The Book Collectors

by Delphine Minoui

  Omar is also particularly attached to The Shell because it reminds him of his own situation. How to survive behind bars? How to endure forced confinement?

  He insists on reading me an excerpt:

  I unwind the past and I dream of the future. These waking dreams have become a habit. They bring me great pleasure—they’re my drug. I build the dream little by little, I arrange every little detail, drawing them, correcting them. I immerse myself for hours, seated or lying down, I forget the reality in which I find myself: I transport myself to a reality where everything is beautiful and easy.

  Omar looks up, still lost in his reading. He continues: “The Shell is a mirror in which I can project myself. A protective bubble I create to be able to endure the worst. A suit of armor to protect myself from danger.”

  His unwavering faith in books brings to mind all the letters and accounts left behind by the soldiers of World War I. Like Marcel Étévé, a graduate of France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure, who devoured eighty books in two years on the front line. Or Robert Dubarle, the captain of France’s legendary mountain infantry, whose wife constantly sent him reading material for the trenches. Then there’s the famous Société Franklin, which bankrolled the creation of 350 barrack libraries. Reading to escape. Reading to find oneself. Reading to feel alive.

  Among the young people of Daraya, reading has even more meaning than that. Here, reading is an act of transgression. It’s an affirmation of the freedom they’ve been deprived of for too long.

  Despite their complete isolation, their reading choices are more varied than those of the trench soldiers of World War I, whose books were regularly scrutinized by military leadership concerned with controlling ideas and dissuading conscientious objectors. In Daraya, there is no screening of publications: the activists and Free Syrian Army fighters who saved thousands of works from the rubble maintain their commitment to putting all of them on the library shelves. And thanks to those satellite dishes smuggled into Syria at the very beginning of the revolution, they can even download new texts directly onto their cell phones.

  “My friends send me lots of books on my smartphone, after getting them online. That’s a huge help, especially when I don’t have time to stop at the library to borrow new ones,” Omar tells me.

  His dream? To get hold of a digital copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. When I hang up, I promise myself I’ll try to find him an Arabic translation. And I imagine him returning to a front line filled with dangers that even the grimmest of books is unlikely to depict.

  Little by little, the missing pieces of the puzzle of Daraya come together on my computer screen, in Istanbul. After Ahmad, Abu el-Ezz, and Omar, dozens more activists and rebels participate in our virtual dialogue. In order to corroborate the information I’ve gathered, I schedule additional interviews. I fly to Lebanon to meet the regime’s fleeing opponents. I travel to Gaziantep, in southern Turkey, to question exiled representatives of the Daraya local council. I talk about the enclave with journalists, diplomats, and humanitarian workers. Back in Turkey, I meet activists from the citizens’ movement of the 1990s. They’re unanimous about what makes Daraya so original: more than a symbol of resilience, the town is a unique model of governance where, despite the war, civilians, and not armed factions, have the final say.

  Meanwhile, my conversations with Ahmad continue.

  The jihadist question gnaws at me. In Damascus, the proregime TV station al-Dunya keeps repeating the same refrain: Daraya is a nest of terrorists. They need to be eliminated. Taken down for good. The regime propaganda blindly sticks to the same narrative. But I want to be sure. Does the suburb of Daraya harbor, yes or no, Islamist terrorists, even if they’re a tiny minority?

  Ahmad registers my questions. And he answers:

  “I’m going to be honest with you. At the beginning of the uprising, most of the protesters in Daraya were waving the green-and-red flag of the Syrian revolution. Then a few individuals started to carry the famous black flag stamped in white letters with the Muslim profession of faith. At first we let them be. After all, we had already suffered enough under the grip of a regime that forced a single idea, a single banner, on us. Furthermore, the jihadists claimed this black banner was the Prophet’s flag, not al-Qaeda’s or any one specific movement’s. They were using Islam as their shield, a way of saying no to a crippling regime. Later, at the end of 2012, when Daraya found itself encircled by pro-Assad forces, a half dozen Syrian combatants from the al-Nusra Front made an incursion into the town. At the time, it was still possible to enter through the breach in Moadamiya, the neighboring suburb. The anti-Assad combatants of the Free Syrian Army were just getting organized. The Islamic State hadn’t been born yet. We didn’t know much about the al-Nusra Front. So, yes, people let themselves be seduced. Young people especially were easily influenced. Out of ignorance, no doubt. And despair, too. Sometimes, simply in the spirit of being contrary.”

  The new al-Nusra partisans very quickly began to clash with Ustez’s old guard. They accused them of being Western agents, of insulting Islam, of being kafir (unbelievers). There were tensions, a few disputes. In 2014, the local council finally made a decision to stop the situation from degenerating: it signed a common charter with the commanders of Daraya’s two battalions, Liwa Shuhada al-Islam and Ajnad al-Sham, which stipulated that no other entity could be formed without unanimous agreement.

  Once again, the voice of reason prevailed in Daraya. Unlike Raqqa, another rebel-controlled town stormed by the al-Nusra Front and then Daesh (the latter made Raqqa the Syrian capital of its caliphate three years after the revolution began), the enclave was able to stand up to the jihadists. Unable to gain a foothold, the al-Nusra fighters eventually disappeared. Gone for good. But if Daraya succeeded in driving out the jihadists, it was also thanks to a unique and unbending setup: military decisions are made by the local council, and not the Free Syrian Army, as is the case in most of the other opposition-controlled enclaves. Despite the instability of war, this entity operates like an independent minigovernment, with a dozen departments (executive, military, legal, financial, etc.) aided by committees tasked with public relations, health, and public services.

  “I’m going to tell you a secret,” continues Ahmad. “I had my period of doubt, too. Even though I was against the use of weapons, at the very beginning I was curious about what the al-Nusra Front had to say. There was something intriguing about the group. Their discourse was well-practiced. I naively thought that they had come to support us, to defend our revolution. After all, we shared the same desire to change the regime. And then they quickly showed their true colors: suicide attacks in other parts of the country, the terror forced on territories they sought to control, the murder of Free Syrian Army fighters. Even though their terrorist operations don’t go beyond Syria’s borders, unlike the jihadists of Daesh, they’re trying to place a black stamp on the country. Their ambition is territorial and ideological, under the cloak of Islam.”

  Another form of urbicide, a religious version. A perverse desire to transform cities and trap people into a single way of thinking.

  “Another unique thing about our enclave is that the anti-Assad rebels are all guys from Daraya,” continues Ahmad. “Young men, with no military background, who took up arms for the first time during the revolution to protect themselves from the regime’s bullets. A third of them are former students, like Omar. What’s really absurd is that Bashar al-Assad accuses us of having been infiltrated by foreign fighters, when his forces are relying on the support of Russian planes, and militants from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to smother what’s left of the moderate opposition. Through his propaganda machine, Bashar al-Assad is trying to convince the West that he’s the sole rampart against Daesh. In reality, the government’s brutality is only radicalizing its opponents. Instead of pulling out the weeds, Assad is watering them. If the regime really wanted to eradicate terrorism, it would have started bombing Raqqa a long time ago, not Daraya.”
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  Ahmad breaks off. He’s talked enough about politics. He wants to get back to the original subject: the library.

  “It’s our best shield against deception and ignorance. Our way of banking on better days. We have to cultivate patience. You went through this in France. The revolution didn’t happen overnight. The other day, I watched the movie inspired by that Victor Hugo novel Les Misérables with some friends. Man, it was depressing! But, at the same time, I told myself—it took years, but France succeeded in getting what it wanted. Social justice, democracy, human rights. That gives me hope again. The same hope I feel when I watch my favorite movie, Amélie.”

  Istanbul, November 13, 2015. I’m celebrating my birthday with a few friends, along the Bosporus. A brief moment of respite from the hellish news cycle. Last night, two suicide bombings struck Beirut. Last month, Ankara, the Turkish capital, was plunged into mourning after a pair of similar attacks. While Damascus wages war against the moderate opposition, the monster Daesh is bulldozing its own path, increasing attacks outside the borders of its self-proclaimed caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria. Despite the gloom descending on the region, Istanbul remains a cosmopolitan hub where friends from Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, France, or the United States can gather for the span of an evening. It’s that rare multicultural destination where everyone finds his or her place to heal from the wounds of war and exile.

  It’s 11:30 p.m. At the end of the dinner, a Turkish friend approaches me and whispers, “Did you see what’s happening in Paris?” I look at him. He’s pale, holding his smartphone. He hands it to me. Red alerts flash across the screen. Explosion heard at the Stade de France. Gunfire on café terraces in the tenth and eleventh arrondissements. Shots at the Bataclan concert hall. I call my parents, my sister, my friends. Glued to the phone, I mechanically repeat, “Are you okay?” The roles have reversed. After eighteen years living in the Middle East, it’s me asking the question.

  The evening ends in worry, with telephone calls and shared dread. With all those little words you whisper to yourself, to reassure yourself, to pretend that you’re fine, or that you’ll be okay. Waking up the next day is like emerging from a nightmare.

  Except the nightmare is real.

  On TV, it’s all they’re talking about. At least 128 dead. More than four hundred injured. And the claim of responsibility, in black and white, by the Islamic State, which declares that it wanted to target the “capital of abominations and perversion.” After Charlie Hebdo in January, Paris is once again struck in its very heart. Injured Paris. Wounded Paris. It suddenly sinks in that violence has reached my home city. Paris has always been my invincible refuge, where I go to recharge between tough assignments covering wars, revolutions, and political crises. Suddenly, the lines are blurred. War here. There. Elsewhere. War at home. On the street corner. War without a front line.

  My daughter wakes up. I have to put on a brave face. Let nothing show. Look, it’s Saturday, and it’s nearly 11:00 a.m., almost story time, our ritual that can’t be missed. Samarra and I skip breakfast, throw on our coats, and go down the stairs. At the bottom of the steps, I take her small hand in mine. Then we cross Taksim Square, walk past the simit seller, pet a cat as we enter Istiklal Avenue, and wind through the dense crowd of pedestrians.

  At the French Institute, the flag is at half-mast. The garden is practically empty. Only a handful of children have shown up at the library, accompanied by their brave, visibly tense parents. Julie’s here, too, the storyteller loyal to her job, despite the mask of sadness whitening her face.

  We take our seats. Julie stands up straight before her young audience. With a slow motion, she opens a bag filled with books, picks one at random, and begins to turn the pages. From the first words, her voice envelops the room like a comforting blanket. To the children, she has always seemed like a benevolent fairy. Suddenly her stories make sense to the grown-ups, too.

  I look around me. There’s something calming in the perfect arrangement of shelves, the coats hung at the entryway, the small benches lined up in front of the storyteller. For the first time, I pay attention to another detail: the library is in the basement. Every Saturday, we walk down a set of steps to reach it. A protective bubble. Like in Daraya.

  Back home, I turn on my computer, torn between the desire to flee the bad news and the thirst to know more. Opening my emails, I immediately see a message from Ahmad:

  We’re so sorry for what just happened in France.

  In Daraya, we are by your side against terrorism. If our own suffering was not so deep and if the bombings were less intense, we would have lit candles as a sign of solidarity, but sadly we can’t do much.

  I hope that you’re okay and that, wherever you are, you’re not in danger. Know that we are deeply saddened by what happened. We offer our condolences to you and to all the French people.

  We know that if France is in mourning today, because of this terrorist act, it’s because you support our fight for freedom.

  We are truly thankful for the help of the French people.

  Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

  I’m dumbfounded. Ahmad lives under a steady rain of bombs. He’s lost countless friends, hasn’t seen his family in three years. His daily life in Daraya is a spiraling crisis. Yet he took the time to write this message, to share his compassion.

  Would a terrorist ask forgiveness?

  Would a terrorist grieve the dead?

  Would a terrorist quote Amélie and Victor Hugo?

  On December 7, 2015, I receive a new message from Ahmad.

  This time, it’s a shard of a sentence, piercing like a bullet fragment. It fits on a single line: “The library’s been attacked.”

  I reread it immediately, scanning every word, every syllable, hoping to uncover some detail wedged between one letter and the next. In vain. I hurriedly grab my phone to call him. His number rings but no answer. I open Skype: Ahmad is listed as offline. Then I send him a text: “You okay?”

  Met with silence, I resend my question a few hours later. And I add, “Are you there?”

  Later that day, his response finally arrives.

  There he is, at the end of this patchy line, in this inaccessible and bruised part of the world.

  He’s there and it was a close one. In the middle of the day, a barrel of explosives struck the building housing the library, ripping off two of its five stories, turning the entrance into a mountain of debris. In the basement, the shelves have spit out their books. They litter the ground like flotsam, disarranged by the explosion, bent, wrinkled, mixed with plaster and broken glass. In the fall, pages were torn out. Covers dented. Dust has taken care of the rest, burying tables and sofas under a grayish blanket. Now it’s time to sort the books again, to remove the broken fragments of wood. “But you don’t need to worry, everything’s fine,” continues Ahmad. “Nobody was hit, there are no dead or injured. A miracle! And actually, we’re already back to work, cleaning everything, putting every book in its place, gluing pages. This is how it is. Life goes on. They just ruined the main door, the one that leads to the street. From now on, we’ll enter the library from a hole dug into the left wall. It’ll be more discreet, better protected. And yes, the library is going to reopen for its readers. And if it’s not tomorrow, it will be the day after tomorrow, inshallah. In the meantime, we still have things to read thanks to the PDF files saved on our smartphones.”

  Ahmad tells me all this in a sporadic series of texts. Now and then, to save time, he answers me using audio clips recorded on WhatsApp. Since the beginning of the war, this has been the best way to communicate intermittently with Syrians on the inside. You send your questions. And they get back to you when they have time—or a connection. A modern answering machine that escapes the regime’s surveillance.

  I ask him if he thinks the attack was deliberate, if Damascus knowingly targeted the library. He says nothing. That’s how he responds when he’s thinking. Saving his words, trying to be objective. T
hen he tells me that he doesn’t really know. Elsewhere, in the rebel neighborhoods of East Aleppo, in northern Syria, the regime and its Russian allies purposefully target hospitals, doctors, and ambulances. It’s blatant. Premeditated destruction. Even the United Nations has recognized it. But for barrel bomb attacks, like in Daraya, it’s harder to prove. The strikes are random. They’re not precise. They can miss their targets. Yet another reason they’re so terrifying and so lethal.

  “Deliberate or not, this attack confirms how much Bashar al-Assad hates Daraya. He just wants us dead. It’s obvious,” Ahmad continues.

  His voice lowers slightly, then regains its original strength. “If he could burn us alive, he would!”

  This time, I’m the one who retreats into silence. I can’t help but think of Fahrenheit 451. About the mad firemen who set books alight in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel. About the special brigade that roams the streets to punish offenders.

  I remember a sentence uttered by the head fireman, Captain Beatty:

  A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

  And I tell myself that one day I’ll share this twentieth-century work of fiction with Ahmad. A prophetic novel he can add to his long reading list.

  Over the following days, Daraya sinks a little deeper into darkness. Blockaded by the government. Pummeled by bombs dropped from helicopters. Condemned to live like an ostrich, head buried in the rubble, in an attempt to resist. As 2016 begins, winter pelts the town with the same persistence as the aerial strikes. “Daraya, the city the sun forgot,” as they say ironically, and bitterly, in a video filmed by the local council during the siege and posted on YouTube. In December alone, more than 933 barrel bombs were dropped over Daraya. Easily designed and inexpensive, these are the Syrian army’s preferred weapons of terror. Is this the reason for Ahmad’s silence? Since the attack on the library, he’s been less talkative. I imagine he’s overwhelmed, especially now that more bad news has descended: in January 2016, after numerous aborted attempts, the regime succeeded in definitively cutting off Daraya from its neighbor Moadamiya, thereby depriving it of its last source of external food supplies. There is now no way to leave the enclave. The side roads are permanently blocked. The blockades are fortified. More families, in a panic, packed their bags and fled at the last minute through the fields, bringing the number of residents down from twelve thousand to approximately eighty-three hundred.