City of Sparrows

by Eva Nour

  ‘I have only one question. Are you retarded or just regular idiots?’

  The air was thick with tobacco smoke and they could hear bangs from the shooting range.

  ‘Well? I asked you a question. A simple one at that.’

  Ahmed coughed and opened his mouth but the major general banged his fist on the table.

  ‘Did I say you could speak?’

  The major general lowered his voice and articulated as though he were speaking to imbeciles.

  ‘We didn’t ask for the long way to the city centre. If that’s what I’d wanted, I’d have asked my niece to draw the map, or a donkey.’

  The plan had been doomed from the start. Of course they would discover that they hadn’t put in the most important entry points to the town, the bridges. That they had instead drawn up a longer route and ignored the possibility of using armoured vehicles.

  ‘Have they caused trouble before?’ the major general asked, addressing their general.

  ‘Never,’ he assured him. ‘They’re normally very well behaved.’

  ‘We should send you all to Palmyra,’ said the major general. ‘Who’s responsible for this map?’

  For a moment, time seemed to stop and the world shrank to that one room, its walls and the two eyes watching them. Their fates depended on the caprice and ill-will of a single person.

  ‘I am,’ Sami said. ‘I’m responsible for the map. Rafat was on leave and Ahmed was working on other assignments.’

  The brigade general looked like he was about to object but then he closed his mouth. Perhaps it was better for his reputation if only one of his apprentices had screwed up. Maybe it could be passed off as a mistake and not a deliberate act of protest. The leather chair creaked when the major general leaned back.

  ‘Take him to the clink and I’ll think about it.’

  Sami breathed a sigh of relief.

  In the clink the mosquitoes were more numerous and eager than usual but now that the tension had been released, Sami fell asleep immediately. He woke up with his blanket pulled up over his face, his arms red and swollen with bites. He felt palpitations under his ribs, the feeling of harbouring something that was baring its teeth. He would have to be more careful. Another transgression would not be tolerated, especially now the major general had his eye on him.

  * * *

  —

  Sami was let out four days later. He almost expected Ahmed and Rafat to congratulate him but they were absorbed and barely looked up when he entered the map room. The light from the drawing table spread a halo around the brigade general’s back.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’

  The concrete walls seemed to warp and Sami’s field of vision narrowed. The map they had made was laid out in front of him. The general cleared his throat and straightened up.

  ‘We are behind because of you, and now time is growing short. You have until tomorrow morning to finish the job.’

  There was no need for him to deliver veiled threats or mention their families; they knew what was at stake. Their pencils lay where they’d left them. New paper had been brought in. The map table shone dully, white, like the new moon above the treetops in a dark forest. Ahmed and Rafat had been sketching out a new scenario that included the bridges. Sami just had to colour it in. He told himself it wasn’t hard, that it was like the drawings he painted as a child, but a string had begun to vibrate and left behind a dull reverberation inside him.

  * * *

  —

  The day after they submitted the map, Sami descended the steps into the bunker, which soon turned into an illuminated tunnel. The lights flickered and cast long shadows across the walls. The corridor wound ever deeper underground.

  Sami’s friend was normally always in the same room, eyes glued to a fax machine that at any moment could spit out a pivotal message from another division. How Issa was able to keep a TV that received international channels wasn’t clear to him. It likely had more to do with his commanding officer wanting to follow events than with an oversight. There was always a certain level of anxiety when they were down here, even though unknown footsteps would be heard from very far away. Hafez and Bashar’s eyes watched them from the walls. The kettle was sitting on the black iron stove. They normally drank maté, a bitter green herbal tea, but this time Sami was unable to raise the glass to his lips. His hands were shaking too much.

  Sami remembered conversations they had had. Why them? Couldn’t they just refuse? The answer was always: if they didn’t do it, someone else would. But if they all refused, who would do it then? A system can only be perpetuated if people perpetuate it. The memory of voices, his own concerns and doubt, all the threads tangling together. The din intensified, drowning out all thought. Stop! It was too late, it made no difference. Not now.

  The blue light lit up the room and the newscast began. The reporter summarized the events of the past few days. Thousands of residents had fled to the Turkish border, where they were being housed in temporary refugee camps. The town was virtually deserted, an activist said. And yet the army claimed armed rebel groups were holed up in there.

  ‘Yesterday we could see the army lining up armoured vehicles and surrounding the town. Most of its residents have fled,’ the activist told the reporter.

  But far from everyone had left. Later, Sami would describe it as the moment a missile hits. When matter seems to lose its original form and firmness and contours dissolve. The floor swayed, the portraits stared at him, the kettle whistled, slicing through the sound of guns firing on TV. He didn’t notice his hands cramping until he felt the glass cut into his skin. Red blood dripped on to the concrete.

  Hundreds of people had been killed and arrested. With the help of their map, which he had coloured in. Just like he always did. Filled it with colour.

  Now the colours became reality, in the images that flickered past and blended together. The green fields and the shadows of the mountains, which surrounded the settlement in the heart of the valley. The water – wild swirls, deep streams – flowing past under the bridges lined with lampposts, where tanks and soldiers were pushing forward. Soon, black smoke rose over the rooftops.

  Sami sat dead still in the blue light. To his shock, Ahmed collapsed on to the basement floor and wept.

  Issa, who minded the fax machine, had his head in his hands. His aunt wasn’t answering her phone. She lived in the town with her two sons, his cousins.

  ‘Maybe they fled,’ he mumbled. ‘Or were arrested. If they were arrested, there’s still a chance.’

  * * *

  —

  Later on, a returning soldier told them the takeover had been smooth. They had lists of people to arrest but were told to bring in more. The names went on and on, page after page. On TV, they said about one hundred and seventy people had been killed – it was probably more, said the returning soldier. Because he had seen the army load dead bodies on to trucks and remove them.

  Sami closed his eyes and the sound of the TV turned into a distant buzzing. He and Ahmed and Rafat had followed orders and in that moment crossed a line. And it was just the beginning. There would be new orders. They would draw new maps. Every time he reached a line in the sand, there would be another one beyond it, and when that was crossed, another. It would never end. It would continue for ever, until nothing human and decent remained in him.

  How much remained in him now? He had drawn the map. Beyond this line there was no turning back. The bunker walls closed around him, numbing in their colourlessness.

  III

  There is a picture of the little boy in the penguin jumper. In another, he’s wearing a camouflage uniform and cradling a rifle in his arms, squinting at the sun, his boots resting in the tall grass. The pictures blend together and drift apart. I try to make them co-exist in my mind, understand how they can both be of you.

  What would another person have done in your situation
? What would I have done?

  My writing is becoming an obsession. It breaks free of my computer and becomes part of everything I do, a snake skin I can’t shed. We watch the hundreds of video clips you have filmed. We flip through nearly twenty thousand photographs you have taken, most of them from the siege. We cook your favourite dishes, stuffed vine leaves and lamb-filled zucchini in a saffron stew. We listen to your father’s favourite singer, Umm Kulthum. We study maps and street addresses, read reports on mass executions in the prisons and the composition of sarin gas. The more I think and read and see, the less I understand.

  When I see the ad for the Swedish army’s survival course, I think that’s a step closer. I regret my decision before I even get there, but am given a uniform and a green plastic tube of chapstick. Sleep in a steel bed, fire a Kalashnikov and bandage a gunshot wound. Have a hood put over my head and am interrogated with blinding lights in my eyes. I’m surprised at the ease with which I and my fellow prisoners get used to it, how willingly we adapt to the rules of the game before they’re even presented. Forget that you have a body, keep control of your mind. But can a protest live only in the mind without being embodied? How quickly we fall silent when someone else has a gun pressed to their forehead.

  An obsession, yes. To understand you and what you’ve been through. And a vague sense of unease which refuses to subside, telling me that no matter what I do, I will never understand.

  19

  SLEEP PULLED SAMI under. When he awoke for short periods, it lingered like a cold in his throat, a heaviness in his arms and legs, like an apathy towards the things going on around him. Shadows moved back and forth in the doorway. Sound and light blended together, there were unfamiliar voices and dirges, he imagined bridges hovering above his bed.

  After three days, Rafat woke him up and said enough already. The brigade general had not given them any new assignments but it wouldn’t be long before they had to go back to drawing maps. The problem was his hands would no longer hold pencils. He kept crumpling up sheets of paper. Lines were erased and blurred. He carried the maps inside him. He folded and unfolded lakes, forests and valleys. Moved cities and villages around. Watched a flame take hold in the paper and eat its way towards the edges, until he himself caught fire and burnt. In his dream, his face and skin were seared until he had no eyes to see with, hands to draw with or heart to feel with.

  As day turned into dusk, the black dog appeared. A wild dog. The soldiers loathed them. They roamed the hinterlands and didn’t hesitate to attack if you stepped into their territory. The black dog was mangy, its ribs visible and its breath acrid. Even other dogs disliked it: its right ear had been torn off by a pack that had lain in wait and ambushed it. The soldiers shooed it away with kicks and curses but the black dog continued to visit the military base. It slunk by, panting with hunger.

  Then, one evening, it didn’t come. Sami went for a walk in the mild summer night without admitting to himself that he was looking for the dog. There was something about it that reminded him of the mutt his little brother Malik had dragged home when they were younger. The next night, the dog was back and he felt involuntary relief. Sami gave it the remains of his dinner: a bowl of chicken stew to lick clean and a crust of bread to chew. From that day on, the black dog followed him wherever he went.

  ‘What’s the name of your stinky dog?’ the other soldiers asked.

  ‘It’s not mine,’ Sami replied.

  But he continued to put out bowls of leftovers and, after a while, the dog’s ribs were no longer visible. The dog slept outside at night, except for when it managed to sneak in and lie down outside his room. At first, he scolded it, but then he got used to it, and eventually he looked forward to scratching it behind the ears. The black dog became a reason to wake up in the morning. To gather up his limbs and exist.

  * * *

  —

  After weighing up different scenarios, Sami, Ahmed and Rafat agreed that they would desert if ordered to fire at people. At present, however, it was safer to stay where they were. The revolution had blossomed during the first tentative, passionate spring months, and matured and gained new force over the summer. Then the temperatures fell. An undertone of pine needles and wet soil infused the mountain air and the leaves changed colour. There was no sign of the revolt cooling off or dying down.

  Sami was normally woken up by the dog’s eager scratching at his door, but one early autumn morning he was instead awoken by Rafat sitting down on the edge of his bed.

  ‘Ahmed’s gone,’ he said and held out a mobile phone.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘Never mind, just look.’

  The black dog lumbered into the room and curled up next to the bed, its tail languidly beating the floor. Sami sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, watched the grainy video. Judging from the date, it had been uploaded the day before. When he recognized the face, his legs started bouncing up and down and he pulled a flake of dry skin from his lip.

  ‘Enough already,’ Ahmed said, looking into the camera, fixedly and slightly wild-eyed. ‘The regime is shooting us, they are killing our sisters and brothers. Peaceful demonstration isn’t enough any more.’

  Ahmed held up his military ID and Sami thought about how often he had seen those hands illuminated from below by the drawing table. Long, thin, sinewy fingers, which would not have looked out of place on a musical instrument. It was with those hands, piano hands, violin hands, that he tore up his military ID.

  ‘I’m no longer fighting for Assad’s army, I’m fighting for the Syrian people. Long live the Free Syrian Army!’

  The name was not unknown to them. The armed rebel group, the FSA, had been founded over the summer. It disseminated pictures and videos of deserting soldiers while rumours spread about what had happened to the deserters. Deserting was far worse than being a conscientious objector and almost always led to a bullet in the head or a disappearance.

  ‘Your lips are going to be a mess if you keep doing that,’ Rafat said.

  ‘Have you talked to his family?’

  ‘I can’t get hold of them. People say his parents have been arrested.’

  The black dog raised its head from the floor and studied them before lowering it back down and putting a paw across its nose. If Sami had been in a sleep-like state during the past few months, he was wide awake now. Why had Ahmed not warned them? They had talked about everything. Hadn’t they? But Ahmed had made a decision, planned his escape and left on his own. In addition to his disappointment and mounting restlessness, Sami couldn’t help but feel a tiny pang of jealousy. Ahmed had dared to leave.

  Although they were not brothers, they had lived so closely together. It made him think of Homs and how much he missed his family. He hadn’t been able to visit since the New Year and asking for leave was pointless. The more soldiers deserted, the more restrictions were introduced. After his infraction with the map, the general had decided Sami would not be given any opportunity to go home. Perhaps he sensed Sami would choose to stay and join the protests, or maybe it was just his way of demonstrating his power.

  ‘What’s it like in Homs?’ the brigade general had said as he and Sami stood together in the gloom by the drawing table. ‘I’ve heard they’re planning to grow potatoes there.’

  Because of the strong turnout over the past year, Homs was called ‘the capital of the revolution’. ‘Growing potatoes’ was code for crushing the resistance and levelling the rebellion. A chill ran down Sami’s spine. It meant complete destruction, and he knew that the same expression had been used before the massacre in Hama.

  ‘I thought you were familiar with Homs,’ Sami said as neutrally as he could.

  ‘I am,’ said the general and straightened up. ‘Haven’t I told you I did my training there?’

  ‘Then you should know how cold the nights get. A pretty unsuitable place for growing potatoes.’

&
nbsp; The general snorted and said Sami was never going to be granted leave anyhow.

  So he would have to sort it out himself.

  * * *

  —

  Sami went to bed with his uniform on. Instead of sleeping, he lay down and waited for the night to turn into greyish light. He finally sat up in the steel bed, carefully, but it still gave off a squeak. He stiffened, but Rafat’s snoring rose safely from the other side of the room, where he slept on his back with a slightly open mouth. Sami tied his boots and took the backpack he used for leave and sneaked out of the room. Outside the door was the black dog, who drowsily lifted its nose when it saw Sami.

  ‘Ssh,’ he said and patted the rough fur. ‘Want to join me on a little adventure?’

  He handed out a piece of dried meat and the dog waved his tail happily. Not only had it put on some weight, it was even getting a bit round.

  The sky was still grey when they began to walk through the base but soon the dusk began to dissolve.

  ‘Come on, we have to hurry.’

  The dog sometimes ran before him, sometimes after him, clearly excited about the excursion. After half an hour the trail began to descend and they were out of sight of the camp. Sami changed clothes in a shrubbery and put his uniform in the backpack. If anyone asked where he was going, he had faked a permit to leave. He would spend one night in the clink for wearing civilian clothing, but in the best-case scenario that would be the worst of it.

  The black dog moved playfully up and down the path, then suddenly became quiet. Sami stepped out of the bush in his new clothes, jeans and a woollen sweater over a washed-out T-shirt, and whistled low. No dog in sight. He continued down the path and froze at the sound of an angry growl. Two wild dogs blocked the trail, puffy and with yellow eyes fixed on him. They were smaller than the black dog but long-legged and sinewy, and above all they looked at him with starving eyes.