Syrian Dust

by Francesca Borri

  I think about Atmeh. Because there was this girl in Atmeh. On a frayed mat. A girl with Down’s. And Atmeh was already what it was, the cold, the hunger, and that girl, in that dilapidated tent, in the mud, humming a singsong cadence. In the silence there in Atmeh, in the snow, only that singsong. Those grunts. She was—she was Syria. That look. Defenseless. Stricken. She was the icon of Syria. It could have been one of those photos that go around the world. With everything after remaining as before. Alessio had looked at her. Focused. Then he looked again: not through the lens.

  At the girl. Outside the photo.

  And he focused again. He looked again.

  The girl wasn’t even aware.

  In that corner, in that fetid air.

  Nothing more. And Alessio there, looking at her. The girl. The icon.

  The girl. And she there, not even aware.

  The icon.

  He unscrewed the lens. He said—No.

  And he walked away.

  It was his last time in Syria.

  they found Eva’s son.

  The Genovese boy. He had his passport with him.

  And then they phoned his father.

  His closest friend, they told him, a Somali boy, had been wounded. And Ibrahim tried to drag him to safety. He was shot and killed.

  “My son is a hero,” the father said.

  “My son was a little fool,” the mother said.

  His name was Giuliano, actually. Giuliano Delnevo. He studied a bit, worked a bit. With no specific plans. He had converted to Islam in 2008, and went around in a beard, robe, and turban. On YouTube there’s a video in which he talks about Ramadan, another in which he urges Monti, Italian prime minister at the time, to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. That’s all. He urges Monti to build schools and hospitals instead. Much like the campaign against the F-35. Except that now there are all these other more radical videos circulating on his YouTube channel, the Liguristan. I don’t know. To be truthful, looking at him, listening to him, he honestly seems like someone who became an Islamist the way another kid might become a punkabbestia, a gutter punk. It depends on who you run into along the way. But now, of course, the Italian newspapers have discovered Syria. More or less. Because when I went to read the article, the subtitle reported: “Killed in Qusayr, Just Outside of Aleppo.” And Qusayr is 125 miles from Aleppo. So I stopped reading. I turned to the following article, about Afghanistan. But I ended up not reading that one either. Maybe the reporter thought he was in Afghanistan, but he was wrong, he was 125 miles farther north. He was in Tajikistan.

  And I ordered another piece of banana cake.

  The Liguristan.

  In reality Westerners such as Giuliano, without Muslim roots, are few here. A Belgian guy. A Canadian. There are so few of them that we all know them. The others are second generation guys. Young men from one of those suburbs you can’t even get to by tram or subway. And then sociologists wonder why they aren’t able to fit in. What may be wrong with Islam. Many of them, honestly, remind you only of a Fabrizio De André ballad—they left to go to war “per un ideale, per una truffa, per un amore finito male.” Because of an ideal, because they were misled, because of a love that ended badly.4 Like countless other soldiers. They are not fanatics. The first thing you think, when you talk to them, is that they come from difficult lives. That the real war, for them, is the one they left behind. Which, of course, does not justify the decision to go to Syria. Some people react in life by shooting, others by adopting orphans. Personally, I have no doubt about who the heroes are. Because my only thought, honestly, when I think about these young men, is that this is not their war. Whatever their reasons. There’s this piece by John Cantlie, the first of us to have been kidnapped here. A year ago. He manages to escape at some point. Wounded, but he manages to get free and to run away, swiftly, in these woods like the Highlands, he writes, and those men, behind him, shooting at him. A British man chased by two British jihadists. In a Syria like Scotland.

  now the phone rings constantly. In more than two years of war, 107,000 dead, it’s the first time. No, they don’t want to know about Qusayr. Where meanwhile the battle rages. Qusayr is the axis of the revolt; it’s like Hama, and most of all, it’s strategic, it’s at the border with Lebanon. It is from Qusayr that the Hezbollah guerillas who support Assad enter, and if Qusayr falls—if Hezbollah establishes itself in Qusayr—Aleppo will be next. But they don’t want to know about Qusayr. They want to know if it’s true that there’s an Italian woman among the rebels.

  An Italian woman at the front. In Aleppo.

  Because in fact, there is.

  She’s thirty years old, and also has a degree. A beautiful woman.

  Yes, there’s an Italian woman at the front.

  And so the phone rings constantly.

  They all want to talk to the jihadist woman. Their voices excited. A Jihadist. Italian. “And a woman too!” They’re in a state of fibrillation. They want a photo of her with a Kalashnikov. Of her helping her wounded comrades. A photo of her putting on makeup there among the sandbags. With a mirror propped up on the ammunition crates. Of her in high heels, one of them tells me. In the evening, when she goes home. Excuse me, when she goes home where? “Okay,” he says, “a photo in flats will also be fine. But does she have a Taliban boyfriend as well?”

  For three days. Calls like that.

  They all want the Italian woman at the front.

  The only problem is that she isn’t fighting. They say she fought for only a few days. At first. Some shrapnel to the stomach changed her mind. She, too, thought it was probably wiser to be 22 million against one than stand there in flip-flops against the fighter jets. And so she remains at the front, sure. On the front line. And for nearly two years, true. But she doesn’t fight. She deals with humanitarian aid, logistics. Intelligence. “I’m sorry, but she really doesn’t fight.” “So okay, fudge the answer.” “Meaning? A person either fights or doesn’t fight.” “Meaning you ask her, and she responds with silence. With an ambiguous look. And the reader gets it.” “Gets what?” “He understands whatever he wants to understand.” “But I’ve already asked her. And she didn’t respond with silence. I asked her: ‘Do you still fight?’ She said: ‘No.’ That wasn’t an ambiguous look. It was a no.”

  Lorenzo shows up.

  They’re offering 2,000 euros for the piece.

  Only Lorenzo doesn’t have her number.

  I tell him: “There’s nothing to write about.”

  “If they pay you, there’s a story.”

  Three days of it.

  While Qusayr falls.

  While in Qusayr, in the meantime, everything explodes.

  Explodes and topples.

  And Qusayr isn’t just any city here. For anyone. Because it provides access to Homs. And for the Syrians—as well as for us—Homs is where it all started. It was in Homs, on the outskirts of that city, that a mortar struck Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik. Colvin wrote for the UK’s Sunday Times, and the only thing someone can say about her is: read what she has written. She was simply number one. Ochlik, twenty-eight years old and a photographer, was considered the best of our generation. One of those faithful to Robert Capa, who used to say that if the photo isn’t good, it means you didn’t get close enough. That’s how Remi was: when everyone else was running away, he was running into it. He was extraordinary.

  February 22, 2012.

  The bombing was so heavy that the bodies lay there for days.

  Seven people died retrieving them.

  But now, May 2013, the regime is back on the offensive. With intense shelling. Hour after hour, dramatic images filter through, hundreds and hundreds of Syrians trapped while from here all the rebel brigades converge toward the south in a desperate defensive attempt. But Hezbollah is much stronger, and hour after hour, photo after photo, these horrific images multiply. They’re all
dying in Qusayr, nothing but corpses, corpses, corpses, rubble and blood, and these photographs of nights lit by bombs, these orange-tinged nights, completely ablaze, like the mouth of a steelworks, a blast furnace that will incinerate everything. You call the activists and you hear screams in the background, shots and bombs; you call back after an hour and another voice answers: the first person you talked to is dead.

  Hour after hour. Minute after minute.

  These excruciating emails. They’re killing us all! Where are you? They’re killing us all!

  But from here Qusayr is too far away. It’s too far south.

  And for months now the border with Lebanon has been sealed by Hezbollah.

  While around you, at the Ozsut, they’re listening to Justin Bieber.

  I call a general in the Free Army and inquire about the possibility of going in with them. But he has no idea what’s going on in Qusayr. He has no idea how he can help me. He says: “We’re in Aleppo, Idlib, Raqqa. But farther south, we have no contacts.” I call the delegate of the National Coalition with whom I have tighter relations. He’s lived in Europe for over twenty years, and has been a guest several times at my place in Tuscany. He goes back and forth from Beirut. He replies from the Amalfi Coast. He tells me not to get so upset. He tells me that when the assault is over, I can go in, of course. A matter of days, he says. Why go in now? Wait for it to be over. Among other things, he says, there’s a beautiful exhibit in Rome. He says that maybe he’ll pass by my house on the way from Pisa to Florence. I tell him my neighbor has the keys. He says: “I thought you’d be there.” Disappointed. He adds: “If you have a girlfriend, I’m with a buddy of mine.”

  There’s nobody left. “Besides, with this light, you can’t shoot anything anymore,” Tom says, zipping up his backpack. “I need skies with less light.”

  “Why not go to Brazil?” he tells me. “Or Istanbul. Why don’t you go and report on Gezi Park?”

  There’s nobody left.

  I read, in the evening.

  I read and look at Alessio’s photos. The ones from Time. The ones—the ones I felt like I was falling into the first time I saw them, when I decided to come to Syria. It’s been over a year. And this is no longer a revolution. It’s—I don’t know what it is. And yet there is still a story in them. In those photos. Looking at them all together. There clearly is a story, nothing else has ever been so clear to me.

  There is a story.

  There is a story, in them.

  There are the Syrians.

  Even though now there’s no one left.

  Only those photos.

  We are burnt up by hard facts. Like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities.5

  * * *

  3 Paul Wood, “Face-to-face with Abu Sakkar, Syria’s ‘heart-eating cannibal,’” BBC News Magazine, July 5, 2013.

  4 The lyrics are from “La collina.”

  5 Remarque, op.cit., 122.

  SUMMER 2013

  We’re running. We’re running quickly between the houses in Salaheddin, now in ruins, these houses that are nothing but rubble and rats, nothing but caked blood, we’re running, quickly, from house to house, through the breaches in the foundations, the ones the snipers use, through gaps in the walls, from room to room; we’re running, quickly, running through these apartments that are like dig sites, strewn with objects still intact, still in place, except they’re all grimy now, covered in dust, and we run and run, from room to room, from floor to floor, staircases that, suddenly, jut out of thin air, because everything has collapsed, all gone, just these stairs there, now, you turn around and there’s nothing left anymore, abruptly, only rubble, just more rubble, and so we run, turn back, run quickly, this chopper over our heads, the clatter getting closer, and there are mortars, all around, bullets, nothing but mortars and bullets and we’re running from house to house, running quickly, running in the midst of these charred bodies, these intact charred bodies, an entire family at supper, completely black, and everything is normal in the room, everything in its place, the chandelier, the sofa, the china closet, the dinner plates, everything intact, the clock, only it’s all grimy with dust, and these six bodies, at the table, composed, fork in hand, still chatting, these six charred bodies, eyes wide, sockets empty, these skeletons, and us running, running, the helicopter slinking low between the streets, hunting for us, hunting for the last ones still alive, while everything, all around us, explodes, explodes and collapses, and there’s only this helicopter hunting us, only we are running from room to room, floor to floor, quickly, and we can’t stop, because if you stop, before turning, before taking another flight of stairs, if you stop to make sure that there are no snipers on the other side, someone grabs you from the rubble, grabs you by the ankles, pulls you to the ground, these bodies, pleading, “Water, water,” they beg, gripping your ankles, pulling you to the ground, but the chopper is over our heads and it’s hunting us, it’s seen us, it saw us and we have to run, just run, fast, because there’s also a plane now, a jet, and it goes into a nosedive, the plane, spins into a nosedive, it saw us, it rushes at us and . . .

  Brightness.

  Brightness.

  3:37.

  It’s 3:37. Only 3:37 a.m.

  A pine tree. A pine tree outside the window. A swing set.

  The swing, the hills.

  Ramallah.

  Ramallah. Back again.

  Ramallah.

  For months now I haven’t slept.

  For months now I wake up at the same time.

  “I like starting with a word,” Federico wrote me, “and following with other, freely associated words.” He wrote: “Weightless, Spontaneous, Airy, Vibrant. Soaring.”

  He wrote to me from Newcastle, where he teaches at the university. Ancient History. And because readers are indeed sometimes strange, he asked me to send him a word for each letter of the alphabet. But in the end I’m here for them, for the readers. Here with them, because they play a part in what I write; ultimately, they are the ones who complete it, who construct its significance, its value. They are part of me. And so, even though they’re sometimes strange, I thought up a word for each letter of the alphabet.

  Freely associated.

  Red. R for Red. R for Rebels and for Regime and for Rubble, A for Airplane, H for Helicopter, E for Explosions, M for Mortars, W for Wounded, B for Blade, G for Grief. I for Inadequate. F for Fear, D for Depletion. I for Inadequate and Insufficient. F for Front, F for Freezing, for Famished, for Flight. G for Guilt. C for Corpse, T for Tank, S for Sniper. F for Flesh. C for Collapse.

  L for Loneliness.

  B for Blood. B for Blood, S for Shrapnel, L for Loneliness.

  Loneliness.

  I reread the list and came to Ramallah.

  Ramallah because this is where I first came. For my Master’s thesis, a Master’s degree in Human Rights and Conflict Management, and I was supposed to stay three months. Instead I stayed three years. And when I think of a home anywhere in the world, when I think of the place I most naturally feel like a foreigner, as Italo Calvino said, I think of Ramallah.6 Of Israel and Palestine.

  And so I came back.

  After more than two years.

  Because when I’m in Ramallah I don’t feel like I’m distracting myself with irrelevant things. Like I’m wasting my time. When I talk to Israelis and Palestinians, I never feel like I’m gliding over things. I have a feeling of depth. In this connection, this cohabitation, in this daily confrontation with life, with basic life, liberty, dignity. Identity. With who I am. With courage and fear. This being asked to choose, each day, and each day being given the chance to be like the girl in that U2 song, “Grace,” to turn hurt not into hatred and acrimony—not into a shield or barricade or assault—but into openness toward others and understanding. Into gentleness and beauty. Into kindness. “She mak
es beauty out of ugly things . . .” The ability to respond with beauty to what has hurt you—“what left a mark no longer stings”—means it can no longer hurt you. “Grace,” that’s the name of the song. “Grace.” And it’s the only thing that I aspire to in life.

  That song. Only I got lost.

  I don’t know where, but I got lost.

  I’m beginning to be like all the others. Like those I criticize so much.

  The same catchy phrases meant to be sensational. The same superficiality. And when I plan my pieces, when I decide what to report on, I start looking for characters, instead of people.

  I begin—I begin to know in advance what I’m going to write. What I’ll find.

  I begin to see the same things over and over. I begin to use the same words over and over. The same adjectives. I get formulaic. I begin to not feel.

  In February, in Aleppo, I was at the entrance to Zarzous, the hospital that replaced al-Shifa. I was there waiting for the victims of a missile, or a sniper—because that’s my job. Spending three hours in front of a hospital waiting for someone to die. And all the while I was talking with some kids and another journalist, a dead body lay beside us. I hadn’t noticed it.

  I noticed it after twenty minutes.

  I said: “A body.”

  And I went on chatting.

  The truth is that it doesn’t only happen as a journalist. One evening in March, as we were dividing up our apple into nine pieces, the Syrians, as usual, were asking me: “Why doesn’t the world intervene?” And I talked about Russia, Obama, Iraq, the politics, but mainly the economic crisis. The recession. There I was telling them: “We can’t afford it. We can’t help you.” Telling them: “The banks. The stock market, mortgages. People in our country can’t make it to the end of the month.” And they look at you, with their little piece of apple in hand, all of them emaciated, holding cups of yellowish rainwater, they look at you, these people whose problem it is to make it to tomorrow, while your jeans alone cost as much as a whole paycheck. It’s not an exaggeration. Your jeans really do cost as much as a paycheck which in Syria supports six people.