Bitter Paradise

by Ross Pennie

  KB?

  answer PLEASE.

  heavy stuff, omar. gotta keep r heads. me and trav wanna keep u safe.

  lotsa thinking to do. inbox u later, k?

  u gonna help?

  do r best.

  inshallah.

  inshallah, you bet. bye.

  Max shut the laptop and let out a sigh that morphed into a long moan. Travis crossed the room and grabbed one of Max’s best t-shirts from a drawer then mopped his cheeks with it. Max told him he’d better sit down before he fainted. His face was so white his port-wine birthmark had practically disappeared.

  Chapter 17

  At seven o’clock on Saturday morning, Hosam gave up trying to sleep. Saramin had dropped him at the Beer Store sometime after two. His mind had been racing with guilt, anger, and fear ever since. Not in his wildest dreams had he expected Canada to resemble the Syria he had left behind. But it had happened again: the moment life seemed to be humming along pretty nicely, it kicked you in the gut.

  He took a shower then shaved with the only object he possessed from his life in Aleppo, his chrome-plated Solingen safety razor, a sixteenth birthday present from his father. The shave made him feel a bit fresher, but yesterday’s events weighed on his shoulders like a surgeon’s lead-lined X-ray vest.

  Leila was still in bed, curled under the covers. He could not tell whether she was sleeping or hiding. She had done a lot of both during these past few years.

  He dressed quickly and quietly and set off for James Street North, five short blocks away. The barbershop would be closed today and for a good few more. He would not be working his usual weekend shift from ten until six, but he could still try to enjoy the Saturday morning routine he had come to count on. He wished he had put on a scarf, for a heavy cover of low cloud had moved in sometime early this morning. The accompanying sharp wind made the air feel even colder than it had last night. The entire month of April had been comfortably warm, but here it was the first week of May and the weather had turned cold already. Had summer come and gone that quickly in this unpredictable country?

  Of course, he told himself, long stretches of warmth and heat did not make a place a paradise. Look at Syria. Since the French had pulled out in 1945, the country had been in a state of almost continuous political turmoil. Embedded in the chaos, however, was a legacy from les Français that could only be called exquisite: the crusty baguettes, flaky croissants, and tangy lemon tarts crafted at his grandfather’s Patisserie Chez André in Aleppo. During the good years, it had been Hosam’s routine to collect, for the family’s Saturday breakfast, a dozen oven-fresh croissants from Nabil, Grandpapa André’s young successor. No matter how many hours Hosam might have spent in the operating theatre the night before, he rarely missed an early Saturday bakery run. Sadly, the trips ended when the civil war descended and Nabil disappeared. The missing croissants became symbolic of many untold losses and deprivations.

  One day, while Hosam was scouting the neighbourhood around their new home in Hamilton, he found a small but authentic French bakery on James Street North. How wonderful it had been to walk through a bake-shop door for the first time in years and breathe in those wonderfully yeasty aromas reminiscent of happy family times. He had lost his daughter, his surgical practice, his villa, and his car, but in that moment he had regained a cherished Saturday tradition inspired by his late grandfather’s devotion to his craft.

  Today, he paid for six croissants with part of the one hundred dollars in small bills that Saramin had thrust upon him when she dropped him outside the Beer Store. He did not want to take the tainted cash because it magnified his guilt, but she had made it clear that he had no choice. And there was no point in pissing her off.

  When he returned to the townhouse, he found a tearful Leila at the kitchen table. She was clutching an envelope. It looked identical to yesterday’s, but that one he had already ripped into pieces and tossed in the garbage.

  Like the previous envelope, its flap was unsealed. The Caliph was taunting the household by making it easy for everyone in the family to see for themselves the plainly worded threats.

  “Did you read it?”

  “I found it on the mat at the front door when I came down to put the kettle on.”

  His throat tightened. “Did Omar see it?”

  “I do not think so.”

  “Merde, I hope not.”

  She handed it to him. “You will find it contains similar threats and another assignment.”

  “When?”

  “Monday night.”

  “Putain! So soon?”

  “Are you going to tell me what they made you do last night?”

  “You do not want to know.”

  She stood up and checked the staircase around the corner in case Omar was eavesdropping. When she returned, she whispered, “Habibi, I have to know. Did they make you kill someone? Or force you to bury a body? I saw the mud from your shoes on the mat. Allah have mercy on us! Please tell me. What were you doing last night in the pitch dark?”

  He took her hand. “No bodies, Habibi. And no violence. It was thievery, plain and simple.” As she pressed his hand in both of hers, he felt more guilty than ever that the thievery had been neither plain nor simple.

  “Did you meet the Caliph?”

  “Nobody meets him.”

  He stroked her cheek with his left hand and took back his right. He removed the note from the envelope and read the rough scrawl. It gave instructions to meet at eleven thirty on Monday night in front of a McDonald’s on Mohawk Road East. He should allow twenty minutes to walk from his house to the McNab city bus terminal and board Route 23 Upper Gage from Platform 5 at eleven.

  He stuffed the envelope in his pocket and set about making the coffee. He did not ask Leila if she wanted any. He prepared it the way she liked it, placed a croissant on each of two plates, and hoped she would accept the sustenance. They both needed it.

  On those cheery Saturday mornings in Aleppo, they had always had their croissants with honey from a local farm.

  “Do we have any honey?” he asked.

  “Like everything in this country, it is too expensive.”

  One of the first shocks that had hit them in Canada was the exorbitant price of food. For what they spent on a week’s groceries in Hamilton they could have had six weeks of good eating in Aleppo. Before the war, that is. Now, Aleppo had no functioning supermarkets, and most of the independent market traders had fled. “Fine, Love. I will enjoy mine plain.”

  He pulled apart his croissant and watched its extravagant, buttery flakes scatter onto the table. Leaving her plate untouched, she looked blankly at the wall and sipped her coffee without comment. He had not seen her this defeated since Turkey, since those terrible weeks after Farah’s death.

  “How many clients do you have this morning?”

  “I cannot face them, Hosam. Not today. I rebooked and told my helper not to come.”

  He finished his pastry and took a croissant upstairs to Omar on a tray with a cup of sweet black coffee. As he opened the door, the boy rushed to greet him with a guilty look on his face. As he set the tray beside Omar’s open laptop, he noted that though the screen was blank the device radiated a telltale warmth. Why, he wondered, was his son communicating with friends so early on a Saturday morning? Would they not still be asleep?

  Downstairs, he kissed Leila goodbye and told her he needed a walk. She knew an hour of fast walking often cleared his head. He had done a lot of walking during those two years in Turkey. The endorphins had kept him sane. And alive.

  He found himself first at his workday bus stop at the intersection of King and James. One more block, and he was at McNab city terminal. If he followed the Caliph’s orders, he would be boarding here from Platform 5 on Monday night. Some thirty metres ahead, a Route 21 Caledonian U was loading passengers from Platform 7. The posted route map showed that
bus meandering through the upper city above the Escarpment and terminating at Caledonian University’s Medical Centre on Mud Street at Winterberry Drive.

  Filled with longing for what he had lost, he strode to Platform 7 and jumped aboard. He tapped his transit card on the electronic reader next to the driver and found a seat.

  Knowing it would be a fairly long trip, he pulled out his copy of Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát. Edward FitzGerald’s translation from the original Persian was the first bit of poetry Hosam’s English tutor had assigned him to read those many years ago. The individual words were simple and their meaning superficially clear. But underneath, the poet’s message was intriguing and complex. Omar Khayyam was not generally appreciated, or condoned, by most Arabic speakers. But Hosam’s secular, largely Mosque-free upbringing blended well with the Rubáiyát’s philosophy: carpe diem because life on Earth is all there is. Don’t expect a heaven or a paradise.

  He read several of his favourite quatrains and concentrated on memorizing two or three more. Anything to take his mind off yesterday’s barbarities. The poetic imagery so absorbed him that the end of the route arrived before he realized it, and the driver shouted at him to get off. Hosam dropped the Persian poet back into his bag, raced down the steps, and strode away from the bus and toward the large red-and-white sign that said Emergency/Urgence.

  He found a seat in the Emergency Department’s crowded waiting room and felt instantly comforted by the familiar bustle. He breathed in the unique hospital amalgam of blood and body fluids tinged with the no-nonsense odour of germicide. He watched the human dramas unfolding: parents with tearful children, worried wives with grim-faced husbands, middle-aged women fussing over their elderly fathers. He recognized the scenarios, imagined the symptoms, speculated on the diagnoses, and predicted the interventions. He ached to be knee-deep in the fray.

  Frustration overwhelmed him, and after the better part of an hour he couldn’t take the ache any longer. Other people were wearing his scrubs. Other doctors were putting his patients’ lives back together. Why was he torturing himself? Was this an act of penance for the treachery he had perpetrated last night? Or was his subconscious at work, secretly strengthening his resolve to pass the devilish MCCQE and get back to the business of healing? The Caliph be damned.

  As he stood, desperate to head for the exit, he spotted a familiar sight. In the farthest corner of the waiting room, a youngish couple — the woman wearing a hijab and a long skirt, the man dark-haired and unshaven — were huddled together. A young boy was asleep across their laps. Were they waiting for the doctor to see the lad, or were they awaiting news of another family member undergoing assessment in one of the treatment rooms? The parents’ eyes had the vacant look of two people hopelessly lost in the hubbub of an alien landscape conducted in a tongue of which they did not understand a word.

  At first, he thought the trio seemed familiar because they resembled almost any family from back home. But when the father caught Hosam looking at him, the man’s face brightened and Hosam realized they recognized each other from the neighbourhood. Not from Hosam’s old neighbourhood in Aleppo but from their new one in Beasley.

  As Hosam walked over to the couple, the parents roused the boy and quickly lifted him off their laps. They leaned forward on their toes, the mother’s head partly bowed, their eyes beseeching. It was as if he had found them lost in the desert and he was holding the first vessel of water they had seen in days.

  Hosam extended his hand to the father and greeted him in Arabic: “As-salaam alaikum.”

  “Wa-alaikum salaam,” the parents responded in unison.

  Tears welled in the woman’s eyes.

  The husband beamed with relief. “We are so very happy to see you,” he said. “We do not know what is happening. We have been in this place the entire night, and they have not found us anyone who speaks our language.”

  “That is a poor show. They should have tried harder. But I would be pleased to act as your interpreter.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the man, his whole body nodding along with his head.

  “You need to give them your permission,” Hosam cautioned, “but I can help you arrange that.”

  “Most certainly,” said the husband, still nodding vigorously. He pointed toward the registration clerk sitting at a desk behind a glass panel. “Tell her the doctor must come and speak to you.”

  “We will ask for one of the nurses, first. The doctor may be too busy to come for some time.”

  Hosam invited them to sit down and introduced himself by name, first and last. He did not mention his former title.

  “Oh, we know who you are, Doctor,” said the father. “The famous surgeon from Aleppo.”

  “No, no. Please, I was never famous. And in this place, I am just Hosam, a helpful neighbour. Now, remind me, you are . . . ?”

  “Khateb,” said the husband. He pointed to himself and then to his wife. “Fadi and Rima.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course.” They had met and chatted briefly on a previous occasion, although Hosam couldn’t remember exactly when or where. He did remember that Fadi had worked as an auto mechanic in the city of Hama. That was before Bashar al-Assad’s government forces destroyed much of the city in the process of driving out the ragtag rebel forces that had occupied it.

  Hosam gestured to the lad who was clinging to his mother. “Is this fellow the patient?”

  “No, no,” Fadi said. “Achraf is tired but not sick.” Fadi pointed to the door leading to the clinical areas beyond the waiting room. “It is our daughter. She is in there. A private room.” His face tightened. “Where you must wear a gown, a mask, and gloves.”

  “Her name is Jamila, and she is only seventeen years old,” said the mother, wiping more tears from her cheeks. “We do not know what is . . . what is wrong with her.”

  Fadi shook his head and stared at the floor. “It was a mistake to let her take that job.”

  “What job is that?”

  “At a pet store,” Fadi said. “Cleaning fish.”

  Rima touched her husband’s forearm. “Jamila does not clean the fish, Doctor. She cleans the tanks where they keep the fish. And it is good that she earns the extra money. She is saving for a laptop computer and also helping us with the grocery bills.”

  Hosam wondered what diseases you could get from fish tanks. Some sort of diarrhea, perhaps. It did not sound too serious, and if the diagnosis was gastroenteritis, it made sense to keep the girl in isolation.

  Before speaking with a nurse on the family’s behalf, he needed to hear the parents’ version of their daughter’s illness. They quickly told him how she had been well until yesterday morning when she complained of a headache. Hours later, she developed a sore neck and Rima noticed the girl was feverish. Ultimately, she became confused. This was not the story of simple gastroenteritis. It sounded more like meningitis, an infection of the membranes covering the brain. It was a serious diagnosis, and common enough among teenagers.

  He was about to approach the registration clerk and present himself as the Khateb’s interpreter when a siren began wailing inside the building. A red strobe light flashed behind the clerk and a woman’s voice came over the PA system: “Code Blue, Emergency Department, Isolation Room Three. Repeat, Code Blue, Isolation Three.”

  The Khatebs could not understand much English, but they understood sirens and flashing red lights. They gaped at the ceiling in stunned silence as if it were about to collapse. Fadi pushed Achraf under their chairs.

  “What room is Jamila in?” Hosam asked.

  The parents came up blank. But little Achraf poked his head out and held up three fingers.

  “Are you sure, son?” Hosam said.

  The boy nodded shyly, bit his lip, and drew the Arabic number three in the air.

  Chapter 18

  For sixty excruciating minutes, Hosam sat in the waiting room with Fadi, Rima, and you
ng Achraf. Four times, he approached the registration clerk for news of Jamila. Each time, he was told, “Take a seat, sir, and someone will be with you shortly.” And each time, he made certain to keep his hands in his pockets with his fists balled, his fingernails biting into his palms. He couldn’t afford to show any signs of what his Toronto Notes study guide termed microaggression in the chapter on Physician Behaviours. The MCCQE website stressed the importance of a satisfactory score in professional ethics and deportment. He did his level best to keep the annoyance off his face, the contempt out of his voice, and his hands lower than his waist. If he wasn’t careful, a security guard would be summoned to give him a sharp warning. And if he demonstrated anything close to what Canadians liked to call a meltdown, no matter how justifiable, he would be escorted off the premises and the Khatebs would not have a chance.

  When his patience finally ran out, he stood by the electronically controlled door leading to the department’s inner sanctum and waited for a professional to come by with their keycard. After a few minutes, a stressed-looking nurse, mid-thirties, dressed in pink scrubs and white running shoes, approached the door. She had her keycard at the ready. He accosted her with the largest smile and most confident English he could muster and recited the pitch he had memorized: “Excuse me, I am Doctor Khousa visiting from . . . from Sudbury. They called a Code Blue an hour ago on my niece, Jamila Khateb. We are hearing nothing since. My poor sister, she is out of her mind with worrying. She has no English, and her husband has but a few words. We would be most grateful if you could find out what is happening so that I can explain it to them.”

  “What was the name, again?”

  “Jamila Khateb. She is from —”

  “Jamila? I haven’t got a clue who that person is.” It seemed the local guidelines of deportment allowed the nurses to give stern looks and answer in a curt tone of voice. “What room’s she in?”