The Stray Cats of Homs

by Eva Nour

  ‘I have to be honest,’ his father said, ‘there’s not much to look forward to here. But that my son is going to live a life of freedom, that is something I never thought …’ He let the words tail off.

  Sami wondered if he had heard him right. It was an admission he never expected from his father. That freedom existed, that it was worth something. And by extension: that the revolution he and his siblings had fought for had value.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ his father said before they hung up.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Moustache.’

  The exile was an involuntary loss. It was losing your linguistic, cultural and social identity. But it was first and foremost grief at having lost himself, his dreams and plans for the future. Of course it was possible to start over, but what if you didn’t want to? What if you found that the weaving of your life had been torn and the wind was blowing through its warp and weft. He had been cut in two: the Sami who walked the streets of Paris and the Sami who looked up and saw the pigeons of Homs circle overhead. As though everything in his former life – all the memories associated with specific places and people – had been transformed into stories.

  Longing was embedded in every memory. He could not sit in the kitchen and argue with his siblings. He could not gather up the overripe fruit under the orange tree at his grandmother’s house. He couldn’t walk to Clocktower Square and have a coffee with a friend. He could only tell people about it. And every time, he wondered if his memories were changing, if he was adding or subtracting, if his narrative was as fluid as he felt. Was the telling a way of keeping the memories alive, or did he lose them the moment he spoke them?

  In November, two friends Sami had grown up with but not seen for many years visited him from Germany. It was a Friday night and they sat outside a bar near the Saint-Martin canal, under the patio heaters.

  Their journey had been more difficult than Sami’s. They had crossed the Mediterranean in a rubber dinghy that had quickly sprung a leak. At first, the boat stayed afloat, but then fuel mixed with the water and burned their skin, particularly of the women and children crowded on the floor. Only one of the two friends knew how to swim; he had to keep them both afloat. People screamed in the freezing water. One by one, the bodies sank, only to be washed up on the beach they could see in the distance. But, miraculously, the two friends made it.

  ‘That’s why my beer’s always on him,’ said the swimmer of the two and smiled.

  They talked about childhood memories, which reminded them that they did have a past, a normal life, before everything was broken. Did they remember the theme music to Kassandra? Did they ever. Sami hummed its distinctive melody.

  He asked the waiter for salted nuts. The bowl clattered when he put it down on their table and, in that moment, they heard the crackling bangs. The people in the bar looked around and exchanged nonplussed glances.

  ‘Fireworks this early?’

  After that, everything happened very quickly and very slowly. Phones began to ding and people were shouting that they had to leave. Chairs toppled over, glasses smashed on the ground, Sami caught the word ‘shooting’. Nothing around them seemed to signal danger; maybe it was just a gang fight further down the street. They walked around the corner from the bar and had a look around before Sami dropped his friends at their hotel.

  It was only on the metro back home that he realized the extent of what had happened. Normally people didn’t speak to each other in the carriages but now everyone was eager to inform and warn. Sami caught snatched words and sentences and read more on his phone. Masked men had fired at several restaurants near the canal. Explosions by the football stadium, the Stade de France, where a game was being played against Germany, had been reported. He and his friends had talked about going to that game but the tickets had been too expensive. His phone dinged again; terrorists had opened fire in Bataclan, where over a thousand people had gathered for a concert.

  When police helicopters began to circle above the rooftops, Sami had flashbacks to the airstrikes in Homs. He bought two large bottles of water and stocked up on candles and tinned goods. Then he paced to and fro in his room, unable to relax.

  Later that night he decided to head back out for a walk around the neighbourhood. The streets were deserted but he felt like he was being watched. He turned around in the light of a streetlamp and looked into a pair of golden eyes. The cat licked its black fur, languidly stretched out its back, then jumped down from the wall and slunk into the cemetery.

  The following night, to clear his head, Sami walked to the Place de la République. Marianne was standing on her stone pediment, holding an olive branch up towards the sky, surrounded by flowers and light. For the first time he felt a strong kinship with the city. They were here together and they grieved together. Perhaps the people here did have some understanding of the trauma he had been through.

  The French president had declared three days of national mourning. This was not just an attack on Paris or the French people, the American president had said. This was an attack on all of humanity and our shared universal values.

  Sami had passed the square many times before, had sat in its burger restaurant and gazed out of the windows on the second floor. During the day, skateboarders zigzagged across it. One time, an evangelical man had preached about sin and forgiveness through a whistling microphone. The preacher had spoken rhythmically, like a rapper, and the people had swayed around him. Sami had paused for a while, trying to decipher the French.

  Now it was midnight and the mood was very different. People were gathering in groups, offering each other tissues and cigarettes. Soldiers with automatic rifles patrolled the square; Sami would have preferred it if they had kept more of a distance.

  A slight cough made him jump. And when he turned around, there she was.

  ‘Do you have a light?’

  He searched his pockets.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said with an accent he couldn’t place. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, too?’

  He laughed and lit one; she smoked with her hand close to her chest as though she were cold. She was a journalist and there to report on the terrorist attacks.

  ‘Stockholm,’ he repeated. ‘I know a couple of Syrians who live in Sweden.’

  ‘What else do you know about Sweden?’

  ‘There are polar bears there, right?’

  ‘Not really.’ She laughed. ‘We have as many polar bears as Syria has penguins.’

  ‘Well, it depends on how you look at it …’

  And then he told her that his mum once knitted him a penguin jumper. That it had been his favourite. He didn’t know why, but something made him want to tell her that. And tell her more, continue sharing his memories. He stopped himself in the middle of a sentence when he realized how strange he must seem.

  ‘I guess you miss her a lot. Your mum and the rest of your family.’

  Then silence, hands deep in their pockets, neither one seeming to want to leave. He nodded at the graffiti wall and asked if she knew what the words meant. Fluctuat nec mergitur.

  ‘It is Paris’s motto,’ she said. ‘She is tossed by the waves but does not sink.’

  Then she took two tealights out of her coat pocket and asked if he wanted to light one with her.

  Sami thought about his little brother, about the ninety people who had drawn their last breaths in the concert hall, about how death always struck out of sequence and indifferently. He cupped his hand against the wind, a flickering flame in the night.

  When we were born, what did any of us know about what our lives would be like? Nothing. We knew nothing. The only thing we could do was look at the place we were in and take a step in one direction or another. Life required nothing more than that. That was freedom. One step at a time.

  Sami had already started feeling at home at Charles-de-Gaulle, particularly in terminal 2F. Over a year had passed since their first meeting at the big square, where people had mourned and she had asked him for a cigarette.
During the autumn, he had waited for her here every other or every third weekend. Sometimes, he had hidden behind a pillar and put his hands over her eyes and pressed his lips against the back of her neck. They took the train into Paris and forgot about time for two or three nights until they had to come back here. Charles-de-Gaulle was their passage and ritual; they met and parted under the white fluorescent lights.

  But now, in December 2016, it was Sami’s turn to go to her.

  Sami had only been on a plane once before and had already forgotten the procedure. Did he show his passport first, or his bag? How many security checks did he have to go through? There was something about all the security guards that made his shirt cling to his back and his breathing become laboured. Martial law was still in effect over a year after the Paris terror attacks. There were reports about raids in the banlieues and Muslims being arrested in the middle of the night on the vague charge of associating with terrorists.

  Her voice on the phone calmed him. Had he packed gloves and a scarf? The winter in Paris wasn’t like the winter in Stockholm, even though Stockholm winters were nothing like the Arctic landscape he had dreamt of as a little boy, with penguins, seals and polar bears. The layer of powder snow that sometimes fell was usually thin enough not to settle on the asphalt, but it gathered in drifts and crept inside your collar on the faintest of breezes, or melted into sludgy patches and seeped into your shoes.

  The night before his departure, he had slept poorly. He had one of his recurring nightmares, the one where he was stuck between two checkpoints. One checkpoint was on his right, and the soldiers were calling him over. Then he heard voices from the left and turned around. The soldiers at that checkpoint were waving for him to come, too. He started moving in their direction, until a round of rifle fire in the gravel made him stop dead. Come here! This way, you idiot! No, this way, or I’ll shoot!

  He turned left and right, increasingly unsure about which way to go. Which checkpoint was more likely to let him through, if he even managed to get to it? Then he put his hands in his pockets and realized he had lost his identity papers. He had nothing to prove who he was. Without papers, he was lost; without papers, he was no one. The bullets struck the sand, closer and closer. In that moment, he had woken up.

  We fit inside a single broken ray of light that contains the echo of every spring.

  One day, the people would be victorious; Sami still believed that. The dead would never come back, but the perpetrators would be held accountable through fair trials and proportional punishment. Because that was the ultimate sign of a free society, that even the criminals benefited from democratic rules and laws.

  So it’s freedom you want? I’ll show you freedom!

  The memory was as brief as a breath. But it was possible to remember together, to turn it into a collective act. Under the regime’s censorship, reading itself became a protest and spreading stories became resistance. More voices would be needed. Voices to provide wind beneath their wings.

  But our bird already knows how to fly.

  Exactly, it just needs to be reminded.

  The plane began its final descent and everything came closer: the sea, the sun, the snow-covered city. Soon, he would see her face in the arrivals hall.

  The darkness fell quickly outside her family house, the streetlights glowing like big fireflies in the winter landscape. Her parents said that he should feel at home. Home. No more than that. But for a moment he forgot to breathe, the pain tingling in his chest.

  The night before Christmas, he gave her an early gift: a notebook bound in maroon leather. In it, he had written down details from their first weeks as a couple. The morning she had knocked on his door with breakfast. The way she walked, that her steps could be slow or fast without her getting winded. There were words in it that made her blush: about her skin, hands, the curved arc of her fingernails which left marks in his flesh. His exhilaration when their lips caught on each other. They sat in bed and Sami watched her read his scribbled notes.

  To’bri albi, you bury my heart. Tishkli assi, you will put flowers on my grave. Tetla’ae ala abri, you may step on my grave.

  ‘All your declarations of love are about death,’ she said.

  Perhaps the violence was buried in the language, Sami thought, and maybe that’s where the change had to begin. With a new language, and new stories. Or maybe death and love really did exist in symbiosis, equally transformative and unpredictable, equally inevitable and absurd.

  Sami watched her close the notebook and run her fingers over the cover.

  ‘One day, I’m going to give you a book,’ she said. ‘And that book will contain your story.’

  A Note from the Author

  Dear Reader,

  I call myself Eva Nour. The pseudonym is necessary to protect the main character Sami, to whom my novel is dedicated. We first met in 2015 and now share a calm life in Paris, with some stray cats in our courtyard. When we met, Sami had recently arrived in Paris as a Syrian asylum seeker and I was there as a Swedish journalist to report on the terror attacks. We became good friends and then, after a while, more than friends.

  At first, Sami preferred not to talk about the war and his escape. The stories came out in fragments and flashes. Some of the things he told me were so horrifying that I had to write them down to organize my thoughts. It started as a private diary, but the narrative gradually grew and took on greater importance, while Sami encouraged me to keep making notes and asking questions.

  A rule of thumb for journalists is that you should never interview people you know well. The lack of distance can be a weakness, but here, it became a strength. I dared to ask things I had never dared to ask before – and Sami dared to tell me.

  Sami’s story gives frightening insight into one of the world’s harshest dictatorships, but it also poses universal questions about the responsibility and authority of the individual, and about the power of love. Questions that are not limited to the suffering in Syria. All major events in the novel are based on reality and are seen through Sami’s eyes, but several characters and situations are fictitious. I believe fiction can often bring us closer to the truth, and in Sami’s case the fiction was a necessity and prerequisite for publishing this book.

  For the shape of the narrative, I have drawn inspiration from novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, witness literature like Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and Samar Yazbek’s brave literary journalism.

  Cats have been included as a red thread in the book and the title The Stray Cats of Homs came after Sami showed me a picture he had taken. It showed a couple of kittens that he’d given a bowl of yogurt to. It turned out that the picture was taken in his home, shortly after the house was destroyed by the regime’s missiles. How could that be possible, I thought. Your home has just been destroyed and yet you feed the animals. For me, the cats became a symbol of humanity.

  It started out as a love story and turned into a novel. Which in turn is an act of love, a love of both Sami and the Syrian people. And the name? Eva is a common Swedish name that means ‘life’. Nour is a common Arabic name that means ‘light’. Light and life. Since this is, after all, a story about keeping hope alive.

  Eva Nour

  Paris, 2019

  Acknowledgements

  A warm thank you to my publisher Sarah Adams and her wonderful team at Transworld Publishers, who have showed tremendous support and encouragement. Also, thank you to my translator Agnes Broomé and copy-editor Mari Roberts, for an impeccable eye for details and sense of rhythm. A special thanks to my Swedish publisher Maria Såthe, editor Johan Klingborg and the other kind people at Wahlström & Widstrand, who believed in the novel right from the start. Thank you to my agent Elisabet Brännström and her team at Bonnier Rights, who have helped to share this story with more readers.

  Finally, my greatest and deepest gratitude to you, Sami, and our Syrian friends, who have confided in me with your trust and testimonies. You have found a home in new parts of the world and yo
u continue to make these places forever better.

  With hope for peace and freedom.

  THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

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  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published in 2018 by Wahlström & Widstrand as

  De Hemlösa Katterna I Homs.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Doubleday

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Eva Nour 2018

  English translation copyright © Agnes Broomé 2020

  Cover photo © ‘Sami’

  Eva Nour has asserted her right under the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact,

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.