Ariella B.
To this letter, which was waiting in her mailbox, Osnat chose not to reply. She read it twice, folded it up, and put it in a drawer. Now she’s standing utterly still, looking out of her window. Three kittens are by the fence: one is busy biting its paw; another is crouching or maybe dozing, but with ears pricked suspiciously, as if catching a thin sound; and the third is chasing its tail, constantly falling over and rolling softly onto its back because it’s so young. A gentle breeze is blowing, just enough to cool a cup of tea. Osnat moves away from the window and sits down on the sofa, back straight, hands on her knees, eyes closed. It’ll be evening soon and she’ll listen to light music on the radio and read a book. Then she’ll undress, fold her afterwork clothes neatly, lay out tomorrow’s work clothes, shower, get into bed, and go to sleep. Her nights are dreamless now, and she wakes before the alarm clock rings. The pigeons wake her.
JANINE DI GIOVANNI
Seven Days in Syria
FROM Granta
1. Hossam
When my son was born, I was unable to cut his nails. It was a visceral rather than rational reaction. I would pick up the tiny baby scissors, look at his translucent fingers, clean and pink as seashells, and feel as though I would retch.
One night, in the hours between darkness and light, the time when the subconscious allows the source of such neuroses to become clear, I understood my inability to perform such a straightforward task. I had a vision of the Iraqi man I once knew who had no fingernails.
In the dying days of the Saddam regime, I had an office inside the Ministry of Information. It was a sinister, paranoid place. Journalists begged, bribed, and pleaded to stay inside the country to report. We were followed, videotaped; our phones were tapped. We all knew that our hotel rooms were equipped with hidden cameras. I dressed and undressed in the darkened bathroom.
Every Monday morning, the man with no fingernails arrived in my office and stretched out his hands, utterly unselfconscious that in place of nails were raw beds of flesh. He had come for his weekly baksheesh. His job was to get the money to seal my satellite phone so I could not use it unless the ministry listened in. Most of us had to pay our way to get anything done, and aside from the fee the ministry charged, we gave a baksheesh to get it done faster.
Every time the man arrived and I looked at his hands spread out, I immediately felt a wave of panic, which turned to nausea, and yet I could not take my eyes off the place where his fingernails had been ripped off. Questions that I could not ask him raced through my mind. What had he done to deserve such agony? Was he an informer? Had he tried to escape Iraq and been caught? Was he part of the secret network attempting to overthrow the dictator? I never asked. Nor would he have answered. We were living in a republic of fear. He became one of those shadowy figures one holds in one’s mind forever, hovering on the fringes.
The man, whose name I never knew, seemed to bear no resentment that he had been disfigured in such a public way. Because hands are one of the first things we usually notice about someone, every time he stretched out his, one knew immediately he had done something.
Or perhaps he had done nothing at all. Perhaps it was a horrible mistake. Such things happen all the time under dictatorships. People get locked up for years, forgotten, then the key turns and a jailer says, “You can go now.” They never know why.
The day Saddam’s regime fell, in the feverish chaos, I went to search for the man with no fingernails to open the seal so I could use my sat phone. But he, like most of the regime staff, had fled.
I went back to Iraq many times after that, but I never saw the man with no fingernails again—except in my dreams.
In northern Lebanon, in a town now inhabited by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and many fighters who are recovering from severe injuries, I do what I do in most war zones: I go to the nearest hospital. In the hallway of a small rehabilitation clinic, I pass a man who recently had twenty-nine bullets removed from his body. Then I meet a paralysed man strapped to a board who is playing with a child—an orphaned child. The man had been badly beaten and left with a fractured spinal cord.
“Every time they hit me,” he said, “they screamed, ‘You want freedom? OK, take this! Here is your great freedom!’”
Then I meet a man I am going to call Hossam, a student of human rights law, who sits on a bed trying to re-enter the human race.
He is twenty-four years old and dressed in baggy dark trousers, a T-shirt, and has a full beard and a shy but gentle demeanour. He keeps trying to buy me packs of Winston cigarettes, but I keep refusing, and he keeps insisting, gently, that he must give me a gift. On his hands and arms I see cigarette burns that I suspect are not self-inflicted.
On another bed, pushed against a wall, a fourteen-year-old boy sits and listens. When I suggest he leave the room for the interview, which I know is going to be painful, the boy explains that his father was killed in front of him, so he can take whatever else is about to come.
Hossam is Sunni and religious, but he still shakes my hand and gets off his bed, limping, to get me a chair. He tells me that he comes from an educated family—his father a civil servant, his brothers all university-educated.
Then he begins to tell his story without words. Slowly he removes his T-shirt. A thick, angry scar that begins under his mid-breastbone swims down to the proximity of his groin. He sighs, lights a cigarette, and starts to talk in a low voice.
Hossam comes from Baba Amr, the district of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, which became an icon for the suffering of civilians when it got pummelled and overrun by Syrian government troops and paramilitary units beginning in December 2011. He admits that he was one of the organizers of the first peaceful demonstrations against the government, but denies that he is a member of the FSA.
“It was about freedom and rights at first,” he says. “Then came bullets.”
On 8 March 2012 at about 7:30 p.m., there were shouts outside the door of his family home. He heard men speaking a foreign language that he believes may have been Farsi. At first he refused to open the door. “I said, ‘We are civilians! We have rights!’”
But the soldiers—who he said were not wearing uniforms, meaning they could have been paramilitary—fired intimidating shots, and his brother opened the door. The men shot the young man through the chest at close range, and the force of the bullet pushed him against a far wall where he fell, dying.
They swarmed into the house like bees. Hossam thinks there were about thirty of them. They shot Hossam in the shoulder and in the hand as he tried to cover his face for protection from the blow he thought was coming. He holds up his deformed fingers, and touches the angry red circle on his shoulder blade. The impact of the bullet made Hossam reel backwards, and he ended up lying next to his dying brother, looking him straight in the eye.
“I was watching the life go out of him,” he says quietly.
The men then picked him and his brother up by their feet and hands and hauled them, along with several dozen men from the neighbourhood, to a truck and threw them in, one on top of the other. They said they were going to use them as human shields. Some of the men in the truck were already dead, many were badly beaten and lay groaning in agony. Others had been shot.
“One guard pulled a man up by his ear and said, ‘Say Bashar al-Assad is your God.’ The man replied, ‘I have no God but God,’ and the guard shot him and tossed him onto the pile of bodies.”
Hossam was bleeding but his brother was closer to death. They took all of them off the truck when they reached the military hospital, and the minute they closed the doors, they began to beat Hossam brutally with sticks of plastic and wood.
Hossam’s brother and the other men were flung into an underground room that served as a morgue. This was the same room where, from then on, Hossam was thrown every night to sleep after he was tortured, on top of the dead bodies. He described how he would lie awake listening to people breathing their last breath.
On the first day, Hossam�
�s torturers, who were Syrian and told him they were doctors, brought him to something like an operating room. There were about four of them. They strapped him down.
“Are you a fighter?”
“No, I’m a student.”
“Are you a fighter?”
They held his penis and took a blade and said, “Okay, cut it off.”
They pressed the blade into his flesh, enough to draw blood, then began leaning painfully on his bladder, forcing him to urinate.
“Why do you want to kill me?” Hossam asked.
“Because your people are killing us,” he was told.
Then they electrocuted him. This went on for three days. Beatings, burnings, cuttings. The worst, he says, was “the cutting.”
“They came for me. I lay down on a table and closed my eyes. I saw them cut my gut with a scalpel.” He tells me that he must have been in shock because the pain did not seem to reach his brain. “Then they lifted something out of my body—I felt pulling. It was my intestine. They stretched it. They held it in their hands and laid it on the outside of my body. They made jokes about how much the rebels ate, how much food was inside my intestines. Then they sewed me back up, but in a rough way so that there was skin and blood everywhere.”
He tells me his stomach was “open” for two days before they properly stitched the wound closed.
The next day the torturers—who clearly must have had medical knowledge—punctured Hossam’s lung. They cut an incision that runs from under his nipple to the middle of his back. They inserted what he described as a small plastic suction tube.
“I felt the air go out of my lung,” he says quietly. “My right lung had collapsed. I could not breathe.”
Hossam is alive only because on the third day of his torture he was left hanging upside down for nearly five hours. He tells me how he was “used as a punchbag by nearly everyone that went by as a way of having fun,” until, later that day, when it was quiet, a doctor suddenly knelt before him.
He whispered, “My job is to make sure that you are still alive and can sustain more torture. But I can’t watch this any more.” The doctor shook his head.
“Your heart has technically stopped twice, once for ten seconds and once for fifteen.” He leaned forward and opened a notebook.
“I am going to close your file and write that on the second attempt to revive you, I failed. Do you understand what I am saying? You are dead.”
As the doctor walked away, he said, “If Allah intends you to live, you will find a way to get out of here.”
It took several minutes for Hossam to understand what the doctor meant. He was giving him a chance to escape, to live. The doctor ordered that Hossam be taken down from his ropes, and he was tossed back into the morgue. As he lay there, he thought of his dead brother, somewhere under the pile of bodies.
Hossam’s story is so grisly that, in spite of his obvious wounds, part of me, a small part of me, wonders if it can be true. How can someone actually survive such treatment? This is what torture also does. In its worst form, it makes us doubt the victims.
After an hour among the dead, in pain so brutal that he could think of nothing but the blood coursing through his ears, a nurse came into the room. She whispered that she had been paid by the FSA to bring out any men who were still alive. She told Hossam to follow her instructions carefully: she would give him a Syrian government uniform, and a number, which he must memorize. She made him say it twice. He mumbled that he could stand no more, and she gave him an injection of painkiller. Then, she gently lifted him up and helped him put on the uniform.
With his arm around the nurse for support, they walked out of the courtyard of the military hospital. It took twenty minutes to walk a few feet; but he tells me that it felt like days. A guard asked him for his serial number. He gave the number the nurse had rehearsed with him while she looked on nervously.
At the gate, a car was waiting. It was someone sent by the FSA. They opened the door and the nurse helped him in and turned away without looking back.
He was free.
2. Daraya
Daraya, a suburb seven kilometres south-west of Damascus, was once known for its handmade wooden furniture. It is also allegedly the place where Saul had a vision of God, became a believer and apostle, and headed for Damascus.
In August 2012, more than 300 people, including women and children, were killed—the town was “cleansed.” It marked a turning point in the war. I was driven by a Sunni resident, Maryam (not her real name), and we passed easily through the government military checkpoints manned by young boys with stubble and Kalashnikovs who looked as though they would be more comfortable in discos than in this war zone.
Maryam’s family came from Daraya, but they had been at their holiday home near the coast when the massacre took place between 23 and 25 August. As we drove, she took in the destruction with a certain sangfroid, but it was clear that she was shocked. She had not yet decided if she supported the government or the rebels. But as an open-minded, educated woman, she wanted to see for herself what was happening in her country.
The government line was that the massacre was a prisoner exchange gone wrong; the FSA said it was an attack and cleansing operation.
“Syrians could not do this to other Syrians,” she said, her voice shaking. It appeared as though the government tanks had rolled right through the centre of town, destroying everything in sight, crushing the street lights, the houses, even the graveyard walls.
There were shattered windows and glass everywhere and I saw a lone cyclist with a cardboard box of tinned groceries strapped to a rack over his back wheel. But there were no other civilians on the streets. The buildings appeared crushed like accordions; it looked as though people had either hidden or run away as fast as they could.
The Syrian opposition was giving figures as high as 2,500 massacred, but the local people I managed to find told me the number was closer to 1,000 people killed, mainly men and boys.
One month on, there are still no clear figures, but the number 330 is usually quoted. But everywhere I went that day in Daraya, I encountered the distinctive smell of the dead decaying.
I met one of the witnesses, a man who had just been released after six months in prison. His crime? There were often demonstrations in the streets. But this man said he wasn’t even at a demonstration when he was arrested.
“They picked up the wrong guy and forgot about me.” He had been led outside in the prison yard, naked but for his underwear in the freezing winter cold, doused with icy water, then left hanging from ropes for hours and beaten. But somehow, he survived.
After a while, Maryam and I went to look for the gravedigger to see if he could give us a count of the dead. There was a crowd of people gathered who were reading a sign put up by desperate families—a list of the missing. They told us that they came every day to see if they could find their loved ones. One man told me he had been looking for his elderly father for three days before finally finding his body decaying in the heat on a farm outside Daraya, along with the bodies of several young men.
“But why kill an old man? Why?” Then he said what I kept hearing, over and over on this trip: “Syrians cannot do this to other Syrians.”
3. The Balloon Has Not Yet Burst
My first trip to Syria was in the stifling heat of summer. I arrived in a local taxi from Beirut. The first thing I saw once I crossed the border was the enormous colour portrait of the leader, common to all autocratic regimes. This was of the youthful, triangular face of Bashar al-Assad.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 12