The Stray Cats of Homs

by Eva Nour

  Sami’s thoughts were interrupted by a familiar and ominous silence. The calm before the strike. He only just had time to throw himself to the floor before the missile struck the house next door. The roaring escalated and the tremors intensified. The walls shook, a heavy object thudded to the floor and then he heard a girl’s high-pitched voice from the other side of the room. He looked up in the dark. The girl’s monotonous voice made his blood curdle.

  ‘You’re a beautiful girl, you’re a beautiful girl …’

  He lay still and listened until the battery in the doll died before daring to get to his feet and gather up his scattered items of clothing. He had to leave; there was no guarantee the next missile wouldn’t hit the house he was in – and yet, it was as though he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Sami moved towards the window he had first climbed in through, but with each step he felt as though something was trying to hold him back. As though the house wanted to hold on to him, yes, devour him.

  A new silence fell. In his head, he could hear the doll’s voice ring out after him, hollow like a house without human life. That was when he decided to seek out Muhammed and Leyla after all, before the isolation drove him mad.

  34

  CHRISTMAS WAS APPROACHING and although Sami didn’t celebrate it, he missed the sense of festivity that used to spread through the city, especially in his old neighbourhood, al-Hamidiyah, where many Christian families lived. The streets would be transformed in December, with holly wreaths and tinsel garlands and luxury gifts in the shops.

  Sami had celebrated Christmas with Sarah one year. They had dinner with her family and then went to the midnight mass, where they sat close on the wooden bench and held hands, hidden under her Bible.

  Both the church bells and minarets had been silent for a long time now, the muezzin no longer calling out for prayer five times a day.

  The muezzin was usually chosen for his talent in reciting prayers melodiously or at least – as in Sami’s old neighbourhood – loudly. The recitation was a special kind of art that touched everyone who heard it. Not least the salat, the dawn prayer just before sunrise, which many woke up to, or half slept through with the words finding their way into their dreams. But the muezzin in al-Hamidiyah had made people put pillows over their heads or turn up the radio. Finally, the priest in the neighbouring church had taken the matter into his own hands and walked over to the mosque to talk to the imam.

  ‘Church bells sound the same regardless of the day,’ the priest had said. ‘A human voice is another matter …’

  He didn’t want to hurt the imam’s feelings, especially since they were colleagues in the matter of religion, but the imam didn’t seem to understand.

  ‘You know how people talk,’ the priest continued. ‘Religion is also a matter of aesthetics.’

  The imam fully agreed. ‘Content and form can’t be distinguished from each other and when they interact at best, the message is … elevated.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the priest finally said, ‘but I have to tell you the truth: your muezzin is completely tone-deaf. You’d better change to someone with a better voice to keep your believers.’

  Sami smiled at the memory and picked up his phone.

  Hey Sarah. What do u want for Christmas?

  It took some time before the small screen lit up.

  Ask Santa for peace on earth. And chocolate.

  His belly rumbled at the thought of food. Right now, between peace and chocolate, the choice would have been easy.

  It was both the hunger and the thought of company that drove him out now, on to the dangerous road to Muhammed’s house. Muhammed had stayed in his old home and promised he was going to make Sami and Leyla a feast. A phenomenal recipe, he claimed.

  The passageways Sami used through houses and cellars were constantly changing whenever new ruins blocked the road. Several of the fabric screens set up to obscure the view of snipers had blown down. In addition, the ground had frozen during the night and he had to take extra care when moving in open spaces.

  He arrived at Muhammed’s house but barely recognized the building. The rose bushes had been cut down, probably for firewood, and black plastic now covered all the windows.

  ‘My friend.’ Muhammed embraced him on the doorstep as if it had been a lifetime since they last saw each other.

  ‘It felt like I lost you at the same time as your little brother and Anwar. How are you?’

  ‘You know.’ Sami shrugged, then suddenly noticed the grey wool sweater Muhammed was wearing. ‘Is that Malik’s?’

  ‘Do you mind that I’m wearing it? It’s been difficult to find warm clothes.’

  ‘No, not at all. It was just …’

  His voice broke and the grief came over him without him being prepared for it. They walked inside and Leyla rose from the couch. She took his hands and kissed his cheeks, her lips cold and her fingers blue. Both she and Muhammed had become thinner since he last saw them. And although Sami was happy that they were all together again, he felt discouraged, because in their empty eyes he saw himself.

  ‘How about your plans to start a new school?’ Sami asked.

  Leyla sat down heavily. ‘It’s not possible any more.’

  She held out an arm and Sami sat down beside her on the sofa. Muhammed fiddled with a stereo until they could hear quiet music, then took a few steps into the room and declared that they were not under any circumstances to talk about sad things, for this evening was a feast.

  ‘Did Abu Omar ask for me?’ Sami interrupted and felt his legs shaking.

  Muhammed nodded. ‘But don’t worry, I said you were dead.’

  ‘Which is almost true. You look like a ghost,’ Leyla said.

  ‘You too. Both of you. Which makes this a ghost party, I guess.’

  Muhammed raised the volume and Sami recognized the mixed rock classics they had played during the car trips as teenagers.

  ‘Can you remember when you last had a decent meal?’ Muhammed asked and waved a wooden spoon in the air.

  ‘I remember the arsenic pancake,’ Sami said.

  ‘This is different, I promise. Smell that meat?’

  Sami remembered the smell of roast chicken in Karim’s restaurant and his mother’s lamb stew; he remembered juicy steaks, kebabs and steaming beef kibbeh. And this, which Muhammed insisted was meat stew, smelled nothing like meat.

  ‘Are you sure? Have you tried it?’ Leyla asked and pulled her scarf tighter around her shoulders.

  ‘It’s one hundred per cent animal. You won’t be disappointed,’ Muhammed reassured her. ‘When the revolution is victorious and we’re living in a villa by the sea, I’m going to write A Survivor’s Cookbook. It’s going to be a bestseller.’

  Their expectations rose dizzyingly. Something akin to saliva moistened their mouths. Sami and Leyla nestled into the sofas; Muhammed handed out bowls. A charred cooking pot sat on a moth-eaten jumper on the coffee table. Muhammed waited for silence, like a magician waiting to pull a rabbit out of his black hat. He lifted the lid. The pot contained a watery, brownish soup with flat rectangles floating in it. Their excitement was dampened somewhat, but they held out their bowls while Muhammed served. Leyla put a spoonful of broth in her mouth.

  ‘You should probably come up with a plan B in case the cookbook thing doesn’t work out,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not that bad, is it? Sami, what do you think?’

  He stuck his spoon in the soup and fished out a piece of meat. Sami chewed and thought to himself that it was like chewing a rug. A sheepskin rug, that had spent years on a dirty floor, collecting dust and grime, and then been picked up, rinsed tolerably, cut into squares and boiled for hours.

  ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Muhammed said. ‘You just cut off the wool and boil the skin for a few hours.’

  Sami was surprised to find it was possible to fall short of his expectations. But the so-called meat was in fact inedible. Afterwards they had tea with shaving gel, which gave the beverage a hint of sweetness.

&
nbsp; Moments like this cut through the meaninglessness with a metallic white light and almost made him smile. What if anyone could see them there, in the basement, chewing boiled sheepskin? Wasn’t it comical, this human existence? How your life contained many lives, layer upon layer, like a nesting doll or an onion? How you never knew what to expect?

  Before, he would never have been able to imagine this. The way the rest of the world would never have been able to imagine this, because most people only know about their own lives and one or two generations back. If the world knew this, it wouldn’t let it continue, naturally. And so Sami laughed, at the ignorance of other people and at himself, who only now realized that everything he had ever learnt was meaningless. He should have been learning how to make fire and to dress in layers. How to determine whether a plant is poisonous or not. How to find and purify water.

  In the before times, he had worried about unfinished homework or a spilled drink. In the before times, he had been able to obsess about a rash word or a rash action. All of that was nothing. Insignificant. It was about finding warmth, shelter and water, in that order.

  35

  THAT WINTER, THE last one in the siege, brought a white storm in over Homs. The snow rose in plumes of smoke and whipped across the rooftops. The wind howled and whistled through cracks as though the house were an organ. Sami kept the small wood-burning stove lit around the clock. His fingernails were purple and his cuticles black with soot and oil. The sofa was too short to stretch out on; he spent his nights with his legs pulled into his chest, counting the seconds between the rumblings. His hair, which had grown long once more, started to fall out. He slept with two hats on and in the mornings they were full of tufts. He cut it himself with nail scissors but kept part of his beard for warmth.

  It was during the protracted blizzard that Sami stopped praying. He had never performed the daily prayers with much dedication; he preferred to pray when he felt a need for it. But now, after burying his little brother, in their hometown, which was no longer theirs, what was there to hope or pray for? Sometimes he felt guilty about the shoes, that he hadn’t let his brother keep his shoes.

  A gun battle broke out in a nearby house; one half of the building was dominated by the rebel army and the other by regime soldiers. They were so close they could see each other’s faces, so close they would be able to recognize an old classmate or neighbour or barber among the enemy, through the bullet holes in the wall.

  But it was as though the fighting no longer concerned Sami. He slept and watched reruns of the cooking show Fatafeat, a kind of elaborate self-inflicted pain that still gave him some pleasure. Despite his hunger, he knew it wasn’t hunger that was going to kill him. It was more likely he would die from dehydration or exposure on a night with sub-zero temperatures, or that a blood infection would eat him up from the inside. And yet, all those thoughts of food. It would be a long time before he could pick the first spring grass and the delicate green leaves of the bushes, and another few weeks after that before the first unripe fruits would appear on the few remaining trees.

  The mice were another problem, even though he sometimes appreciated their company. At night, they climbed over his legs and back as though he were part of the sofa, an immobile piece of furniture, already dead. He slept with an arm over his face so he could swat away the most intrusive little tails.

  Sometimes Sami wondered what the end of the siege would be like, if there ever was an end. The Free Syrian Army was too weak and fragmented now to resist the regime forces and liberate the city. They could possibly withdraw to one city block and regroup, maintain at least one stronghold. Otherwise, it was likely the army would go in and clear out the city centre.

  In the spring of 2014, after drawn-out negotiations between the regime and the UN, there was an opening. The green city buses that people had used before the war now entered the besieged zone to evacuate civilians, but not without restrictions. Any young men were likely to be pressed into service. It was unclear whether there would be an amnesty for people who were wanted by the secret police. As a consequence, the people leaving on the green buses monitored by the UN were mainly women, children and the elderly.

  ‘See you on the other side, little brother?’ said Leyla.

  They hadn’t seen each other since the sheepskin meal with Muhammed. Leyla stroked his cheek. It was an unusually tender gesture, but then it might be their last time together. She had stuffed her backpack full of textbooks, some of whose thick bindings had been hollowed out to hide memory cards.

  ‘Remember what we agreed,’ she said.

  If he hadn’t heard from her in twenty-four hours, she had probably been arrested, and he was supposed to get in touch with his contact at Facebook and ask them to close her account. If she was brought in for questioning by the secret police, she would be forced to tell them her password and thereby put others at risk. By closing the account, they could at least protect other media activists Leyla had been in contact with.

  Sami asked her to send his love to his family and to Sarah, if she managed to see them. Leyla climbed on to the bus and waved through the window, but she didn’t smile.

  The green buses left, as did the UN, and the checkpoints closed behind them. He felt both sadness and relief. Several of the children from their school had also been given a seat on the buses. But not Mona and Amin, whose faces he involuntarily scanned the crowd for.

  There was another way out but it could hardly be considered an opening. It consisted of relying on people outside the siege, people who had good connections and could negotiate the passage of their friends. But there were no guarantees. Some managed to get out that way but it was mostly a matter of luck. It only took one sniper not knowing about the negotiation or disapproving of people being let out, or one stray bullet, and it would all be over. There was also the risk of disappearing in the labyrinths of underground jails. To Sami, the odds seemed too long to take the risk.

  ‘I’m doing it,’ said Muhammed, who despite his placid nature was growing impatient. He was speaking faster than usual; his nails were chewed to the quick and he had lost more hair than Sami. There must be another way, Sami said to his friend. Wait a few days.

  ‘I’ve waited long enough.’

  When they hugged goodbye, he could feel his friend’s ribs.

  ‘Do you know the first thing I’m going to do once I’m free?’ Muhammed said. ‘Drink a Coca-Cola.’

  ‘Are you serious? Pepsi is so much better.’

  Muhammed shook his head and smiled.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Sami thought of everything they had been through together. From when they were young, trying to get each other to laugh during the military class at the schoolyard, to the excursions with the Pink Panther, and all the times that Muhammed had got Sami out of danger. Without him, the siege’s difficult years would have been even more challenging.

  ‘So, where are you planning to go?’ Sami asked.

  ‘Beirut, probably. My cousin has invited me to stay in his flat. You’re welcome too, when you get out of this hell-hole.’

  ‘If I get out.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. We are both getting out.’

  They stood in silence, neither of them wanting to leave.

  ‘Hey, by the way,’ Sami said. ‘My parents are going to try to persuade you to testify.’

  Muhammed bowed his head. ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘I know, and it’s fine. That’s all I wanted to say.’

  It was about his little brother. In order to produce a death certificate for Malik, the regime required two witnesses to testify as to the cause of his death, which was tantamount to admitting you had been in the besieged area and were a rebel sympathizer.

  ‘I’ll explain to my parents, they’ll understand.’

  The two friends said goodbye again, then a fourth time and a fifth.

  It was the last time they saw each other.

  No one was able to explain to S
ami what happened next. Maybe it was a sniper who didn’t know Muhammed had negotiated free passage in exchange for leaving the Free Syrian Army and handing over his gun. Maybe it was a bored regime soldier doing target practice. Maybe Muhammed had a change of heart halfway and tried to turn back. Maybe he paused one second too long, a moment of hesitation. Whatever happened, his body now lay on the red line, in no-man’s-land, only starving cats daring to approach him, sniffing interestedly.

  Sami’s deepest grief was not being able to grieve. One by one, they had disappeared from his side. His little brother, Yasmin, Anwar and now Muhammed – soon he would have no one left. He wasn’t even there himself. He was a shadow, wandering through ruins.

  In April, a third and last route out was offered. This time, the agreement to bus people out of the besieged zone to a town north of Homs had been brokered by the Russians and Iranians, both allies of al-Assad. But Sami would not be safe in that town; he had written negatively about FSA soldiers there. Once again, the green buses arrived and left.

  April wore on and the situation became increasingly dire. It was only a matter of time before the regime forced its way in, reclaimed the city centre and purged whoever was left. Sami was still staying in the house near the red line and considered moving to a different street, but then what? It was like being back in that tunnel watching the water rising. Should he have tried to get out on the buses, even though he would have been arrested on the other side? He thought about Younes, the electrician, and how little it took for the regime to brand you as a threat. The cable mark on his forehead, the smallest of visible scars.

  He needed someone to talk to about all of this. On occasion, he caught himself saying words or full sentences out loud to his little brother or his childhood friend. The mice squeaked in response and darted about the floor. There was nothing to look forward to; loneliness enveloped him like a blanket. He rarely left his room.

  But he had a small quantity of ground coffee beans left, which Muhammed had given him before he attempted the leap across the red line. A good day was a day when Sami could make coffee, had enough tobacco to roll a cigarette and it was warm enough to sit on the roof. He took up a couple of sofa cushions. Turned his face to the sun and studied his garden: a six-by-six-foot patch of sand, rat shit and soil. He had found the radish seeds in an abandoned house. There wasn’t time to let the roots grow; he picked the tender leaves and ate them like lettuce.