Escape from Aleppo

by N. H. Senzai

  “We can’t go in there,” hissed Basel, resisting. “We’ll be dead for sure!”

  “We’re not going all the way up,” said Nadia. “Just to the guard tower till things calm down.”

  “I don’t know about this . . . ,” muttered Basel, but followed.

  Through the hole in the sheet, Nadia kept an eye on the guard tower as they scurried along the boundary wall as fast as they could. Eighty more feet . . . thirty . . . ten more. She glanced beyond the tower toward the bridge. “Oh no,” she gasped. Grabbing Basel’s hand, she pulled him down to the base of the wall.

  “Ouch,” grumbled Basel, rubbing his elbow. “What did you do that for?”

  “Sorry,” said Nadia. “The doors to the citadel are open. Soldiers are coming down the bridge.”

  “What do we do now?”

  Anger and fear flared through her. Yes, what do we do now? Feeling hopeless, she punched the wall with a clenched fist, about to admit defeat. The concrete sent a shock of pain rattling against her knuckles. The wall . . .

  • • •

  Booted feet stomped along the walkway, weapons rattling, breaths heavy, the air crackling with tension. Nadia and Basel sat six inches away, scrunched over, on the other side of the boundary wall. With seconds to spare, they’d climbed over the waist-high concrete barrier that separated the walkway from the lip of the moat, before the rebels could spot them. Meanwhile, the Syrian soldiers exiting the main gates of the citadel had made their way across the bridge to the guard tower and had barricaded themselves inside.

  “Come on,” said Nadia, heart pounding as she shoved the sheet into her backpack. The rain had picked up, and it soaked them to the bone as they slithered down the steep embankment slick with mud. The moat stretched along the bottom, passing under the stone arches supporting the bridge. Water pooled in the usually dry ditch, swirling past fragments of wall that had tumbled down from the hill. Nadia grabbed Basel’s hand and sloshed through the icy puddles, hurrying toward the protection of the arches, about seventy feet away.

  “I don’t like this,” whispered Basel, his usually confident voice wavering. “I don’t know how to swim.”

  “It’s okay,” panted Nadia, dragging him on. “It isn’t very deep—I’ll help you.”

  Basel’s grip tightened, and without warning he halted. Irritated, Nadia glanced back and caught the look of horror on his face. Something floated by, then caught on a jagged outcropping of rock: torn jeans . . . a bloodied shirt. She glimpsed a young face, bloated and pale. Eyes wide, she couldn’t help but think that the dead boy looked like her brother. Jad, that could be Jad, she thought, or Malik, or my dad. . . . Her mind froze.

  “Nadia,” Basel cried, “we have to go. . . .”

  But Nadia stood rooted to the spot, paralyzed. Basel pushed her forward, and icy currents lapped against her legs. She winced as rough stone grazed her cheek when she stumbled under the safety of the bridge. Basel stared at her, fear pooling in his eyes. “Are you okay?” he whispered apprehensively. “Please be okay. . . .”

  Nadia slumped against the wall, eyes squeezed shut. I’m not okay, she thought, her body shivering uncontrollably. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t save Basel—I nearly got him killed. I can’t save anyone . . . not even myself. Basel’s skinny arms circled her waist, and his cold face pressed against her neck. Startled, she opened her eyes to see the little boy hugging her as if his life depended on it.

  A terrible boom echoed above. Her head jerked up, and she expected an explosion or a jet roaring past. But when a blinding streak of lightning illuminated the citadel so that it glowed like a golden beacon against the darkening sky, she realized it was thunder. “Ya Haddad . . . ,” she muttered, as Basel tightened his arms.

  “Ya what?” he mumbled against her skin.

  A memory tugged at her mind . . . a cool spring day, when she was about ten. An apple-cheeked history student from the university was giving Nadia’s family a tour. Vivacious and full of stories about the secret tunnels and dungeons that ran beneath the citadel, she’d led the family to the heart of the complex, to its oldest site. A basalt sphinx and lion guarded the entrance to an ancient temple that housed a stone carving: a powerful bearded figure wearing a bull-horned headdress and carrying a thunderbolt.

  “Ya what?” repeated Basel.

  Nadia took a deep breath, her pulse calmer. “Remember the Ebla tablet we saw at Professor Laila’s hideout?” At his nod, she continued, “Haddad was the storm god from that time. He was known as the protector of life and growing things. His temple is in the heart of the citadel.”

  “Maybe he’s protecting us,” said Basel, as another strike of lightning brightened the skies.

  With a pained grin, Nadia hugged Basel back, wanting to keep him safe as she would her little brother. Protecting us. Yes, she thought with returning determination. “Come,” she said, “we need to go.”

  “Do you think Ammo Mazen and Tarek have reached the gate and are waiting for us?” asked Basel.

  “They might have,” answered Nadia, pulling out the compass.

  “Which way do we go?” asked Basel, his teeth chattering.

  “We follow the curve of the moat,” she said. “Once we’re on the other side of the citadel, we’ll climb out and make our way to the gate.”

  “Bab al-Hadid gate,” said Basel. “Sounds like the god Haddad.”

  “Right,” said Nadia, with what she hoped was an encouraging smile. She eyed the moat and was about to emerge from under the arch when shouts rang out above them. She shrank back into the shadows. Basel stood peering down at the water swirling around their ankles. Nadia looked up at the boundary wall where they’d climbed over. It was quiet. The men had disappeared, at least for the moment. She knew the lull wouldn’t last. . . . A clash was coming.

  • • •

  Half an hour later, they ducked behind a car parked at a roundabout. “There it is,” whispered Nadia. Bab al-Hadid. The iron gate. They looked through the arched doorway that led into a stone tower, hoping for a glimpse of Ammo Mazen or Tarek. But there was no movement.

  “Maybe they’re inside the tower,” whispered Basel.

  “They should have been here a long time ago,” muttered Nadia, looking for the cart or Jamila.

  “Maybe they got stuck somewhere along the way,” said Basel matter-of-factly.

  She nodded, trying to appear positive, but she couldn’t stop herself from running through the possibilities: shot by snipers, bombed, caught by rebels . . .

  “We’ll just wait,” said Basel, pointing to a spot behind an empty newspaper kiosk, which they barricaded with empty crates and cardboard.

  Nadia slumped beside him and looked down at her hands, surprised to see that her mittens had disappeared, leaving chipped and torn nails. She stared at the flecks of nail polish and froze, expecting a familiar sense of panic to flood her chest. But it didn’t come. I don’t really care, she thought. She looked out between a gap in the cardboard and stared at the moon. She wondered where her family was and whether they were gazing at the same moon, safe on the Turkish border. Releasing a hot gush of air from her lungs, she continued staring at the silver orb, dancing between the clouds, a flickering beacon.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  January 13, 2013

  Nadia hadn’t seen Ms. Darwish in over six months. Not since that last day at school, the day before the school permanently shut its doors after months of dwindling enrollment and growing violence on the streets. But there she was, in the middle of the night, her sharp features framed by a plum scarf, her figure leaner. She enveloped Nadia in a warm hug and introduced her brother, Safwan, a police captain. Although Nadia was surprised to see her, her parents weren’t. The four of them disappeared into the living room with stern instructions that they were not to be disturbed.

  Like many across Syria, Ms. Darwish’s Sunni family had been fractured by differing loyalties. One faction believed in ending years of tyranny by supporting the rebels. The ot
her side, however, saw Assad, no matter how terrible he was, as the only force that could hold Syria together, allowing them to live in relative peace and comfort. They’d seen how other countries in the region, like Iraq, had turned into a living hell after their dictators, Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s case, had been toppled. They didn’t want Syria to suffer that same fate. Ms. Darwish’s father supported the regime, and he’d decided to move his wife and their children, along with spouses and grandchildren, to Damascus. But before she left, Ms. Darwish fulfilled a request Nadia’s mother had made to her in a desperate phone call the day before. And as Nadia later learned, Safwan had unearthed the information they needed, using his extensive contacts with the mukhabarat.

  • • •

  The evening after Ms. Darwish’s visit, Khala Shakira sat, too shocked to even weep. But Razan, huddled beside her mother, was doubled over with sobs. The entire family was crammed into her and Nadia’s grandparents’ living room, and even the little kids were there, silent as mice.

  “Are you sure it’s him?” asked Jiddo, eyes hopeful as he stared at Ammo Ramzi, standing with Khala Lina.

  Nadia’s father shook his head, face drained of color. “It was just like Safwan told us last night; the mukhabarat picked Zayn up for interrogation. After we bribed the right people, we found him.”

  “Are you sure?” repeated Jiddo.

  “Yes, Father, it’s Zayn,” said Ammo Hadi. “We’re certain.”

  “What happened?” whispered Nana, her usually calm demeanor frayed.

  “He was found near the soccer stadium, in a ditch,” said Nadia’s father.

  “Was it the mukhabarat?” asked Jiddo, his face aging before their eyes, his body trembling.

  “That’s what we’ve heard,” said Ammo Hadi.

  “He shouldn’t have gone back to the office,” said Nana, face drained of color.

  “They came twice to interview him, and when he didn’t provide answers they liked, they took him,” whispered Nadia’s father.

  Silence descended on the room. Tears streamed down Nadia’s face as the phrase took him repeated in her head like a DVD caught on repeat. She knew what that meant. To be taken by the mukhabarat meant a visit to the government’s prisons to be interrogated, tortured . . . killed. An image of her uncle flashed before her, of a man filled with laughter, always telling terrible jokes and bringing home chocolate for the kids. The day they found him, hands and feet bound, a single bullet in his head, was the day Jiddo had the stroke that took his life. It was the day her grandmother’s hair turned white and Khala Shakira stopped talking.

  Later that week, Nadia’s father, uncles, and male cousins stood before Nana. “You must give us permission, Mother,” Nadia’s father pleaded, standing tall in his olive-green woolen coat. “You know we cannot go without your consent.”

  But Nana stayed silent, face haggard. She was dressed in widow’s garb. “How can you ask this of me?” she finally asked, eyes bright with unshed tears. “Zayn and your father are gone. Now you’re asking to risk your lives?”

  “Mother,” said Ammo Hadi. “We’re not safe. Our city and country are no longer safe.”

  “Hadi is right,” echoed Ammo Ramzi. “We must do something.”

  Nadia stood in the shadows, shivering. What her uncle said was true. Within days of Ammo Zayn’s body being found, an old family friend had come by, slipping through the back door. He’d stayed only a few minutes, just long enough to share what he’d learned. Authorities believed Ammo Zayn had been supplying phosphate to rebels to build bombs. Now the family’s name was on a list of potential enemies.

  “We can no longer hide our heads in the sand like ostriches,” continued Ammo Hadi. “Assad is out to erase us from the earth. We have to do something to save our family, our country.”

  With tears streaming down her cheeks, Nana gave them permission to go. So on a chilly January night the men melted away into the darkness to join the rebels. Soon the family received texts with smiling pictures of the men, holding machine guns, giving thumbs-up signs. Over the next few months, Nadia and her aunts and cousins sat huddled beside the television and radio and on the Internet, collecting news. They heard that the Kurds in the north, most notably the Kurdish Salaheddin Brigade, were working with other opposition forces, like her father’s, to create a multireligious and multiethnic coalition. But then rumors began to bubble of rebel groups using civilian homes for shelter, looting supplies, and switching loyalties from one group to another. Things worsened when foreign fighters began arriving from around the world. Many were experienced and came from the ongoing insurgencies in neighboring Iraq; others were novices, emboldened by religious extremism, come to Syria to play at war.

  “We are being squeezed,” wrote Nadia’s father in a text late one night. “On one side by Assad’s forces, on the other by warring rebel groups and foreign fighters. We are losing hope. . . . The country is falling apart before our eyes . . .”

  Chapter Thirty

  October 11, 2013 9:07 p.m.

  Nadia stared at her watch. Where can they be? she thought for the thousandth time, worry burning through her like acid. They’d been waiting for over an hour and the only thing that had crossed their path had been a stray dog and a few mice. Not that Basel had noticed; he’d been fast asleep. Nadia stared across the street at a mural of a Free Syrian Army fighter, bleeding in the faint light from the window above. Beneath it the caption read People, forgive us if we make mistakes. We are dying for you. Over it someone had spray-painted Liar.

  Restless, she rose, rubbing away the ache in her leg, anxious to check the gate again. This time she decided to pass through to the other side, and made her way past a line of shuttered blacksmith shops. A cool breeze whistled by, carrying with it a familiar fragrance—the earthy scent of laurel oil, coupled with olive oil and lye. Nadia shone her flashlight into a small abandoned workshop and found fragments of green bars scattered on the ground: Nana’s favorite soap, manufactured in Aleppo for over a thousand years. As she circled back to the kiosk, Nadia nearly missed the fluttering cloth tied to a pole beside the tower entrance, a red-and-white-checked scarf. Her heart leapt into her throat. Tarek’s keffiyeh. Untying it with shaking fingers, she felt a piece of paper knotted inside.

  • • •

  “Are you sure this is it?” asked Basel, examining the nails that studded the heavy wooden door that stood before them. Nadia double-checked the directions drawn on the page and nodded. With the butt of his gun, he rapped against the wood.

  Within a minute the door opened a crack, then flew open, revealing a disheveled Tarek. “Thank Allah you found us,” he said, voice tight with emotion, as Basel threw himself at him for a hug. He and Nadia grinned at each other like idiots. “Another ten minutes and I was going to go looking for you.”

  “You left great instructions,” said Nadia, handing him back his scarf. “How did you find this place?”

  “Ammo Mazen knew the owner and said it would be safe,” explained Tarek, locking the doors once they’d slipped through.

  “Wow,” said Basel, eyes wide as he saw what lay beyond.

  Wow, indeed, thought Nadia, staring at a lush garden, illuminated by the moon. A beautiful tiled courtyard, its walls decorated with intricate geometric designs, sat in the center. A marble fountain edged with sweet basil and white roses gurgled in the middle. Beyond it rose a two-story house that reminded her of the one in Jdeideh, where they’d found the figs, but this was far grander.

  “Jamila,” cried Nadia, spotting the donkey happily chomping on leaves. She ran over to circle her neck with her arms. “Where’s Ammo Mazen? Is he okay?”

  “He’s inside,” said Tarek, pointing to the doors of the reception hall, standing opposite the iwan, the outside sitting area.

  Nadia hurried through the doors to find a cheery fire in the fireplace, its warmth spreading over a ball of orange fur curled up against an old man lying on a cushioned divan with his eyes closed. Worry ate at her as she examined h
is pale face. “Ammo,” she whispered, kneeling down next to him. “Are you okay?”

  The old man’s eyes fluttered open. “Oh my goodness.” He stared down at her with relief. “I’m fine, my dear, how are you? Whatever took you so long?”

  For the next half hour, they exchanged stories of what had happened after they’d been separated. Mishmish, who’d disappeared after snuggling with Nadia, returned, a dead mouse dangling from his mouth.

  Basel took one look at the plump mouse and said wistfully, “I’m hungry. Do you think there’s any food?”

  Only he could look at a dead rodent and think of food, thought Nadia, exchanging a smile with Tarek. Leaving Ammo Mazen to rest, they used Nadia’s flashlight to forage through the house, passing through a hallway into another sitting room, its ceiling inlaid with colored marble, its walls supporting built-in shelves crammed with statues and carvings. Through another hall, they finally stumbled into the kitchen.

  “Nothing . . . there’s nothing,” grumbled Basel, poking his head into an empty cupboard as Tarek yanked open drawers crammed with utensils.

  Nadia peered behind the stove, hoping to find a bouillon cube, a crust of dried bread, or fallen grains of rice, but sighed in disappointment. A rank, moldy smell spilled from the fridge, which was empty except for a half bottle of milk, curdled and green. Frustrated, she slammed it shut, thinking of the unlimited number of free cartons of dried milk she’d gotten from the dairy company after her advertisement ran. She peered behind the fridge, just in case. Nothing . . .

  “It looks like they took it all with them,” said Tarek, disappointed, as he grabbed a stack of candles he’d found in the back of a cupboard.

  “Maybe I can find a pigeon or something,” said Basel.