by Eva Nour
‘I don’t even like children,’ Sami said.
‘But you don’t dislike them?’
Underneath Leyla’s mild voice and gentle gestures was a core of pure steel. She put her hands in the pockets of her lined coat and fixed her gaze intently on him.
‘I don’t have the patience to teach,’ Sami said.
‘You could at least try, it’s only temporary.’
She wrapped her scarf around her neck and it was settled.
He didn’t learn much about Leyla or her family except that they were Druze and came from the Golan Heights in southwestern Syria, the area annexed by Israel in the 1980s. The Heights sloped steeply down towards the Sea of Galilee, which was one of the specific flashpoints between the two countries, in addition to the area’s general strategic importance. Syria wanted Israel to pull back from the shores of the lake, but it was one of Israel’s most important sources of fresh water.
Sami knew the Druze didn’t believe in predetermination. God had given humans the intelligence to choose and act freely, and it was their responsibility to shape their society and living conditions to suit the divine purpose. Maybe this was her way of doing it.
Sami would have loved to ask Leyla more questions but she disliked talking about herself and her background. Moving to a big city had been a way for her to have more freedom and room to act. Once she had told him all the choices we make are based on either love or fear. Sami pondered that for a long time. The Druze were not supposed to marry outside their religion. Maybe she had met someone her family considered inappropriate? He didn’t know her well enough to ask.
Instead, Sami told Leyla about Sarah, expecting a certain level of interest or curiosity on her part. He thought the two of them would have got on well, felt they had a number of things in common, what with their passion for poetry and pedagogy. But Leyla asked no questions.
‘So she left,’ was all she said.
Sami wanted to defend Sarah – it was the ones who had stayed who were being selfish. People like him, who didn’t think of how the separation would affect his family. Without taking into account that being apart from each other might be worse than any risk outside the siege. But Leyla didn’t see it that way. She was going to stay with the children until the last bomb had fallen.
‘First of all, we need to find a place to have the school.’
‘I’ll ask around,’ Sami said.
* * *
—
So far Leyla had been tutoring in people’s homes but she wanted to find a place where more children could participate. They found the solution with a man who distributed food rations to families. He offered to let them use his house in the mornings, as long as they kept it neat and tidy. Sami and Leyla printed up a couple of flyers and handed them out, and the man helped spread the news while he handed out rations.
The school was small but would do for now. It consisted of a big living room with a wood-fired stove that would keep the children warm. Sami and Leyla arranged the sofas in a semi-circle and put a big notepad up on the wall. Books, pens and notepads were collected from a bombed-out school nearby.
The day before the first day of school, Sami felt noticeably restless. He swept the thick carpets, even though this had already been done. Put books out on the sofas, gathered them back up and put them back out again. He opened the windows to air the room; a thin layer of powder snow had fallen in the courtyard, settling on the remaining leaves on the lemon tree. Leyla was sitting cross-legged, mapping out the week’s lessons. She was planning to review the alphabet and assess the level of the students. He had no plan other than the task Leyla had given him: to teach the children mathematics and English.
‘Would you calm down, please.’
Sami had reorganized his papers for the fourth time and accidentally knocked over a jar of colouring pencils. Much as he tried to suppress certain memories, the smallest detail was enough to bring them back. His breathing was shallow as he stood staring at the rainbow of pencils in his hand. The engraved letters: Faber-Castell.
‘What if no one shows up?’
‘They’ll be here,’ Leyla said calmly.
The next morning he shaved for the first time in weeks, and washed and combed his hair. The frosty streets were teeming with people. He was in a hurry and tapped a woman on the shoulder. She was holding a child in each hand, a girl with a side plait and a boy with an unruly fringe.
‘What happened?’
‘Something happened?’ The woman stopped dead in the middle of the road while the girl tugged her sleeve.
‘Mummy, hurry, we’re going to be late.’
‘I didn’t mean to scare you, it’s just so busy today.’
‘Oh, it’s the children, you know. They’ve opened a school in the area. Can you imagine? It’s been almost a year since my daughter last went to school. She had only just learnt to read and my son never even started.’
Sami thanked her and continued at a brisk pace to the school house. Leyla was already standing at the gate, greeting people. She held her hand out to the children first, then their parents.
‘Amin,’ said the little boy he had just met.
‘Mona,’ said his older sister with the plait.
In the end the courtyard was so crowded they had to ask the parents to leave. Come back at two, we’ll look after them until then. See you soon, sweetheart, be a good boy and make your parents proud. Just leave, Dad, I’m fine by myself. There, there, I’ll help you with your homework tonight. You are going to give them homework, aren’t you, sir?
Sami was taken aback but Leyla came to his aid.
‘There might be homework,’ she said. ‘But the most important thing right now is to build routines and encourage the children’s desire to learn. Don’t you think?’
When the parents had left, twenty-four children remained in the courtyard. Leyla started things off with a game where the children had to line up in order of age. Mona raised her hand.
‘But, miss, how are we supposed to know who’s oldest?’
‘I guess you’ll have to ask each other.’
So the children turned to each other and asked about birthdays and soon the ice was broken. After much laughter and giggling, they had formed a line, with the little boy called Amin first.
‘And how old are you?’ Leyla asked.
‘Five and three-quarters, miss,’ Amin said, with his arms pressed stiffly to his sides.
Leyla divided the children into two groups, with the youngest students, from five to eight, in one. The younger group went into the classroom with Leyla while the older students, from nine to twelve, stayed with Sami in the courtyard for physical exercise. In the afternoon, it was Sami’s turn to teach inside, first the older group, then the younger, by the heat of the stove.
* * *
—
We’ve started a school, he wrote to Sarah. The kids call me Mister Teacher, can u believe it?
For the first time in a long while, she texted a heart.
Mister Sami, it suits u. Bahebak kteer.
I love u too, he answered.
* * *
—
The next winter morning, there were thirty children in the courtyard. At the end of the week, closer to fifty. At first, Sami yelled at them when they fought or talked during class. But then he realized they were bored and viewed school as a break when they could see their friends. War was not constant battles, there were periods of tedium. At the end of the day, the children growing restless and playing was a good sign – better that than the apathetic look he had noticed in some children’s eyes.
Sami changed tactics and practised patience, giving them space to both play and learn new things. Mona and Amin were among the hardest-working students, shy but always helpful.
However, external circumstances made teaching more challenging. The regime’s airstrikes be
gan with a couple of reconnaissance planes. Then the planes returned, circled above them and released their bombs. While the shells from mortars could weigh up to five pounds, the airdropped bombs were ten times bigger. The ground rumbled for miles. Smoke rose in mushroom-like clouds. During the airstrikes, hiding in a basement wasn’t an option; the bombs obliterated everything in their path.
If it was the Free Syrian Army the regime was targeting, the aerial assaults were not particularly helpful. The rebels cleaved to the red line, while the bombs were dropped over the city centre, where the civilians lived. Bombs aimed at the red line would have risked hitting the regime’s headquarters, since their strike radius was at least three-quarters of a mile.
Sami and Leyla continued to document events when they weren’t teaching. Leyla filmed and painted murals, believing art to be a way of reclaiming the city. Our hearts belong here, she wrote. We’re going to return. Sometimes she painted flowers and animals so the children would have something comforting to look at.
In an interview, much later, he heard Leyla describe her work. Body parts were the hardest things to film, she said. The man looking for a hand among the debris. The boy staring straight into the camera, in shock, not realizing he had lost a foot. The suffering of the animals was difficult, too. Limping pigeons and dogs without hind legs. The cats that gave in to hunger and ate human corpses. A porcelain cup could be devastating. Sitting on a table, waiting to be drunk from, no one coming to pick it up.
Sami agreed that the remnants of everyday life were unbearable. The children’s coats on the hooks, covered in dust, in the empty houses where they were looking for food. School backpacks, workbooks and felt-tip pens. Death was ever-present, breathing in their stead, an endless wait. When it stepped in and snatched away a life, it left a black hole that was soon filled with more waiting.
Even so, the airstrikes, too, became a sort of routine, predictable: twice or three times a week the aeroplanes approached. You had to do your errands at the right time of day, in the right place, and keep an eye out for scouting drones.
They tried to continue teaching as usual despite the airstrikes, to distract their students from the world around them. To let the classroom be a reminder of what everyday life used to be. But it was only possible up to a point. Even if the school remained a haven, they couldn’t protect the children for ever.
* * *
—
In the last days of January 2013, after taking pictures in the area, Sami ran into two of the children from school, Mona and Amin. The snow had melted and they were playing next to a blocked-off intersection near their house.
‘Look at my bike,’ Amin said proudly and climbed on the saddle.
‘What do you mean, your bike? It’s our bike,’ said his big sister.
‘That’s great. Where did you find it?’
They pointed in unison at a house whose façade had collapsed.
‘OK, but it’s dangerous in there. Bricks can come loose and fall down.’
‘How much does a brick hurt?’ Amin asked.
‘It depends on how big it is, obviously,’ Mona told him.
While they argued about the brick and who should have first go on the bike, Sami got out his camera. It was the hour before sunset and everything was golden. The evening light was filtered through the spokes, drawing lines of shadow on the asphalt.
‘Take our picture,’ Amin said and leaned one arm on the handlebar.
Mona picked up a white kitten with a black tail, which had come to them in hope for food. Sami snapped a few pictures and said it was getting late; their parents were probably waiting for them.
‘We’re just going to play for a bit longer, sir.’
The mortar shell hit half an hour later.
* * *
—
The shockwave had broken the windows in the adjacent buildings and no people could be seen in the concrete cloud that rose after the explosion. Searching the debris, they found the bike, whose red lacquer finish was blanketed by grey dust. Then they found Mona’s shoes, next to her braid with the pink hair tie. Amin’s body was warm when they dug it out, his jeans soaked with urine.
Their father cried when he saw the picture Sami had taken of the children, the moment when everything was still possible. When the black and white cat was trying to wriggle out of Mona’s arms. When Amin was balancing on the tall saddle with his tiptoes on the ground.
‘Is there anything I can do?’
The children’s father shook his head.
‘Post the picture. Let the world see.’
Sami thought about Nizar Qabbani, who had written about his wife’s death and expressed his grief and rage in poetry, in a poem that had outlived its author. But to what avail? It was still just words, as meaningless as the verses his grandmother had sung to him when he fell off his bike and broke his finger a long time ago. A life was a life. It could never be recreated in words or pictures.
* * *
—
Leyla told the other students about Mona and Amin’s death. She said there was a fixed number of souls on this Earth and when someone dies a metamorphosis takes place, through which the soul from the deceased passes to a newborn baby.
‘Where did you get that from?’ Sami asked her afterwards.
‘It was something my parents used to tell me,’ Leyla said.
‘Do you really think that’s how it works?’
‘What does it matter what I think? What matters is what the children think.’
29
‘WHERE DID IT hit? Around yours?’
‘No. And you, is everyone on your street OK?’
Sami let out a sigh of relief when he heard Leyla’s voice but then they fell silent. Someone else had been hit instead, in one of the myriad airstrikes that had finally forced them to close the school, in the beginning of summer. Someone else was lying in the dark, staring up at a ray of light and a corner of blue sky, a window in the debris.
He ran outside and forgot for a moment where he was going. There, the silvery cypress trees. There, the sun shimmering over the rooftops, over the houses that still had rooftops. There, the wooden fence and, behind the fence, the park with its swings and patch of greenery. Sami had played there as a child, swinging higher and higher until he almost reached the sky. One time Sami had challenged his little brother to jump from the top, after he himself had made a perfect landing in the dust. Malik tried and scraped both knees, and Sami made him promise not to tell their mum. But even though Malik was hurt, he was the one who joked about it, so Sami wouldn’t feel bad.
‘Better practise,’ Malik said and dusted off his wobbly knees.
‘Practise for what?’
‘For when God throws us out of heaven.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Sami laughed. ‘You’ll go to paradise, I’m going to hell.’
‘Yeah, I know. But someone should keep you company, right?’
Other times, Sami and Muhammed used to go to the playground in the evenings, sharing a cigarette, his friend’s pale face and curly hair illuminated by the soft glow. All this seemed so long ago.
Sami took a step forward and felt a pain rise when his foot hit a brick. That was when he remembered – the missile.
After helping to dig out the dead, they buried the bodies in the former playground. Sami recognized one of the women he had seen as recently as the week before. She had been hiding in a stairwell, kissing a rebel soldier she had met at a checkpoint. She wore the same red headscarf now as they put her in the ground.
That night, Sami and Malik made a fire to cook soup, and the next day Sami went out and chopped down the fence by the playground. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before; the fence was dry and old and would burn well.
Sami chopped wood once or twice a day, usually at dawn before the airstrikes began. It might be old chairs, kitchen tables
or thick limbs from damaged trees. Every other or every third day he scavenged for food, usually after a bomb raid when there was reason to expect a moment’s peace.
The mortar shells, on the other hand, rained down on them both day and night. Sami brought his camera and took pictures, then returned before nightfall and hung out with friends until late.
He felt both relief and sorrow when the room began to grow lighter. It was all going to start over again. The future was narrowing until it was no wider than the barrel of a rifle.
I dunno if u were brave or crazy to stay, Sarah wrote.
Neither, he answered. I was feeling guilty.
But guilty over what, exactly? That he hadn’t done enough or that he’d done too much? Or guilty to have survived so far, when so many others hadn’t?
* * *
—
After a while, Sami forgot his own smell. He reeked in the heat but there was no way of differentiating his own body odour from the smell of dirty and unwashed clothes. Sami washed when he could, but the choice between drinking water and clean clothes was a no-brainer. He boiled the water to kill the worst of the bacteria but his bowels were chronically unsettled.
It might have been the food they ate. Rice that had lain on the floor of bombed-out shops for over a year was collected and rinsed. Unripe fruit was eaten, peel and all. ‘Bread’ consisted of wheat husks they did their best to separate from rat droppings, glass and stones, kneaded together and baked over embers.
‘One day, we’ll be eating rats,’ Muhammed said.
That was the line in the sand; the day they had to eat rats, it was over. Sami couldn’t bring himself to eat cat either. At the start of the siege, when there was still food to be found, he had given the stray cats expired tins of tuna. They still gathered outside his door and meowed when they saw him, long after he had stopped feeding them.