by Eva Nour
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘Are you sure? Maybe I’m just getting old and forgetful …’
That settled it. His dad still didn’t suspect that Sami borrowed his car, and so he continued to use it. To keep his promise to his friend, Muhammed was given the chance to drive, but he frowned and said the city traffic stressed him out. Instead he sat in the passenger seat and picked the music, usually American rock or metal.
At the time, in 2002, they didn’t know that metal would be banned a few years later. Maybe it had always been illegal, prohibited by some lurking legislative paragraph, but if so, the law had never been enforced before. It wasn’t only listening to or owning the music that was forbidden, just looking as though you liked rock was suspicious. A guy in their school was arrested for having an earring, unwashed hair down to his shoulders and a tattered denim vest.
Was it that the lyrics were considered subversive and likely to instigate civil unrest? Who knew.
The concerts might have been the problem. Gathering in groups was only allowed under certain circumstances, such as during the annual manifestation in support of President Bashar al-Assad, who had taken over at the turn of the millennium after his father died. People got signed attendance sheets to prove they had participated, and were given pictures of the father of the nation. Many praised the new president, not least Sami’s dad.
‘Things are going to change for the better now,’ Nabil said.
‘I thought you were happy with things the way they were,’ Sami said.
‘Yes, but now they are going to be even better.’
Sami’s teenage years were about walking a fine line between different sets of expectations. Because he did well in tests in school, he was expected to raise his hand and choose the advanced courses. He won the calligraphy competition in their district, writing excerpts from the Quran and other poetic verses in different, ornate styles. Afterwards, all the teachers recognized him in the hallways, said hello and told him he should sign up for future calligraphy competitions.
Instead, he joined a boxing club. He punched mitts and sandbags for a couple of months, until his coach suggested he start competing. That made him quit boxing, too.
When Muhammed asked if he wanted to split a bottle of wine, he usually said yes. Before going home, he chewed a couple of coffee beans.
‘What’s that?’ Samira said when she kissed his cheek at the door.
‘Just a new kind of gum.’
‘Is that right?’
Sami engaged in other everyday protests too. For the most part, it was enough that he knew about them. The challenge lay in exuding enough confidence and compliance to get away with overstepping certain boundaries. In creating a pocket of freedom in the unfreedom. Like keeping a rock album under your mattress. Like borrowing your dad’s car without asking.
6
HE LONGED TO be older, but the growing itself was an unpleasant process. His body shot up, his voice made involuntary backflips and he slept like a hibernating animal. In the mornings, he borrowed Hiba’s concealer to cover the worst spots on his face. At least until his father caught him in the act.
‘Are you putting on makeup, my son?’
Makeup was on the long list of products that were not suitable for men. So was moisturizer, and electric razors.
‘Real men use straight razors,’ Nabil said.
‘You’ve seen too many cowboy movies, Dad.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. Can I borrow yours?’
Samira exploited Sami’s new height in her weekly cleaning. They began every Sunday morning by turning off the power. Then the furniture was carried outside and the rooms doused with water. Walls, ceilings and floors, everything was washed and scrubbed. Afterwards the water was poured away down the floor drain, but only once it had cooled down, so as not to awaken the evil spirits. Hiba teased their mother for believing in jinn, but at the same time it did seem stupid to risk it. Especially since it was said the spirits could take any shape they wanted: trees, animals or humans. How would you be able to tell where they might be?
Sami was responsible for the crystal chandelier in the living room. It was a balancing act that took at least a full hour to complete, standing atop a rickety ladder. Every crystal had to be polished individually. His older brother Ali was too heavy for the ladder, his younger brother Malik too short and Hiba had her hands full with other things.
‘What’s this? Ew … disgusting.’
Sami turned to see his sister holding up a flimsy piece of cloth and making a face.
‘Hey, they are not disgusting. They are perfectly clean.’
‘Could we please not use Sami’s underwear to dust the shelves? Or any other underwear.’
‘Why? You don’t use them any longer,’ Samira said. ‘What should we do with them, throw them in the bin?’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘Do you know how much water a cotton bush needs? Do you know what it would cost to buy cleaning towels every week? Do you want me and your father to grow old and poor?’
‘Mum.’
‘Would you and your brothers prefer if I use them in the quilt and sell it at the market?’
‘OK, OK.’
But before Hiba had time to dip the boxers in water, Malik snatched them from her hand and put them on his head.
‘Guess who I am? An evil jinn who has come to eat you …’
Sami’s little brother walked with his arms out, like a sleepwalking ghost, and before Sami had time to stop him – Hey, careful! – Malik had bumped into the ladder, which swayed dangerously but stayed put.
Around one, they turned the power back on. Sometimes, Sami turned the chandelier on too quickly, to check if he’d missed any spots, and was rewarded with a shock from the damp switch.
‘See, I told you.’
Samira smiled triumphantly, one hand on her hip and the other on the scrubbing brush.
‘Seriously,’ Hiba said. ‘If you’re a spirit and you can live wherever you want, wouldn’t there be better places than drains and electrical outlets?’
At night, Sami was afflicted with another kind of electricity, which had him waking up in the mornings with stains on his sheets. It was as though something took over his body at night, as though it were possessed. His older brother laughed when Sami, mortified, asked if a jinn might be behind it.
‘My brother, you are growing up, that’s all.’
Yes, he grew taller and older, and one day he was offered his first job. He and Muhammed frequented a restaurant where they ate shish tawook, grilled chicken. The big windows had a view of the mosque and a small square with palm trees and water features. Sami’s father was good friends with the owner, Abu Karim, who would sometimes stop by their house for a cup of coffee in the evenings.
Abu Karim always came in a suit, unless it was the weekend, when he wore a long and expensive-looking djellaba under the jacket. He always brought sweets or fruit with him, and praised their well-kept home. Sami didn’t know how his father met Abu Karim, other than that they were colleagues in a state-owned factory in their youth. Nabil had been responsible for clocking in the workers and had covered for Abu Karim when he was late in the mornings.
‘Who would have thought that one day that sleepy boy would become the owner of his own restaurant?’ Nabil joked.
‘But that’s precisely why,’ Abu Karim said. ‘I don’t have to get up early any more – my employees do.’
Samira had tried to get Nabil to think about his health but he couldn’t resist Abu Karim’s baklava from the best bakery in town, baked with thin dough and fresh butter and lovely layers of crushed pistachio and auburn-coloured honey and – Nabil stretched for another one.
‘Take one more, my friend.’
‘Well, if you insist …’
On one occasion they were discussing the restaurant’s finances. Abu Karim told Nabil he had all his papers in order, well, near enough anyway, but that the author
ities still weren’t satisfied.
‘Maybe I could help?’ Sami said.
Nabil laughed at his impudence, but let Abu Karim ask him some questions to test his knowledge. At first, his father was flipping through a magazine and stroking his silver moustache, but by and by he started listening attentively, leaning forward in his leather armchair.
‘Where did you learn that?’ Nabil said.
‘School,’ Sami replied.
It was almost true, but he had also had a peek at the books of Ali’s computer shop, which had just opened in the city centre. Overnight, it seemed, his older brother had grown into a mature adult who wore a shirt and tie and talked with Dad about business. Sami felt like it was his turn to step up.
‘Would you like to help me out after school one day a week or so?’ Abu Karim asked.
His father leaned his elbows on the worn knees of his trousers and Sami thought he would say no, that his son was only sixteen and needed to focus on his schoolwork. Instead, he shrugged and smiled at him.
‘So long as your grades don’t suffer.’
The next day, Sami went straight to the restaurant. Downstairs, a magical world of steam, clatter and loud voices opened up. A number of men were moving between hobs and counters. They roasted and fried meat, rinsed lettuce and sliced tomatoes, sifted egg whites through their fingers to save the yolk for mayonnaise. Abu Karim put an arm around Sami’s shoulders and gave him a tour.
When they reached the office, the sounds became muted but the smell of food lingered. The room was sparsely decorated: a huge desk in dark wood, an espresso machine in the corner, and a TV screen showing pictures from the surveillance cameras in the kitchen. Sami thought something was missing, and then realized there was no portrait of the leader on the wall.
The clutter was all hidden under the surface. In the desk drawers, that is. From the top drawer, Abu Karim pulled out a thick wad of receipts from the lunch service. He just had to put the numbers in the columns, here and here. Questions?
When Abu Karim left him alone, Sami realized this was serious. His shirt clung to him and his mouth went dry, then he picked up the topmost receipt and read it. There was a knock on the door and a stranger put his head round.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Accounting,’ Sami said.
The stranger laughed and disappeared. He picked the receipts up one at a time and wrote down what dishes and drinks the customers had bought in one column, the price in the other. As he worked through the pile, he discovered that some receipts were invalid – usually due to the wrong dishes having been entered – so he put them into a separate pile.
By his second day in Abu Karim’s office, he already felt like part of the team. It was not unusual for the restaurant to have a call from a company ordering two hundred chicken sandwiches in one go. Could they deliver in two hours? They always could. If they weren’t fast enough, someone else would be. Sami was responsible for keeping the books on a day-to-day basis, under the supervision of Abu Karim’s oldest son. A couple of hours after school, on the weekends and more in the summer. Before long, the other employees got used to Sami being around.
‘Hey, bookkeeper boy, want a sandwich?’ Anwar, one of the more experienced chefs, would say.
Anwar was wide and tall and had what people used to call ‘good health’. His starched apron was stretched tight over his stomach, and the sleeves of his white shirt were neatly rolled up around his thick arms. He kept his hair in a tight knot and wore a black bandana that gave him the look of a martial arts trainer. Despite his size, Anwar was the smoothest operator in the kitchen. No one could roll sandwiches like him. He moved between benches and bowls and juggled bread and chopped vegetables as smoothly as a professional karate coach.
Sami watched in awe as Anwar squirted on sauce and clamped the sandwich shut in one motion. He made Sami feel like he was one of them. Sami, who made his own money and was free, a grownup, at least in his own eyes.
Winter and spring blended together. Sami worked at the restaurant and tried to keep his grades up. He regularly visited Ali’s computer shop but barely ever saw Hiba, who spent all her time at the music school where she had just been accepted. It was at this time their mother was taken to the hospital with a lump in her breast. It was benign, but even so, it did something to her. Samira said the sunlight was too strong. She pulled the curtains shut and often stayed in bed until almost noon.
Meanwhile, their youngest brother grew increasingly neglected. When Malik came home with the wrong school books or a scraped knee, Sami scolded his little brother and told him he had to do better. Malik would put in an effort for a while, but would often be distracted by what was in front of him in the moment, a comic book or a friend to play with.
Being siblings was supposed to be uncomplicated, a love that was a given. But that was not how it was for Sami and Malik. Perhaps it was because his little brother was so much younger that he didn’t feel like a real person, more like a dog who was always demanding attention and following him around. Never a moment’s peace. But Sami had promised to help with bedtime and it was on one of these nights that Malik whispered to him.
‘You know what, I have an idea about how to cheer Mum up.’
The next day, Malik brought home a puppy that he claimed a friend of his had asked him to look after. The little mutt had tangled fur and ears that flapped when it shook its head. It was like Malik himself, with a dark, unkempt fringe and big, soft eyes, playful and naive. Was his little brother insane, bringing home a stray dog? But when Malik scratched the dog’s ear, it rolled over and licked his fingers.
‘Aw,’ Samira exclaimed and put her hand on its pink belly like a star.
‘It can live on the roof,’ their dad said.
Memories can change shape over time, but later in life, when Sami thought about his little brother, one moment always came to him first. It was when Malik took his hand on the roof terrace and pointed to a hunk of green shell next to a heap of black, raggedy fur. The turtle squinted as they approached. The puppy languidly wagged its tail. There they lay, the dog and the turtle, dozing next to each other, as though they were sprung from the same womb.
7
NABIL DIDN’T SAY in so many words that Sami ought to choose one thing or the other. Instead there were unobtrusive comments: I always hoped your older brother would become a doctor. Or, imagine having an officer in the family, the advantages you’d get.
It wasn’t just education and careers that had to be chosen. When Sami turned eighteen, a voting card arrived in the post. His first instinct was to tear it up but Nabil stopped him.
‘It’s never going to get better than it is with the Baath Party,’ his father told him.
Baath means renaissance, and what was to be born anew was Arabic nationalism. The Baath Party advocated a united Arab state, since it was said that the division of the Middle East into different states and peoples was made up – artificial lines and borders drawn by colonial powers.
When Sami thought of belonging, he felt more like a resident of Homs than anything else. Syrian, sure. Arab, why not? But he didn’t understand the pompous speeches and parades. Did his father really think there would never be a better party? Sami didn’t know. All he knew was that his parents, in fact most of their generation, thought differently than he did. It wasn’t just that they supported the regime. Some even seemed in love with the military uniform gazing back at them from school books, office posters and long televised speeches. Or perhaps the aftershocks of previous massacres were still reverberating, a quiet quake manifesting as silence.
‘Fuck the Hafez generation,’ said Muhammed, one of the few times Sami heard his friend swear.
There was an imbalance in their society. It was like tiny tears in silk cloth, growing and multiplying until the fabric was unable to conceal what lay behind it. The knowledge of the massacre in Hama was one tear, and the militaristic school uniform and the propaganda songs were another. At the same time, living in their
country was fine, so long as you stayed on the right side of the curtain. On the surface, nothing was wrong or lacking. There were hospitals, schools, holiday resorts, churches and mosques. There were malls, gardens, theatres and libraries. The problem was the arbitrariness, that you could never know when the fabric would rip in two and reveal the other side.
‘There’s no point bothering with politics,’ Nabil said. ‘So long as you have nothing to hide and you keep your nose clean, they leave you alone.’
Sami used to think that way, too. It was a banal, inconsequential event that made him change his mind.
What happened was that Sami went to the state bank to cash a cheque and the teller asked him for a bribe. A bribe! Sami knew it had happened to other people but hadn’t thought it would happen to him. Naturally, he wouldn’t pay someone under the table for a service he was entitled to.
‘Is it true, did he really ask you for money?’ the bank manager said.
Sami described the course of events again and explained his surprise. Gave a matter-of-fact account, curbing his anger, to make sure the teller would be reprimanded. The bank manager nodded several times. He was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on the polished teak table, a confidence-inspiring pose that made it seem he was both listening intently and not listening at all. When Sami was done, silence fell and the bank manager took a sip from a dainty porcelain coffee cup. Then he dabbed his lips with a napkin, folded it four times and put it in his breast pocket. The only sound was the ticking of the clock on the wall.
‘Was that all?’
That was all.
The bank manager slowly turned to his colleague and opened his mouth and from his throat came a rumbling, almost inhuman sound. He was laughing. The bank manager was laughing and his colleague was laughing with him, and it was so absurd Sami joined in, too. They sat in the bank manager’s office, laughing. Their laughter grew and echoed and bounced between the walls, filling the room until they almost ran out of air. It was a good feeling. How stupid of him to have even worried about drawing attention to the corruption! Sami leaned back in his chair and considered asking for a cup of coffee.
