The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  I always believed that adversity makes us stronger, more resilient. Should we not be used to death by now? Five years on, did I still need to live in fear? But my fears have not faded; new ones simply accumulate. My brain churns out all types of anxiety, fear, loneliness and terror, while my heart races and my breath grows ragged. Everything toys with my fleeting sense of security, especially at night, when the day draws to a close. I am afraid, so I think about fear. And when I think about fear, I feel afraid. Maybe fear is the only emotion with which the soul wrestles constantly. It is so difficult to resolve, or to coexist with. It nests deep inside, no relation to the outside world. It is dazzlingly innovative and multifarious, reinventing itself at every turn. My imagination blazes in service of fear and anxiety, and baulks at comfort. Perhaps fear is the only way it knows to defend itself.

  Is there anything more vivid than fear? Naseem has stolen stories of my father and my fear-flecked childhood, and animated them with his own character. If I tell him this, he will say that my family and I are just four people among twenty-three million frightened Syrians. Or he will tell me flatly that he’s also afraid, and has disguised himself too behind a pen name. He will say that he lost his family just like Um Malek lost her husband. That we all have the same story. We may as well be copies of each other. Here we are, at school, at home, in the streets, in Damascus’s few cinemas, at the theatre, in government offices…all of us living one story, one aching version of humankind.

  I was racing through his novel, whereas my mother had been stuck on the same page of her book for days, maybe weeks. I was devouring Naseem’s manuscript, perhaps looking for Fouad. There was no mention of him. Was that odd? Hadn’t they been friends? Naseem—who carried his devastated, paralysed father to Turkey and then on to Germany—said he lost his memory, that his life stopped in mid-2011. That events move so quickly he can’t take them all in.

  Was he in love with someone else when he left? I didn’t ask. I didn’t ask him questions any more. The moment never seemed right. “As if I had time for love,” he would’ve said disdainfully. That’s what Naseem always said when I asked him that question. He’d respond, half distracted and half irritated, implying that he didn’t have time to shower, much less fall in love. “I don’t have time for love!” He never felt bad about giving an answer like that. Never dismissed the idea of infidelity by telling me I was enough for him or that he loved me, but on the grounds that he didn’t have time to cheat! Was infidelity a matter of free time?

  He didn’t ask me to go with him to Turkey or Germany. Of course he knew that my mother and I wouldn’t leave Damascus until we had news of Fouad. Naseem was certain I wouldn’t join him. But still, he didn’t ask. This wouldn’t surprise anyone who knew Naseem; he never said anything because it should be said. Never uttered a word he didn’t mean, or anything he wasn’t sure would come true. Naseem knew I wouldn’t leave my mother alone. He knew I wouldn’t cross the border before Fouad returned, whether alive or dead. So he couldn’t ask me to go with him, or even show how much he wished I could. He just slapped his cheeks every time we spoke.

  We were having a row, I don’t remember why. The cause of our fights was often unclear. (Naseem never tells me when he’s upset with me, or even alludes to his frustration. It accumulates, layer by layer, until he explodes. When that happens, a tremor ripples across his face, his eyes bulge and the knot between his brows vanishes. He gestures, angrily purses his lips. A snarl extends to his nose and the two lines descending from either side.) At any rate, we were fighting and I was exasperated. Whenever we fought, Naseem disappeared afterwards, as if he was driving me out of his life, exiling me right when everything was exploding. He often disappeared and cut me off completely, as if I had never existed at all. I’d call him again and again, and he’d hang up on me, or not even pick up. I felt so alone in those moments. And those moments were many.

  I saw myself sitting with him. Every bit of him was there, all his bones, everything about him. All of it, filling him up. I felt certain I knew what he was feeling, as if he were part of me. This was a different Naseem. He had the same face and clothes, left the same scent on my skin. But it was another Naseem, different from the one with whom I was fighting. This Naseem was as delicate as the breeze. He reached a loving hand to my face and gently brushed my cheek; he stroked my hair and tucked a strand behind my ear. I felt secure, safer than I’d ever felt in my life. A sense of tranquillity settled into my soul. I gazed into his eyes and complained about Naseem. But he was Naseem! It was like my dream, where I was driving a car and sitting next to myself. I complained about the Naseem I was fighting with, the one who so cruelly disappeared, to the compassionate Naseem sitting in front of me, there in a place I didn’t recognise. It saddened Naseem that I felt so wronged. I saw his large, bright eyes fill with sorrow, and something flickered in them. He reached out to take me in his arms, all of me, the entirety of me that he chased away when we fought; he pulled me to his chest and hugged me. I was stunned by the tenderness flowing from his arms, it caught hold of me and swelled over me, and I wouldn’t have cared if my life had ended right there, drowning in that embrace.

  But I woke up a few seconds after he let go, still holding his warmth in my ribcage. I cried feverishly, wishing I could find that other Naseem. I didn’t want a different man; I wanted a different Naseem, like the one in my dream.

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  I was fourteen, and it was a Friday. It was around that time that I began to hate Fridays. Of course this did not mean I liked school days—I hated those too. My hatred for school days was surpassed by my hatred for Fridays, however. On that first day of the weekend, the traffic abated, the voices of passers-by and neighbours grew softer, and the pace of social engagements slowed. One particular Friday, everyone was sleeping or confined to the house, restless and bored. I sat in my room, finishing my schoolwork, which was tiresome as always and only made Fridays feel lonelier. I heard Baba call me. I rushed into his room, which was adjacent to mine. He told me to sit on the edge of the bed, next to him. He was looking out the window, through the wooden shutters that chirped in the harsh winter wind. “Look at that woman, lying naked on her daybed,” he said to me. I turned to the window with a start, shocked at the thought of a woman lying around naked in our neighbourhood, unconcerned by the gaze of her conservative neighbours. I didn’t see her. I pressed him, and he pointed her out for me. “Look there, in the window across from ours.” The window in the building across from ours was covered by an ancient screen that had been warped over time by the cold, heat, dry spells, rain and snow. Baba saw a naked woman on a daybed in the curves of the warped screen! He was imagining her. I was terrified. I smiled and mussed his hair. It was soft, now that the chemotherapy had stolen all the black strands from among the grey. I kissed his neck, on that small spot which my heart expanded to fill. I slipped back to my room, leaving Baba to frolic with his imaginary women.

  I had long been jealous of every woman who crossed our threshold. They sat as close to my father as possible on our long white sofa. Sitting near him was not enough for me; I stuck so close it must have been bothersome. But he never once became cross with me. Never sighed or asked me to give him a bit more space. He would hug me, and I would occasionally lean in to kiss him, while the women sat nearby, clearly annoyed. That was how it felt, at any rate. And they annoyed me too. I desperately wanted them to go, from the house and from our lives, for ever. Not only was Baba unbothered by the way I clung to him, this envious streak of mine amused him. He encouraged my jealousy. After the women left, he would watch me with strange satisfaction while I imitated them, making fun of the way they spoke, the colour of their clothes or even how they did their hair. I called them stupid, insensitive, brainless and horrid, while he quietly looked on and smiled.

  One time when he went to Paris for medical treatment with my mother, I stayed with some family friends who had three daughters around my age. While
I was there, another friend of my father’s named Safeyya phoned their house and asked me to spend Friday with her. We could cook and watch a film; it would be fun. I was eleven at the time. I didn’t like her because I knew that she and my father had dated before he married my mother. I didn’t like how she was kind to me or how she tried to get close to me, because I knew it was just a way of getting close to my father. Children’s emotions are raw, and not subtle.

  Safeyya arrived at our friends’ house to walk me over. I hated her blue eyes and blonde hair, maybe because she resembled my aunt and her daughters, who always teased me for my brown skin. We walked back to her place and it took nearly half an hour. I did like her apartment. Her living room had originally had high ceilings and she had divided it into two storeys. The new living room was on the bottom, and if you climbed up a short ladder you reached her bedroom, with a real wooden floor. I remember she made pasta with tomato sauce, minced meat and pine nuts. We ate lunch in her little kitchen, and then sat in the living room. I told her I thought her house was pretty, and that I wished I had my own upper bunk to hide in. She smiled and asked me a question that seemed odd. “Do you want the ceiling to be colourful, and covered with stickers and drawings?” I said yes. Then she said, “But if you cover the ceiling with pictures, paintings and colours, and lie in bed at night staring at the drawings, it will ruin your imagination.”

  A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was not yet three in the afternoon. Safeyya opened the door. Her boyfriend was standing there, holding a small bouquet of flowers. He kissed her, and she let him in. He shook my hand, coolly. I could tell how irritated he was by my presence. He had expected to arrive and find his girlfriend alone. As soon as Safeyya sensed his annoyance, she looked at me and said, with a mix of tenderness and wickedness, “We’ve had so much fun together, haven’t we! Now go on, sweetie, you know your way home, right?”

  I was a child of eleven. I had never left the house without my mother or father. I did not even know the names of the different neighbourhoods in the city. But on that epic afternoon, I decided to make my way back by myself. Safeyya had not given me the chance to say that I would not be able to manage it on my own, nor had she cared that it was her responsibility to take me to our friends’ house. I went out into the street. I don’t remember whether I felt scared. But a vast loneliness settled into my soul; I missed Mama and Baba terribly, and my longing for them began thumping within my ribcage. I started down the road, trying to find my way. And then all of a sudden I was lost. I went into a little shop and asked the owner if I could use the telephone. I kept a phone book in my head, where I memorised numbers for us, my aunt, my grandmother’s house in the village and our friends, whom I called, and asked the shopkeeper his address so they could come and take me home.

  This was the first thing Baba and I spoke about when he arrived home from Paris. I saw anger stir in his chest and ascend to cloud his beautiful eyes. He hugged me tenderly. And he never spoke to Safeyya again. He cut her off completely, because she had left his daughter to find her way back alone, to a house whose address she did not know. I was glad.

  The second thing was something my father told me. He asked me to make him a cup of coffee, and announced that he had three months left. I remember exactly how he said it. “We still have three months together.” “Still,” as if three months were three years. Now I feel certain it was three years. Father knew time would slip through our fingers like water, but he also knew how to take advantage of the time we still had. He prepared for the future. He’d been by my side for all of my eleven years, and would be with me for the years that lay ahead. He would be with me for those last three years, and what now amounts to more than twenty. I swallowed my tears that night and tried to understand, and then we agreed that three months was not much time at all.

  We agreed that he would not pass away before the three-month mark, or even right after; we agreed that he would fight to stay beside me. And I believed him. The thought of his passing was incomprehensible. I was convinced he would not leave me. But despite my conviction, I lived those three years on death’s razor edge. From morning until night, I walked in the shadow of fear. It took shape in my mind, as its features slowly gained definition…until I was twenty-eight, and awoke one morning with arrhythmic heartbeats, a tightness in my chest and panic attacks that lasted all day.

  This was fear. Kamil told me it was fear. Fear of losing someone grows in your soul, but you never notice it until it reaches a certain size. It sprouts hands and feet. Gains eyes and begins to stare at you, though still invisible itself. Races through your veins, though you never feel its footfall until it appears as a panic attack. And if the soul grows weak, fear invades the body instead. It meddles with your heartbeat. Steals sensation from your extremities. Makes your hands go numb. Snags your breath in your chest, until you choke and flail and feel you are drowning. Dizzies and blinds you, until you cannot think of anything but fear. This was fear. I was often afraid as a child. Fear is all I remember.

  * * *

  The final exam for elementary school, the brevet, was about a month and a half away. We stopped going to class in order to prepare. There were so many books I had to memorise “from cover to cover,” as we said. I went to stay with my father’s cousin, her officer husband and their children. Their house was spacious, but every evening it constricted around me until I could hardly breathe. Shami Hospital, which was near the house, felt a world away. I called my mother every hour to check on her, and her voice, though weary, remained bright until the end. The family gave me my own room so I could study in peace, away from the commotion the grandchildren made. There were four of them, and then six when their grown-up daughter came to Damascus to visit from Europe, where she lived with her husband, another doctor.

  Every morning I woke up in that room, where the balcony looked out on the homes of officers with a lower rank than our relative’s husband. The decaying buildings were a terribly dreary sight. Their paint had deteriorated: dull blues, faded greens, and a yellow that had cracked with the passing seasons. The buildings looked like giant cement blocks stuck together, with apartments piled on top of each other and balconies all in rows. They depressed me so much that I kept the curtains drawn to protect myself.

  One hot morning in May I opened my eyes and got out of bed. I did not call Mama like usual. Instead, I got out the youngest daughter’s tape recorder, turned on some music (“Bamboléo” by the Gypsy Kings) and started to cry. Every time the tape ended, I kissed it. From eight in the morning until eight that night, I did not leave the room. I did not respond when the family urged me to come out and eat. All I did that day was cry. Through my tears, I talked to Baba, begging him not to go and leave me alone. I reminded him what he had told me hundreds of times: “Don’t be scared, I’m here with you.” Don’t leave me, I told him, and I was sure he could hear me. Then my tears dried, and I could shed no more. At eight o’clock, I lay down on the bed and nodded off. I opened my eyes at midnight to a pitch-black room. Hunger wrenched my stomach, fear shattered my nerves, pain gnawed at my joints. I walked to the kitchen and went to the freezer, where I kept a large metal spoon: I used it to soothe my swollen red eyes whenever I had been crying. I was fourteen years old, and deep down I still am.

  Did her tears dry at their source like my mother’s? My father has also passed away, and my brother too. Was this girl me, living alone with a mother who suddenly aged when her tears dried up? As I read the manuscript, I wondered again about Naseem’s motivation. Why did he make his narrator carry all of our stories? Wasn’t my life enough for a novel? Why so much hardship?

  I texted him and told him I missed him. Silence. I imagined him and his father sitting in a little room. He hears the phone buzz. He picks it up. Reads the message. Gazes into the distance. Puts the phone down. Struggles to type. Or can’t find the words to respond.

  When I saw Kamil, I told him that Naseem had changed, though I did
n’t mention him by name. The time I finally worked up the nerve to admit to Kamil that I was in a relationship with a “fellow patient,” he laughed at that phrase. I don’t know why I admitted it: Naseem and I had both promised we wouldn’t reveal the other’s identity to Kamil. Was it because I felt so filled with grief and fear at losing Naseem too? Was I mourning my ability to preserve him as he was, whole, the way I knew him? As expansive as the earth, as tempestuous as the sea?

  Kamil told me that Naseem hadn’t changed. (“Am I the one who’s changed?” I blurted out. He shook his head.) He told me that Naseem “was always that way,” and I thought about this for a long time. Kamil meant that I hadn’t loved Naseem as he was, but as I wanted him to be. I invented a fantasy version of him, gave him imaginary characteristics, then fell in love. Was it a coincidence that I’d fallen in love with a doctor like my father? But I hadn’t known Naseem was a doctor when I met him, I told Kamil irritably. When had I stopped imagining him? Why did I now feel like he’d changed? “Fantasies fade with time,” Kamil responded. And as time passes, the need for a new fantasy arises. My illusion had been diffused by the passing years. Or perhaps Naseem, by the force of his reality, had destroyed what I’d imagined and brought me back to earth…in front of him, in his house, where I searched for him and found nothing but cold silence.