The Pianist from Syria

by Aeham Ahmad

  The next day, Marwan and I went over to visit. Raed was lying on a mattress, curled up like a baby. He was still too weak to talk.

  “Is there anything you need?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Do you have water?”

  We looked at his wife. She shook her head. So we filled up the water tank.

  Raed needed another day to recuperate, and only then did we learn what had happened: When he persistently refused to decode the SD cards, the militants began to torture him. First, they whipped his back with an electrical cable, then they whipped the soles of his feet. He still didn’t talk. They pressed a gun against his head and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t talk! But he refused. They put handcuffs on him and strung him up, so that he was dangling from his wrists. After a few hours, they cut him down and he collapsed onto the ground. And still he didn’t talk.

  Raed never mentioned my name. He knew that if they caught me, I would give in at the first slap. Maybe they would have started with “music is haram,” and then . . . Who knows what might have happened?

  I couldn’t believe it: Raed had endured torture to save me. Truly, this man was my guardian angel. My best friend.

  Weeks passed, and Raed recovered. He was tough. But the scars on his back will never heal completely. And guess who called one day? Aya Osman, the film director from the Emirates. She asked how Raed was doing. And, by the way, what about the footage we had promised to send her?

  Anyone else would have cursed her and hung up the phone. But not Raed. He was stubborn as a mule. Once more, he risked his life: Grabbing his batteries and his router one night, he snuck toward the Watermelon. There was an internet café with a high-speed connection nearby—but it was within reach of the snipers. Still, Raed managed to tap the line, and then he uploaded the entire 240 gigabytes within two or three nights.

  And so, the documentary The Pianist of Yarmouk was completed. We were told that it played at some festivals, but it was never shown on TV, and never won any awards. The director sent Raed a copy of the film. After watching it, he said: It’s garbage.

  On October 18, 2014, an article about me ran in Süddeutsche Zeitung, a well-known German newspaper. I didn’t know anything about this paper or where it was published. I had long since lost sight of such things. To me, the woman from Süddeutsche Zeitung was another one of the many people who wanted something from me. I was increasingly losing my patience with these European journalists, and had a feeling that they were benefiting from our predicament.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, a woman from Hamburg contacted me, first on Facebook, then on Skype. She greeted me in English, and she sounded like a kind person. When I answered in Arabic, a friend of hers joined in, a Palestinian from Yarmouk. He was now working as a doctor in Germany.

  “The lady would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “And who is she, this lady?” I asked, irritated.

  “She’s a journalist.”

  She seemed to sense that I was getting irritated. So she added, “It’s true, I’m a journalist, but I’m reaching out to you as a human being.”

  I was still skeptical. But I grudgingly stayed on the line. I learned that her name was Monika. She told me that she admired what I did and that she wanted to help me. She said that she had been supporting refugees in Germany for a long time and that she found it unbearable that the world was simply watching the tragedy in Syria unfold. She wanted to do something.

  But I really wasn’t in the mood for such sentiments. “Oh, so there’s someone in Hamburg who wants to help me? Why don’t you help all of Yarmouk? Everyone here needs help. Why me? I know this much: people don’t just help.” I truly believed what I said. I asked the translator to translate everything word by word.

  “I don’t want anything from you,” she replied. “I’d like to support you. Your humanity, the things you achieve with your music. Of course, it would be nice to help many more people in Yarmouk. But I am just one person.”

  Until that point, everyone who had promised to “help” me had wanted to somehow take advantage of my situation. I decided to end the call. I said, “I don’t have time to talk right now, I have to go.”

  When the two of them tried to reach me again on Skype two days later, I began to suspect that they were serious. This time, we turned on our webcams. On my screen, I saw a face framed by blond pixels. Next to hers was a darker face, just as pixelated, with the typically Middle Eastern receding hairline. The translator. I was still annoyed and began lecturing them.

  “More than a hundred people have died of starvation here. And now you say you want to help me. Is this some kind of joke? I don’t need help.” This is how mean I can get if I suspect that someone is trying to take advantage of me. Monika explained to me that she and her husband had traveled through Syria before the war, and that she felt a connection to the country. And she reiterated: She didn’t simply want to stand by and watch. Perhaps someone else would follow her example.

  So we kept in touch. She began making arrangements for me to emigrate. She contacted the German Foreign Office, aid groups and refugee organizations, as well as the Palestinian National Authority delegation in Berlin. But it was hopeless.

  * * *

  It was a hard winter after Kinan was born. I spent hours gathering firewood, trying to heat the apartment. I used up all my money on plastic fuel. We needed it to cook food and wash the baby’s clothes.

  It snowed in January. In the morning, when I was getting water with Raed and Marwan, we had a snowball fight, and after that, we built a snowman. Later on, I took a video of my parents walking through the white, unreal landscape of snowy Yarmouk.

  We were lucky, and our stomachs weren’t quite as empty anymore, since every two weeks now we received an aid package from the UN. During the fall, food distribution had been moved to Yalda, where it was safer. No one had to fear for their life anymore, waiting for a ration of rice. People lined up in orderly lines; everyone waited their turn.

  But it was a dull time. For two years we’d been under siege, and there was no end in sight. Since Zeinab’s death I hadn’t composed any songs. We had no plans for the future. All that mattered now was perseverance and survival. There was a stubborn rumor that ISIS would soon march into Yarmouk. Great. Dazzling prospects for someone like me, who had gone out on a limb . . .

  A few months before, an acquaintance of mine had fled to Germany. His name was Ghatfan Samarkand, and he used to own a small music shop. We had paid him a commission to sell our ouds. In January, I called him.

  “How are you? Are you safe?” was my first question.

  “My friend, this is Germany! Of course I’m safe. Everything’s peaceful here.”

  My second question was: “Your journey, was it dangerous?”

  He talked to me for an hour and a half. He told me about the route, the prices, the risks. Setting out across the Mediterranean toward Greece, he said, wasn’t as bad as he had thought. Hungary was much worse. People had been locked up in refugee camps there—they’d even been beaten. The Hungarian officials took your fingerprints and then you weren’t allowed to register as a refugee anymore, not in any of the European countries.

  He ended with the following words: “Sorry, I’ve got to go. I have to go to school.”

  “School?”

  “Everyone here has to take German classes. You have no idea how hard that is.”

  “Wow.”

  “They do a lot for the refugees here. I can go to music school and take piano lessons for next to nothing.”

  I called him back the next day. And the day after that. All in all, we must’ve talked for ten hours.

  “Is it true that the German government gives everyone three hundred euros a month?” I asked.

  “That’s true, but do you know how much a pound of tomatoes costs here? One euro!”

  “You’re joking.” In Syria, a pound cost only ten cents.

  In the end, he gave me a piece of advice: �
�Bring your family. Once you’re here, it’s almost impossible to bring them over.” I promised to think about it.

  In March, Mahmoud Tamim vanished, the cheerful man who had written so many of my songs. He was the first person I’d told about my idea to push my piano out into the ruins. Now he was gone, from one day to the next. He had been lining up for a food package, and then he was gone. Had the soldiers arrested him? Or had he “surrendered” to the army?

  In those days, armed rebels were allowed to leave Yarmouk if they handed over their weapons and joined the “Fatherland’s embrace.” But the offer didn’t apply to civilians. A lot of people were afraid of an ISIS assault and wanted to leave Yarmouk. That’s why many people spent a lot of money to buy a rifle or a grenade that they could then hand over at a checkpoint. The soldiers would photograph these people with “their” weapon, and you had to sign a written oath renouncing violence. Most of the people who did this, however, resurfaced later not in the Fatherland, but in Turkey, on the way to Europe.

  But not Mahmoud Tamim. He was gone. No one ever heard from him again.

  And then, in early April 2015, the unthinkable happened: ISIS conquered Yarmouk. At first, the Hamas militia put up some resistance, engaging in bloody street battles with the black-clad militants. But in the end, ISIS overpowered them. Or perhaps they simply paid more. To this day, I’m not sure how they managed to channel hundreds of fighters into occupied Yarmouk. Did these fighters even come from outside the city? Or had ISIS infiltrated Yarmouk with a small detachment and convinced the militiamen to defect? Soon, we started hearing about the dozens of corpses of decapitated Hamas fighters lying in the hospital in al-Hajar al-Aswad.

  ISIS opened a recruiting office—in a neighboring street, no less. There was talk of arbitrary arrests. The mood here changed radically: We all began to mistrust everyone. At any point, some snitch could rat me out, lead ISIS to me and say, Here he is. The idiot who always plays piano out in the streets. No, it was time for another escape. Back to Yalda.

  Raed, Marwan, and I loaded up one of our two dollies with suitcases, boxes, household goods, and my parents’ bed. We brought it through the ISIS checkpoint to my old apartment. The place was dirty and dusty. We covered the empty window frames with plastic, fixed the hole in the outer wall, and began to scrub everything. Soon, my parents, Tahani, the boys, and I were living here again. Of course, the space was too small for us all.

  April 17, 2015, my twenty-seventh birthday, fell on a Friday. Marwan, my father, and I went to Yarmouk. We wanted to save my white piano, and we had a plan: We were going to do it on a Friday afternoon. At that time, any ISIS man worth his salt would be praying at the mosque. While we were there, we also packed three expensive violins and sixteen guitars. We tied everything down and covered the instruments with sheets.

  When we approached the ISIS checkpoint to return to Yalda, it was guarded by only three guys. They wore black turbans and black djellabas; their Kalashnikovs were casually slung over their shoulders. Behind them was a sandbag barricade. Next to that, in the last building on the Yarmouk side of the border, a wall had been partially broken open to provide for some kind of office. A black curtain was hanging from a taut line across the street, to protect the checkpoint from the FSA snipers in Yalda. And that was all. The checkpoint was fairly small, not like those elaborate army checkpoints that consisted of cage-like metal structures.

  We lined up. Marwan and I kept to the back and let my father go first. Then it was our turn. A small militant with a long beard lifted the bedsheet over our dolly and shot us an astonished look. He began quizzing us in labored Standard Arabic—he was probably imitating his favorite TV preacher. “What have we here?” He wore eyeliner, like so many Muslim men who prided themselves on their extreme religiosity.

  He pulled the bedsheet off completely and admonished my father: “Don’t you know, brother, that owning musical instruments is an unforgivable sin?”

  The man made me nervous. His hands didn’t seem to fit with the rest of his body; they were too small for his bulky frame. Maybe he was hiding something underneath his djellaba?

  One of the ISIS guys seemed to recognize me. Perhaps he was from Yarmouk. When he saw me behind the pushcart, he called out, “Hold on, aren’t you the guy who’s always playing piano?”

  My father pushed himself in front. “No, no, it’s my piano! The boys are just helping me push it.”

  Suddenly, it all happened very fast. The guy who spoke like a TV preacher went into a nearby shed and came back with two plastic bottles. They were filled with a brown liquid. I slowly backed away from the checkpoint. The man started pouring the liquid over our pushcart.

  “He’s going to burn it,” Marwan murmured very quietly. Only my father and I could hear him.

  “What are you doing, my son?” my father called. “This is all I own. I worked my whole life for it!”

  Then the ISIS guy flicked open his lighter. I saw a flame shooting out. Then I turned and ran.

  “Hey, stop!” they called after me. But I had already run around the corner and was out of range. As soon as I reached our store, I looked for a ladder, pulled the printed plastic foil off our neon sign, crumbled it up, and threw it in the trash. Now the light box was unadorned. Aeham’s Music Shop was history.

  After an hour, my father and Marwan came back. My father had stubbornly insisted that he didn’t know us, saying we were just two guys who helped him push the cart. Finally, they let Marwan and him go. We discussed what to do next. My father decided to ask an old acquaintance for help, a man who had since joined the al-Nusra Front. The man accompanied us to the checkpoint and spoke to the guy in charge. We were waved through.

  As we walked past our burnt piano, I barely dared to look. I had played on this old Ukraina for almost twenty years. It felt as if a good friend had died. But at the same time, I was relieved. After all, Zeinab had been shot right next to this instrument. That’s why we had painted it white. It was as if, along with the piano, a part of my guilt had vanished in the flames. On that day, my burden felt a little bit lighter.

  Two weeks later, Raed and I entered Yarmouk for the last time. I had shaved my head so that no one would recognize me. We passed the checkpoint without incident. As soon as we were in Yarmouk, we looked for cinder blocks and concrete to wall up the shop. Two thousand musical instruments vanished behind bricks.

  By now, the news about ISIS burning my piano had gone around the world. On the day it happened, eyewitnesses had posted about it on Facebook. A news site from Yarmouk picked up the story, and then the dam broke and it went viral. Media around the world, from Los Angeles to Tokyo, reported about it. I read things like: “Aeham Ahmad has the courage to fight terrorism with music.” Ugh! No, I wasn’t that courageous. And I wasn’t suicidal either. If these ISIS guys read any of this, they’d kill me.

  Not far from our apartment was an area where I had internet reception. It took me about ten minutes to walk there, and then, dozens of WhatsApp messages appeared on my cell phone. Almost every day I was contacted by journalists. I was famous, but I never wanted fame. Yes, it was important to me that my message reached people. But I never wanted to be in the limelight.

  But after the guy from Bukra Ahla had filmed our first few performances—even though at first I was against it—I became well known in the Arab world. And once Niraz Saied had—without my knowledge—submitted the famous picture of me playing piano to a news agency, my fame had spread to Europe.

  And now, to my horror, ISIS had burned my piano. For a brief moment, half the world was looking at me. Even CNN aired a segment on it.

  It was a strange journey.

  Whenever I spoke to journalists, I knew that each interview made my situation more dangerous. I just wanted to get out, and would have done anything to do so.

  At my last few performances, I played keyboard on a rooftop terrace in Yalda. I even gave live concerts on Skype, including one that was beamed to Berlin. But I no longer believed in the power of mu
sic. After Zeinab’s death, I had started to feel detached from the people of Yarmouk. I continued giving interviews—but I felt like a newscaster, dispassionately reporting about events that I wasn’t a part of anymore. Each day, the terrifying feeling that I was putting my family’s life at risk grew stronger. Why take that risk if I couldn’t even play piano in the streets anymore?

  Monika, too, had heard about the burnt piano. She kept in touch with me via a translator, and she kept trying to instill a new optimism in me. She agreed that it was best if I left Yarmouk as soon as possible. ISIS was too great a threat. We talked about money. She said she would keep her word about helping me emigrate. If need be, she would help me financially. I thanked her exuberantly and offered to play a song for her.

  Finally, in early July 2015, I had a lead. One of the former Yarmouk Boys had told me—under the pledge of secrecy—about a man who had saved countless activists from Yarmouk. Let’s call him Samir. Samir belonged to a well-known aid organization; they’re still active today. But in addition, he wanted to make some extra money. So he made a deal with a guy from state security. Together, they smuggled out people who were at risk of getting killed by ISIS.

  I contacted Samir on Facebook. He knew who I was. We agreed to talk on the phone. “Aeham, how are you?” he said cheerfully. I wanted to know how much it would cost to get me and my family out. He promised to look into it. A few days later, he called back: twenty-two hundred euros, about twenty-six hundred dollars. I would have paid any price. But I kept asking: Is it safe?

  Now that my escape plan was taking shape, I broached the subject with Tahani. We discussed it endlessly. For a long time, she was strictly against it. But in the end, she agreed. It was too dangerous for me to stay. We would escape, all of us. Traveling as a family was safer. And we had sworn to stay together.