The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  His youngest brother had all the same reasons to share his politics, but he did not. He realised he was powerless and revelled in the fact. He studied fine arts and became an artist. He taught art at a school in Tartus until he was married, and then suddenly an art teacher’s salary was not enough. He ended up playing the darbuka in a seaside nightclub, accompanying the dancers. I once asked him to take me with him so I could watch, but he refused. The place was not suitable for “people like us.” Even though he worked there! It was “inappropriate,” he said. He also bought an unlicensed gun when he started working at the club. (At the time I did not know it would be used for other ends when the revolution began.)

  My eldest cousin, the son of my father’s half-brother, was an engineer. We were friendly and saw each other every two or three months. He often visited us in Damascus and spent the night, and we always stayed up late chatting. His wife was from Lattakia, and her family were part of the shabiha, Assad’s militia. He was not on good terms with them. He tried to distance himself but they threatened to kill him, so he left well enough alone. Two years after the revolution began, this cousin told me that he had killed nine people so far, and would not mind making me the tenth.

  On my last visit to Damascus, before Kamil broke my shackles and launched me into the world, I brought up a subject we had discussed before: how my life was filled with women. Previously, I had said all the men in my life were disabled, ill or dead…and on that last visit, I added “or murderers.” Something flickered in Kamil’s eyes, a movement I barely caught behind the thick smoke. Was this why he set me free, to protect me from what lurked in Damascus? Maybe he was telling me, “Go to Beirut, and don’t ever come back.” Exactly two months later, my eldest girl cousin wrote me a letter. “I don’t hope they kill your mother, oh no,” she wrote. “I hope they rape you in front of her, and then slaughter you like an animal, so she spends the rest of her days in agony.” That was what she wrote—my own cousin. The only one of her siblings who graduated from university, and with a degree in English, the one who taught English in Tartus. The only one of the siblings who could read, the one who asked me every time I visited to bring her the best books I had read lately: novels, short stories, plays, philosophy, memoirs and prison diaries.

  I remember panicking when I read what she wrote. Trembling at the words. Then came a violent realisation, beyond anything I could handle. How had the rift grown so deep? Was it possible for someone to go to sleep as a human being one night and wake up a vicious beast? Or had the beast simply been hiding, lurking in the body of a woman so educated, loving and refined? Had it simply been waiting until it was needed? Who needed it? No one. It sought sympathisers and found kindred beasts: one had been hiding in the heart of an artist, a man who played the darbuka in a nightclub. Another was lurking in a young wife’s heart, a woman whose husband had transformed from Dibo to Ali in broad daylight. Another beast dwelled in the heart of an “aimless” schoolboy who consistently failed his final exams—a boy who joyfully discovered a desire for power during the revolution. Who joined the shabiha and informed on villagers who failed to appear when called up for service “to flag and country.” Who sent his neighbours to their deaths, and who recently enlisted in the Air Force Intelligence Directorate: an informant and a killer.

  A beast had emerged from my cousin’s mouth, and that one unleashed the rest. She sicced these beasts on me, and on anyone else who was different. As for me, someone who had always thought my body held a single soul, I realised that a tiny beast was germinating inside of me too. I wished her dead when I read what she wrote. True, I did not hope she would be raped, or slaughtered like an animal, but I wished her dead! And that was enough.

  That bit of savagery was enough for me to realise that we could not live alongside one another, not after that. We didn’t want to live side by side. How could either of us live next to a murderous beast? Then her imagination extended to my mother’s womb. She said my mother’s womb was filthy, and hoped that “the Sunni womb that bore you rots with cancer.” Then she went further and invoked filthy sperm. I saw myself shrinking, turning into a seed in my mother’s womb. I began to see how others could revel in torturing and killing people. They didn’t see human beings, just filthy sperm to exterminate.

  These beasts who flung insults and joined the shabiha to fight on the side of a regime killing people in cold blood, one day they had woken up and discovered my mother was Sunni! All these years she had lived with my father and alongside them, in the village and in our home in Damascus, and in their homes in Damascus too, all these years and they had not realised. The revolution had opened their blue and green eyes, and they stared at her Sunni-ness. She never insulted anyone. She found their calls to kill us reprehensible, and never discovered they were Alawite! Of course, she had always known they were Alawite. But that did not make them animals in her eyes. She did not see the packs of beasts emerging from their mouths and souls. Just beastly people—because that was what they were, not because they belonged to a certain sect.

  The revolution is like a divorce; family members start saying things like, “She was never right for you anyway! She came from nothing, had no morals…you’re better off without her.” As if my mother became a divorcée, not a widow, when the revolution broke out. “She came from nothing, she’s Sunni!” Thinking about this is enough to bring on a panic attack. Didn’t I want to wipe this from my memory? Rid myself of it completely? A terrible thing, memory. I open it an inch, and all of this rushes out; I hear the thunder of my heart beating, and the crack of electricity regulating its pace.

  The rift punctured a hole in my memory. We didn’t drift apart slowly; it happened suddenly, without warning. How does a human being become a monster? Does it happen instantly, or is it a slow transformation? Had these monsters lain dormant in their souls? Sleeping when they slept and waking when they awoke, eating and dressing and smoking, and all the while being nourished, growing, waiting for just the right moment to emerge? The revolution erupted in an instant. And in that instant, monsters appeared. They filled our city, our homes, our living rooms. They hit and slapped and insulted and killed and destroyed a whole history of human relationships.

  I have this memory of Fouad, my brother. My father had been out, performing an operation at his clinic or the Italian Hospital, I don’t remember which. My mother was in the kitchen making dinner. Fouad and I were in the living room, pressed close to the wood stove. Mother turned the television towards us so we wouldn’t grow bored and bother her. Channel Syria, the only channel there was at the time, was playing the afternoon news. The newscaster announced that the prime minister was launching a cultural institution, and then the news cut to scenes of the opening ceremony. Silent scenes. The prime minister cut a red ribbon and the attendees applauded, all smiling broadly. But there were no sounds of clapping or laughing. All the men looked alike. The same charcoal suits. Same white shirts. Same thick moustaches. Varying degrees of baldness, but the same dyed hair. Suddenly Fouad shut his eyes and started yelling. Our mother came running into the room. “Why can’t we hear them clapping?” he asked in terror. “Are they applauding in thin air?”

  Fouad later told me how he’d felt the first time he joined a protest with his friends in the Midan neighbourhood. “I yelled and I heard my voice,” he said. “Everyone was shouting and clapping. Everyone could hear each other. The age of silence is over!” This last sentence wasn’t hyperbole. Fouad meant it. The age of silence that had pervaded our schools, homes and streets—the silence on the television screen that had thoroughly terrified him—was over for good.

  Our mother knew that her only son was participating in the protests. She was glad. Maybe she saw it as standing up for rights that had been taken from her and our father; maybe she saw Fouad avenging her. But I was surprised that she urged him to rush out and join in. Wasn’t she afraid for him? I asked myself. I didn’t ask her. When he disappeared, I considered a
sking her, but I never did. Fouad left for work one day and didn’t come home. It was that simple. He went out and didn’t come back. That was two and a half years ago. Every day since, I have prayed that he’s dead. And my mother, who aged so suddenly, her sense of calm reassures me. He must be dead. How could she be so calm if she knew he was alive?

  Fouad was working as an instructor at the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts. (It’s painful to say the words “was working.” They’re the past progressive, an incomplete tense. I want a complete tense, like the past perfect.) Mother wanted him to be a doctor. Just like Naseem’s mother wanted for her son. My mother’s reasons were different, though. She wanted him to make up for what her “traitor” husband had done. Was she expecting another massacre? A massacre into which she could send her son, so he could save a new generation in Hama?

  Fouad didn’t make this desire a reality, though. He wanted to study theatre criticism and become a professor. In a country with little arts funding, where the cultural sector was in crisis and corruption reigned, he chose theatre. The institute was his refuge in this lonely city of Damascus. (“Was,” again?) He loved the atmosphere, his students and the geographic and sectarian diversity that had somewhat escaped the regime and security services’ grip. Maybe the institute was seen as neutral territory; maybe it was protected because it served a greater power. There at the institute, near the radio and television building and al-Assad Library, a different Syria existed and thrived. That’s what Fouad always said, trying to convince me to join him in the performing arts instead of the fine arts. But after the revolution began, that elegant white building coughed up its soul and was possessed by another one. Controversies reared their heads and the security services arrived, armed with weapons and vehicles. Regional and sectarian diversity no longer formed the happy picture that Fouad had once painted. Divisions emerged. Several instructors started to avoid teaching theatre in their lectures, explaining that it was where “terrorists” gathered—terrorists who intended to kidnap and massacre minorities in cold blood. Then Fouad disappeared. Was the institute a meeting spot for terrorists? Did they think he was a terrorist? Did he transform, in their eyes, from a simple colleague into an instructor from Hama; was he held to account for Hama’s history?

  * * *

  Naseem showed no sympathy when Fouad disappeared; he just looked at me as if to say, “Didn’t I tell you?” He hadn’t started hitting himself at that point. He could still look me in the eye and stare into the space around my pupils. The eyes are the centre of one’s being. That’s what he told me, more than once. Naseem is no good with explanations. He may have written novels about other people, but he’s no good at talking about himself. Maybe writing sates him, so he needs nothing more from life? He is silent in life, and speaks on the page? Even when sitting with me, a certain restlessness always moves behind his eyes: he has no patience for conversation. He excels only at silence. And recently, he’s begun to excel at self-flagellation.

  I know that Naseem isn’t processing these events any more. But I still can’t understand. He behaves as if he fell into a daze in mid-2011 and just now woke up to discover that his parents’ house in Homs was destroyed in the shelling, his mother and only sister died under the rubble and his father is partially paralysed, driven nearly mad by guilt at being the only survivor. Aren’t five years enough? Time didn’t stop on that day of his great loss. And if Naseem has woken up to find himself alone with a bed-bound father who talks to himself all day, does this mean that Naseem has lost his mind too?

  I don’t think so. He sent me his manuscript a few days ago. Or was it weeks, months ago? I can’t remember any more. Time has lost its meaning. And I still haven’t told him that he stole me. He must have sent me the book in an attempt to justify his theft, but I want to tell him to stop writing. To say to him, your imagination is ruined, you clearly can’t create characters unless you fill them out with people you know. You’ve lost your imagination so you’re using me: my fears and anxieties, my looks and childhood memories. You stole the parts of myself that I miss, the ones I’ve been losing for years and never managed to find, because when you lose something, it’s gone for ever. There’s no way to recover it, and searching is a sure path to frustration and despair.

  Why have you written about me, Naseem? Is it because you can’t write fiction now? Did you borrow my life to escape your own?

  The last time we met, Naseem told me he couldn’t write any more. Every time he started a new novel, he’d flounder about in his own experiences and those of his family, and end up sinking deeper into himself. Then he’d toss aside what he’d written and start anew. He said you know you’ve failed when you start writing about yourself. He said writing is a chance to live among people you don’t know.

  But he doesn’t know me!

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  I was sitting in the living room, sipping a cup of coffee and smoking my fourth cigarette of the morning. It was around quarter past ten. Um Malek sat to my left drinking her coffee, like she always did when she arrived at the house. Late twenties. Sturdy build. She’d given birth to three children; the eldest was nine and the youngest was three.

  A certain melancholy burned beneath her friendly gaze. A profound yet passing sadness, there in the light in her eyes, as if she had happened across the feeling but forbade it from creeping into her soul, where it might take root. She had watchful eyes. And when she spoke, the sadness spilled from her lips until a smile broke through, like the sun cresting layers of snow fallen overnight. She told me what had happened like someone commenting on the weather, letting her words fall matter-of-factly, unaware, perhaps, of the impact she left on her listener. Placid, calm—that was Um Malek. She described things as if they were happening to someone else. As if she were outside the story she told, watching it from afar and protecting herself from succumbing to fear. Fear had no place in her life: fear was a luxury, a disruption that drained the energy she needed to live.

  Um Malek was from Homs and knew nothing in Beirut aside from the houses she cooked and cleaned for each day. She knew the tiny room where she lived with her three children in the Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp. Every morning when she went out, she left them there, alone. But she did not worry, because worry was a type of fear, and fear was something she could not afford. At night when she returned, she took refuge in their company as they did in hers. “During the day I’m their child, and at night they are mine.” That was what Um Malek said, as plainly as someone noting a flock of clouds she’s seen sweep across the sky. Her eldest son, Malek, was not a child any more. He had sprouted a moustache, Um Malek said, half jesting, barely managing a smile. He was six years old when it appeared. It was the day he stood at the edge of a pit in the ground, looked down and saw his father lying there. He sprouted a moustache and told his mother he wanted to study ophthalmology so he could heal his father’s eyes. They were covered with dirt. His father had gone out to protest and a member of the shabiha had beaten him to death with a metal truncheon. Not a drop of blood spilled; he had died of internal bleeding.

  Every morning when she leaves for work, her son gently tells her, “Come back tonight…don’t leave us.”

  “Oh, my heart…” Um Malek said to me, maintaining a smile the whole time. “They’re afraid I’ll leave them like their father did. They’re afraid I won’t return.”

  To change the subject, I asked Um Malek which neighbourhood they had lived in, and she told me, “Bab Dreib.” She said that her eldest uncle still lives in Homs, but he left the neighbourhood of Bab Dreib when it was destroyed. He goes back once a month to collect his pension and passes by their old house and tells them what he sees. Their home, like most in the area, was taken over by shabiha and the regime’s army. She said they stole all the furniture. Even ripped lamps off the walls. They used a steam iron to remove the bathroom tiles. Then they ripped up the paving stones. They took the glass from the doors and the double-gla
zed windows too. Then they began tearing balustrades off the balcony. Um Malek had heard that one of the warlords who was particularly close to the regime had opened a metal factory.

  Hearing Um Malek’s words, I walked, in my mind’s eye, in the footsteps of the shabiha. I followed them from the living room to the bedrooms. Watched them bring an iron into the next room and heat it up to help remove the tiles. With them I ran to the balcony, empty of the family that once sat there, and, now out of breath, ripped out the balustrades. I tried to catch my breath and calm my heartbeat, and I inhaled deeply to ease the tightness in my chest. Um Malek continued talking and I got up and ran to my room.

  I looked in the mirror, swallowed a Xanax and let myself cry. How could anyone be so fragile? How could words alone bruise one’s soul like a violent blow? How could they conjure a complete memory, instantly restore a whole history? A single word could take my body from where it was seated safely on the sofa and toss it down a well of memory. Left there, a frightened creature, my body fights for life tooth and nail, trying in vain to scramble up and escape. And all it takes to lift it to safety is a single Xanax. Nothing more. I struggle with this contradiction.