So here we are, at the start of July 2012 in a taxi taking us from the airport to our hotel, in the Hamra neighborhood of Beirut. Manal, Zena’s sister, came to meet us, having arrived the day before with her husband, Khaled, and their children. Zena chats happily with her sister. She hasn’t stopped smiling since we got on the plane: She can’t wait to see her family and watch them meet me. I know her parents have a sufficiently modern outlook to have supported their daughters just as much as their sons in their studies and career choices, but I’m anxious that cultural differences could mean they will have reservations about me. Zena told her father about me very soon after we met. Once he knew she was serious about the relationship, he voiced his qualms: Zena should finish her degree in Europe and go home to exercise her profession as a lawyer and university lecturer rather than settling in France—and what work would she get there, anyway? He could understand that she had feelings for me, but it was a big leap to be considering marrying someone so different from her when she’d already had one failed marriage.
In other words, I’m not exactly heading into conquered territory.
It’s Thursday evening and Zena’s parents will be arriving on Saturday morning. Manal and Khaled have decided to spend the day with us on Friday to show us around the Beirut region. In glorious sunshine, we drive out of the capital and visit the coastal city of Jounieh. Zena and Manal have a thousand things to talk about, of course, and while they chat Khaled and I discover that we have a lot in common—it turns out we both work in law. Our conversation is animated.
“I try to stay optimistic, Stéphan, but I’m worried for my wife and kids. I’m known to be against the regime, and in my work, for the last eighteen months I’ve defended only objectors. That can’t help winding some people up.”
“Have you had threats?”
“More than once. Manal and I are holding out for now. If things get any worse, she wants to move to France.”
“Well, if you reach that decision, you can count on us to help.”
“Thank you, my friend. We haven’t come to that yet, thank God. But I won’t forget your offer.”
After lunch we take a cable car, which affords breathtaking views over Jounieh bay and brings us to the town of Harissa, with its famous shrine, Our Lady of Lebanon. My Muslim in-laws are keen to show me this important site of Christian pilgrimage, demonstrating the genuine respect for other monotheistic religions that every true Muslim has.
I wake early the following morning, very conscious of how important the day ahead is. Zena and I are expecting her parents to arrive during the morning for the official introduction. I’ve had just one telephone conversation with her father a few weeks ago—I wanted to call him as a mark of respect.
They’re late, but we’re prepared for that: The road from Damascus to Beirut is punctuated with checkpoints that make progress very difficult and journey times impossible to predict. The telephone rings: It’s reception letting us know that my fiancée’s parents have finally arrived. We go down to meet them in the hotel lobby.
Zena does the introductions, starting with her father.
“Dad, this is Stéphan Pélissier, the man I’ve chosen to marry.”
“Welcome to our family, Stéphan. Zena’s told us so much about you, we’re very happy to finally meet you.”
Saif Eddine Al Khatib comes up to me, shakes my hand, and draws me toward him for a hug. His firm grip immediately communicates all the energy and determination that this man has already demonstrated so many times in his life.
“Mom, this is Stéphan, my future husband.”
Wafaa Al Khatib looks at me but says nothing. Zena has warned me that she’s extremely discreet and reserved. I pause for a moment, hesitant and embarrassed: Would it be appropriate and respectful for me to shake her hand or to kiss her? I hadn’t thought to ask Zena about this! Rooted to the spot by this conundrum and paralyzed at the thought of committing a blunder, I stay where I am with my arms hanging limply, and it’s Wafaa herself who comes to my rescue by stepping forward and taking my hand in hers while her face lights up with the kindest of smiles. I tell her quietly that I’m happy to meet her, and her soft warm hands communicate her kindliness and love as a mother more eloquently than any words could.
With Zena’s parents are her other sisters, Mayada and Mirvat, and her younger brother, Anas. They exuberantly rush over to me as soon as the introductions to her parents are finished. We chat for a while, and they are as relaxed with me as they are speaking French.
Soon, we all head up to our suite, where Zena and I busy ourselves serving refreshments. I notice Wafaa is now carrying a huge dish of vine leaves stuffed with rice. I’m overwhelmed with emotion because this dish encapsulates my childhood, it’s what my Greek maternal grandmother, Voula Paraskevi, used to make for me all the time! Granny called them dolmas—here they say yalanji, but when I taste them, I rediscover the exact same pleasures of this simple yet delicious dish: the moist rice, the soft crunch of the leaves, the combination of hot spices and cool mint…In a flash I’m nine years old again, sitting at Granny’s little kitchen table, and she’s watching me eat my favorite food with my fingers while she tells me a story from my mother’s childhood. This dish is my family, and here it is being served by the family of the woman I’m going to marry. This is wonderful, it’s the universe giving us its blessing.
The whole family has arranged to meet at a restaurant at seven o’clock. We’re on the Corniche Beirut, a wide sea-front esplanade on the promontory with incredible views over the Mediterranean. Nearby, the old lighthouse—a tall, tapering building with black and white stripes—seems to watch over us. Zena has changed into a cream-colored silk dress with a light matching wrap, and her hair is held in a headband embellished with feathers that form a flower shape. She’s radiant. This first evening will be the most private: only Zena’s parents, her sisters, brother, and other members of her close family are invited. We walk through the front of the restaurant and at the back we find a pretty terrace with sea views. We all take our seats around the spread of salads, grilled meats, and other mezze, looking forward to a family feast. It’s a very enjoyable meal, with a succession of different groups at each table as we regularly swap places to keep the conversation varied. After dinner we go back inside, where a room has been reserved for us to dance the night away.
For Zena and me, this evening isn’t just a party: It really is a ceremony, a sacred moment in our relationship. We now tell our friends and family—including our daughters—that we were married in July 2012, first in Beirut and then in Castelginest a few days later. After this intimate party at the restaurant, we continue celebrating our union with friends and family for the next two days, but it’s this first evening that’s really imprinted on my heart.
* * *
—
These are the best days of our lives so far and we should be completely happy…
But our parents haven’t even met, and that’s something we must accept.
But Zena can’t show me her country, and that’s something we must accept.
But her parents can’t see what her life is like in France, and that’s something we must accept.
Because our love is powerless in the face of a violent civil war that erupted just when our relationship first started.
In April 2011, when we were exchanging our first emails, Syria saw an unprecedented wave of protests. The regime’s reaction was swift and brutal: Demonstrators were shot at with live bullets and tortured, and thousands of people were taken in for questioning.
In July 2012, while we were celebrating our marriage, the conflict grew fiercer and more entrenched, with the repression of protesters increasingly savage. And the Islamic State took advantage of this chaos to advance on Syria.
* * *
—
How could we hope this conflict wouldn’t affect us?
How could we think t
his war would have no consequences for all of us, from Damascus all the way to France?
2.
Four thousand kilometers
After our wedding, Zena and I settle into the same happy routine enjoyed by millions of couples in France. We love each other and we have plans: to have children and build a house. But there’s a permanent shadow hovering over our happiness. Knowing that Zena’s family is so far away and so beyond our reach…it’s tough for me but much worse for my wife. French television channels present us with terrible images of the conflict tearing her country apart. Week after week there are more reports about demonstrations being quashed with appalling bloodshed, and about armed conflict between the rebel army and government forces. Sitting and watching our screen at home, all we feel is sheer rage at our powerlessness and terror that our loved ones are in danger.
When we next see Zena’s family, in Beirut in March 2013, Zena is four months pregnant. We’re both very happy and have set our hearts on telling them the news in person. But oh, the contrast between our quiet lives and what Wafaa and Saif are going through: Not long after our wedding, they had to move because their lovely apartment on the outskirts of Damascus ended up in a war zone. My heart constricts as Saif describes the cramped accommodations they managed to find at very short notice, and their landlord who takes delight in ramping up the rent—war creates a lot of casualties, and a handful of fortunes. Zena and I ask them—the first of many times—to leave their country to join us in France. She and I talked about it all through our flight, and she naively thought that our unborn child would clinch the argument, persuading them to flee. But, convinced that they are safe in the center of Damascus, Saif refuses to give in to terror. It will be more than a year before he makes up his mind to ask France for help, to no avail.
Zena is devastated. Fear eats away at her. Week after week, month after month, the situation in Syria worsens. My wife is losing sleep over it, traumatized by images on TV and social networks. I, meanwhile, am outraged. I wish Saif and all of his family could join us as soon as possible, but I understand his indignation: No human being should have to flee his or her own home to escape bombing. And when it does come to that, they shouldn’t have to plead with a peaceful country to save their lives. Either way, there’s nothing I can do. Nothing. And it’s driving me crazy. I can’t reassure my wife, she has so many reasons to worry. I can’t take her family out of harm’s way, it’s not in my power. I can only ball my fists with rage as the TV shows me bombings, ravaged landscapes, civilian victims, exiles…and the unshakeable, triumphant Bashar al-Assad.
3.
Living and growing up in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria
ANAS’S STORY
I think I realized very early on that nothing in life happens as planned. I already thought about this a lot when I lived in Syria. Obviously, not many young people who live with their parents have hectic lives full of shocking surprises, but when you go to school in Damascus things are very different.
The civil war started when I was just thirteen, and I’d already had friends disappear overnight or come to school in tears because they’d lost a loved one—either killed in a confrontation or taken in one of the regime’s arbitrary roundups. But my parents, my sisters, and I were convinced that we could and should stay in Damascus.
Looking back, I don’t know how we held out for so long.
My parents were forced to move for the first time in 1997: The government had labeled their neighborhood an “area of historical interest” and had expropriated their house. They ended up, on very short notice, in Husseiniya, in the outlying southern suburbs of Damascus. Luckily, four years later my father managed to get a house not so far from central Damascus. But in 2012 they had to abandon that home, which was now in a war zone, and move to a tiny apartment closer to the city center. It was tough both psychologically—we’d lost a lot of our creature comforts—and financially—our landlord raised the rent every month because he knew we didn’t have a choice. Even so, we clung to the city where we had all been born, and the country for which my father had fought in his day. Stéphan and Zena kept saying we should leave Syria and join them in France, but my parents turned a deaf ear.
I’m not sure about my mother and sisters, but I stopped believing in the future when my father was abducted in 2014. Those four months when he was held prisoner have marked me for life. I couldn’t understand how my mother stayed calm and always seemed optimistic. I could see she was sustained by her faith, and I was ashamed that I wasn’t as pious as she was, ashamed that I was so terrified, thinking we’d never see my father again. Of course she was frightened too, especially at first, in the few days when we had no idea what had happened to him. Then came the ransom demand, and it may seem crazy, but we were relieved: So he hadn’t been taken by the regime, which would have meant certain death. It was just a financially motivated kidnapping like so many others in Damascus at the time: Big wheels in their fifties and sixties were specifically targeted, and my father was just the sort of established figure with the means to pay an enticing ransom. Despite all my mother’s efforts, it took a very long time to get him out. He was held for four months. When I finally saw him again, he had changed so much it felt like hugging my grandfather. After he came back, I couldn’t bear it if anyone in the family was even five minutes late coming home. It gave me panic attacks.
We did a lot of talking as a family after that, and in the summer of 2014, finally persuaded, he agreed to ask for asylum for the whole family in France. The French embassy in Damascus had already closed, so he filed his request in Beirut.
When I went back to school in September 2014, my own life got a lot more complicated too. There were two gangs. Students whose parents were connected to the regime—and who therefore had the power—put the others, including me, through hell. I was regularly given death threats, insulted, pushed around, and beaten. I often went home bleeding, my face swollen and bruised, and my eyes half closed. I managed to hold back my tears only to avoid making my mother cry too. And anyway, my father hadn’t cried.
At the end of 2014 the French consul in Beirut summoned my father to his office for a meeting about the request for asylum. The conversation went very well, my father made much of the fact that we’d all been learning French since we were very young and that two of my sisters were already in France. We were so happy: We would be granted asylum, for sure! But in March 2015, for reasons we simply couldn’t understand, my parents received a terse email informing them that their application had been rejected.
How absurd: A month earlier, my sister Manal, her husband, and their children had received confirmation that France would grant them political asylum. But they’d been living on French soil for nearly two years, and they’d left Syria to live in Jordan even before that, shortly after Zena and Stéphan were married. It was in Jordan that my sister applied for and was given a precious D visa, which allowed her to go to France and ask for asylum. Manal worked as a translator for various NGOs in Amman, and she was able to use her contacts to secure a swift hearing and a positive outcome.
The situation in Damascus was growing steadily worse for us and everyone around us. My parents were increasingly concerned for their safety, for mine and for my future. I’d had excellent grades so far and wanted to focus on the sciences for my last two years at school but—here too—only the children of people connected to the regime had access to this option, the most prestigious in my country. I had no choice: I had to major in literature, which I found very boring, and the worst part was I knew it was robbing me of my dream of becoming an engineer.
One day at the start of summer 2015, just before dinner my father announced that he’d decided we must leave Syria and join our family in France. My mother and sisters were very worried: Without refugee status, we would have to rely on illegal and therefore dangerous migration networks. For me, though, it was quite simply the best possible news. I couldn’t take any more of this life, and
—at last—my father was giving me a glimpse of another future.
In the end, only Mirvat decided to stay. She wanted to finish her master’s and could live with an uncle whose home was in a relatively safe neighborhood. Maybe she was also scared of the protracted journey itself, especially because she was exhausted at the time. My sister Mayada, whom everyone calls Mimo, would come on that journey with my parents and me.
* * *
—
The need for complete secrecy complicated preparations for our departure. If the authorities got wind of our plans, we risked being arrested before we even left the country. It would have been unthinkable to tell our landlord we were going abroad, we just said we were handing back the keys because the rent had become too expensive. I couldn’t confide in friends at school, I couldn’t even say goodbye to my two best friends, Fares and Mahmoud. As soon as I reached France, I contacted Fares to explain everything, but Mahmoud isn’t on social media and I’ve never heard from him again.
A few days before we left, we sold everything. Everything. The journey would be very expensive, we had to pay for people smugglers, hotels, food…My father emptied all his bank accounts, and Manal and Zena sent us as much money as they could. My mother parted with bracelets, necklaces, and rings that she’d inherited from her family. I’m a real geek, so my most precious possessions were my game console and my computer: I sold them off within a few hours of putting an ad on social media. We changed all the money into euros and dollars, exchanging it in small sums to avoid attracting attention. We kept only our phones. I know some people are surprised when immigrants have the latest smartphone, but it’s important to understand that during the grueling journey we were facing, phones would be our only means of communication. Because we would have no fixed abode until we reached France, it was imperative that we be able to contact not only our loved ones who’d stayed in Syria, but one another if we were separated. We would also needed our phones to use social media in order to find and contact the people smugglers who would get us over international borders. And we would use GPS apps on our phones to find our way around unfamiliar countries and cities. Not to mention the fact that the photos on my phone are now the only physical reminders of my life in Syria. I abandoned everything else when I left.
I Just Wanted to Save My Family Page 2