by Dan Mayland
“Crutches?” asked Hannah. “With a broken leg?”
“As I have already informed you, the fracture has been repaired. The rod I inserted will prevent the bone from moving. He will be unable to walk normally for many months, but some movement early on is important.”
“What I would really like to know,” said Hannah, “is whether he has been receiving the proper antibiotics. I read about different treatment plans in the United States, and—”
“You are American?”
“Yes.”
Sami nodded. That explained it. “I see. And given your expertise with these treatment plans, as you call them, could you please inform me what antibiotics you think he should be receiving?”
“Well, I am not sure, but I have been trying to make out the Cyrillic writing on the”—at a loss for words, she gestured to the IV bag—
“on that.”
Sami read the list of medications that were being administered.
“And is that . . . ahh . . .”
“Is that what?”
“Appropriate?”
“Yes.”
“You do know his bone was exposed? All I am saying is that I think we need to be worried about infection.”
As she spoke, it occurred to Sami as strange that, even though the words coming out of her mouth were inane, and he was happily married and had already passed along his genes to two beautiful children, that something so simple as a pretty face could affect him this way—the same way a bright flower might attract a bee.
“And that,” said Sami, “is why he is receiving the antibiotic I have prescribed him. And why I spent all the time I did last night irrigating and debriding the wound. And why I intend to monitor it in the days to come for infection.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
Sami turned to leave.
“Wait, I mean, Doctor, please—”
Sami stopped but didn’t fully face her.
“When do you think he can leave? Or at least be transported to Turkey?”
“One week.”
“A week!” cried Oskar, in English. “I can’t stay here a week.”
“That is my recommendation,” responded Sami, in passable English. “But this is not a prison, Mr. Lång. If you choose to make other arrangements and accept the consequences, that is your business.”
chapter 8
Over the course of the day, the bruises on Oskar’s leg darkened, and the swelling increased. Blood seeped out from the sutures. Hannah called for a nurse, who assured her it was fine.
When the transfusion was delayed, Hannah complained. Politely at first, then less so. When she tried to find Dr. Hasan, she was told he was at his clinic. After the transfusion was finally administered at eight that evening, Oskar perked up, but his increase in energy was paired with an increase in pain, and for the rest of the night he was moaning and gripping the metal rails of his bed.
That night Hannah slept in the empty bed that lay on the other side of the room. Instead of a sheet, she used a towel from the bathroom.
At six in the morning, she was awakened by a team of three nurses—all women. They wheeled her bed out of the room and a new bed in.
On it lay a patient who appeared to be unconscious. Oxygen tubes led to his nose. IV lines and wires sprouted from his arms and torso. His head had been shaved and bandaged. One of his legs had been placed in a cast from the knee down, and both legs had been fitted with black braces.
Hannah took a seat on the folding chair next to Oskar’s bed. She couldn’t see the new patient directly because the nurses had pulled a privacy curtain between the beds, but a mirrorlike chrome paper towel dispenser hanging above a common sink afforded her a distorted view of the man’s face.
Only as she studied him, she realized he wasn’t so much a man as a boy. Smooth cheeks, curly, jet-black hair, thin arms.
Poor kid, she thought.
Unable to see more than hints of daylight through the opaque, ceiling-level windows, the passage of time failed to exert its usual influence on Hannah. The fluorescent lights looked the same at noon as they had at six in the morning. The hospital was air conditioned but still hot.
Oskar grew irritable. His body itched. He spent a lot of time on his phone, texting with his family back in Sweden, trying to sort out the logistics of when and how he’d get back home.
Hannah took a walk outside, just so she could see the sun, and returned to the hospital in far better spirits—only to find Oskar being helped to the toilet.
A powerfully built bald man in black slacks and a gray blazer held him under one shoulder, a pear-shaped middle-aged nurse under the other.
“Go!” Oskar shouted when he saw her, his face contorted with pain.
“Let me help.”
“I don’t want your help!” He grimaced and hopped on his good leg as the man in the blazer opened the bathroom door. “Not with this. Please, Hannah. Give me some space.”
She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter. She wanted to say she didn’t think less of him just because he was human and needed to shit.
She just wanted to help him.
“Go!” he cried.
When Hannah returned half an hour later, the man in the blazer who’d helped Oskar to the toilet had been joined in the room by his wife, daughter, mother, brother, and six children of varying ages and sizes. They were all talking over each other.
“Do not touch him!” a man shouted.
“It was only his hand! Surely a mother can touch her son’s hand!”
“He is so pale. Why will he not he wake?”
Hannah felt like an intruder, the way she was eavesdropping on them from the other side of the privacy curtain. Oskar seemed not to even hear them as he tried to eat a bit of thin leek-and-chicken stew.
That afternoon, the family left but Rahim—as Hannah had learned the man in the blazer was named—stayed. By watching his distorted reflection in the towel dispenser, she saw him remove his shoes, wash his face, arms, and the tops of his bare feet in the bathroom sink, then roll out a red prayer mat. First standing with his arms at his sides, then alternately bowing, kneeling, and raising his arms, he prayed. By the end, he was breathing heavily, his forehead glistening with a thin film of sweat.
He struck Hannah as a kindhearted man, clearly devoted to his son, whom she gathered had been in some sort of traffic accident.
The folding chair on the other side of the curtain creaked when Rahim plopped his heavy frame down on it.
She glanced at Oskar and saw that he’d fallen asleep, so she stood and ducked her head around the curtain. Rahim was rubbing his knee.
“I wanted to thank you,” she whispered in Arabic. “For what you did earlier. To help my friend.”
He glanced up at her, then quickly averted his gaze, stood, placed a hand over his heart, and said, “You are most welcome.”
“And I am so sorry about your son,” she added. “I do hope his recovery goes well.”
Keeping his hand over his heart and performing a little bow with his head, he said, “Inshallah. And for your loved one as well.”
Hannah wanted to ask him about his son, and whether he was satisfied with the treatment he was receiving at the hospital, but she sensed he was a traditional-minded man who would be uncomfortable talking to a woman for very long—especially one who wore her hair uncovered as she did.
So she simply thanked him and turned back to her side of the room.
But Rahim stopped her. “Wait,” he said, and then he grabbed a box from a bag on the floor and said, “Please, my wife, she brings these pistachio karabij for my son. They are his favorite biscuits, but he cannot eat them.”
“Then you must, of course,” Hannah said.
“Oh, for me there are far too many. My wife, she brings so much.”
Rahim continued to hold the bo
x out with two hands. “Please,” he said.
Hannah took it, because she didn’t know how not to without giving offense. “You are most kind,” she said.
chapter 9
They came from everywhere and nowhere. From mosques and apartment houses, from the cars and buses that spilled off the M5 highway, from the backs of spice shops and cafés. They didn’t form so much as swarm.
They wore jeans, dress slacks, camouflage pants, and cargo pants. Oxford shirts, camouflaged combat vests, T-shirts, hoodie sweatshirts, black headbands, baseball caps, and red kaffiyeh headdresses.
Some wrapped scarves around their mouths to hide their faces. Others wore aviator sunglasses. A few were too proud or reckless to disguise themselves.
Everyone carried a rifle. Russian-made AK-47s. Chinese, Yugoslav, or Romanian AK-47 knockoffs. A few next-generation AKMs and AK-74s. Some of the rifles had steel folding stocks, some wood stocks, some no stocks.
A few men waved the flag of Syrian independence, but they hadn’t come to protest and be shot at in the streets. They’d come to fight.
Because he served in the Shu’bat al-Mukhabarat al-’Askariyya, the military intelligence division of the regime’s secret police, Rahim Suleiman got the warning before anyone else at the hospital. It came in the form a call from his commanding officer.
There was trouble brewing in the Salaheddine district.
“How much trouble?” he asked, still standing at his son’s bedside.
No one knew for sure. But it was bad. Come straight to headquarters. It was not a request. To refuse would be to refuse an order. Men had been shot for less.
Rahim called his wife as he retrieved his ten-year-old, Iranian-made Samand sedan from the hospital parking garage. Believing the attack on her son was somehow tied to his profession, she hung up on him before he could finish explaining that he was being given a chance to avenge what had happened to Adel. But he knew she would hurry to the hospital, so at least their son would not spend the night alone.
The headquarters of the Aleppo division of the Military Intelligence Directorate lay just east of the Aleppo University Hospital, behind high walls topped with silver concertina wire. The building itself was a dun-colored monolith, five stories at its highest, unremarkable save for the entrance which was flanked by an enormous Syrian flag on one side and an equally large flag imprinted with a photograph of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on the other.
The photo of Bashar looked out onto a traffic circle, in the center of which loomed a statue of Bassel Assad, Bashar’s late brother, riding a leaping horse into battle. As Rahim sped around the circle, the Assad brothers staring down at him, he saw that BTR armored personnel carriers and 6 X 6 armored Ural troop transport vehicles had taken positions outside the walls of the headquarters building. Regular army troops, dressed in camouflage uniforms and looking top-heavy because of all the magazine pouches strapped to their chests, were assembling. In the parkland that lay between the traffic circle and headquarters, a T-55 tank had left a path of crushed shrubbery in its wake and was now belching out black clouds of diesel smoke as it aimed its big gun down Abu Al Shuhada Street.
Rahim eased his Samand into the gatehouse checkpoint funnel and manually rolled down his driver’s-side window to flash his ID. Not far south of the headquarters, shooting and explosions sounded. Past the gatehouse, scores of military intelligence soldiers, all dressed in black riot gear and armed with assault rifles, were piling into civilian cars, packing them absurdly tight like clowns at a circus.
Rahim double-parked at a rear lot. As he jogged to the entrance, he was intercepted by Major Akhras, a short man, ten years his junior, but far more influential because he was distantly related to President Assad’s wife.
“You will be outfitted in full combat gear and ready for transport within five minutes,” the major ordered.
“The protesters, they are rioting?” asked Rahim.
“These men are not protesters.”
Rahim’s eyes widened. “Free Syrian Army?”
“They are not an army, Lieutenant. They are criminals, and that is how we will treat them.”
The major began walking toward the headquarters building, and Rahim jogged a few steps to catch up.
“Reinforcements are coming,” the major added, “but for tonight, we must hold them back ourselves.” In case his point wasn’t clear, he added, “The rebels are within a kilometer of this building. They already control Salaheddine and they are moving into Sakhour. I also hear reports of skirmishes at the border crossings. Five minutes, Lieutenant. Be ready!”
The hairs on the back of Rahim’s neck tingled. The rebel Free Syrian Army was no disorganized criminal gang. Comprised of thousands of defectors from the regular Syrian Army, and backed by Islamist groups, they had already taken over large swaths of land on the border with Lebanon and Turkey, and there was open fighting in Damascus and Homs. But Aleppo was the largest city in Syria, the economic capital of the country. Textiles! Pharmaceuticals! Food for the whole nation was processed here. If the Free Syrian Army was able to take Aleppo in a surprise attack, they might very well win the war.
“And my squad?”
Rahim had six men under his command. But they were not real soldiers. They were the eyes, not the fists, of Assad; the men who secretly patrolled the stores of the souk and infiltrated the student groups and yes, put down the protests, but none had ever been in a real battle.
“They are already here.”
Rahim and his men received their orders: hold a narrow residential street not far from the epicenter of the fighting. But nobody really knew where the epicenter was. There was no front line. The rebels were like ghosts, appearing for a moment and then disappearing just as quickly, as though they had never been there.
To get into position, his squad pushed through a countercurrent of mothers clutching the hands of crying toddlers in one hand and rolling suitcases in the other, of fathers carrying tube television sets and computers. Once there, Rahim didn’t even know which way to tell his men to face.
Windows behind them rattled, rocket-propelled grenade explosions echoed off steel roll doors in front of them. Puffs of black smoke curled up above the rooftops. A rebel pickup truck, with a Dashka machine gun bolted to the back bed, raced down a nearby cross street. Police and ambulance sirens blared.
Rahim positioned one of his men behind a wrought iron gate that blocked an alley and two more behind an exterior staircase that stood in front of a ridiculous mural of a cartoon cat. As he rushed up the stairwell of an apartment house with his remaining three men, headed for the roof, he was cursed at by people rushing in the other direction.
When a rebel fighter ducked his head around a corner at the end of the street and fired a rocket-propelled grenade, Rahim and his men on the roof fired off a few shots; when two more rocket-propelled grenades were fired in quick succession, they took cover behind a rusty water tank.
Gunshots, followed by cheering, erupted.
Rahim crawled to the edge of the brick parapet that ringed the roof and slowly raised his head. He caught glimpses of the rebels below him, partially shrouded by smoke. They wore civilian clothes and were screaming Allahu Akbar!—God is the Greatest—as they stripped the three men he had posted to the street, now dead, of their weapons. One of the rebels was dancing as he filmed the crime with a cell phone. Another scanned the roofs on the opposite side of the street.
Rahim held up a fist, signaling that his remaining men should wait. Then he waved them forward, so that all three were crouched with him right below the parapet that ran along the edge of the roof.
“When I command,” Rahim whispered.
As he waited for the smoke to clear, and for three more rebels at the end of the street to cautiously creep forward, he recalled hearing stories of army snipers in Damascus who had made a game of shooting at rebels. One would shoot for a s
pecific body part, and over the course of the rest of the day, other snipers would compete to see how many others they could hit in the same spot. Rahim had always thought the game to be depraved and ungodly. What kind of man did such a thing? But at that moment, he thought of Adel and the men in the pickup truck who had tried to kill him—rebels, like the men below him—and he whispered, “Right temple.”
“Sir?” asked the soldier closest to him.
“You will fire when I do. Aim for the temple. We will see who shoots best.”
Rahim failed to hit anyone in the right temple. His AK-47, though reliable, could hardly be described as accurate. Its sights were useless. But it mattered little.
The gun hammered against his shoulder, the muzzle flashes in the weak light hurt his eyes, and the gun smoke in his lungs left him lightheaded. The magazine contained thirty rounds. He fired them all, then reloaded and emptied the new magazine. His men did the same.
The rebels below wobbled and fell and crawled and then were still.
chapter 10
Sami had just started his final rounds of the day when rumors began to ripple through the hospital. Multiple gunfights had broken out in Salaheddine! The police station had been overrun! The Mukhabarat were fleeing! The liberation of the city was near! Thousands of rebel fighters were gathering by the new soccer stadium!
There was jubilation—the ultrasound technician he passed in the hall could not stop smiling, the cafeteria custodian blew by Sami with his chest puffed out. But there was also panic. Three of his patients demanded that he release them immediately, before the fighting spread to the hospital. Sami impressed upon them that if they were determined to leave, there was nothing he could or would do about it. But people should not jump to irrational conclusions simply because they could hear a few explosions. Besides, he told them, it was probably just rumors.
When the helicopter gunships began buzzing the city, however, flying so close to the hospital at times that they rattled the windows, Sami concluded at least some of the rumors must be true.
