Son of Syria

by Schafer, Ben

  And, in a terrible moment, our hope of escape vanished.

  Time slowed to a crawl. I could only watch as the helicopter plummeted toward the parking lot. The rotor blades connected with a palm tree on the way down and tore into it like a demented weed trimmer. The helicopter slammed into the street in front of the office complex with a thunderous shriek of shredding metal.

  God help us all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “THIS is stupid,” I muttered. I looked around the quiet street. There were no people nearby, and the small but well-maintained house was far enough from the major roads that traffic was light. It was hard to imagine that we were in the heart of the greatest city in Syria. I wondered what this peace and quiet cost. The man who owned it wasn’t wealthy by any means, but he knew the right people.

  I knocked on the heavy wooden door. When there was not an immediate response, I let out a sigh of relief. “Well, I tried. There’s no one home.” I turned to leave. Then I heard the door groan as it opened.

  “Kyle!” Waseem’s voice boomed. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be going to school?”

  “I was on my way, sir,” I said. I tilted my head to the backpack on my shoulder. “I didn’t see Azima yesterday. I was wondering if she was sick.”

  Waseem frowned. “Yes, she has a fever. She is resting now. Perhaps you will see her tomorrow.” While he spoke, sudden motion at the side of the house caught my eye.

  I kept any reaction from my face and simply nodded. “I see. I should continue on to school, then. I thank you for your time, Mr. Zbida.”

  He started to close the door, then stopped. “Oh, when you see your father, tell him that the new contracts have arrived. He needs to sign them soon. Things are much more serious than I thought. Delays will not be tolerated.”

  “I will do that, sir. Thank you.” When he shut the door, I made my way to the alley beside his house. Azima was there, quietly closing her window behind her. She was dressed in a gray skirt and white cotton T-shirt which bore the logo of a popular Lebanese rock band. A bright green headscarf held back her hair, which she was busy adjusting when I rounded the corner.

  “You seem to have made a quick recovery,” I said.

  She jumped and spun around. “Kyle,” she breathed. “Don’t be so loud. My father might hear.”

  “Aren’t you afraid he’ll just go into your room and see you’re not in bed?”

  She shook her head. “He placed me in quarantine. ‘It would do you no good if I got sick, too.’” She said in an impression of her father’s voice. “All it took was the old fool-the-thermometer trick and some expert acting.” She held a hand to her forehead. “‘Oh, father. I can’t be sick. Not today. We have a big test in history class. You can’t make me miss that,” she giggled.

  “Come on, Azima. We’ve got to get to school.”

  “No, we don’t. I hate that stuffy place. Why do we have to go there?”

  “My parents said that it’s the best school in Damascus. The kids of all the ambassadors go there.”

  “It’s just so ordinary. You and I were meant for . . .” she shrugged as words failed her. “Well, more than this, anyway.” Light glinted in her eyes. “You should spend the day with me. It’ll be so much more fun.”

  I looked at my backpack, then back to Azima. “I don’t know, Azima. We could get into a lot of trouble for this.”

  She flipped her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Who cares? Will we bring the whole world crashing down on our heads by skipping school?” She looked around theatrically. “No. The planet is still spinning. Have a little fun for once.”

  I considered her words. “Well, we’re only talking about medieval history today.”

  “Exactly. What will you need to know about knights and swords and holy wars in the real world?”

  I stood still for another minute, then took the backpack off my shoulder. I hid it in a small alcove beside Azima’s window. “Okay. Just today. You understand?”

  The grin on her face grew so large I thought she might pull a muscle. “Oh, yes! Yes, yes, yes!” She grabbed my arm and tugged. “Let’s go. I’ve got so many things to show you.” She released my arm and her grin turned mischievous, a look that had become her trademark. “That is, if you can catch me!” She spun on her heel and sprinted down the peaceful street.

  I rolled my eyes and took off after her. “Do we have to do this every time?”

  We flew down the street, moving parallel with the road. The few pedestrians at this hour in the morning jumped out of our way and began shouting at us. One man with a wide-brimmed hat and a briefcase twirled around to look at the source of the commotion, his briefcase skimming mere inches from Azima’s nose. She moved on undeterred. The man in the hat glared at me and shouted an obscenity.

  I held up my hands. “I’m sorry, sir. Sorry.”

  Azima changed directions without warning and I struggled to maintain my pace. I followed her into a small alley between two buildings. The air was filled with the sickly-sweet scent of rotting fruit and clouds of tiny insects. They buzzed and bit at every step. Azima didn’t even seem to notice.

  “Always running somewhere,” I muttered. “It just seems like there should be an easier way to—Whoa!” An unseen door to the building on my right flew open directly in my path and a man wearing a greasy apron emerged. I contorted my body to avoid a collision. Instead of hitting the cook, I stumbled into the side of a Dumpster. I threw out my hands to mitigate the impact, and when I pulled them away they were coated in black sludge. I flung as much of it off my hands as I could, then resumed the chase.

  That delay gave Azima an advantage of almost twenty feet, but with my longer stride I was certain that I could catch up with her in a flat-out foot race. I think Azima understood that, because when she reached the other side of the alley she cut to the left and vanished.

  I emerged from the alley and almost collided with a young woman carrying a bolt of shimmering fabric. The woman shrieked.

  “Sorry,” I said. It came out as a wheeze.

  Azima had disappeared into the souq, a huge street marketplace that stretched for blocks. The air was filled with the scent of spices and the shouts of merchants vying for customers. The place was a maze of stalls. I kept moving in the direction I had last seen Azima. My eyes scanned the souq for the bright green headscarf she wore.

  There. I saw a flash of green twenty feet in front of me. She must have been slowed by the crowds and the stalls as much as I had been. Maybe I had a chance at catching her, after all. I took off into the market after her.

  I hadn’t taken five steps before someone jostled me and threw me off-balance. I fell against a rickety wooden stand covered in apricots, and it strained against the sudden weight. I regained my balance and kept moving.

  The merchant shouted at me, using words that were inappropriate for such a public setting. And he wasn’t the only one. Every person I passed, bumped, or sent scurrying out of my path had something to say about it. Soon, I had collected a sizable chorus of angry voices behind me. I didn’t care. I was closing in on Azima.

  Without warning, a man appeared out of the crowd. He led a donkey with an old rope. The donkey, in turn, hauled a cart filled with dried fruits. I was moving too fast to stop, so I dove forward. I missed the donkey by a fraction of an inch and landed hard on the cobblestones, rolling several times before coming to a stop. I groaned.

  “Are you crazy?” the man with the donkey yelled. “You could have hurt my donkey.”

  “I’m fine. Thanks,” I mumbled. My body ached as I rose to my feet. My pants were torn and covered in filth, and my palms were scraped raw. There was no way that I could catch up with Azima now. I looked up, expecting to see the green scarf at the far end of the souq by this point.

  A sudden sharp whistle caught my ear. My head whipped around to the left. There, leaning against a wall beside a tiny alley, was Azima. She grinned ear to ear. She beckoned with her right hand and held her left in a discre
te pocket sewn into her skirt.

  When I reached her, she could no longer contain her laughter. “Oh, man. That was so funny. I especially liked the way you dove in front of that donkey.” She pantomimed throwing herself into a swan dive. “It was great! You really know how to put on a show.”

  “I’m glad you’re having such a good time.” I dusted myself off. “I knew skipping class today was a mistake.”

  “Oh, cheer up. We’re almost there. I mean, you did catch up with me.”

  “Great,” I grunted. “Though I think I bruised a rib.”

  “Yeah, you should really be more careful,” Azima laughed. “You’re a delicate desert flower.”

  Azima walked into the alley and I followed her. A few feet from the entrance the glaring sun dropped away to a dim twilight. The path was hardly large enough for two people to walk side by side. The only vehicles that could travel through here were bicycles, and a battered yellow ten-speed rested against the exposed bricks of the building on our left. It was missing one wheel, and the other squeaked and spun lazily as it caught the breeze.

  This was less of an alley and more of a crevice in the urban landscape. We had strayed into one of the worse neighborhoods in town. The buildings on either side were crumbling and large sections of masonry were missing entirely. One of these holes overhead was so large that I could see into the room beyond it. There was an empty clothesline above my head and another about thirty yards deeper into the alley. Colorful shirts and dresses were suspended from the second line. They swayed with every gust and looked like dancing ghosts in the dim light.

  I shivered, and not just because of the wind. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be here, Azima.”

  She put a fist on her hip. “Will you stop worrying and trust me?” Azima began climbing the fire escape on one of the buildings.

  I grabbed the iron ladder and began climbing after her. I grumbled the entire time. She waited for me on the third story. “We’re here,” she declared.

  I looked around. “Your secret is this fire escape?” I asked. “I’ve got to admit, Azima, it certainly is—” I looked at the red dust that coated my hands and clung to the grime left over from my collision with the Dumpster, “Rusty.”

  She shook her head. “Not the fire escape.” She pointed down and across the narrow gap to the huge hole in the wall I noticed earlier. “All we have to do is jump across and—”

  “Jump? Are you crazy?”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything I haven’t already done,” Azima said. “Trust me. I promise it’ll be worth it.”

  I looked down the twenty-five foot drop to the hard stone below and gulped. The safety railing had been eaten away by rust and fallen away, leaving nothing between me and the gap. This was really dumb, but I was a young man on the cusp of puberty. Doing dumb stuff to impress girls is kind of required. So I took a deep breath and gauged the distance. The rational part of my brain was screaming at me that it didn’t make any sense, that the math didn’t add up. I told that part of my brain to shut up.

  I stepped back from the edge as far as I could. I took a series of rapid breaths, then took off sprinting toward the gap. At the last second, my legs pumped and propelled me into the air. For a moment, I was flying. I was untouchable. I let loose a wild cheer. It was just so much fun.

  Then, I promptly collided into the brick wall on the other side of the crevice. I screamed as I fell, flailing desperately for some sort of hand hold. My left hand caught the edge of the opening, but I didn’t have enough strength to pull myself up. I was stuck twenty feet in the air and dangling by one arm. That might not sound like a long fall, but at the time it felt like I was perched above a cliff.

  “Hold on, Kyle!” Azima shouted. She leapt across the gap and landed neatly on some rugs inside the open room. Then she turned around and grabbed my right arm. She pulled with all her strength and I managed to gain a foot hold. It was slow going, but with her help I made my way up and over the ledge.

  When I finally crawled up into the alcove, I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes. “Let’s agree to never do that again.” I wanted to take a nap. I wanted to go home.

  “Wake up, Kyle! You’re missing the fun part.”

  I didn’t open my eyes. “Which ‘fun part’ am I missing? The part where I’m sent flying into a Dumpster? How about the one where I bruise a rib diving in front of a donkey?”

  “I don’t think you bruised a rib.”

  “Oh, I know,” I continued. “It must be the part where I crash face first into a brick wall and nearly fall to my death.”

  Azima sighed. “Ugh, you did not almost fall to your death. Broken leg, probably. Broken back, at worst. But you’re focusing on the journey when we’ve reached the destination. Open your eyes. Tell me what you see.”

  Against my better judgment, I did. “I see what looks like an empty dining room in a condemned apartment in the low-rent side of town with nothing but some rugs and what looks like a plastic planter turned upside down.” I glanced at Azima. “Now I see a girl who is crazy enough to think that this is worth all the misery I just had to go through.”

  “Hmm. I’d hoped you’d have learned to look past appearances by now, Kyle. True, the building is unoccupied and is supposed to be condemned. But the owners can’t get anyone to buy the land, so the abandoned building stays up because demolition is too expensive without a buyer lined up for the property.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” I asked.

  She ignored the question. “And where you see a collection of useless junk, I see an attempt to make this empty space more comfortable. This is all I could sneak in here. It’s not like I could bring a couch, a TV, and a refrigerator up here with me. Speaking of which,” she reached into the hidden pocket and poured out a handful of pistachios onto the planter. “Snacks.”

  “When did you get those?”

  “About the same time you were making such a scene with the donkey. None of the shopkeepers were watching their stalls. I could have made off with a lot more than this.”

  I sat up and picked a pistachio. I popped it in my mouth. “I’m glad you didn’t,” I said before I finished chewing.

  “But, finally, you seem to have forgotten one thing.”

  I grabbed another pistachio. “Yeah? What’s that?”

  She pointed to one of the large windows on the opposite side of the room. “The view.”

  I moved to get a better look at the window. It was cracked and had several irregular shards of glass missing. Other children, I guessed, enjoyed tossing stones at the decaying structure.

  But beyond the window was an incredible view of the souq. Hundreds of people flowed like streams around islands of vibrant tapestries, colorful fruit, and anything else the shop owners had for sale. I could see the whole market from here, and past its edges where the hustle and bustle of daily life in Damascus went about unabated. Farther still, off to the northwest, was the looming peak of Mount Qasioun. I smiled at the memories the sight evoked.

  I sat cross-legged on the floor. The view of the souq vanished, but the wide mountain was still visible. Azima took a pistachio and joined me. We sat together in silence for a few minutes, lost in our thoughts.

  “Kyle, what do you want from life?” Azima asked.

  “Uh, I don’t know. For crying out loud, Azima, I’m only thirteen. I’ve got time to figure it out.”

  “I’ve decided that I want to be an actress. I could get a job that would take me to Beirut. Or Cairo, maybe. Just away from Damascus.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why do you hate Damascus?”

  “I don’t hate it,” Azima replied. She shifted her gaze from the window to me for an instant. “Not all of it. But I just feel like I can never reach my full potential here.”

  I pointed at the mountain. “Remember when you were going to move to Mount Qasioun?” I asked.

  She grinned. “Yes. I was going to live like a hermit all by myself.”

  “That’s
not quite true,” I said. “You did invite me to join you.” Azima blushed but said nothing. I leaned back and rested on my elbows. “Then my mother took us to eat at one of the restaurants near the peak and we realized the truth. Our ‘safe haven’ was one of the most popular spots in the city. We saw the dream for what it really was.”

  “The fantasy of a child,” Azima commented. Her voice was odd and distant.

  “Don’t you think that’s all this is?” I swept my arm to indicate the empty room. “An attempt to escape reality?”

  A sad smile touched Azima’s lips. “And why shouldn’t I escape reality? What good has reality ever done me? My father treats me like his puppet, I don’t even remember my mother, and society expects me to have no dreams for myself. Why shouldn’t I cling to my fantasy?”

  “But what good will your fantasy do you?” I countered. “If you work on your life, take control of it, you can be happy.”

  “Now who is living a fantasy?” Azima scoffed. “You can’t control reality, Kyle. It is brutal, it is relentless, and it is heartless.” She looked at her lap and added, “For some of us more than others.”

  “I realize I have been blessed. But I . . .” I frowned. “I mean, my parents consider you to be a part of our family, too.”

  Azima shrugged absently. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She bit her lip, obviously hesitant about something. Then, without warning, she leaned toward me and kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it, and by the time I realized what was happening she had pulled away.

  Neither of us spoke for a while after that. We just watched the city move past beneath us as we denied reality together, even if was just for one day.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  MOVE.

  That word dominated my thoughts. We had to move. Whoever fired that rocket would be coming for us. If they came in force, and I had no reason to believe that they wouldn’t, this rooftop would be a deathtrap. I didn’t know how many of us had survived the helicopter’s near-miss, but if we didn’t get to safer ground none of us would be making it out of here.