The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  He edged forward through the sunbaked, weedy strip of land that ran parallel to the wall that encircled the fuel depot, keeping the railroad to his left as he had been told to do.

  No one shot at him or ordered him to go back. If there were Iranians still entrenched at the fuel depot, behind the wall, he saw no evidence of it. He advanced a bit more, then gestured for the others to follow. They did, and with Sami leading the way, they made it past the fuel depot and into a blasted-out wasteland of what used to be a residential area. Now it was little more than a collection of rubble, old oil drums, charred tires, and garbage.

  The whole area was riddled with dusty, narrow trenches. An Iranian rial bill blew past Sami’s feet.

  Not far ahead lay a protected path between a collection of buildings that were still standing, and just beyond that, the wider expanse of rebel-held territory. They were so close to being free of the city.

  “Quickly,” he said.

  And then came the shot. A single crack that was closer and louder than the intermittent volleys of AK-47 fire sounding from the cement factory. The girl behind Sami cried out. Her mother screamed.

  “Get down!” yelled Sami to Adam and Noora, but Hannah was already pulling them into a trench.

  Another shot sounded, then from behind them came the rapid pop-pop-pop of AK-47 fire. Sami slipped into the trench next to Hannah and his children.

  “Keep their heads down!” he said to Hannah, but then he lifted his own above the lip of the trench.

  The mother was on her knees, wailing, completely exposed. Her wounded daughter lay at her feet, bleeding from her arm and making goat-like bleating sounds. Sami crawled on his belly to the girl and pulled her into the trench.

  As Sami ripped the girl’s pink tracksuit open, exposing her wounded arm, a group of five rebel soldiers vaulted over the trench, raising their AK-47s above their heads as they fired on automatic.

  Ignoring the gunfire, Sami observed that the bullet had passed through the girl’s triceps and did not appear to have impacted the humerus bone.

  “Give me your veil!” he said to the mother. And when she appeared flustered, “I must use it as a bandage.”

  She removed it, revealing long, dark hair and a face marred with a bruise on her right cheek. Sami placed her hands over the wound on her daughter’s arm.

  “Squeeze,” he said, and then began ripping the veil into long strips. The girl wailed, but Sami told the mother to keep squeezing.

  Noora was crying.

  Not far from the trench, the five rebel soldiers had taken cover behind a pockmarked concrete wall that had once been one side of a house. They wore sleeveless t-shirts and bandanna-like head coverings and were laden with ammo pouches. One wore a surgical dust mask; another had brought a wood box filled with loose AK-47 rounds and was frantically loading spare magazines while the four others fired at the smoldering T-72 tank that lay in front of the cement factory.

  The bullets were as thick as a bee swarm and they pinged as they hit the tank.

  Sami eyed the rest of the trench and concluded they should have been traveling in it to start with because it appeared to lead all the way to the protected section of path ahead.

  “Go!” he said to Hannah. He gestured with his chin down the trench as he continued to apply pressure to the girl’s arm. “I can catch up. Take the children. Run!”

  Hannah eyed the trench then began to shepherd Adam and Noora down it. Sami turned to the girl. Her straight, brown hair had been pulled into a ponytail that was only barely held in place by a Donald Duck barrette. A small scab above her eye had been picked off and was bleeding a little. The sequined, rainbow-colored butterflies on her tracksuit were stained with blood. For a moment he was transported back to the beginning of the war, when he had failed to save his nephew Omar. He recalled the cerebrospinal fluid, the seizure, and Aya’s despair. For this child, though, things would be different.

  He finished ripping the veil into strips, and then fashioned a pressure field dressing out of the strips and applied it to the girl’s arm. The trench was too narrow for his shoulders, and his hands and arms stirred up dust as they banged against the trench walls.

  As he was finishing, the gunfire from the AK-47s abruptly stopped. He heard a whoop and an, “Allahu Akbar! ” and surmised that the sniper who had shot the girl had himself been shot.

  “It hurts now, but you will be fine,” Sami said as he placed his palm on the girl’s forehead. He turned to the mother, “She must be seen at a hospital, of course, after we are through. The wound must be properly cleaned and dressed. But the prognosis is excellent.” Upon sensing her skepticism, he said, “I am a doctor, so I say this with confidence. We must move now.”

  The mother and daughter and Sami crawled down the length of the trench. To their right, more rebel supply trucks were racing down a road that appeared to have been bulldozed clear. When the trench ended, Sami helped lift the girl up into an alley that led straight south.

  He ran to catch up to Hannah and Adam and Noora. After a minute, he thought it odd that he had not reached them yet, so he ran faster. He popped out at the end of the alley and started bearing to the right, toward the road that led straight out of the Ramouseh district and into the heart of rebel territory.

  “Adam! Noora!”

  He scanned the fields in front of him.

  “Adam! Noora!”

  He ran forward, all the way to the road, then doubled back and asked the woman and the girl whether they had seen his family. He asked the same question of the rebel soldiers who had shot the sniper in the tank.

  “They were following the tracks,” one of the soldiers said, pointing to the railroad. “But they were going the wrong way.”

  “What do you mean the wrong way?”

  The soldier pointed. “That territory is held by the regime.”

  Sami recalled that early on, they indeed had been told to keep the railroad tracks to their left. But that was only until they got to where the city ended, and the fields began. After that they needed to bear off to the north, to reach the road that ran out of Aleppo.

  Surely Hannah had known that! Surely she would not have . . .

  But how well did she really know the city? And why had he not told her to wait for him when she got to the fields? He had assumed he would catch up to her long before then, but he should never have sent her off without instructing her on where to stop!

  For the next five hours, Sami searched for them. In between searching, he called Hannah’s phone twenty, thirty times. She never answered.

  Finally, he fell to his knees and screamed.

  chapter 66

  One wrong turn! Such a simple mistake. There had to be a way to fix this, Hannah thought.

  After nearly falling on top of regime forces hiding in the trenches next to the railroad tracks, she had begged the officer in charge to let her and the children go. To overlook her mistake. To give her a second chance.

  “We pose no threat. We wish only to go to Turkey.”

  “Take her to the others,” said the officer to one of his men, after confiscating her cell phone.

  They were marched at gunpoint to a Russian cargo truck that was idling next to a water treatment plant.

  “Please,” Hannah pleaded with the soldier who’d been assigned to guard them. When she looked over her shoulder, she could see the dormant fields that marked the start of rebel-held territory. In minutes she could be there.

  They asked for her papers. She explained that she had none, that they had been lost in the bombing of Beit Qarah, but if they would only let her—

  “Climb up,” said the soldier.

  When she hesitated, looking longingly toward the rebel-held territory, he poked her in the small of her back with the barrel of his rifle.

  The cargo truck was packed with other detainees.

  “
I want to go back to Beit Qarah,” said Noora.

  “Where are they taking us?” Hannah asked the other detainees.

  An old man shrugged. A child cried. No one gave her an answer.

  It was hot in the truck, and there was no water. Sami had been carrying it all in his satchel.

  “Where are you taking us?” Hannah demanded of the soldiers guarding the rear of the truck.

  “Quiet,” they said.

  Their first stop was a processing center near the international airport. Television cameras filmed them waiting in line. Hannah and the children were given water and rosewater sweets.

  She held her head high and told herself that she had been through worse than this, that she would find a way to make things right. She recalled a night long ago with Oskar, dinner at the Baron Hotel in downtown Aleppo, the same hotel where Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie and the Shah of Iran and Ataturk had dined. She’d heard that the hotel had survived the war on the regime side and resolved that, if the regime showed them mercy—and from the reception they were receiving she thought maybe, just maybe, they would—she would take the children there and let them order whatever they wanted.

  It would be okay.

  She gave them her real name and said she was an American, and pregnant, and that the United States embassy in Ankara was expecting her to show up on the border with Turkey, and if they would only let her—

  “Walk forward,” said the soldier who fingerprinted her.

  Flanked by Adam and Noora, and grasping their hands tightly, she did.

  At the end of the line, where there were no cameras, she was herded into the back of a prisoner transport van.

  Fifteen minutes later the van pulled up to the entrance of a four-story cement building surrounded by a high wall topped with rusting concertina wire. The air smelled like rotting corpses.

  “Get out,” said the soldier who yanked open the back of the van, “and line up next to the wall.”

  chapter 67

  Regime-held Aleppo

  The rebel advance notwithstanding, supplies in regime-held Aleppo were still plentiful, so Rahim did not hesitate to make what had become a weekly sojourn to his favorite restaurant just off Saadallah al-Jabiri Square.

  He did tell himself that he must exercise restraint when it came to the green olive, red pepper, and lemon appetizer—not in consideration of any wartime restrictions so much as his waistline—but his willpower to resist fresh olives had always been limited, and he soon lost count of how many he popped into his mouth while half watching the news on the flat-screen television that hung in the corner.

  In the beginning of the war, the state broadcasts had depressed him, given the gap between what he knew to be reality and what was being reported. He had wanted real progress, not propaganda! But now it was different, he thought, as he put down the sprig of mint he’d been fiddling with and stuffed another olive into his mouth. Now the rebels, despite their recent advance in Ramouseh, were truly suffering.

  Now the news reports did not ring nearly as false to him as they once had.

  The noose was tightening! Regime troops and Hezbollah reinforcements were flooding in to help close the gap in Ramouseh. And anyone whom God had deemed to make stupid enough to still be living in rebel-held Aleppo after all these years deserved what was coming.

  A few of them, apparently, were trying to get out. Admitting the error of their ways and throwing themselves upon the mercy of the regime.

  On the television, he observed a woman in a black abaya clutching a newborn as she was being processed by the army. They would be granted safe passage, said the newscaster, to the rebel-held city of Idlib. Fine, Rahim thought, if a few women and children managed to escape, surely that was also God’s will and for him to begrudge them the opportunity was churlish.

  Go, he thought. Ma salama! Go in peace!

  He plucked another olive from the bowl and resolved to double the alms contribution he made each year to the poor and orphaned. Then glanced at the screen again and froze, the olive poised before his lips.

  She wore jeans, a loose-fitting blouse, and sneakers. Her purple headscarf had slipped off the crown of her head, which she held high, exposing much of her long, black hair. A veil lay carelessly over her shoulder, as though it had been pulled away from her neck.

  For a half-second, Rahim’s interest was centered purely on the woman’s beauty. To see such a lady emerge from the ashes of rebel Aleppo made him feel something akin to shame.

  Then she turned, so that for a moment she was directly facing the camera. Rahim leaned forward. No, he must be mistaken . . .

  He kept staring, leaning toward the screen, but her head was again turned from him as she was questioned by soldiers. He focused on the shape of her chin, the curve of her ear.

  Then the camera panned away.

  Rahim closed his eyes. Had it really been her?

  Yes. He was sure of it.

  He grabbed his cell phone, pushed his chair back, and stood. He had to alert his superiors so that they could question her! Question her about Dr. Hasan! She must not be released!

  But as he pulled out his wallet and searched for the waiter, hoping to hail him for the bill, he paused and considered the image of the American woman and the fact that she had clearly been caring for two children. Four years ago, she had shown him a kindness by telling him that Dr. Hasan had given Adel the wrong medication.

  Rahim scratched his temple and stared at the television, then glanced at the single olive that remained in his bowl.

  He had already taken his revenge upon the doctor. That was what mattered.

  “Sir, your meal,” said a voice—his waiter’s—from behind him. The waiter moved the olive bowl to the side and slid a plate of lamb kebab with Aleppo pepper in front of him. When Rahim continued to stand, he asked, “Was there something you needed, sir?”

  The doctor’s house was in ruins, Rahim reasoned. The doctor himself, likely dead. At this point, what was the girl to him? Even if she was an American spy, what did it matter? The rebels were losing, which meant the Americans were losing.

  Rahim recalled that the Prophet, peace be upon him, had been renowned for his kindness, even to non-Muslims. But especially to women. Rarely were women evil, he thought. Unsophisticated and misguided? Like his wife and daughter? Yes. Ruled by emotion? Of course. But almost never evil. That was the province of men.

  So was it asking too much to show a bit of kindness to the American woman? Surely doing so would not in any way alter the course of the war.

  He recalled a passage from the Quran that had always struck him as profound.

  Cursed are those who perform the prayer,

  unmindful of how they pray, who make of themselves a display,

  but hold back the small kindness.

  “No,” said Rahim, sitting back down and returning his cell phone to his pocket. The American girl was not his concern. Maybe she would find happiness with her rebel friends in Idlib and maybe she would not, but he would not personally make life more difficult for her.

  “No, this will be fine. I have everything I need.”

  chapter 68

  There was no light in the cell, just a door with a barred window. The cinder block walls were stained dark from oily human hands. There was no toilet. No cot. No blankets. No food.

  Wails from women caged in neighboring cells reverberated down the dimly lit hall.

  “They must be injured,” Hannah said when Adam and Noora started to cry. “But I am sure people are trying to help them.”

  The number they assigned to her was 11735.

  The next morning a guard banged on the door with a club.

  “Stand!”

  She stood. The children stood with her. If she were cooperative, she thought, maybe they would go easy on her.

  “Step back from the do
or!”

  Boiled potatoes were left for them on a metal try, but the potatoes had little insects crawling over them, so Hannah made a game with the children of who could pick off the most. Noora won, but only because Adam had retreated into himself and wasn’t playing, and Hannah didn’t count half the insects she killed.

  That night, two cells down, Hannah heard the slap of truncheons hitting flesh, the sound of clothes ripping, then meek protestations and men grunting—whether from the struggle to hold the woman down or the rape itself, she couldn’t tell.

  She sang songs to the children and told them more lies.

  The next day, Adam began screaming that he wanted to go back to Beit Qarah, and when the guards ordered him to stop he told them to eat shit, so one of the guards beat his hands until they bled, and made him stand for six hours outside the cell.

  Hannah had never felt so devastated. She didn’t know what they wanted from them. She didn’t know why they were there.

  That night, no dinner was offered. The children cried.

  From the indirect light that spilled in from a single basement window at the end of the cellblock hall, Hannah guessed that it was dawn of the second day when two interrogators—both older men with leaden eyes and gnarled fingers—came for her.

  Noora gripped her legs and screamed for her not to go. Adam lay in a fetal ball in the corner.

  The prison guards locked their hands on her arms and marched her to another cell and made her kneel on the concrete floor while they asked her questions. Save for lying about who the children’s father was—a topic which didn’t seem to interest them anyway—she gave honest answers.

  She told them that she had dual US and Syrian citizenship, and that the embassy in Ankara would verify her US citizenship. She told them she had been delivering medicine for Bonne Foi, and when Bonne Foi was pushed out of Turkey—

  “So you admit to aiding the terrorists! To bringing them medicine!”

  “No!” she cried. The only people she had been aiding were the two children with whom she had been detained. And did they know that she was carrying the unborn sibling of those children in her womb? Surely they would want to show a woman in her condition mercy!