The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  At first, he thought he had to be mistaken. Surely, she was just taking Adel’s pulse or feeling his lymph nodes.

  He squinted at the paper towel dispenser, wishing his mind wasn’t so cloudy. He didn’t trust himself.

  “Hey!” he called out.

  The nurse looked around, appearing confused as to how Oskar might be able to see her. Sounding stressed, she said, “Sir, I must tend to this patient. I will bring you Tylenol in an hour.”

  Oskar stared at the hazy reflection. The nurse appeared to be compressing the carotid arteries on either side of the boy’s neck.

  “What are you doing?!” called Oskar in Arabic. Then, “Stop that!”

  The nurse kept her fingers firmly in place.

  “Get the hell off him!” Oskar yelled in Swedish, then he grabbed his cane, which was propped up next to his bed, and used it to whip open the privacy curtain.

  There was no doubt. The nurse, her fingers still pressing down on Adel’s carotid arteries, glared at Oskar. Oskar tried to push himself out of bed, but before he could extricate himself from the sling that kept his leg elevated, the nurse grabbed a used catheter needle from the top of the garbage bin and was on Oskar a second later.

  She pressed her fingers into Oskar’s wounded chest with one hand and with the other, jammed the tip of the needle into the corner of Oskar’s eye.

  The nurse was a full head shorter than Oskar, but it didn’t matter. Oskar’s broken leg kept him anchored to the bed and the pain in his chest was raging. When she poked the corner of his eye with the catheter needle, Oskar froze.

  “Fight me,” she said, whispering directly into Oskar’s ear, “and I will see if I can reach your brain.”

  For a moment, neither spoke nor moved. Then the nurse cast a glance to the closed door, as though afraid someone might walk through it at any moment, and whispered, “If you say a word of this to anyone, as God is my witness, I must kill you. Do you understand me?”

  Oskar couldn’t speak.

  The nurse dug her fingers into Oskar’s chest wound, applied more pressure to the catheter, and repeated her question, sounding more frantic this time.

  Keeping his head perfectly still, Oskar managed to whisper a single word in Arabic. “Yes.”

  “You will find a way to leave Syria,” she said. “Today. You understand?”

  “Yes,” whispered Oskar again.

  She released him, stood, then tossed the used catheter needle back into the garbage.

  Oskar was trembling. He observed the nurse was as well.

  “Even if I say nothing,” said Oskar, as the nurse yanked the privacy curtain closed, “to anyone, ever—people will still see this! There will be an investigation. You cannot hide this.”

  She gesticulated with her hands, in a way that made Oskar wonder whether she was crazy. “And who do you think will investigate?”

  “The police!” said Oskar.

  “Wrong!”

  “Or the boy’s father. He works for the government.”

  “Who do you think did this? Do you think I awoke today and decided to”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“take the life of one of my patients? Out of spite? The government—the Mukhabarat!—forced me to do this because they found out he”—she gestured with her chin to Adel—“was spying on his father. They came to my home; they made threats. I have children,” she pleaded.

  Oskar observed how rattled the nurse appeared, perhaps on the verge of tears, then asked, “Does the boy’s father know this?”

  “No! The Mukhabarat did not tell him. Will you?”

  Oskar didn’t answer.

  “Better for him to think his son died from a car accident or from a medical mistake than to know the truth. Go home, Mr. Lång. This is not your business. This is not your war.”

  Oskar, upon finishing his story, listened to the sound of Hannah breathing on the other end of the line.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked eventually.

  “I was sick.”

  “You got better.”

  Oskar pressed his lips together as he searched for a credible lie that wouldn’t reflect poorly on him. Finding none, he opted for the truth, “I was ashamed. For leaving you the way I did. For allowing myself to be bullied by that woman. I didn’t want you to know.”

  “Oh, Oskar.”

  “And there was also Elsa.”

  It all came out. His childhood romance with Elsa, the breakup with her before he left for Syria, sleeping with her before her bone marrow transplant in Paris. The second relapse. The funeral. The utter awfulness of it all.

  “I didn’t tell you about her,” Oskar said, “because I was afraid you wouldn’t take me back if you knew. And I planned to come back to you, after getting Elsa through the rough part of her transplant in Paris. And then I got hurt. And the war happened. And that fucking nurse happened. And Elsa never got better, at least not really.”

  He wanted to add that he considered abandoning her in Syria to be the biggest mistake of his life, that he’d tried to find her after losing Elsa, but he didn’t think that would be fair. She’d moved on from him a long time ago.

  chapter 63

  Rebel-held Aleppo

  Later that night Hannah told Sami how the nurse had been the one to kill Rahim’s son, Adel.

  She did it as they lay side by side on a living room carpet that smelled of cat urine. They had no sheets or pillows. The children were sleeping by their feet. Through an open window, she could see the sky and had been hoping to catch a glimpse of at least a single star, but there was too much smoke in the air.

  “It is like this whole war,” Sami finally said, several minutes after she had finished.

  She turned to him and raised herself up on an elbow. “How do you mean?”

  “Misinformed. Misguided. Irrational.”

  She touched his cheek. “But surely it makes you feel a little better?”

  “Why should it? The boy still died. She must have cut off the blood supply to his brain just long enough to kill him, instead of giving him an overdose of morphine so there would be no evidence of excess drugs in his body,” he speculated, as though the logistics of the crime, not his belated absolution from having caused the death of a child, was what truly interested him. “Or evidence of missing morphine. I wonder if she switched the labels in the pharmacy or whether it was truly just a mistake?”

  “Either way, that boy did not die by your hand, Sami. It makes a difference.”

  “Too many others have been killed or saved by my hand for it to mean anything to me anymore.”

  Hannah suspected he was speaking more out of frustration than conviction, but she couldn’t be sure. She hadn’t seen what he had.

  “This nurse,” she said. “Did you know she was Mukhabarat?”

  “No. Farrah was a good nurse. I liked her. But I suppose I should have guessed. After the war broke out, did you know many of the nurses brought their families to the hospital at the university? Not because they were sick, but because they had no electricity or food at home. They used up half of the patient rooms, pushing out regular patients, but because they were Mukhabarat, they were permitted to stay.”

  “Rahim has no reason to hate you, Sami. He should know this.”

  “At this point, Hannah, it matters little. The damage has already been done.”

  That night, the fighting just southwest of their position was intense. Adam and Noora woke up in the middle of the night, scared and asking to go to the cellar, not realizing that there was no cellar to go to.

  Hannah worried that if the city stayed surrounded, things would only get worse. That food would run out, that the bombings would intensify. She didn’t think it inconceivable that the regime would slaughter everyone who remained on the rebel-held side. They had the city surrounded. The rebels showed no signs of being will
ing to surrender, and the Russians had no shortage of bombs.

  In the morning, the regime dropped leaflets which fluttered like confetti to the ground and blew through the ruined streets, getting stuck in the gaps between the piles of rubble and swirling beneath the wreckage of burnt out cars, hanging like laundry from tangles of electric wires.

  People picked them up, but upon realizing what they were, threw them back to the street and stepped on them.

  More regime lies, they said. More tricks. They were not humanitarian corridors; they were death corridors.

  In the early morning, while the children slept, and as the sounds of homemade rebel cannons mixed with the sound of starving cats fighting each other in a nearby alley, Hannah and Sami examined the map on the back of one of the leaflets.

  “There might be safety in numbers,” said Sami. “If thousands are crossing.”

  Hannah’s eyes widened. “No! It will never be safe for you there, even if you were to make your peace with Rahim. They would kill you because of who you are!”

  “I meant for you. And the children. Not me. If you were to call your friend Oskar, and he were to tell the American embassy in Ankara that you plan to cross, there at least might be a diplomatic cost to mistreating you.”

  “No,” said Hannah. “We stay together.”

  “You would deny the children food for this purpose? Why? How does that benefit them?”

  Hannah took a long time to answer because she was so torn up inside. “I will do as you think best,” she said. “But I would much rather we stick together. The children need you.”

  “We split now and reunite later,” said Sami. “That is what I think is best.”

  chapter 64

  More than anything, Adam just wanted to go home.

  He had been scared the night before when he needed to go to the bathroom; it had been so dark. And he had been hungry when he had woken up, but no breakfast had been offered, and Hannah had told him not to ask the old woman for food. He knew that Hannah and his Baba had no food either, which worried him a lot. After they started walking, he asked whether there was anyone who could sell them food.

  “Not yet,” said Hannah.

  “Soon?” asked Adam.

  “I am not sure how soon,” said Hannah.

  “I need you to be strong, Adam,” said Sami. “Can you be strong?”

  Adam said okay, but what he thought was, how could he be strong if he had nothing to eat?

  He thought again of Beit Qarah. He remembered the way the smooth handrail to the cellar felt under his palm, the way the door to Mémère’s yellow room squeaked a bit when it opened, how he liked to lie on the floor in the living room in a patch of sun under one of the windows and look up at the painted ceiling. He remembered harvesting a giant, purple eggplant from the rooftop garden and climbing the laurel tree in the courtyard. He knew that the house had been damaged, but he also knew his father was a doctor and good at fixing things. So he thought maybe Beit Qarah would get fixed soon and everything could go back to the way it was.

  Noora said she was tired, so Baba picked her up and carried her. Adam thought that was unfair, but after looking at the expression on his father’s face, he decided not to complain.

  In the middle of one road, men wearing plastic sandals and sleeveless undershirts were burning tires, claiming that the black smoke would help shield them from the bombs. The smoke got in Adam’s lungs, and he began to cough until Baba pulled him to a spot where he could breathe. On another road, a crowd had gathered around a tiny Russian plane—they called it a drone—that someone had managed to shoot down. Even though he was scared, Adam wanted to see it so that he could get ideas for his planes, but Hannah would not let him get close.

  Eventually, they came to a stop at an intersection.

  “Is this it?” asked Hannah.

  Baba gestured for everyone to wait, then poked his head around the corner of a mustard-yellow building that had weeds growing out of cracks in its walls.

  Hannah looked around the building as well. “Maybe it will open this afternoon,” she said.

  Across the street, a woman dressed entirely in black, wearing oversized designer sunglasses, held the hand of a little girl who—despite the heat—wore a bright red coat. Adam waved to the girl.

  “Have people been crossing?” Hannah called out.

  The woman in black shook her head.

  “Are we trying to cross?” asked Adam.

  “Maybe,” said Hannah.

  “Why?”

  “It might be better on the other side,” said Hannah.

  Adam hoped that better would mean more food. He began to dream of the kanafeh cheese pastry Hannah had bought him during the cease-fire and how sweet and delicious it had tasted. He could eat ten squares of it now and still not be full.

  Baba pulled out one of the leaflets that had fallen from the sky and consulted the map with Hannah.

  Gunfire erupted. It did not appear to be directed at them, but then a group of rebel soldiers ran over and waved them away. The soldiers told them to go home and that it was not safe for them this close to enemy lines, that there were snipers.

  They walked. Adam felt the longing for Beit Qarah intensify so much that his stomach hurt. He would give anything to be in the courtyard right now! Hiding in his sheet fort or helping Mémère with her garden or listening to Fairuz in Mémère’s yellow room . . .

  Mémère! How he missed her.

  Thinking of his grandmother made him think of his mother, and all of a sudden, he began to cry. He had not thought of his mother in so long, he could barely remember what she looked like, but he had such a need to see her now—even if she was in one of her sad moods. He remembered the way she would grip his hand so tightly when they were outside Beit Qarah.

  “Hey there,” said Hannah. She put his arm around his shoulder. “Not much farther now. You can do it.”

  But no people were crossing at the next place either, and the sound of gunfire near the line of control was intense.

  Noora began to cry, because even she knew that meant they were trapped.

  chapter 65

  They went back to the M2.

  Though its facade was pockmarked, its windows shattered, and whole wings had been entirely destroyed, most of the old building still stood and thus had been reopened. Arrangements were made for Hannah and the children to stay in a nearby apartment while Sami worked at the hospital. Ibrahim, they learned, was dead—killed fighting to keep Castello Road open.

  Hannah hated the idea of being confined to the new apartment, though, and said it was no different than being imprisoned by Ibrahim. So although she stayed there with the children during the day, she began bringing them to the M2 at night. While they slept in a sandbag-reinforced closet near the intensive care unit, she served as a nurse’s assistant.

  Her efforts were not nearly enough, nor were Sami’s. The city was still surrounded. Patients died for lack equipment, antibiotics, anesthesia, electricity, and care.

  But a week later, when thousands of rebels banded together and launched a lightning attack on the regime lines just to the southwest of the M2, everything changed.

  For several days the near constant sound of jet fighters and artillery fire sounded like distant thunder, bouncing off of cloud formations. A Russian Mi-8 helicopter was shot down and the pilot’s naked body dragged through the streets. The M2 was busier than it had ever been. Finally, over the roar of the Russian and Syrian jet fighters, a convoy of trucks, brilliant, white semis filled with supplies, blasted through a new gap in the regime lines.

  The siege had been broken.

  The first delivery of medicine in nearly two weeks arrived at the M2 at four in the morning, and that was when Sami turned to Hannah and said, “Gather your things and the children. We are leaving for real this time.”

  He again tol
d Dr. Wasim that he would return as soon as his family was established Turkey.

  Do not be a fool, Dr. Wasim said. If you make it to Turkey, stay there.

  They trudged through the narrow alleys of the al Fardos district and then Sheik Saeed. Sami carried a leather satchel across his shoulder and wheeled a suitcase behind him. Even at dawn it was hot, and his long-sleeved Oxford shirt quickly grew stained with sweat.

  Along the way they encountered militants who tried to advise them.

  “When the gap narrows, do not venture near the cement factory, it is still held by the regime.”

  “The center of Ramouseh is safe, but to the west, near the artillery base, it is not.”

  “Keep close to the cement factory, there are Iranian forces entrenched near the fuel depot.”

  “Stay clear of the river.”

  “If the railroad is always to your left, all will be well.”

  While crossing under the M5 highway, they joined with a seven-year-old girl and her mother.

  “Stop,” said Sami when they arrived at the narrow isthmus between the rebel-held section of the city and the wider rebel-held regions beyond.

  A fuel depot lay directly to their right, behind a high brick wall. Its enormous circular storage tanks were intact but contained no fuel. To their left, across the corpse-laden Queiq River, loomed the cement factory.

  Gunfire could be heard near the cement factory, and swirls of dust rose up from the gravel pits behind it. In front of the factory lay a smoldering Russian-made T-72 tank that was missing one of its treads. In a swath of rebel-held territory across from the factory, militants were milling around atop flat roofs. Far to the west, two helicopters were hovering near an artillery base that, until a week ago, had been occupied by the regime.

  But there were other civilians in front of them, and they appeared to be passing through without incident.

  “Wait here until I tell you to come,” said Sami.