The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  That afternoon, I ran to the door while she sat in front of her bowl of lentil soup, eating at her own pace, as if all of time would unfurl itself while she finished her lunch. I opened the door and found Naseem. He could barely stand. He was panting, and sweat poured down his forehead and all over his body, leaving dark patches under his armpits, tracing the folds of his stomach and running down his back. He told me he was dying. My mother remained sitting at her bowl, showing no sign of interest.

  I led him to the living room and helped him lie down on the sofa. I brought him a bag of ice and put it on his forehead, just like he told me to. With that, he regained his medical abilities, and began dictating to me what else I should do in a moment like this. The sharp cold would slow his racing heart, he said. He closed his eyes, and words tumbled from his mouth. He said he was dying and he was afraid and he didn’t want to die now because he wasn’t ready.

  I asked if a person could ever truly be ready for death. Were the stories told at funerals true? At every memorial service I’d been to, I’d heard relatives of the deceased say things like, “For the first time in his life, he said goodbye when he left the house that day, as if he knew it would be the last time.” (Usually the people who told these stories were young, not middle-aged. Older people don’t feel death immediately at hand so much as sense it drawing closer, every moment, every day, until it arrives.) Or relatives would say that before passing away, the soon-to-be-deceased began speaking to people no one else could see. Those people were never from the world of the living, naturally; they might be a long-dead mother, a father who had passed away several years earlier or a friend who had died young. The ailing man would begin speaking to them as if they had just entered the room, called his name and asked him to join them in travelling from our world to theirs. These were depressing stories, and made death seem all the more depressing too.

  On the sofa, Naseem kept saying he wasn’t ready to die. What did it mean to be ready to die? How could one be prepared for death? He got up and rushed through all the rooms of the house. He said he was looking for something. Maybe he was looking for his soul; maybe it had fled his body in fear, gasping for air in a body undergoing a panic attack. Like a madman he ran from my mother’s bedroom to my bedroom, to Fouad’s room, to the toilet. He turned on the tap and put his head under the rush of water, and said it wasn’t cold enough to breathe! Could he breathe underwater like a fish? He dried his face, went back to the living room and lay down on the long sofa again. I followed him into the room. He picked up the bag of ice he’d tossed on the wooden coffee table and put it on his head, then pressed it to his forehead, then his cheeks. That wasn’t enough, so he opened the bag and took out a piece of ice. He ran it over his stomach. It melted with the heat of his body, and the water dripped onto the red sofa and made dark spots on the fabric. Naseem was drowning in sweat, ice melt and fear. His fear rose steadily until it reached its zenith, and then began to drop, incrementally, degree by degree. He told me that fear struck him all at once, rushing through his veins (Naseem frequently used vaguely medical metaphors). And when it faded, it did so excruciatingly slowly; it took an exhausting amount of time.

  Naseem eventually calmed down. My mother was still sitting in front of her bowl of lentil soup, eating steadily, as if nothing were amiss. She entered the living room after she’d finished her food, and after he’d calmed down, after his soul had returned to his tired body. She sat down across from him, and looked into his eyes. “Have you eaten lunch, Naseem?” she asked softly. He didn’t answer. He apologised for his sudden visit, thanked me for my concern and left. The door had barely closed behind him when she uttered her favourite phrase: “Poor Naseem.”

  * * *

  —

  Was Naseem Dr. Soufjan from Shami Hospital? I wondered as I thought about his book. I knew Naseem had worked in that hospital. He complained of encountering death every day in the corridors, hospital beds and operating rooms. He told me that death had a certain scent. He often smelled it while examining a patient who had just departed from this world. He once told me about a cancer patient who spent a month in the hospital before he died, with his wife by his side. A few minutes before midnight, his wife left the room and came to the counter where the on-duty doctors and nurses sat, and asked Naseem to come with her to her husband’s room. He went in and saw that the patient’s eyes were closed. “Is he gone?” she asked. (I remember the word as if he said it today: “gone.”) Naseem examined him and realised there was still a slow, weak pulse in his veins. Naseem shook his head. The wife was a few moments too early. She whispered in her husband’s ear, words Naseem couldn’t catch. Her husband opened his eyes and managed a smile. Then he let out a brief exhalation and closed his eyes again. The woman looked at Naseem, and asked him to examine her husband again. Naseem approached and caught that strange scent, the whiff of death. He knew her husband was “gone” without feeling for a pulse. He placed the stethoscope on the man’s chest, and could hear that his heartbeat had stopped. Complete silence. Her husband was gone.

  Naseem, a man who feared water, told me that in his mind, death was like the moment you plunge into the sea, when all external sound disappears and only a deep internal sound remains. It was silence. Deep silence, undisturbed by anything. But Naseem never mentioned that this patient had a daughter who was, and still is, fourteen.

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  My mother sat in the waiting room with a friend of the family, smoking silently. My father’s room was down the hallway. The waiting room was not sectioned off from the corridor or other hospital rooms by a door, and smoking was permitted at the time. Suddenly my mother broke the silence, handed the friend her cigarette and excused herself. She gave him the cigarette because she thought she would only be gone for a moment.

  Later, my mother told me that she had heard a deep voice calling her name. She immediately knew that it was her husband. He called to her without parting his lips, not even slightly. She went into his room, which was filled with friends standing around his bed. As she approached him, they stepped back and moved to the foot of his bed. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked his head. He opened his eyes, with effort, and looked at her. She bent down and whispered in his right ear: “You can go, habibi. I’m with you…you can go, sweetheart.” He smiled at her and closed his eyes. My mother looked at Soufjan. “Is that it?” she asked. “Is he gone?”

  Soufjan approached, checked my father’s wrist for a pulse and found it. He shook his head. She drew close to him again. She whispered in the same ear, “It’s OK, habibi…darling, go on…I’m here with you.” He gazed at her deeply, as if his eyes were fixing themselves to hers for eternity. As if he were giving her his radiance before it was extinguished, pouring it into her eyes so she could carry it with her for the rest of her life. Then he briefly frowned, let out a deep exhalation and was gone. Yes. My father didn’t pass until his wife told him he could go. Years earlier they had agreed that she would help him when the time came. They renewed their pact frequently, as if it were the air my father needed to breathe. Once his wife told him it was OK to go, he knew that passing was the only way, and he did not linger.

  Someone who writes things like this isn’t mad. But for years my mother has insisted that Naseem has lost his mind, just as she insists that she’s losing her memory. She hasn’t forgotten the time he arrived at our house at one o’clock in the morning. He woke us all up: my mother, Fouad and me. My mother, as usual, was not unnerved to hear the doorbell ring after midnight, but Fouad and I rushed to the door. We opened it to find Naseem standing there, his face damp and pale with fear. He asked if he could spend the night. He said he’d been lying in bed when he heard strange noises outside the door. He’d quietly got up and looked through the peephole. He didn’t see anyone, but he felt like a person, or people, had been there and left. He’d dressed quickly, cautiously opened the front door and gone down a flight of stairs to the ground floor. He ra
n through the streets until he found a taxi and came to our house. With conviction, he said they were still following him. “Who’s ‘they’?” my mother asked. Naseem didn’t know, not exactly. But he was sure they were watching and following him.

  “Poor Naseem. He went mad,” my mother still says, as matter-of-factly as someone commenting that the weather is cold.

  In our house that night, Naseem remembered that amid all the chaos and unnerving details, he’d glimpsed a black bag of garbage stacked by his front door. This surprised him. It must be a message that they wanted him to decipher, he said. I told Naseem that my father, too, was always afraid that “they” were suspicious of him—despite the portrait hanging in his office, and despite his complicit silence, for which my mother never forgave him. Who were “they”? I didn’t know, we didn’t know and my father didn’t know. Naseem also claimed “they” were following him, spying on his movements, monitoring his every breath. They were watching him in his bed, on the right half; they held in their grip the one place he belonged.

  “So what if they don’t believe me?” my father often said. What more could he do, beyond running away to Damascus and “treating the people who lived there instead of his own kin in Hama,” as my mother said he had done? What more could he control, beyond hanging a portrait in his office, high on the wall above everything else? What more could I do to allay his fears, beyond participating in Young Revolutionaries and Pioneers concerts at school, using my bold voice to sing “Oh Abu Bassel, our Leader with the high forehead” and “O Syria, through you I’m free! You gave to me my dignity.” Yes, I lent my voice to these songs for years, singing of dignity and freedom at the top of my lungs without ever considering what the words meant.

  Was that not enough for you, Baba? Didn’t I excuse you from the obvious questions about dignity, freedom and occupied lands? About National Education lessons and principles of war? About our teacher at school who disappeared after her five-year-old son let the President’s picture trail on the ground behind him? We were celebrating the “Corrective Movement,” which began with a coup led by Hafez al-Assad. Nationalist songs filled the courtyard and made their way to surrounding homes that day, Syrian and Ba‘ath Party flags fluttered everywhere, and pictures of the eternal leader covered the walls. They had been hastily affixed, though, with shiny silver duct tape. All her five-year-old son did was tear one down and drag it along behind him, on the ground. The teacher disappeared from school after that, and we heard she was disappeared for good.

  This story aside, didn’t I tolerate your anxiety, Baba? Did you know that when I was in Year 10, the youth military-education instructor asked me into her office. It looked much like yours. “Suleima, your family is from Hama,” she began. “Has your father told you what happened there?” No sooner had her question slithered into my ears than I transformed into you. I saw you entering my body, your eyes filling mine. I was you. Immediately my stomach cramped, the way yours would have done if you had been there. I won’t forget how weak my knees became, how fragile I felt, oh Baba. My inconsequential life was reduced to the vibrations of her voice. “Our Father the Leader has bloodied his hands for the entire Syrian people,” I replied. I waited for her response: a frown, or a contented smile. She smiled and told me I was free to go. I desperately wanted her to do something—shout at me, for instance; slap, kick or report me to the Wise Leadership, with orders to assassinate you and Mother! Or for her to have said: “Bravo! Your family raised you well.” Instead, her cryptic smile kept me up night after night, imagining what might be in store. Here, I’m speaking again about fear of fear. Anticipating fear is harder than feeling it. Prison is easier than fearing it. Fear on its own is less cruel than fearing fear.

  Has Naseem really lost his mind?

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  Yasmine called me one morning from a Lebanese phone number and said she was in Beirut for the week. More than a year had passed since her family had all seen each other, so they had decided to meet in Beirut. She arrived from Damascus with her mother, father and brother. Her older sister flew in from Dubai with her husband and children. And her younger sister travelled from Germany with her husband. They came to spend New Year’s Eve together in a cheap hotel halfway down Hamra Street, and planned to return to their respective homes on New Year’s Day. I hadn’t seen them since the revolution began.

  I had not forgotten the years we all lived on the first floor of a building in Masaken Barzeh. The girls were open and friendly, and we all grew up together. I had been completely alone in those days, and they were like sisters to me. Then came the rift. It happened quietly, no shouting, confessions or discussion. They stopped calling, and I knew. It was not hard to understand. Things were not the way they had been before the revolution. The rift was self-evident, and there was no need to try to repair it or restore what used to be.

  But now she had called and reached out, and I was happy to hear from her after so many years. I went to the hotel to see them. They had two small adjacent rooms shared by the whole family. Even for someone who had never met them before and did not know them at all, it would not have been hard to tell who had come from Damascus and who lived abroad, free from the madness that Syrian cities had become. My friend’s body appeared feeble and slack, and the same was true for her mother, father and brother. Her sisters coming from Dubai and Germany looked robust, though, with a blush of contentment on their cheeks.

  Those coming from Damascus politely declined to meet in public, explaining that they were a bit unsettled and did not feel like going out to a coffee shop. I understood. It was not hard to understand. Things were not the way they had been before the revolution. We sat together in their hotel room and made a real effort to avoid discussing politics. This proved difficult if one considered power blackouts, rising prices, shelling, mortars, checkpoints and fear to be political. But they saw nothing “political” about any of this; in their eyes it could all be explained by conspiracy theories. Then, even though they had refused to meet in public because they would “rather not go out,” they left the hotel, all except for Yasmine. She was tense, and it became clear that she wanted them to leave so she could be alone with me. I returned my cup of coffee to the room’s kitchenette. I didn’t tell her that I avoid coffee in the evening. I had a strange feeling that saying anything about my habits, preferences or even my mood would be excessive.

  We each lit a cigarette. Conversation was slow at first, as if we had just met, as if the river of our shared memories had run dry when the revolution began in 2011. I asked her how work was going and she responded briefly, though not discourteously. “It’s going. We’re getting by, thankfully.”

  Slowly, we opened up to each other again. Yasmine told me that her salary was less than two hundred dollars a month, and that she spent most of that on public transportation between her home in Masaken Barzeh and her job in Firdous. What remained was not enough to buy a cup of coffee in a café, she said, much less clothes or other necessities. She told me that by last month she had managed to save five thousand lira, which used to be worth a hundred dollars. But now it barely amounted to ten. The airline company where she had worked for more than a year now required her to wear a skirt as part of its uniform, and she had wanted to buy wool tights to wear underneath…but they cost three thousand lira! All day she booked tickets from Damascus to Dubai or Egypt for passengers who were turning to private companies now that the national airline’s fleet has been reduced to a single plane. She said that she held passports, airline tickets and hotel reservations in her hands every day, but never dreamed of leaving that dreary swamp herself.

  In an effort to make the conversation more natural, like it used to be, I asked her if she still cried. Before the revolution, Yasmine used to come over with a little bag and spend days or weeks at our house. She said she felt like a stranger in her home. I never understood where her sense of alienation came from: she was so similar to them, as
they were to us. But she was constantly lonely, as if her soul had been born into the wrong skin, as if she belonged to her family and home in body alone. She often lived with us for long periods, and we would almost forget she was there. The only reminder was the sound of her crying emanating from the little room where she slept, the one that used to be mine. She cried feverishly, without a clear sense of why. Maybe she needed a daily cry to wash away some obscure pain.

  Sitting there years later with our cigarettes, I asked her if she still cried. She gave me her old, sweet smile…and began to cry. Had I reminded her of her tears? I don’t know. She cried and cried. I smiled tenderly, and encouraged her to talk to me.

  She said she was deeply in love with a young man named Mahdi. She had met him at the checkpoint erected in front of her grandmother’s house in Damascus, in the neighbourhood of Mazraa. Yasmine stopped to check in on her grandmother every evening on her way home from work. The taxi stopped at the checkpoint, and each time the man asked for her ID and smiled at her. Yasmine fell in love faster than you could write the word, and they started meeting at his house in Mezzeh. She was so in love! I felt a lump in my throat when she told me about Mahdi. She said that he had texted her a few minutes ago to tell her that a decision had been made to transfer him to Harasta, to fight on the side of the regime’s army. “I don’t know if I’ll see him again,” she said through tears. “What if he dies?”