The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous

  I suddenly felt light-headed and unable to breathe. Panic gripped my lungs and squeezed my chest. I took a whole Xanax. She said his family refused to let them marry because she was Sunni and he was Shiite. My fingers began to tremble and I lost the ability to speak. I could not even maintain a kind, empathetic gaze to soothe her. Could I offer consolation for her boyfriend being transferred to the Harasta battlefront? Harasta, where my uncle lived before the revolution began, from where he was forced to flee when the regime’s army bombed and invaded the city, where houses were destroyed and lives stolen. How could I console her, when her lover was going to fight against civilians in retreat? I asked her how she could love a killer. This surprised her. She said that he joined the combat so as not to be killed. I hope he does get killed, I said to myself, and then repeated the phrase, repeated it until it echoed in my mind, until I could no longer distinguish its reverberation from her words or the cars passing under the window.

  Cutting her off mid-sentence, I stood abruptly, went to the window, opened it, stuck my head out and inhaled the damp, chilly air. It had started to drizzle. I felt as though I couldn’t breathe. I went to the sofa, where I had haphazardly tossed my things. A packet of cigarettes; my purse, scarf and coat. Suddenly I felt as if these scattered things were my soul, or a collection of memories. And then a sense of being lost, estranged and separate from reality swept over me again. I felt so heavy and so light at the same time! My head was empty all of a sudden, yet I struggled to keep it on my shoulders; it felt detached from my body, and I was filled with a sense of absence. My soul was in my eyes alone; they were my window to the outside world, as I felt my way along my numb body to be sure it was really there.

  Yasmine was crying and talking about Mahdi, and meanwhile I was suffocating. I interrupted her. I told her the story of the underwear. I don’t know why her talk of Mahdi reminded me of it; I had heard it a year earlier, and it had stayed with me. It was the story of an officer in the army who was suspected of being a potential deserter and detained. He was stripped of all his clothes, even his underwear, and left naked. Then he was thrown into a small room with other naked men. Only one among them was wearing underwear, and though they were tattered, he was the envy of everyone else. Why were they all naked, they wondered, while this man’s genitals were covered? Why him? Every morning, the men were led in procession for a short round of torture, the first of a long day that would see many more.

  One morning the man with the underwear was brought back to the room and its stench of hot breath, pus and disease. He was thrown to the floor, tortured so severely that he collapsed. He was bleeding everywhere and his eyes shone with pain. He groaned, his vacant gaze roving across the room, until finally he closed his eyes and passed away. The rest of the men fought and wrestled, swearing at each other, using the last of their strength to win the underwear. But it was the officer who emerged victorious and put it on. Only then did they realise the story behind it: it was a trophy to be won by a single man, who would not relinquish it until he died or was released.

  Yasmine fell silent, and I made an excuse to leave. I walked through the streets of Hamra in the light rain, searching for air and some sense of security. No, we could never live together again. That was what I was thinking.

  Has Naseem lost his mind? Did he lose it in Damascus, or under the rubble of their house in Homs, or in Germany? Or did he lose it in the “Department of Death and Madness,” where he was held for thirty days? Naseem wasn’t involved in the protests, and hadn’t participated in any suspicious gatherings. But he had come to our house often, and had a good relationship with Fouad.

  One morning about three months before Fouad disappeared, Naseem went out and was detained. They thought he was coming over to meet with my brother. When they found out he was a doctor, and from Homs, their suspicions grew. They dragged him to Department 215, or the “Department of Death and Madness,” as it was known. Naseem spent thirty days in a four-by-five-metre cell with more than ninety other detainees. They were packed in so tight he couldn’t even raise his arms. A single mass of bodies, all the arms as if amputated: one body with more than ninety heads. Naseem told me that there were ninety-nine of them, and that each head bore one of the ninety-nine names of God. There was al-Jabbar, al-Mo’men, al-Shaheed, al-Hayy, al-Haq, al-Haleem and al-Sabbour…names meaning the Almighty, the Guardian of Faith, the Witness, the Immortal, the Truth Embodied, the Patient One…My mother couldn’t hold her tongue when she heard this, and whispered in my ear, “So which one was Naseem? The All-Hearing? The Watchful One?”

  Naseem said that one day the head next to him took his hand, leaned in close and whispered, “You know…this place isn’t that bad. We’re starting to really love it here.” These words sent a shiver through Naseem’s soul—Naseem, who considered love to be nothing more than habit! Would they be detained long enough to grow accustomed to this place, and come to love it? Who was it who said this—was it “the All-Seeing” or “the All-Knowing”?

  Naseem was never beaten. Even so, he wished for death every moment of those thirty days, he said. It was over 50 degrees Celsius in the “dormitory,” as the cell was called, and the air was thick with the prisoners’ breathing. Exhalations accumulated in impenetrable layers, and it was hard to find a fresh gulp of air in between. Bodies deteriorated quickly, overtaken by rashes, scabies and pus-filled sores. People went mad in there. They beat each other in a fight for survival. Prisoners hit each other, aiming to kill, just for an extra sip of oxygen, a body’s width of space or room to raise their hand even slightly. They barely ate or drank. Emaciated: that was the word that described them all. Prominent bones. Skin hanging in folds, or stretched concave over empty bodies. Bulging eyes sunken into sockets. Everyone crammed against each other, everyone’s limbs sticking out of everyone else. You might see a prisoner’s foot protruding from someone else’s mouth. One person’s head sprouting from another’s stomach. Like an insane asylum. Everyone wanted to kill everyone else. Everyone lost consciousness at times, or entered a tunnel of hallucination and scrabbled for something that would never be found. Some survived. Many did not.

  After thirty days in the Department of Death and Madness, Naseem was taken to Department 227. There, “conditions improved”: only twenty detainees in a seven-by-twelve-metre room. They tortured him twice, beating him with a metal pipe that had turned green with corrosion, an “Abrahamic green,” as the other prisoners said. Prisoners were beaten on their bruises. Naseem tried to kill himself by scratching at his body and ripping his limbs apart. He tried to strip his skin from his soul. But his soul fought back…and madness was how it resisted.

  Fouad was crushed by what happened to Naseem, and held himself responsible. My mother made light of it, saying Fate clearly wanted Naseem to be detained; the experience would make him a bit braver, and breathe life into his clearly ailing conscience in his prison of a soul. After all, his family was dying in the siege of Homs. I didn’t argue with her about his conscience.

  When given an opportunity, my mother could never hold her tongue. She had lost her brother in the Hama massacre more than three decades earlier, but had never lost hope of his return. I often imagined his homecoming. He had been fifty at the time, so, if he really was alive, he’d be nearer ninety by now.

  * * *

  —

  Has Naseem lost his mind? I sat in Kamil’s waiting room, so packed it had begun to feel more and more like a hospital. Instead of extending hours for appointments, Kamil had reduced them under the pretext of the security situation; he said he wanted to be sure that his commute home to Bab Touma and Leila’s commute to Masaken Barzeh were safe. Prior to the revolution, he always took Fridays and Sundays off, but now he closed the office on Saturdays too.

  Sitting in the small waiting room wasn’t as nice as it used to be. After Naseem left, it felt constricting, and I often thought I heard his footfall coming up or down the stairs. I remembe
red the chair where he sat, as if he belonged there. I remembered his wandering gaze, how he lost himself in thought, and the smoke of his cigarette when he ashed it. He would look directly at Leila every time, as if he were doing her a favour by using the ashtray.

  On Kamil’s face I saw lines etched by exhaustion. It occurred to me that for the first time in his life he was experiencing the same thing we were: we the crushed, unnerved and frightened ones. We were all feeling the same thing, and he was one of us now. He suffered as we do, living in fear of checkpoints, attacks, shelling and death.

  The time before, I had asked him if madness had a clear starting point. Did it begin gradually, or did it happen all at once? What makes a person lose their mind?

  Kamil gave a brief smile, then quickly focused his attention. “Are you afraid you’re going mad?”

  For a moment I was silent. “Yes,” I blurted out. “I’m afraid of going crazy the way my mum became an old woman—overnight.”

  He laughed, exhaled a puff of smoke and shook his head with a slightly exaggerated gesture. “Don’t worry…you won’t go mad until we all do.”

  His response confused me. Before the revolution, Kamil had never spoken about “us” as an entity. He talked to me about myself, distinct from anyone else. One time I wanted to give him a painting I’d done, though finishing it had given me a panic attack, and told him it might help him understand the intensity of fear that moved in my mind. But Kamil had refused the gift, insisting on maintaining a professional relationship between himself and his clients.

  That was the incredibly thin but intentional line Kamil had guarded, no different from other doctors and therapists. The revolution had snapped that line. Irreparably. We weren’t standing on opposite banks any more, we stood on the same shore; even shabiha still coming to see him had joined our ranks. Apparently Kamil believed that either we all stood together or we’d all lose our minds at once! Did we all possess the same degree of strength? Was Kamil so overwhelmed that he thought the current situation was stronger than all of us, more than we could bear, more powerful than each of us individually? Is that how we became all of us, not each of us?

  I told him that in my dream I’d been in my father’s clinic in the Italian quarter. I didn’t know how I got in. His office was on the first floor of an old building with high ceilings in the Ain al-Kirish neighbourhood. There was a little room upstairs with a window-sized door; I’d somehow got in and had sat down by the door. Naseem was standing on the ground below, looking up at me. I was in his clinic. He wasn’t wearing a white coat. He was in jeans and a light green cotton jumper. He stood there, cocked his head and gently said, “Come on, now…come on down, habibti.” I was surprised to hear him say habibti; rarely did he call me “darling.” I refused. I wanted to keep hiding there, though I didn’t know what I was hiding from. Kamil smiled. He said matter-of-factly, as if the dream were a cliché: “You miss your father, and you replaced him with Naseem.”

  NASEEM’S MANUSCRIPT

  I did not know it would be my last visit to Damascus. I left Beirut at three in the afternoon. For the previous few months I had preferred having Hassan drive me instead of Mohammed; even though I had known Mohammed for years, his needling questions about current events made me nervous. It was never casual curiosity or commiseration; his questions felt more intimate and had a whiff of the secret police.

  “Do we have a choice, aside from Bashar?” he said once. “I mean, don’t get me wrong here…but we could probably do better, don’t you think?” This he said emphatically, and then leaned forward slightly to look me in the eye in the rear-view mirror. I was silent.

  Hassan was in his fifties, and more genuine than Mohammed. He talked about what was happening in the country too, but never concealed anything behind his words, no matter how harsh they might be.

  We left Beirut at three in the afternoon, and by quarter to four we’d gone no further than Hazmieh, on the outskirts of the city, less than six kilometres away. It was Friday and the traffic was at its peak.

  “Did you hear what happened to Mohammed?” asked Hassan. He continued without waiting for me to respond. “May he rest in peace. He was coming back from Jdeidet Artouz a week ago. He owed money to a man, a member of the shabiha, and hadn’t yet paid…They killed him in front of his kids, right there in the car.”

  I felt sorry when I heard this. Though I had known that Mohammed was working with the mukhabarat, I also knew how hard times had been for his family. He had three boys and four girls, and no one in the family had finished school. How could anyone survive amid news of death and murder every day? Did some of us deserve death and others not? Would I have felt worse if Hassan had been the one killed? Had the revolution turned us into people who doled out death or remorse according to victims’ deeds? Had this brutal regime turned us into brutes ourselves, brutes who choose who should be killed?

  We reached the Lebanese border, crossed the no-man’s-land and arrived at the Syrian side. The traffic was unbearable. The lists of wanted people, formerly maintained by the Immigration and Passports Office, were now held at the border checkpoint. Several junior and senior officers were stationed there, all with the same disinterested expression, and most of them had a cigarette stuck between drooping lips. Aggravation. More aggravation. Even when they detained you, they did so with just a degree of irritation, as if detaining people was a daily occurrence, no stranger than the common cold.

  The officer inspected my passport closely. He said my name then, loudly, as if he wanted me to respond, to identify myself among the other passengers. But the only other person in the car was Hassan; did he think Hassan would respond when he shouted my name?

  He said my name again, my full name. Then he took my passport and went into the cement building—one room only, clearly hastily constructed—to an officer sitting behind an ancient little computer. I could see him speaking to the other officer and giving him my passport. Then they signalled me over. Hassan said apprehensively that if the unthinkable happened, he would continue on to Damascus and tell my mother that I had been detained.

  I got out of the car, feeling incredibly anxious. I walked to the building and went in. The officer sitting behind the computer stared at me with contempt. He shook his head, and the cigarette dangling between his lips shook too.

  “Where’s your father?” he asked.

  I smiled, in an attempt to show my confusion. “Baba? He’s been gone for a long time now,” I said.

  He let out a sneering laugh. “Where’d he go? Fled with the rest of the traitors?”

  “He’s dead,” I said, and thought of Kamil. The officer raised an eyebrow in surprise. He asked me for my father’s date of death, and his surprise grew when I said he’d passed away more than fifteen years ago. He looked at his computer, then back at my passport.

  “Why are you asking about Baba?” I ventured.

  He replied with a degree of annoyance that was clearly constant. “Your father’s a wanted man. We need to know where he is.”

  I told him there must be someone else with the same name. He raised his eyebrows again, this time to tell me I was wrong. “Your father’s a writer, isn’t he?” I nodded. “Yeah, he’s a wanted man,” he confirmed.

  He gave me my passport, and I left. Are they trying to detain the dead now too?

  When I finally arrived, at seven at night, my mother was waiting for me. I told her that they wanted to arrest her husband, and that she needed to stay alert. Then, somehow, this sentence emerged from my lips: “On the border today, just a little while ago, actually—Baba died.”

  I wandered through the house, as I did every time I came back to Damascus, appreciating my books, notebooks and other belongings, and all the photographs hanging on the walls. Every time I came home I opened my dresser and found that the clothes I had left behind no longer fitted. I had lost ten kilos in the past two years. In the dining room, my mo
ther finished setting the table. She had prepared all the food that I had missed, and had chilled a bottle of the Chilean white wine she knew I liked. We sat in front of the television, chatting and eating and drinking, recovering a sense of family, the two of us, as we had done in the years after the death of my father, apparently now a wanted man.

  Around midnight, my mother got up and went out of the living room, into the kitchen perhaps. She left her phone on the table. It rang. An unknown number.

  —Hello?—Good evening, madam.—Hello, who’s calling?—You don’t know me.—Excuse me?—Madam, why didn’t you spend the Eid holiday with us? It’s just not right.—I don’t understand.—Eid’s come and gone, madam, and you didn’t spend it with us. We thought you knew where you came from, but it turns out you come from nothing.—Who am I speaking to?—I told you, you don’t know me. Are you sitting down to dinner with your daughter? Did she just get back from Beirut? Is it nicer in Lebanon? What’s for dinner tonight…?

  I hung up. Panic swept over me, I felt light-headed. I was suddenly short of breath, a wave of sweat poured down my whole body, and a tingling sensation spread down my neck to my chest, fingers and stomach. I shouted for Mama and told her, my voice wavering, that one of them was watching us; he might be standing at the door to our building ready to break into the house. I drew all the curtains, locked the door and went to my room. I took a whole Xanax. I lay down on the bed, hugged my knees, curled up in the foetal position. My body quivered like a slaughtered chicken. Every part of me was shaking. My teeth, eyes, hands, feet, stomach and heart shook; even my stomach was shuddering inside me.

  My mother came in and hugged me and tried with all her strength to control my shaking. My body kept trembling for half an hour until it wore itself out, and the effects of the tablet began to flow through my veins. I stretched out, and my body began to relax. I cried feverishly. I couldn’t sleep that night.