The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  Kamil hasn’t left Damascus yet, but he’s exhausted just like us. We used to think him immune to exhaustion, frustration and depression, but he’s not been his normal self. He greets me with a fraction of his usual energy, a sombre look and a practised smile.

  I wonder how Kamil can treat shabiha and murderers. I’ve seen them in his waiting room, Naseem, on more than one occasion. Men with inflated muscles and broad shoulders, their expressions tinged with evil and fear. Have you ever seen evil coexist with fear? I’ve seen it in their eyes. They stare boldly, with impudence, at anyone, it doesn’t matter who. How can Kamil accept their appointments? How can he listen to them? Do they tell him that they’ve killed? Do they speak of their pleasure in torturing people? Does one of them have Fouad’s scent on his hands? Why do they come to see Kamil? Do they simply have an abundance of time and money? Or are they sent to confess how they abuse and torture others? Do they need practice at inventing insults to spit at whoever falls at their feet or into their grasp? I imagine rounds of torture all over again. I don’t dare ask Kamil how he can accept appointments from men who stand at the edge of an abyss. How he can speak with perpetrators and victims alike. Does he treat them equally? Neutrally, professionally? Does he help them build their self-confidence? Does he help them kill the way he helps us survive?

  Could you bear sitting next to a man with bulked-up muscles in the waiting room where we first met? If your daydreaming gaze had wandered into his, where evil marches in stride with fear, would he have tolerated it?

  I miss you and your anxious, ragged breath. I miss the scent of your sighs, to which I’m so attached. While you went on about what it means to belong somewhere, I never told you that the way your breath smells is one way I feel at home in my body; I belong to the blood that carries your body’s scent through my veins.

  Do you remember the last time I lay next to you? Do you remember how cautiously you kissed me, as if I were a stranger? Do you remember your obsession with people you imagined were watching us? Spying through your bedroom curtains, or from the light on the ceiling, or the cracks in your wardrobe with its contents so carefully arranged? Do you remember how many times you moved the huge desk in the living room, searching for a tiny camera fixed there? At the time, I didn’t tell you that it was just fixed in your mind, something both simple and complex. I found no sign of it between the books. I never told you how often I wished I could find it and settle the matter. At one point I considered buying one and placing it between the books or hanging it from the curtains, before ripping it away, and ripping your fears away with it. But I abandoned the idea, because I thought this might also heighten your fears, make you more self-involved.

  Hadn’t we once agreed that as time goes by, life in this brutal city makes us believe we’re important? Our egos swell, and we walk down the streets so full of ourselves. We all believe we’re being followed, that we’re an important target for the secret police. I didn’t want to entrench this egotism further. But I did play along to ease your anxiety, and helped you put the desk back together, again and again. Do you remember that cautious kiss? It still pains me. Like a slap, it left a mark on my lips.

  I see it in so many dreams. In one dream, I’m lying next to you. Gazing at your face, into your eyes. Contemplating your fear and anxiety, so pure that no comfort can touch them. I hear you ask me fearfully, “Suleima, are you a frog?” I look at you. “Of course not. If I’m a frog, does that make you a slice of orange?” I knew you hated the scent of oranges. I imagine you as a huge orange with a head on top. You sniff your orangey body, and then, like a parrot, repeat: “I’m annoyed by how I smell, I’m annoyed by how I smell, I’m annoyed by how I smell.” I heard that sentence repeated in the dream, and when I woke up, I couldn’t tell whether you repeated it by yourself, or if I’d been chanting it with you, until for ever, endlessly.

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  As a child I often spent summer vacations in the village by myself, without my parents. Three months, or a few days shy of that. The same thing happened every time. The first day was the hardest. When night fell, and the call to Isha’ prayer rang out from the mosque next to my grandfather’s house, my heart dressed itself in black. I missed my parents terribly, and begged my aunt to find a way to take me back to Damascus. She always smiled and asked me to be patient until morning, because she knew perfectly well that I would not raise the matter the next day. She knew that before long, as days and then weeks went by, I would count the nights left and cry because time was passing so quickly.

  I did call home every evening. In those days, phone calls were difficult, incredibly complicated. There was no direct line between Damascus and the other governorates. First I called the telephone operator (Central). I asked her to connect me to 423116 and hung up. The operator called them, and then routed the call back to me when she heard their phone ring. Meanwhile, I would be waiting by the phone for endless minutes, sometimes half an hour or a full hour, and if I called her back she’d snap: “I’m trying, I’m trying…the line’s busy.”

  In the village, our choice of games was limited only by the number of streets, and the streets were endless. We left the house each morning and did not return until sundown. We roamed and explored shrines scattered around the village, where we always discovered puzzles and clues. Once, we found verses from the Quran handwritten on a white slip of paper, and below them a note saying that whoever laid eyes on the verses must copy them one hundred times or be paralysed! My friends and I did not copy them, not even once. We decided to have a bit of fun.

  We took the paper to Asia, a woman in her thirties whom my grandfather knew somehow. Asia: I imagined this was her name. She looked like an “Asia,” I could not say why. I never imagined another name for her. She was tall and slender, almost frighteningly so. Her skin was a translucent white; her soft, long hair was pitch-black, and always tied back with a green ribbon. Asia was incredibly impressionable and believed whatever she heard without stopping to consider whether or not it was true. She believed that if you left the house right after showering you would die. And that anyone who used scissors after sunset would be cursed with bad luck for life. If we told her we had seen a ghoul, she would have believed us and been frightened; she would shake so hard her joints would knock, and she’d refuse to leave the house for days.

  We ran to her house from the shrine, and took a moment to tamp down our laughter as we caught our breath. We knocked on her door. She opened it and welcomed us in as usual. She was exceptionally generous, especially given how hard times had been for her. She opened the fridge and served us everything a child might wish for after a long day of playing and running around, oblivious to what we were hiding. We waited a few minutes, and then showed her the paper. She read it and gasped. She wished she had not read it. And then we left! Asia confined herself to the house until she had written the verse one hundred times, to save herself from paralysis. She never married; she’s a spinster still. Maybe as a child she heard that marriage would kill her.

  In the village, I was given freedom from every rule imaginable. This was in unspoken defiance of my mother. My family in the village believed she was too restrictive and probably prevented me from playing, going out in the street and mixing with other children. First off, she was neurotically clean; that’s what they said in front of me, bluntly and often: “Really obsessive.” On top of that, she was a Damascus, big-city girl: playing in the street didn’t feature in her idea of childhood. Of course, as a child she had spent whole days playing on the block. “It was different back then…” they said, taking sides, and of course there was some truth to that.

  I could put on a white dress and spend the whole day playing, and it would remain spotless all day! I always gave a wide berth to anything that would make it dirty. I remember people in the village trading jokes about my soap-swallowing addiction too. Between seven and nine years old, I was addicted to eating soapsuds: I would wash my
hands well, foam up the soap and then, with ravenous desire, bite into the bubbles. They said my mother’s neuroticism must have tricked me into thinking that soap would disinfect my insides!

  My mother once came to the village on an unexpected visit. It had been more than a month since I had arrived, enough time for me to become a different child. I remember her silence. I was wearing red nail polish, and my fringe was coiffed with hairpins like a rooster’s comb (years later, this would be in vogue) and stuck straight up, cliff-like, atop my forehead. I was using words she had never heard, liberated from every restriction and obligation, thoroughly debauched. She said nothing, but her look alone was enough to make my fringe collapse. She took me back with her to Damascus, and back to what was, in her opinion, right.

  My mother says that when I was six or seven, she took me to a friend’s jewellery shop to buy a present for another friend who had just given birth to her first child. I was wearing a burgundy velvet dress, and a hat in the same colour. When I sat on a tall chair that was burgundy too, the jeweller looked over and said, “Ah, bless! Your girl’s a little princess, isn’t she.” They were engrossed in the bracelets and rings on display when suddenly they heard a soft voice say, “Mama, can I have some water?” Recently back from summer in the village, I had asked in an Alawite dialect. My mother said the shopkeeper was stunned and looked around for the source of the voice, in disbelief that it could have been me.

  The accent signalled a history’s worth of stereotypes and the suffering of millions; dialect alone was enough to unleash its savagery. The anecdote was notable because it was so dark. The accent was a stark contrast to my burgundy dress and title of “princess.” It didn’t fit boys and girls of the big city, who were so refined their ancestors must have heralded from palaces, not far-flung and half-forgotten coastal villages. Anyone who spoke with an Alawite accent was assumed to be a country bumpkin, and anyone who spoke with a Damascus (or “neutral”) accent was clearly an urbanite. This wasn’t just about a burgundy dress worn by a “princess sitting on a burgundy throne.” The associations it conjured were as intricate as the stitching of the dress itself.

  You only needed to say that someone had “an accent” for anyone to understand the implication: it was Alawite. It was the only accent that had this much power, capable of transforming a simple, downtrodden man into a swaggering force, someone who could saunter into the middle of Damascus and defy the authority of traffic officers, government officials, pedestrians, street vendors and anyone who fell short of perfection. Accent was identity. And not just any identity; the identity of absolute power, an identity shared by the dictator and tyrant. The identity of terror, anonymity and dread. Anyone who spoke it perfectly found that shortcuts and loopholes magically appeared; it was invaluable to getting by in a country like Assad’s Syria.

  The accent’s power had distilled with time. Eventually, you did not need to speak in a full Alawite accent to wield its effects. Even just properly pronouncing your T’s was enough to spark terror and summon a history of oppression in an instant, the brief instant it took to pronounce a T. Slurs like “dogs,” “rats” and “vermin” were practically the extent of certain sects’ vocabulary.

  I still do not know the origins of certain odd words in the Alawite accent. Some come from Turkish or Ottoman, like khashouqa, which means “spoon,” but other expressions have roots that are harder to trace.

  For example, one time many years ago, a relative of mine, an architectural engineer who rarely visited the village, asked his grandmother—who was my great-aunt, grandmother Khadija’s sister—“Sitti, why d’you call Baba ‘Jakjouk’?” Jakjouk, a derivation of Jack-in-the-box, was his father’s nickname in the village. What did his grandmother say? “Zee wurna cree.” My friend was bewildered; he had not understood a single word. Making sense of her reply was harder than filling a sieve with water. He tried to decipher each word separately. (Zee: “because he”; wurna: “was in a”; cree: “scurry” or “rush” or “hurry.”) When my cousin wanted to show how much she liked something, she would say: “Aman, how lovely!” Aman comes from Turkish too. When expressing surprise, her favourite phrase was “Oh myyyyyyyyy,” and she always let the Y extend until infinity, stretching it until her breath ran out, like a deep-sea diver. When she made fun of other people for putting on airs—a poor man acting as if he would become rich overnight, or a young woman of average beauty acting as if all the young village men were courting her—then came the phrase “Oh Lord,” but the vowels grew rounder in her mouth, so the O’s became U’s: “Uh Lurd.” Negation didn’t exist in dialect. For example, instead of saying “can’t,” people from the village said “cann,” extending the penultimate consonant instead of pronouncing the T. “Won’t” became “wonn,” “didn’t” became “dinn,” and so on. As for final consonants, people in the village tended to trail off at the end of their words. “Home” became “ho…”: the sound of the H and O remained, while the M and E gently faded away. A friend used to tease us, saying, “You goin’ ho…to eat hu…?” The subtle shift in vowel—from O to U—was all that distinguished “home” and “hummus” in his question.

  Another thing I never understood was a tendency towards using classical Arabic when speaking to important people (public figures). No sooner does an Alawite sit down with an important figure than he puts on an air of erudition, and tries hard to employ a higher register. I remember my father’s cousin, a low-ranking officer in the army, who once called my mother and me while we were out. It was a few months after Baba passed away, and Abu Jamil wanted to check in on us. The phone rang several times before the answering machine picked up. He figured that an answering machine requires the same formality as a letter, and so he left us the following message, word for word: “Dearest ones, I hereby have called, yet found an empty abode. As it was my wish to enquire after you, I might request that you return my message when convenient. Sincerely, Abu Jamil.”

  I also remember a joke about an officer who only wanted to receive Alawite visitors. He told a conscript to place a bottle of water on the table in the entryway and ask each guest: “What is this?” If the guest answered “A jug of water” and properly pronounced the T, the conscript allowed him in to see the officer. But if the guest swallowed his T’s and said “A jug of wa’er,” the conscript would tell him the officer was busy and show him the door. One day, the conscript rushed into the officer’s office and said, “Sir, there’s a man says it’s a carafe, I donn know wha’ to do, should I lettim in?” The officer laughed delightedly. “Show him in, show him in,” he said. “He’s clearly more cultured than either of us!”

  Dialect was not the only thing shaped by sectarianism; certain sheikhs in these villages possessed “divine abilities.” I remember one summer vacation, when my grandmother thought a patch of spots (eczema) near my elbow looked suspicious. All she did was send me to her sister’s husband (the architectural engineer’s grandfather), a prominent sheikh in the village. He said he would write a charm for me to wear underneath my clothes like an amulet, and the spots would disappear. I went to see him with my youngest cousin, the one with the booming voice that always forced my aunt to acquiesce. We entered his room by the little vegetable patch, near the house where his son’s family lived. He was eating lunch and his mouth was filled with bits of food. I showed him my rash. And what did he do? He spat on a scrap of fabric and rubbed my arm with his saliva and bits of food. Then he wrote a charm for me and told me to put it under my pillow. Needless to say, my eczema did not disappear until my mother took me to a dermatologist in Damascus.

  My father did not leave me a family when he passed away. He was my family, all of it, and then he was gone. He left me his mother and childhood home, and his books, papers, journals, photographs and pens.

  And what did Naseem leave me, aside from books, papers, journals, photographs and pens? He left me obituaries too, and a home that didn’t look like the one where we’d spent ye
ars together. My mother never asks me about him. Just like she never asks about Fouad. Maybe she assumes that in war it’s men’s duty to disappear, whether on the battlefront, in prison or in exile. She never asks about the men we’ve known for so long. Only about the women. My mother, how strange she is! If my father were still alive, I’m sure she would have separated from him. He wouldn’t have enlisted at his age, and might not have taken a clear position on the war. She wouldn’t have been able to abide staying with a man who chose to hide instead of disappearing.

  My mother, who has lost her only son, seems proud for the first time in her life, proud that her lost son has given her life meaning again. Fouad has given her the ability to keep on going, for days or even weeks, between the covers of a book, on page 24. Naseem, however, I don’t think she ever liked. She saw a miniature copy of her husband in him: a doctor, a man who abandoned his family and fled in fear. Naseem was also afraid of fear, so he summoned it and let it overwhelm him. In the end, the result was the same.

  I remember the day, before Fouad disappeared, before Naseem left for Germany, when Naseem showed up unexpectedly around lunchtime. He knocked loudly, as forcefully as someone who had arrived to pick a fight or murder or assassinate someone, and that was the best-case scenario. I ran to the door. My mother was unaffected by any noise outside the gloomy spot in her memory that she inhabited at that time. I was surprised. She seemed isolated, her feelings undisturbed by external factors like a sharp knock at the door, the telephone ringing in the middle of the night or even the sound of an explosion. (She isn’t affected or struck with panic like I am, even though she is entitled to be afraid. She carries thirty more years of memories than I do.)