Roundabout of Death

by Faysal Khartash

He asked the waiter to bring us something from the sweets shop next door, and he brought us a kilo of kanafeh pastry.

  “Shame on you, your body can’t take all of this.”

  He laughed, saying, “Don’t you worry about it. We can do whatever we want.”

  As I nibbled on one piece of dessert, Abu Muhammad asked the waiter to wrap up everything that was left over so he could take it with him. The waiter tidied up the table, placing all the leftovers into a bag. After finishing our tea we stood up. I tried to pay the bill but the owner refused to take my money, telling me, “Your money’s no good here, just give the waiter five hundred liras.”

  The waiter carried the doggie bag out to the Mercedes for us. Abu Muhammad and I sat down in the car and took off. We headed north and then west. He told me he was going to pass by the house so he could put the food there. His house was right near the mayor’s mansion, in an expensive, brand-new building, on a street they call Villa Row. He didn’t take me inside with him, and when he came back after a bit I asked him to take me somewhere I could rest and then come pick me up later to take me to the market. I walked into the hotel, waving goodbye to him in more or less the same way I had said hello a little while earlier.

  Early the next morning I went over to Abu Muhammad’s place on Villa Row and rang the bell but nobody answered. I waited for some time, until a member of the Islamic State came to greet me. When I asked about him, the man demanded, “Who is he to you?”

  “He’s a friend,” I said, “I’ve known him a long time.”

  “He’s gone off on a jihad operation,” he told me.

  “Where?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “But he’s a good friend of mine.”

  He simply repeated that he had departed on a jihad operation and that heaven was his final destination. I walked back to the hotel, packed up my things, and decided to return to Aleppo. I made my way back to the bus station, booked a seat, and then boarded the bus, waiting for it to depart.

  The bus was all set to leave the garage when a bearded man whose hair had grown out long hopped on board. He was dressed in the uniform of the Islamic State, bristling with guns and grenades. He scrutinized the face of each and every one of us, studying us carefully, then proceeded to the women in the back of the bus and started chatting with one of them. There were eight women back there, all sitting primly in their seats, all had draped their niqabs down to cover their faces. They were dressed in black from head to toe. When the man came back toward the front of the bus, I asked him what he wanted with that one woman in particular.

  “Brother, everybody knows how women are supposed to dress in the Islamic State, everyone except for this one apparently.”

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “She sasses me and says she’s been dressing this way her entire life. She deserves to be whipped.”

  “Forgive her, sheikh.”

  “May God protect us from them,” he muttered as he walked away.

  The young woman was wearing dark purple, and he insisted that she should be dressed exclusively in black.

  I looked out the window at the street below as the bus sped off. There was a child with ISIS walking around the garage, a little kid who couldn’t have been more than ten years old carrying a Russian-made rifle, dressed in camouflage like all the other Islamic State fighters. As soon as the bus started to veer off toward the right, I felt as though I were saying farewell to the river as we crossed over it in that moment. I shut my eyes and surrendered to oblivion for a moment. What was I going to tell my wife? Should I tell her I wasn’t able to find Hamadi Abu al-Issa? Or that I couldn’t find a house to rent? I think I’ll tell her what happened to me, and maybe I’ll come back soon. The taste of the Euphrates water was still on my tongue.

  In the past I used to travel to Raqqa and from there on to Damascus. Along the Raqqa highway you would pass through Al-Sukhnah and Palmyra. The road to Aleppo was blocked off. There was only one way to cross over there and that was the Raqqa highway. I had reserved myself a seat on a bus that would first go to Damascus. We didn’t pass too much on the way down there. I stared out the window at the sky, gloomy and dark, not overcast because of clouds but thick with black smoke. The smell inside the bus was intense.

  “They’re extracting oil and barreling it,” said a man on the bus.

  I could have sworn I saw specters of men covered in black directing a primitive refining operation. There were black dots all over the place, human beings extracting petroleum coated in black, their clothes and their bodies alike. Everyone was hard at work. They were transporting the crude oil in containers for sale at the marketplace. They loaded it into barrels, sold it as diesel and gasoline. The market was located just before you reach Tabqa. There were cars waiting to deliver the barrels to areas not under regime control.

  As soon as we had made it to areas that didn’t reek of petroleum, we were stopped at a checkpoint. Someone from the Islamic State boarded the bus and said, “As-salaamu aleikum,” some of us replied to him, others said nothing at all. He began by giving us a sermon about the significance of the pious cloak, how the Prophet had sent one to the Ruler of Egypt, al-Muqawqis, telling us that entire story before going on to tell us how deeply he came to believe in Islam when he heard the tale of the cloak. He was addressing us in modern standard Arabic, telling us how he used to be a law student but then left that behind to join up with the Islamic State. He told us all to extend our hands as he pulled out a small nail clipper and began cutting fingernails, not everyone’s, of course, just those with long ones, insisting that all hands should look like women’s. When he had made it all the way to the back of the bus he began to walk forward again, chitchatting with the bus attendant, and he concluded by threatening to skin him alive if he ever saw passengers with such long fingernails again. He disembarked from the bus, wishing us all a pleasant journey.

  “God is good,” the bus driver told us, then invited the women among us to dress however they felt like and said that none of us would say a word.

  I turned to his assistant and asked, “What’s the matter with you, man? You just let him cut our fingernails like that. Do you have glue in your mouth or something, brother?”

  And we set off once again.

  The bus continued all the way to Tabqa, where we turned off to the left. The airport was on one side. It appeared totally abandoned. After a while I saw more oil extraction taking place, something like thirty-three derricks, all of them seemed to be brand new, some were active, others were not. There were pipelines to transport the oil. You would have seen a highly coordinated operation that begins with extraction and refining here, then transport somewhere else, only God and the Islamic State know where exactly.

  The bus attendant had gone to bring the women water several times. When we were out of ISIS territory, he returned to the back of the bus to take the flyers the man had given them in the garage. I took one from him and read a piece of paper addressing “My Muslim Sister,” imploring her to respect the law of God, to wear the niqab and to always wear the same bulky gown that was worn by the Prophet’s wives. I turned around to look at them. The women were all bustling to tear off the veils from their faces and the outer gowns from their bodies. Suddenly they were all wearing jeans and blouses, some of them already with makeup, while others applied cosmetics to their faces, all except for that one woman whom the guy from ISIS had threatened to whip when she told him that she had dressed like this her entire life.

  The bus attendant tore up the papers and tossed the scraps out the window. We continued through the seemingly endless countryside for an hour and a half. The youngsters pulled out their mobile phones and started playing games, while the women returned to their seats beside their husbands, at least until we reached the first regime checkpoint. We passed through five checkpoints in total before arriving at Athriya, the crossing point for those coming from Salamiyah, Damascus and Beirut, Tartous, Latakia, Hama, the villages of Idlib and their
hinterlands, and those going onward to al-Shaar and Bustan al-Qasr. I don’t think these people were from around here. I thought they were from Aleppo, and their only way out was through Al-Safira, that’s what I thought anyway.

  We reached Khanasir, then Al-Safira. There were villages scattered here and there completely devoid of people. All the doors and windows had been thrown open, soldiers loyal to the regime were sitting on refrigerators and washing machines all over the place. The regime army was the sole military force present. Birds congregating in the road flew away when the buses rumbled past, squawking at us.

  As we crossed the Al-Safira road we started to notice people who weren’t dressed in military fatigues. At the checkpoints where we were stopped, we paid a bribe along with a bottle of fresh water, until the bus reached the Ramouseh checkpoint. By this point the bus attendant had collected all of our identification documents so the information could be entered into the computer for a security check. We waited about half an hour before we were finally cleared to enter Aleppo.

  ROUNDABOUT OF DEATH

  The next day I went back to the Island Cafe, where the young men had gathered around the table without me on that dark night with no crescent moon. As soon as I sat down at the table, they said in unison: “Welcome back.” How could all this be happening when I hadn’t told anyone anything about what I had been up to in the first place? Before walking inside I anxiously searched the mirror for any lumps of arousal poking through my hair.

  Muhammad D wasn’t there yet, but I learned that his brother had been shot in the right foot by a sniper and was now in the hospital. When Muhammad D showed up two hours later and sat down right next to me, I asked him how the situation was now, and he said his brother had been taken for surgery at the Razi Hospital, that he’d have to stay there for a few days to undergo a second operation.

  “Where did the bullet that struck him come from?” I asked.

  He carefully looked around, remained silent, then looked back in our direction. “I think . . . ” he said, looking around again, and even though there wasn’t anyone there, he whispered in my ear. “It was the regime, my brother’s with them, but they wanted to teach him a lesson, he had been dragging his feet, never really cared about them, it was a warning shot, a message to him, they don’t even know about his illness. Behind the toaster oven there was a curtain that was supposed to protect against snipers, the poor guy couldn’t imagine they’d ever be able to shoot him, and as soon as he placed his leg in the building exit they opened fire, his heel shattered into bits, and they’re going to have to order a plate to put in his foot.”

  “It’s all in God’s hands now,” I said.

  “Is there anything worse than a sniper?” Muhammad D asked. “Muhammad B, that’s right, he’s the pilot who dropped barrel bombs on the old city of Aleppo, he’s sure there were no fighters there from Jabhat al-Nusra or the Free Syrian Army, and still he dropped barrels that killed people and flattened their homes. Now they’re even starting to use water mines, so our sea is secure but we aren’t safe inside.”

  “Guys,” I said, “change the subject already, let’s talk about women instead.”

  No electricity, no water, no gas in the house, and we just got news about my son Nawwar. His mother relayed it to me, that he had arrived safely in Istanbul and found work there, you can all relax, I hope you’re all fine, he wrote.

  “Thank God for everything,” I said, “and curse all the evil things in the world.”

  I went over to see my mother, and she said, “C’mon, let’s go see your sister Shukriya, to offer condolences about her two boys.”

  “What’s going on with her?” I asked. “Which two boys?” as if I didn’t understand a thing. As we headed toward her house my mother explained everything, how her two boys had been killed, one who was with the regime and the other one who was with the opposition, and she was holding the mourning ceremony for them in the street outside her home.

  We arrived at her house to find people seated there for the mourning ceremony. A bunch of young men dressed in camouflage showed up, all of them sons of my powerful sister, and at this point the reader at the ceremony began to recite from the Quran.

  I took advantage of the opportunity to pop inside my sister Shukriya’s house. When I kissed her on the cheek and encouraged her to take comfort in religion and her faith, she muttered something incomprehensible in response. I kissed my other sister and sat down next to my two siblings, my mother across from me, women and children surrounding me. We’re all together on this road, I said. One sister gave me prayer beads and she gave my mother some beads, too. We sat there for a little while, then said our goodbyes and left.

  Now here I sit in the cafe all alone. There’s nobody else left at the table. As I think about everything that has happened, I muse to myself: Tomorrow’s only a day away. I waited for an hour, two hours, and when nobody came, I stood up and went to buy some vegetables. I took a shared taxi to the new part of Aleppo, the southern part, the roundabout of death.

  FAYSAL KHARTASH is a leading Syrian author. He lives in his native Aleppo, has written several novels and works as a school teacher while contributing to Syrian newspapers.

  MAX WEISS teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Princeton University. He has translated books by Nihad Sirees, Dunya Mikhail and Samar Yazbek.

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