The Pianist from Syria

by Aeham Ahmad

  At first, they said, “Syria isn’t Tunisia.” Then they said, “What’s happening in Egypt and Tunisia has nothing to do with us in Syria.” Finally, they said, “The Syrian people stand fully behind their government and the wise leadership of President al-Assad. He alone can save our country from a globalist conspiracy.”

  In February 2011, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down and Yemen was in turmoil. And when masses of people pushed through the streets of Libya, we began to ask ourselves if these protests could also reach Syria, the “Kingdom of Silence.”

  Via satellite television, we saw shaky cell phone videos of sporadic protests in Damascus. Students demonstrated at the Libyan embassy, pledging solidarity with the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi. There was a mass demonstration in front of the Palace of Justice. The relatives of political prisoners demanded that their sons and daughters be released. A spontaneous demonstration erupted in the middle of Hariqa market, where a policeman had beaten a merchant.

  On March 15, a crowd of about 150 demonstrators made their way through the historic Hamidiyeh market, chanting, “God, Syria, freedom, and nothing else!” This was a stab at the government-organized marches, where people were required to chant, “God, Syria, Bashar, and nothing else.”

  The demonstrators were members of the educated middle class and by no means “barbaric Islamists,” as the regime labeled them in an attempt to discredit them. The protesters had chosen a historic site for their march: The Hamidiyeh market was where the revolution against the French occupation had begun back in the 1930s. The demonstrators knew their history.

  Was it on this day that the Syrian uprising began? Or was it three days later, on March 18, 2011, when parents marched in front of a police station in Daraa, in southern Syria, demanding that their sons and daughters be released? The teenagers had been arrested one month before, when one of them had sprayed onto a wall THE REGIME MUST FALL!, a phrase we heard every day via satellite television. And for that, the young demonstrators were tortured, their fingernails torn out.

  The parents were outraged. Hundreds of local residents joined their protest. When state security forces shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing four demonstrators, the outrage spread to other towns. Again, the security forces opened fire. In the first month of the protests, more than a hundred people died. But by then, the uprising was unstoppable.

  On state television, the spokespeople for the Assad regime denied everything. First, they denied the demonstrations. Then they denied the violence. In the end, they even denied that the protesters were Syrian. Whenever a protest was shown on television, which was rare, it was always “foreign agents of Zionism and American imperialism” who were blamed for the unrest. Or Iraqi Kurds. Or Palestinians. At times, the propagandists claimed that the “fake news” network Al Jazeera had been giving hallucinogenic drugs to thousands of people to instigate unrest.

  In June, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Hama to protest against Assad. But the regime said that the footage, shot with thousands of cell phones, came from a film studio in Qatar. They said that a facade of Orontes Square had been built there. Al Jazeera, BBC, France 24, CNN—fake news! Agents of a globalist conspiracy against Syria!

  In Yarmouk, all this arrived with some delay. After all, we were Palestinians. We had to remain neutral. We obediently avoided Syrian politics, just like my parents had always taught me. My students talked about these events as if they were happening far away, and not on our doorstep.

  “Did you hear what’s going on in Daraa?” one of them asked.

  “Yeah, it’s messed up,” another one replied.

  And that was it. Then they unpacked their ouds, and we began our do-re-mi-fa-so-la.

  Many Palestinians were in a quandary: On the one hand, we were indebted to the Syrian state, which had welcomed us so generously as refugees, more generously than other countries in the region. Add to that the Syrian propaganda. But on the other hand, many of us sympathized with the demonstrators.

  Our local politicians in Yarmouk warned us to remain neutral. “We’re keeping out of domestic political conflicts” was the preferred phrasing by left and right, from Fatah to Hamas to Islamic Jihad. “Domestic political conflicts!” A strange thing to say, considering we had been living there for over sixty years.

  Many of us realized that refugees could quickly become scapegoats. This was not just the paranoia of an ethnic minority. In March, Assad’s media adviser accused us of being “foreign elements,” claiming that we were intent on plunging Syria into civil war. So that’s why everyone agreed: Yarmouk couldn’t afford to speak out against the regime.

  But our neighborhood was meant to be a safe haven for refugees. And they came. Palestinians in Daraa and Homs had joined the demonstrations—and paid dearly. State security forces had stormed the camp and “put it through the meat grinder,” as the refugees said. State security had stopped at nothing and no one. Time and again, I heard the story of Sheikh Ahmad Sayasina, the blind imam of the historic Daraa mosque. He had offered shelter to some demonstrators. Soon, the security forces had stormed the mosque, firing wildly and gunning down several young men—“in the middle of God’s house!”

  Tens of thousands of people had found refuge in Yarmouk. They found shelter at the UNRWA schools, and many people in Yarmouk helped wherever they could, bringing blankets and clothing, or taking in entire families.

  It was during that time that I was finishing my studies. I still took the bus to Homs on occasion, mostly to take my exams. My finals would have been in July 2011. But as we were approaching Homs one morning, it seemed as if half the Syrian Army was blocking the expressway. The bus tried to swerve around the massive forces carrying heavy artillery—all the instruments of death, meant to crush the rebellion.

  As we approached a checkpoint, I held my breath. There was a good chance the soldiers would stop the bus and check my ID. If they did, they would probably detain me, because I hadn’t done my military service. Or they might simply arrest me, because any young Palestinian male was inherently suspicious. But I was lucky: the soldiers waved us through, and the bus rolled past the checkpoint without stopping. I exhaled. It was the last time I traveled to Homs.

  My friend Michail, an aspiring opera singer on whose couch I had slept a few nights at the beginning of my studies, called me a week later from Homs and told me about the “Clock Tower Massacre.” He worded everything carefully, afraid his phone might be tapped. “We lost many friends,” he informed me.

  Another classmate of mine, a flutist, expressed it more clearly. He wrote to me on Facebook, saying that the soldiers shot at the demonstrators, until “waves of blood splashed against the walls.” Then the fire department had come and hosed down the walls and streets. Two hours later, everything was clean again.

  Each year, on May 15, Palestinians remember the Naqba, the “Catastrophe,” the displacement of more than seven hundred thousand Palestinians in 1948. This year, there were supposed to be more than just the usual speeches and processions, according to a Facebook page. This time there was talk of driving up to the armistice line at the Golan Heights. The meeting point was the mosque in the middle of Yarmouk Street, usually the site of pro-Assad rallies. From there, buses were supposed to bring everyone to the border.

  Buses? Clearly, this rally must have been approved by the top levels of the government. Was the Syrian government trying, once again, to redirect people’s anger toward Israel? If so, no surprise there. The regime had always justified its repressive policies with the state of cold war with Israel, beginning in 1963. After all, we were at war, and supposed to be wary of the “cunning Zionist enemy”; that’s why public gatherings were forbidden, that’s why there was martial law.

  We Palestinians were only pawns in a game. In those days, the regime kept saying to the world: Without stability in Syria, there can be no peace with Israel. In other words: Leave Israel’s security to us. And at home, they incited people against the alleged
“Zionist conspiracy.” It was cynical and two-faced.

  Hundreds of young men joined the rally. When they reached the border at Quneitra, the Syrian soldiers let them pass. The demonstrators cut through the barbed wire and ran across the demarcation line, waving Palestinian flags. Some of them made it to the border town of Majdal Shams. That’s when the Israeli soldiers opened fire.

  The buses brought the survivors home. Thirteen demonstrators had been killed. Several dozen had their legs shredded by hollow-point bullets, a kind of ammunition that exploded only after it was lodged in your flesh. The wounded survivors were celebrated as heroes and were brought to Mujtahed Hospital, where they received the best medical care available.

  But that was only the beginning. On June 6, three weeks later, was the Naqsa, “the day of revenge,” in commemoration of the Six-Day War in 1967, during which Israel occupied the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, and the West Bank. Once again, people were told to go up to the Israeli border. And this time, there was no doubt: the “General Command” was behind it.

  The General Command is a radical militia whose full name is “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command.” Their program is simple, the “struggle against the Zionist enemy,” by any means possible. Even as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or PLO, was beginning to negotiate with Israel, the General Command was still calling for the extermination of the “Zionist entity.” Their headquarters were in Yarmouk. From here, they organized their terror attacks.

  The Assad clan, first the father, then the son, allowed the militia to do as they pleased. The regime fueled the hatred of Israel as much as they could, with Syrians and Palestinians alike. As long as the General Command was directing its hate against Tel Aviv, they had a free hand. On top of that, the organization was full of state security spies.

  Once again, hundreds of Syrians and Palestinians arrived at the meeting point and took buses to the Golan Heights. Again, they broke through the barbed wire and ran across the border into Israel. This time, even more blood was spilled: 350 demonstrators were wounded, and twenty-three died, among them a young woman. And again, the buses drove directly to Mujtahed Hospital, where the wounded received medical treatment and the dead were cataloged.

  The next morning at eleven, there was a funeral procession in Yarmouk. The bodies were wrapped in white shrouds and placed in open coffins. People carried them on their shoulders to the cemetery. But this was not the usual martyr’s farewell. The grief turned to indignation. People in Yarmouk started to ask probing questions: Why had these young people been sent to the slaughter? Why were they treated like pawns? Why were they the cannon fodder with which the Assad regime tried to deflect attention from itself and toward Israel?

  Soon, people were no longer shouting, “Palestine, Palestine, millions of martyrs!” No, they were shouting, “Freedom!” just like we heard at the protests in Daraa and Damascus. It was the largest demonstration I had ever seen in Yarmouk. Tens of thousands of people were on their feet. The rage was further incited by thousands of new arrivals from Palestinian refugee camps all over the country. They had brought a revolutionary spirit. The old and the young, businesspeople, workers, students, and of course the left—especially the generation that had grown up in the ’80s and ’90s with the songs of Ziad Rahbani. My generation.

  By the way, Ziad Rahbani, the father figure of the freedom marchers, the man who had schooled our gaze for social injustice and who encouraged us to criticize the state and the clerics—with jazz, no less!—had become increasingly cynical over the years. We suddenly found him on the other side: after a long public silence, he revealed in a television interview—to the bitter disappointment of his followers—that he stood with the Assad regime and Hezbollah. Today I can’t listen to his songs anymore without thinking of this betrayal.

  * * *

  One morning, my neighbor from the aluminum workshop next door got on his bicycle and told me he was going to a rally. I was curious, so I locked up the store and rode after him. When I turned onto the main street, I saw a seemingly endless parade of demonstrators, waving flags and shouting slogans. The merchants hastily closed the iron gates in front of their shops. And then, in the distance, I heard three gunshots coming from the cemetery.

  Later I was told that angry demonstrators had started to insult Ahmed Jibril, the gray-haired, mustached leader of the General Command. They were throwing trash at one of his aides, which led to a scuffle with his bodyguards, and one of them fired into the air. That enraged people even more.

  “What gives him the right to fire off shots like that?” they said. “He ought to be punished!”

  Jibril and his bodyguards took off and fled through the alleyways toward their headquarters. Soon, it was surrounded by protesters.

  The mob kept demanding that the bodyguard be handed over. “Give him to us!” they shouted. “He has no right to be shooting at us!”

  They threw stones at the building, then Molotov cocktails. Soon, smoke was rising from the headquarters. Then the demonstrators tried to break through the doors and windows with metal trash cans. More shots were fired.

  I was standing about 150 yards away, in front of Palestine Hospital. I saw the wounded being dragged out on blankets and brought into the emergency room. A few of them had leg wounds, but the vast majority had been shot in the chest, stomach, or head.

  I couldn’t watch anymore. Upset, I got on my bicycle and rode home. Although I had already seen how embittered people had become, this was the first time I had witnessed violence.

  In the following months, the Palestinian groups splintered. The larger militias mostly joined the Syrian protest movement and remained in Yarmouk, at least for the time being. I heard that Ahmed Jibril had been rescued from the roof of his burning headquarters by an army helicopter. Now he commanded his militias from outside Yarmouk. His men were still present inside Yarmouk, but they barely listened to their commander anymore, and many of them deserted. There were increasing tensions between the militias and the people of Yarmouk, who didn’t want to follow any more orders, just because someone had a rifle. “Look at them, swinging their little sticks,” some people said mockingly.

  The younger generation had different heroes; they were no longer looking up to Fatah, Hamas, or the General Command. Their idols were young people from Italy, Germany, France, or Sweden who had come to Yarmouk to learn Arabic or to support the Palestinian cause. The General Command’s calls for neutrality rang hollow to their ears, like music from an old, scratched-up record.

  But, for the time being, things in Yarmouk calmed down again. We enjoyed a last respite. It would take another year and a half before the war reached our neighborhood. During that time, the Syrian Revolution turned increasingly bloody. But life in Yarmouk went on as before.

  — CHAPTER TWELVE —

  On July 7, 2011—one month after the big rally—Tahani and I celebrated our engagement. On that day, sixty of our closest relatives gathered in the living room of Tahani’s father. The dining room was reserved for women, the living room for men. The elders were in front, the children all in the back. My grandfather, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for the past few years, was rocking back and forth in his chair, a distant look in his eyes. I saw Uncle Mohammed and Uncle Sadik, and my cousins Mayad and Tamer, with whom I had played Tobbeh and Dahhal for so many years. Although I felt happy, I had butterflies in my stomach. I had never made a decision like this, which would define the rest of my life.

  The sheikh had come over from the mosque. He was old and fat, with a long beard and a white djellaba that smelled of frankincense. I sat next to him on the sofa as he welcomed the assembled guests.

  Tahani’s grandfather, who had only one eye, began to talk: “We have agreed on a dowry of one hundred twenty-five thousand pounds.” Around 240 dollars, an appropriate sum.

  Tahani’s father suddenly said, “We should change it to seventy-five thousand pounds.” Around 145 dollars.

&nb
sp; Everyone was stunned and silent. The sheikh froze.

  “We had all agreed to this sum,” my father said carefully. “I think we should leave it at that.”

  “No. Seventy-five thousand pounds. Challas, enough,” Tahani’s father said brusquely.

  To this day, I still don’t know why he did that. It was an affront. A remark like that could easily cause a rift within a family. Not only was it a snub to his father, repudiating him in public like that, but it was a snub to my father as well. If he didn’t have sufficient money to pay it, he might have hinted at that earlier. But what a thoughtless thing to say! Thankfully, no one responded. “Very well,” my father said curtly.

  The ceremony began. The sheikh made a brief sermon, reading from the Quran and quoting the Prophet. After that, we all recited the Sura al-Fatiha together.

  The sheikh asked Tahani’s father, “Are you willing to give your daughter as a wife to Aeham Ahmad?”

  “Yes, I give him my daughter.”

  Next, the sheikh read the marriage contract, which stated that this marriage was made before God and all present, and that it was valid for all eternity. In case of a divorce, Tahani would receive two hundred thousand Syrian pounds (almost four hundred dollars). The sheikh asked, “Did everyone hear this? Does everyone agree?”

  “Yes,” they all murmured.

  Then the sheikh rose and went to the half-closed dining room door. Tahani was waiting on the other side.

  “Do you also agree?” he asked.

  “Yes, I agree,” said Tahani, her voice sounding tight from all the excitement.

  Three distant uncles proceeded to sign the contract. Our engagement was now official. The room erupted into cheers. People slapped me on the shoulders and called out, “Mabruk, mabruk! Congratulations!” I was laughing with joy.