia had shattered, and the muscles and ligaments attached to it had been shredded instantly. The pressure wave had opened a gaping cavity that had only partially receded. Sami had already determined that, given the circumstances, trying to save the limb would be pointless.
But to explain that to a partially anesthetized patient would be to invite chaos into the operating room. It was one of the reasons why, despite the supply of general anesthetics being perilously low, he had ruled out using an epidural to numb the woman only from the waist down. He needed her unconscious.
“Relax,” ordered Sami. “When you wake up, we will discuss your recovery.”
The woman’s eyes drooped.
Sami adjusted the placement of the overhead surgical light and examined the makeshift tourniquet that had been applied just below the knee. He palpated the upper calf and considered the X-ray image. Bone and bullet had shattered the upper tibia, but better to leave the knee intact if he could . . .
Had he the time and the right tools, it might have been different. A properly sized intramedullary tibial nail. Or at least more external fixation devices—all of his were already in use. Enough antibiotics. A spare bed so that she could be properly monitored for several weeks while the fragmented bone struggled to heal. But he had none of those things.
He used a surgical marker to draw his cut line.
“Scalpel,” Sami said a minute later.
He cut a ring with flaps around the circumference of her leg, just below the knee, and then used a cautery pen to staunch the flow of blood as he cut through muscle, fat, and tendon.
“Saw,” he said when he was ready.
The reciprocating bone saw the nurse handed him made short work of cutting through the woman’s tibia and fibula. Moments later, he deposited the severed limb into a plastic bag, so that it could be delivered to the woman’s husband for burial.
The amputation, paired with the fact that the hospital cook had left for the evening and it had been seven hours since he had forced down a ten-minute lunch of French fr
ies, fava beans, and chocolate, had left Sami in a foul mood.
So as he was removing his bloodied scrubs and washing up, preparing to go home for the first time in three days, it was without the slightest hesitation that he said, “No,” when one of the nurses asked whether he could examine a patient who had injured his wrist. Especially since he had promised Tahira he would try to buy diesel fuel for the generator on the way home.
“Either Dr. Wasim can see him,” he added, referring to a former veterinarian who, at the age of twenty-six, was now performing general surgery, “or he can wait until tomorrow. Assuming I have the time tomorrow.”
“He works for Bonne Foi. He hurt himself while unloading supplies at the al-Marjeh clinic.”
Sami shrugged. He didn’t think much of Bonne Foi—they were too small to make much of a difference, and their deliveries were inconsistent. But with the security situation deteriorating, the regular shipments from Doctors Without Borders had become much less regular. Every bit helped.
“He wants to leave Aleppo before dawn,” the nurse added. “The van he is driving is needed for more deliveries.”
“That may be so, but to see him tonight is impossible!” Sami snapped. Then, flustered because he knew he had spoken too harshly, he added, “I have other commitments to tend to this evening. But tell him I will try to see him early tomorrow. First thing in the morning.”
Sami finished changing, but the incident with the nurse gnawed on him.
Expecting immediate treatment at ten thirty at night during a time of war!
Such were his thoughts when he opened the staff room door and nearly collided with a woman in the hall.
“Pardon,” he said, stepping to the side. But she stepped to the side at the same time he did, so they nearly collided again.
Annoyed, Sami placed his back to the wall, and while looking down at the floor, gestured with his arm that she should pass. “Go,” he said sharply. “Go.” She did not pass, however, and Sami soon saw that she was a young woman, with a face more attractive than most, and that she was staring at him.