by Dan Mayland
They said they did not believe she was an American, and that they would be calling no embassies. After tying her hands to a rusty metal ring on the wall, they beat her legs with truncheons until her knees gave out.
“You came to the regime side of Aleppo without identification,” they said, “because your real name must be known to us.”
She said she had already told them her real name, that she used to work for the European Development Service, and they should investigate this. In fact, she had been detained at a checkpoint in 2012, surely, they had a record of—
“We need the names of the al-Nusra officers you worked with.”
“I was an employee of the European Development Service before the war. And then I transitioned to delivering—”
They twisted her breasts until she howled with humiliation and pain, bludgeoned her with a truncheon, then dragged her by her hair to a cell where a guard was using a broom handle to sodomize a female inmate whom they had bent at the waist and stuffed into a car tire. “That will be you,” they said, “unless you begin cooperating.”
Hannah made up names.
“You must do better than that,” they said, adding that they had ways to force women who were pregnant to miscarry, but that to do it, Adam and Noora would be taken from her and she would be sent to one of the prisoner hospitals, and that was not a place one wanted to go.
There were crematoriums attached to the hospitals. Did she know that? Because there were too many bodies to bury, they just burned them by the thousands. Surely she didn’t want that for her unborn child?
chapter 69
Rebel-held Aleppo
The day after losing them, Sami woke up with a start before dawn, in the bottom of a trench in the Ramouseh gap.
Not knowing what else to do, he walked back to the M2 and put on his scrubs.
That night the nurses, observing his condition, grew worried. Dr. Wasim insisted that he rest. But to rest was to think and to think was to despair. So he performed a partial nephrectomy on a woman who had been shot through the kidney; he repaired a section of a soldier’s perforated bowel; he extracted a rotted tooth from the mouth of a septuagenarian butcher; he assessed the condition of an eleven-year-old girl suffering from scoliosis; and he called doctors and nurses he knew at the M10 to ask whether any of them had a brace. No one did.
He tried calling Hannah again. And again. And again.
The next morning, he tracked down her friend Oskar in Ankara. But Oskar had not heard from her either. Nor had the American embassy in Ankara.
“She may have been detained,” Sami said. “By the regime. We became separated, and she went the wrong way.”
“Oh, God, no,” said Oskar.
Near the end of the second day, Oskar called Sami back and said he had heard from the American embassy—the Assad regime was denying that they had detained her.
Sami did not believe it. The regime lied with as much forethought as it took to breathe. They lied about using barrel bombs and chemical weapons, about targeting hospitals, killing children, and intentionally starving their own people.
They lied about everything.
He tried to reason with himself. He told himself there was nothing he could do to change what had happened, that acceptance of this reality was the only rational way forward. That he just had to wait, stay calm, and see what fate delivered.
Reason failed him; he sank deeper into the abyss.
He was certain the regime was holding them. Either that, or they were dead. There was no other explanation. Even if she had lost her phone or not been able to charge it, she would have found a way to get a message through. To him, or to someone at the M2.
What frustrated him most was the knowledge that there was nothing he could do for them.
Nothing.
He repeated this to himself time and time again, to the point where it was beginning to drive him mad.
As he was amputating a soldier’s arm right up to where it met the shoulder, however, cutting through the bone and wiping the blood spatter off his surgical glasses, he realized he had been kidding himself.
Of course, there was something he could to do for them. If only he had the courage to do it.
chapter 70
Regime-held Aleppo
At first Rahim thought he was being played.
It was true that ever since the first of his multiple promotions over the course of the war, his secretary Aisha had, at least to his face, treated him with respect.
But he still remembered the eye rolls he had endured prior to the promotions. Certainly, she had made little pretense of respecting him then. He suspected that, appearances to the contrary, she harbored little respect for him now.
Which is why when she told him who was trying to reach him, he suspected a ruse.
“Who gave you that name?” he demanded.
He was seated at his desk. She stood in front of him, clipboard in hand. Squat and arrogant. Crooked teeth.
“The man himself, Major,” she said, appearing confused by his tone.
“That man is dead.”
She exhaled and shrugged.
“Then it must be someone impersonating him.”
Rahim perceived the hint of an eye roll. His eyes narrowed.
“You are certain that a man by that name called this office and asked to speak with me?”
She made a clucking sound with her tongue then said, “He called the main number for the Military Intelligence Directorate in Damascus. They transferred him to our office in Aleppo, who transferred him to me.”
Rahim smacked his fist on his metal desk.
“He said he had information for you,” added Aisha, “and that you would recognize his name. Of course, I asked him—what was the nature of this information? But he refused to give it. I am sorry if—”
“When did he call?”
She shrugged. “An hour ago?”
“And you did not think to come to me at once?”
“I was working on the transcribing the interrogation tape you gave me last night. If you will recall, you asked me to complete it by no later than nine this morning.” She gestured with her head, performing a little bow as she did so, to the sheaf of papers that lay on his desk which she had handed to him upon entering his office. “I did not want to disturb you twice. He did leave his number, sir. I wrote it down for you.”
Rahim stared at his phone for a full five minutes but could not bring himself to pick it up.
He drummed his fingers on his desk then rearranged the back-support pillow he had wedged into the crook of his chair.
The problem was that, two nights ago, he had broken down and called his wife in Beirut, to tell her that the doctor’s home had been destroyed and that the doctor and his family had almost certainly been killed. His wife had not admitted it to him, but he could tell she had been pleased. Later in the conversation, she had confided to him that things were not quite as well in Beirut as she had let on. The refugees were driving up rents, the price of groceries was too high, and the food was nothing like it had been in Aleppo.
He had allowed himself to envision a time in the not-too-distant future when his daughter, wife, and his wife’s parents—and perhaps even his brother and his family!—would all return to Aleppo and he, triumphant after driving the rebels from the city and avenging the death of his son, would resume his rightful place as the head of the family.
With all of his promotions, he might possibly even be able to afford to buy a house.
This recent development, however, it threatened everything. The doctor appeared to still be alive. Which meant he could not credibly claim to have adequately avenged his son. And surely, the doctor was not reaching out to him now to wish him well.
Rahim sighed. Then frowned. Then concluded that God had clearly seen fit to send the doctor back to him, a
nd even though he had not asked for, much less wanted, such a gift, who was he to question God’s will?
He sighed again, then picked up the phone and dialed.
chapter 71
The knock came in the middle of the night, on the fourth day of their captivity.
“Stand!”
But Hannah would not stand.
Nothing she had told them, nothing she had done, nothing she had promised to do—none of it had mattered. So she would not stand now because she knew the pain and debasement would come anyway.
The children lay next to her on the floor. Adam stirred. A key turned in the lock.
“Get up.”
Hannah curled tighter into herself. A hand grasped her arm. A boot kicked her bare foot.
Although her interrogators had made good on their promise to violate her, they had not yet made good on their promise to kill her unborn child. So when they pulled her up from the floor that night, she feared it was for that purpose, and she bit down on the hand that clasped her arm.
Noora screamed. Adam flailed his arms. Another guard entered the cell. Hannah kicked at his genitalia, but he grabbed her foot and twisted her leg so that she fell.
Together, all three guards dragged her out of the cell and brought her to a room that was bare save for two chairs and a fourth man.
Hannah attempted to charge the new man—a young sergeant with a weak chin and trim mustache—but one of the interrogators swept her feet out from under her, and she fell back to the floor. They bound her hands with plastic zip ties, hoisted her into one of the chairs, and zip-tied her feet to the chair.
It hurt for her to sit.
“I would advise you to save your energy,” said the new man to Hannah. “At least until you hear what I have to say.”
She tried to spit at him, but he had taken the precaution of standing too far behind her for her aim to be accurate.
Turning to the prison interrogators, the new man said, “Leave us.”
“Sergeant Nassar, I would not recommend—”
“Go.”
They left, and for a moment it was quiet, quieter than Hannah had ever remembered it being in the prison before.
The sergeant stepped from behind her and into her field of vision. The way he eyed her made her want to crawl into a corner. She leaned back in the chair, so that her loose prison robe fell flat to her chest.
“Please do not do this,” she whispered eventually.
Her voice was gravelly. It sounded to her as though someone else entirely, some strange third person in the room, were speaking. And it enraged and mortified her to ask this man for mercy when she knew none would be offered. But she still felt compelled to try.
“I am here to arrange for your release,” he announced. “A prisoner exchange has been arranged. For you and the children.”
Hannah listened to herself breathe. She feared he was lying—dangling a carrot in front of her nose, fully intending to invent some reason to pull it away.
Unless they had finally realized that she had not been lying about being an American. Was that what this was all about?
“Why?”
The sergeant shrugged. “You must be important to the rebels. Either that, or the person the rebels are exchanging for you is important to us.”
That was when Hannah figured it out. Her stomach flipped. Her face flushed. “No,” she said. “I will stay here. I do not wish to be transferred.”
“I am afraid you do not have a choice.”
“I will fight it!” she screamed. “I am an American, and the American embassy in Ankara knows I am here! Call them; I am not lying! They will get me out! I do not need or want your fucking transfer!”
She spit at him again, and this time hit her mark.
The sergeant stared at the glob on his chest then said, “The decision has already been made.”
chapter 72
Rebel-held Aleppo
Sami visited the ruins of Beit Qarah.
It was as bad as he had remembered. The courtyard was completely gone. No sign whatsoever remained of the seahorse fountain or the lovely iwan. He considered that the house had endured the Ottoman Empire, the French Mandate, both world wars, and all the decades of rule and misrule Hafez al Assad—only to be destroyed by Hafez’s sniveling eye-doctor son.
It hardly seemed a worthy end.
A few of the rooms at the rear of the house remained partially intact. In the one corner of the kitchen that remained standing, the honeycombed vaulting that Tahira had loved so much still clung to a fragment of the ceiling. The room that Aya and her husband Rafiq had occupied at the beginning of the war, and where he had first made love to Hannah just a few months ago, still had three walls and what looked like a relatively stable portion of roof over it.
He would rest there tonight, Sami decided.
That resolved, he took a slow walk up the rubble, stepping over a fragment of his father’s nargile water pipe. Sami recalled passing clean water through the hose as a boy, cleaning the glass. Breaking apart the sticky tobacco so that it would burn properly, poking tiny holes in the tin foil that covered the ceramic pipe bowl, so that the tobacco would burn correctly. Most people would have simply poked holes at random, but Sami had always formed his in the shape of a perfect spiral.
He had been the best at it, his father had said.
A patch of yellow caught Sami’s eye. His mother’s room.
He pulled away a few pieces of limestone. Underneath one, he found an origami rhinoceros that he had made as a child. The paper was sun-bleached, but the folds were still perfect, or nearly so. Next to the rhinoceros, and covered with shards of glass, lay an origami elephant. Remembering how he had folded them, he collapsed both so that they were two-dimensional and slipped them into his back pocket.
In another section of rubble, beneath a ceiling fragment decorated with passion flowers and Damask roses, he found Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, a book he had purchased from the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris when his parents had first brought him to France over twenty years ago. Near the book was a photo of Tahira that had been taken shortly after their wedding, along with a broken section of a hexagonal end table that had sat to the left of their shared bed. He placed the book and photo to the side, then excavated enough of the table so that he was able to remove the contents of one of the interior drawers: among the contents was the bill of sale for Beit Qarah.
The dry but fertile Aleppo Plateau extends west from the Orontes River Valley near the Mediterranean Sea, all the way to the Euphrates River Valley in north-central Syria, to the steppe in the southeast where it touches the tip of the vast Syrian Desert. The land is not completely flat but instead undulates in gentle waves, broken up by olive orchards and grain fields.
Some of those orchards extended all the way to the southern tip of rebel-held Aleppo. Sami began walking toward them before dawn, past the M2, through the vast cemetery that lay to the east of the M2, then turning south.
The air smelled of smoke—from the war or perhaps farmers outside the city burning their fields in preparation for the next planting.
Not being familiar with that part of the city, where the buildings abruptly ended and the fields began, he drifted too far to the north. When the sky began to lighten, he corrected his course and began to jog. The satchel that hung from his shoulder bounced against his hip. His left knee hurt.
As he got closer to the line of control, he watched for signs of rebel positions. A half-built overpass spanning the M5 highway loomed to the west. To the east were bombed-out farm buildings. But the path between those two landmarks appeared to be clear—just as Rahim had said it would be.
When dust plumes from cars speeding through olive orchards on the southern side of the M5 highway appeared, he ducked into a dry irrigation ditch. The dirt was soft and slipped into his shoes
.
A bare, sunbaked patch of land separated the ditch from the M5 highway. In the predawn haze, he could just make out where two cars and a van had come to a stop in the middle of an olive orchard that lay on the opposite side of the M5.
He waited a minute then climbed out of the ditch and began to walk toward the highway, hoping that the regime forces on the other side would assume that he had brought a squad of rebel soldiers with him, ready to back him up should anything go wrong.
At the edge of the asphalt, he stopped, raised his hands briefly above his head to show they were empty, and then rested his palms on the top of his head. As he peered into the orchard on the opposite side of the highway, he observed more soldiers than he could count, crouched behind trees, aiming their rifles at him. Two Russian-made Ural cargo trucks with huge knobby tires were parked behind the two cars and the van that he had observed arriving.
Moments later, Hannah and the children appeared from the back of the van. They formed a human chain, with Hannah in the middle, holding both Adam and Noora’s hands.
The children looked much the same as when he had left them; they even appeared to be wearing the same clothes. But Hannah’s shoulders were stooped, and she was limping—so badly that she could barely walk. Her hair was uncovered and tangled. The formless, black robe she wore was too big for her. As she drew closer to the highway, Sami could see that her cheeks and eyes looked puffy.
He walked to the center of the highway.
When they drew close, Adam pulled his hand from Hannah’s grip and raced toward him. Noora followed close on Adam’s heels.
The sun had just crested the horizon and was bright in Sami’s eyes. It made him blink as he struggled to focus on his children.
Adam tumbled into his arms.
“Adam,” said Sami. Then, “Noora, come here.”
The three embraced. Sami noted that there were raw lacerations on the back of Adam’s hands.