by Eva Nour
* * *
—
Sami and Sarah didn’t talk about the future because this was their future. Freedom, and the new society they were trying to create. They met at each other’s houses and planned activities, usually in the evenings when the military patrols were less frequent.
But it was dangerous work. One night, in the gentle glow of the streetlamps, Sami witnessed the security police breaking into their neighbour’s house to seize the son, a well-known media activist. When they didn’t find the one they were looking for, they took the father instead.
Sami watched from across the street as the elderly man was forced out in plaid slippers and a blue robe. He blinked in the streetlight and was reaching for something in his pocket when he got a hard push in his back and stumbled on the icy step. Sami saw a pair of glasses fall out of the old man’s hand and land on the asphalt. One of the security officers stepped on them, almost unknowingly, while he lifted the man by his arm and shoved him into the black car.
By the morning someone had swept away the splinters and the broken frames. The glasses had vanished without a trace, just like the old man, who never returned to the house.
23
THE ARMOURED VEHICLES were not there just for show. Shops began to close and people began to hoard tinned goods. Some families sought refuge in the countryside. Yet even so, most remained calm. The regime would never dare, they said. As soon as the first missile is fired, the US, France and the international community will react. They said.
In the early spring of 2012, a year after the birth of the revolution, the first rockets were launched at Homs. Until that day, Sami had thought there was a limit, a red line of decency. Yes, he knew tanks had rolled into Daraa at the very start of the revolution. That demonstrators greeting the soldiers with flowers had been attacked with teargas and bullets. And yet he couldn’t shake a seed of doubt that it was all really happening.
It wasn’t just the situation he was unfamiliar with, it was himself, too – or more accurately, humanity. People were created equal and the same, which meant the light that existed in others, existed in him too. The darkness that existed in others, he could summon too. Inside the armoured vehicles were soldiers Sami had served with, soldiers who were now shooting at their friends’ homes.
Rockets and missiles darkened the sky. Sami started taking pictures of the damaged houses. As evidence, he told Sarah. This kind of rocket was from the previous century and had a target radius of one hundred to two hundred yards; nothing you used if you had an exact military target.
Yasmin agreed that they needed to document things. They needed a media centre to coordinate and disseminate accurate information. They took turns meeting at each other’s homes or finding other premises they could be in. Yasmin came to Sami’s house sometimes, when she needed help editing photos or designing pamphlets.
‘Hello,’ she greeted Malik, who always seemed to show up in the hallway when she arrived. ‘What are you up to, ya albi?’
Malik was too big to be called a sweetheart any more but still smiled and blushed. Yasmin leaned down to take off her shoes and Sami came just in time to see his little brother straighten his back.
‘Oh, you know,’ Malik said. ‘I’m thinking of joining the rebels.’
‘Don’t listen to him, he talks nonsense,’ Sami said.
‘I don’t. I want to do something, too.’
Yasmin nodded and said that the media group always needed volunteers. Maybe he liked to photograph or collect testimonies?
‘I mean something real,’ Malik said. ‘Something that changes something. Between a man with a camera or a man with a gun, who would you listen to?’ Malik twisted his hands when he realized what he had just said. ‘Not that I mean that your work isn’t…’
Yasmin shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal but Sami felt the anger rise.
‘First of all, you’re not a man. You’re thirteen.’
‘Soon fourteen.’
‘Second, go and do your homework.’
‘We’ve got vacation from the school.’
‘OK, brothers,’ Yasmin interrupted and turned to Malik. ‘Just tell us if you change your mind.’
Sami remembered the impression Yasmin had made on him when they were young. The feeling of being in the spotlight when she listened or talked to you, as if every word had meaning. As if you meant something yourself. Of course Malik was now feeling the same.
‘Your little brother is cute,’ Yasmin said and continued to Sami’s room, where Sarah was waiting for them. ‘He reminds me of my brother.’
* * *
—
The media activists printed newspapers and posters, shared images and texts on social media. Over time, structure emerged. Yasmin became the informal leader of the work and the forty or so activists engaged in it. Their work became more serious as circumstances became so. Sami’s inner doubt grew stronger and stronger, but all outward doubt disappeared with the vibrations in the ground. When the missiles hit, he threw himself on the floor and covered his ears. Blood throbbed at his temples. The wall of a building further down the street collapsed, but not where he was. Time lost all meaning, at least in terms of how it had flowed before, divided into hours and minutes. Now he divided time into chaos and impending chaos.
For the first time he saw the bodies of young people, whose faces were covered in dust and whose skin steamed with heat. He had been wrong. Apparently, a body could continue to emit heat for a short while after death. The shock that rushed through his body, however, wasn’t something he could talk about.
* * *
—
In the middle of March, late at night, he had a call from Muhammed. At first he didn’t recognize his friend’s voice. He was speaking in clipped, jerky sentences from the top part of his lungs.
‘Come, you have to come.’
A massacre had taken place in Karm al-Zeitoun, one of the poorer parts of Homs. The army had gone in with armoured vehicles, broken into homes and handed the arrested families over to the Shabiha. The bodies needed to be moved before the army attacked again, and Sami and Muhammed’s job was to make way for them.
Sami hurried to his friend’s house and helped empty the rooms of furniture. Muhammed’s glasses were smudged with grease and one of the lenses was cracked; his T-shirt was dripping with sweat. They moved like sleepwalkers, lifting up furniture as if for a weekly clean, sweeping and hosing off the floors. They let the water cool a little before pouring it down the drain to make sure they didn’t disturb the jinn.
Later that night, a flatbed truck pulled up outside the house. The sight that greeted Sami etched itself permanently on his retinas. The bodies were stacked in the flatbed, legs and arms entangled. The smell was of smoke, burnt flesh and hair, sweet blood. The militia had shot or stabbed the people to death and set some of them on fire. Sami turned away and threw up.
‘Hurry!’
Sami, Muhammed and the two men carried the bodies into the house and lined them up in the rooms. As he carried them he thought: One day, someone is going to carry me. One boy looked like he was resting when seen in profile, his eyelashes sticky with sleep. The other half of his head had been blown away, his brain seeping out. A woman was missing her jaw. They stared wide-eyed. Several of the children had knife wounds. What kind of person walked up to a child and stabbed it in the belly?
After midnight they had another call, another car was on its way. The street was dark and deserted. There wasn’t enough room in the house and they had no choice but to leave the bodies in the street overnight. Sami counted thirty-nine dead, in the house and on the street. Nineteen children, thirteen women and seven men, of which three were old enough to be his grandfather. They were going to bury them at first light.
The video camera panned back and forth. When Sami watched the clip back he could hear himself sob, even though he didn’t remember crying
. He filmed it even though it felt pointless. But it had to be illegal, according to some international convention or higher law. He didn’t think about revenge or justice, only this one simple thing: that there’s a limit to what you can get away with. That life couldn’t be allowed to continue as if nothing had happened.
A girl, no more than five years old, had been shot in the forehead. The flesh rose from the miniature crater like a flower, while the back of her head flowed out like a flaccid balloon.
As dawn broke, they began the work of burying the bodies. People joined them and cried with horror and shock. Sami regretted having been unable to take the bodies inside to spare them this sight. At the same time, they now had help carrying. Most of the bodies were buried next to a mosque, others in a nearby garden. Others still were collected by relatives.
Later that day, Sami undressed and rinsed the blood off his hands as rumour of the massacre spread and the mass exodus from Homs began.
24
THEIR CITY WAS being taken from them, imperceptibly at first, then more conspicuously. The army shot at the buildings where the Free Syrian Army were said to be hiding, but most of the victims were civilians. In one day, Sami counted forty rockets raining down on them. There were holes in streets and buildings where the metal points had driven themselves in and remained.
Sarah went back to her family outside Damascus. Sami encouraged her to go.
‘You’ll be safer there,’ he told her, not knowing if it was true.
‘I need to be with my family.’
‘I understand, don’t think about it.’
‘I’ll return to Homs soon.’
Soon, he thought, when was soon? They lived one day at a time.
One morning, Sami’s dad put the radio under his arm and announced they were leaving. His mother packed a few changes of clothes. There was no talk of fleeing, no, they were simply going to leave town for a few days until the regime came to its senses. They would stay with a couple of relatives in the countryside. Hiba had already left with her husband and two children. Ali had hung up a handwritten sign on his computer shop: closed for vacation. He was wanted for military service again and had decided to stay hidden. Sami only knew he was staying somewhere in the al-Waer neighbourhood on the outskirts of Homs. Malik filled his backpack with comics instead of school books; the spring term exams had been cancelled anyway. As he helped his parents and little brother pack up the car, Sami said he would join them soon.
‘They’ll give up in a few days. Somebody has to look after Grandpa Faris.’
Because Grandpa Faris had decided to stay. Nabil and Samira had tried to persuade him to come but, in the end, they realized it was futile to ask Grandpa Faris to leave the city where he had lived and worked all his life, where he had met and buried the love of his life.
‘Water the plants,’ Samira said and kissed Sami’s cheeks. ‘And don’t forget to feed the turtle on the roof.’
Sami didn’t sleep at all the night after they left, only finally dozing off when morning had already broken. When he woke up, it was to a new kind of noise: the deep whistling of rockets being fired by the regime’s artillery from the hill that was home to Homs’ ancient citadel. This was different from the shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Every strike vibrated for miles. Fire and black smoke billowed above the rooftops.
That first day on his own he called Muhammed, who had also elected to stay. Together they went out into the neighbourhood to see if there were any old people who had been unable or unwilling to leave.
Grandpa Faris stayed in his bedroom, where he complained about his aching legs and chain-smoked in bed. After three days, his costume was rumpled and his oil-combed hair dishevelled. The room was stuffy with sweat and pipe smoke. Sami noted the artillery fire seemed to be intensifying. In the silence between the launches he could hear the tapping of Grandpa Faris cleaning out his pipe. Then Edith Piaf’s husky voice from the gramophone on the nightstand.
‘The little sparrow from Paris,’ Grandpa Faris said and drummed his fingers against his leg. ‘That’s one of the cities I’ve always dreamt of visiting. The elegant cafés, theatres, boulevards…Paris seems like a Damascus in the heart of Europe.’
‘When this is over, we’ll go there,’ Sami said.
He sat down and stroked the brown, marbled cane that stood propped against the bed.
‘Walnut,’ Grandpa Faris said.
‘From Aleppo, I remember.’
‘Would you be a good boy and fetch my tobacco?’
The tendrils of smoke rose through the air, giving the room an air of normality, as did the floral bedspread and the gramophone. Sami was reluctant to tell his grandfather but he couldn’t hold off any longer. He was going to call his cousins.
‘They’ll come and get you as soon as they can.’
Grandpa Faris didn’t object, just nodded and said there is a season for everything.
‘Don’t forget your bottle of hair oil,’ Sami said.
‘You don’t want to keep it? I remember you used to like it.’
‘I don’t have much use for it any more.’
He stroked the closely shorn hair at the back of his head, one of the habits he had picked up in the military. They listened to Piaf’s raspy voice, Non, rien de rien, and the distant booms, Non, je ne regrette rien, blending together.
‘I know you and your father don’t always agree,’ said Grandpa Faris. ‘But you know, parents have a different job from children.’
Sami jutted his chin out and shook his head, mostly to himself. ‘They could have protested when they were young.’
‘Some did and paid a steep price. Others tried to protect themselves and their families by keeping quiet, but it didn’t always help. There is something you need to know,’ continued Grandpa Faris. ‘Just after the massacre in Hama, before you were born…did you know that the secret police searched thousands of homes looking for people who might have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? One night, they broke into your home.’
‘Our home?’
‘Yes, your older brother was still a baby.’
Grandpa Faris coughed and took a couple of deep breaths before he started smoking again.
‘Your mother tried to push past the soldiers to get to Ali, who had just started sleeping in his own bed. She was stopped and pushed back on to the bed while your father was pulled out of the blankets. By streetlight, Nabil was dragged outside. He was taken behind a car, in nothing but his underwear, and surrounded by soldiers aiming their guns at him.’
Grandpa Faris held up his hand and looked in the palm as if it was a mirror.
‘The general studied Nabil in the rear-view mirror. Then he waved his hand and your father was released.’
Sami blinked and tried to take that in. His dad, dragged into the street.
‘I don’t understand…did he have anything to do with the protests in Hama?’
‘No, nothing at all. Your father was always eager to do right. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.
‘Sami,’ Grandpa Faris continued, ‘I could tell you that you will never be able to save yourself or anyone else by keeping on the right side of things. That the only thing that can save you is to fight for what’s right. But it’s more complicated than that. How do you know, at any given moment, what the right thing is? Even just talking about this and showing signs of hesitation would be seen as treachery by the regime.’ He waved his hand through the air, scattering smoke. ‘Yes, I know, the walls have ears and all that. But they’re still our walls and our home. Right?’
Grandpa Faris smiled but it looked forced. He leaned back into his pillow, stretched his legs out on the bedspread and sucked on his pipe.
* * *
—
The next day, Sami’s cousins came by and took Grandpa Faris out of the city.
It’s going to be over soon, Sami thought, and every mornin
g it continued unabated. But there was still water in the taps, still food in both fridge and pantry, and his photography gave him a reason to get out of bed. He shortened his walks and avoided the regime checkpoints. He spent most of his time at home. He watered the house plants. Played the gramophone and was soothed by the crackling tones. Grandpa Faris hadn’t wanted to take the gramophone – that would be tantamount to admitting he wasn’t coming back.
Sami flipped through the comic books Malik had left behind. He found a whole box of pictures of his brother as a young boy and surprised himself by feeling jealous. Malik would always be a child in their parents’ eyes. The child who was conceived at the eleventh hour, possibly not planned, but deeply wanted. Maybe Sami had been wrong about his little brother. Maybe all his joking and talking wasn’t a way to please and be loved, but a sign that he already was loved.
He tested out the chair in Nabil’s study. On the desk a marble ashtray, a fountain pen engraved with his father’s name, a portrait of Samira. He spun the ashtray around and discovered a small, flat key underneath. He held the key in his hand; it weighed almost nothing. It reminded him of the keys Hiba had used for her diaries when they were little, the diaries Sami was strictly banned from reading. He read them anyway, and realized with disappointment that she only wrote pointless nonsense about boys in the other class in school and who had the coolest trainers.
Sami looked around and pulled out the desk drawers at random. In one he found a silver flask with a couple of coffee beans next to it. He already knew Nabil drank on the weekends sometimes, that he preferred to do so alone out of respect for Samira.
None of the drawers contained anything the key might be used for. He opened the top drawer again and there, under a stack of papers, he could feel a sharp corner. He pulled out a box and put the key in the lock. It fitted. Inside was a collection of letters tied together with yellowed string. Sami touched the paper but snatched his fingers back as though they’d been burnt. These letters must be very important to his father, so much so that he kept the key to hand, yet hidden. Sami felt embarrassed for his father. Another woman, could it be that banal? Someone at his work, since he was always home early and never travelled. Whatever his secret was, Sami didn’t want to know. Even so, he untied the string and picked up the first letter.