The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “There are protocols that must be followed. I helped write them. I made a mistake, and now I must—”

  Sami stopped in midsentence as he observed a woman, squat and dressed in a black abaya robe embroidered with silver thread, enter the room looking anxious. Adel’s mother.

  “Dr. Hasan,” she said. “Subhanallah.” Glory to God. “How glad I am that you are here. My husband was called away because of the troubles, and I was worried that Adel would be alone.”

  She stared at the floor as she spoke, as though Sami were royalty. Her Damascene accent reminded Sami of his own mother.

  “Please.” Sami gestured to the chair beside Oskar’s empty bed, hoping that if she sat there, the privacy curtain would continue to block her view of Adel.

  But she was already stepping forward and trying to see around the curtain. Sami tried to block her.

  “I am so deeply sorry to have to tell you this,” he said, “but your son—”

  Before he could speak the words, she slipped past him and after a moment of pained silence, began to wail. She kissed her son’s face and forehead; she pulled him up into her breast, and talked to him, calling his name again and again and again.

  Sami waited, intending to confess his role in Adel’s death before he left to operate. But as he watched her suffer, he began to think perhaps the nurse was right, that it would be better if she never learned that her boy had died because of a stupid, entirely preventable error.

  Which is why when Adel’s mother began bawling, “Why? Why? Why did this happen?” and the nurse responded, “It was eraadat Allah, sister,”—What God wanted—“a stroke as a result of his injuries. He died peacefully,” that Sami, instead of correcting the nurse, simply walked away.

  chapter 14

  It was undeniably true, Hannah admitted to the army officer who questioned her, that she had been in the streets of Aleppo, in the middle of the night, on the very same night the rebels had launched their attack on the city. It was also true, she conceded, that she was one of only a handful of Americans who were still in Aleppo.

  She didn’t deny it. Just as she didn’t deny that the Americans were probably using the CIA to secretly funnel arms to the rebels. But she very much did deny that she, personally, was doing any of the funneling, which is what they were accusing her of doing.

  She showed them her European Development Service badge and her American passport; she explained that she had been working in Aleppo for almost two years trying to help the Syrian government—the Syrian government, did they understand?—build an urban park and revitalize the neighborhood that surrounded the park. She helped people get small business loans. She arranged for grants for elementary schools. She compiled community feedback. She wasn’t here on some absurd secret mission!

  Along with a list of local people who would vouch for her, she gave them the names and numbers of EDS directors in Antakya and Brussels.

  “Or call the university hospital! Talk to Oskar Lång—room 142. I work with him; he is an engineer. Talk to the engineers Oskar works with in your government.”

  “Please calm yourself,” said the officer, in a way that served only to infuriate her. “We are checking everything.”

  A female soldier searched her. When they found her Syrian passport in her purse, she explained that technically she was a dual citizen—her late father had been Syrian—but that she considered herself American. They said that if one of her passports said she was Syrian, then she was Syrian, and they locked her in the back of an army-green van.

  Night spilled into morning. The sun beat down on the roof of the van, and the temperature inside spiked. She wanted to call Oskar, but they’d confiscated her phone. She heard men yelling orders, explosions, and helicopters.

  At 8:00 a.m., a young private she’d never seen before unlocked the back of the van, handed over her belongings, and told her she was free to go.

  She didn’t know or ask why, although she did ask whether the university hospital was safe.

  It was just around the corner, but the roads were nearly empty. An eerie quiet, punctuated only by the occasional sound of gunfire, had settled over the university district. The air smelled of smoke.

  The soldier shrugged. “Nothing is safe.”

  “But the hospital is not overrun?”

  “That is my understanding, but the situation is changing rapidly.”

  Hannah jogged down Fatih Sultan Mehamed Avenue, consoled by the sight of an ambulance careening toward the emergency-room entrance, sirens blaring; a sign, she reasoned, that the hospital was still functioning.

  And it was. As she made her way to Oskar’s room, the halls were a frenzy of activity, the influx of wounded raising the normal din of managed chaos up to a roar as patients cried out, family members called for doctors, and nurses shouted over each other.

  Upon entering Oskar’s room and seeing that the bed was unoccupied, she checked the bathroom; it, too, was empty.

  His satchel was gone.

  Stay calm, she told herself. The hospital was in a state of upheaval. They must have moved him, she reasoned. They must have known he was going to leave anyway, and proactively moved him to make space for a new patient. Then she ducked her head around the privacy curtain and saw that Adel was gone too. That, she thought, was strange. He hadn’t been anywhere near ready to leave.

  The women at the reception desk had no record of Oskar having been moved or discharged, but they were so overwhelmed that Hannah put little stock in what they told her.

  She texted Oskar.

  Where are you???

  Then, determined to find someone who could tell her what had happened, ran back to his room, intending to question the nurses or Dr. Hasan.

  Instead, she found a soldier, dressed in full battle gear, in the room. His face was smudged with dirt and blood and peppered with stubble. He smelled of body odor and burnt plastic. Pouches were clipped to his tactical vest, an assault rifle slung across his back. A holstered pistol hung from one side of his belt, a knife from the other. His thick boots were covered with dust. Beneath it all was the black uniform favored by the Mukhabarat when they were putting down protests.

  Hannah startled, then realized it was Rahim, Adel’s father, and that he was in the process of stuffing books and sweets that his son had never been well enough to appreciate into a plastic bag. His movements were sharp. His gear rustled. He didn’t acknowledge her.

  “They moved Adel,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, after cramming a few more things into his bags.

  She eyed the assault rifle, hoping he had engaged the safety or whatever it was one did with those things when they weren’t being used.

  “Why?”

  Rahim finished gathering his son’s things as though he had not heard the question.

  “Oskar is gone too,” Hannah blurted as Rahim was walking toward the door. “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  Hannah just stood there, confused. Then she remembered about the medicine mix-up. And she wondered. The nurse had said both Oskar and Adel would be fine. But things clearly weren’t fine.

  “Was it the medicine?” she asked as Rahim stepped out into the hall.

  He turned.

  “There was a mix-up,” she added. Her intention wasn’t to cast suspicion on Dr. Hasan. Besides, he hadn’t been the one that had mislabeled the vials. She just wanted to know what had happened to Oskar and Adel.

  “What mix-up?”

  “With the medicine. Between Oskar and Adel. I am only wondering whether that is why Oskar and Adel . . . whether something went wrong.”

  Rahim glared at her.

  “I told the nurse about it,” Hannah continued, and then briefly explained what had happened, adding, “The nurse thought everything would be
all right, but now Oskar is gone, and Adel—”

  Before she could finish, Rahim stormed away.

  chapter 15

  Rahim had left his car at military intelligence headquarters, so he commandeered a Peugeot hatchback from a university student who was pulling out of the parking garage.

  As he careened past the gold-domed Ibn Abbas mosque and into the Bassel al Assad traffic circle, an Mi-24 helicopter gunship screamed down the 214 highway, rapidly gained altitude, then released two black, seed-shaped objects from its weapon wings. Moments later, an explosion rocked the city as undulating waves of light gray smoke rolled over the rebel-held section of Aleppo, and a darker smoke cloud shot up from the impact point and curled up into the wind.

  Rahim, consumed with rage—at the rebels, at Dr. Hasan, at his wife who would not even speak to him—hardly noticed. He passed quickly through the gatehouse checkpoint and headed straight to the second floor.

  A veiled, middle-aged secretary, whose name Rahim could not remember, was typing at a metal desk in Major Akhras’s office. Because the one window in the office faced the front of the building, and therefore was covered by the flag that depicted Bashar al Assad, a portion of the president’s thin mustache was projected onto the wall above her.

  “I need you to retrieve a file,” Rahim said, slightly out of breath. “The name is Dr. Samir Hasan. He works at the University of Aleppo Hospital.”

  They were alone. Nearly everyone else had been deployed.

  The secretary squinted at him. “The major told me nothing of this.”

  “Because he knows nothing of it yet.”

  “Then I will have to call him.”

  Rahim inclined his head. “Do as you must.”

  “And yet, he asked not to be disturbed.”

  Major Akhras and his men, having been relieved by army reinforcements, had been sent home to sleep for a few hours. Indeed, Rahim had been ordered to get some sleep so that he could be ready to fight again that evening, but his daughter had called him with the news about Adel, and he had instead run straight to the hospital, hoping to see his son one more time before the body was brought to the morgue. He had been too late.

  “I guess you will have to decide whether this is an emergency!” said Rahim.

  He had not intended to shout, but that was how it came out.

  “You are okay, Lieutenant?”

  Rahim took a moment to collect himself, then said, “Of course.”

  The secretary eyed him, then tucked a wisp of hair back under her headscarf. “This doctor. You are sure he has a file?”

  “Yes,” Rahim lied. But he felt confident in his answer, as it would be unusual for a man of Dr. Hasan’s prominence not to have been investigated over the course of his career.

  She frowned then asked Rahim to spell the name, which he did. “Wait here,” she said.

  Ten minutes later, she returned from the basement bearing a manila folder. Rahim snatched it from her hands. On a bench outside Major Akhras’s office, he read as fast as he could.

  Born in Damascus to a prominent thoracic surgeon, permitted to leave the country to study medicine in Paris, applied for an only-child waiver from military service—no surprise there, the coward—had operated on countless high-ranking air force and army officers at his expensive clinic . . .

  As Rahim considered how the doctor had breezed in and out of Adel’s room the day prior, spending two minutes—no more!—with his son, he imagined all the attention the doctor must have lavished on his more important patients at his clinic. His frustration boiled over and he smacked the file as hard as he could on the bench. By treating Adel as though he were nothing more than a bothersome dog, Dr. Hasan had insulted the whole Suleiman family!

  Moments later, Rahim picked up the file again and resumed reading.

  No hint of subversive behavior. Had signed no anti-Assad petitions. Had sent no private letters to President Assad—a fellow doctor—entreating him to show more mercy. No record of him having treated protesters. When he had been approached by air force intelligence in 2010 and asked to keep an eye on the chief of surgery at the University of Aleppo Hospital, he had agreed to do so, but had apparently seen nothing that merited filing a report.

  Typical, Rahim thought with contempt. Everyone knew the vast majority of doctors—and especially the medical students—were against the regime. But they hid their true allegiances, protested anonymously, covered their tracks.

  Disappointed at not finding any direct evidence of sedition, Rahim flipped to the end of the file, where Dr. Hasan’s familial connections were listed. There, he only had to read the name of Dr. Hasan’s wife—Tahira Seif—to know that all was not lost.

  Seif, he recalled, had been the last name of the boy whose funeral had devolved into a protest just three days ago. The same funeral protest Rahim had helped to put down. The same funeral protest that Adel had attended, just hours before he had been attacked.

  It was a common name and possibly a coincidence, but Rahim doubted that was so. After sending Major Akhras’s secretary back down to the basement to pull more files, he was certain of it.

  Major Akhras was not pleased at being disturbed. “What are you doing at headquarters? I sent you home to rest.”

  Rahim explained that not only had the renowned Dr. Sami Hasan intentionally killed his son, who, even though he was only fifteen had been a member in good standing with the local shabiha and—

  “Lieutenant Suleiman, please!” interrupted the major. “You and your family have my deepest sympathies, but a medical error is not—”

  “I assure you, Major, this is about more than my son and defending the honor of the Suleiman family. I must humbly tell you that I have discovered that Dr. Hasan is related to a boy named Omar Seif who was killed at a protest three days ago. This boy’s funeral was held two days ago, at which there was another protest. The sister of Dr. Hasan’s wife would have been brought in for questioning yesterday were it not for the hostilities. Dr. Hasan is working with the rebellion, Major, I am sure of it. His whole family is filled with rebels!”

  Major Akhras sighed. “Of course, this Dr. Hasan, he will have people—patients—that will try to protect him.”

  “A man like Dr. Hasan could be of great use to the Free Syrian Army,” Rahim countered. “If we allow it.”

  Silence, then, “Take one of your men and bring him to headquarters. But you will wait to question him until I have time to investigate this further.”

  chapter 16

  As the wounded flooded in and the staff drained out, the University of Aleppo Hospital had descended, if not into anarchy, then something on the verge of it. Patients crowded into the halls wearing only hospital robes and pulling their IV stands behind them, clamoring for doctors or medicine, complaining that they were hungry because the cafeteria had failed to deliver the usual breakfast trays of bread, eggs, and olives. Overburdened doctors and nurses rushed from room to room, but never fast enough. Over the loudspeaker, calls went out for surgery residents to report to the emergency room.

  For Hannah, it meant navigating a moving obstacle course as she searched for Oskar. She checked the intensive care unit, pushing her way past a nurse who insisted she wasn’t allowed in. She ran through the cardiology unit, which was an attached building, thinking maybe Oskar had developed a blood clot. She snuck past the nurses’ station in the maternity wing, in yet another adjacent building, reasoning that they might have opened the rooms there to trauma patients.

  She tried to call him, twice. After checking the morgue, it occurred to her that it might be worth trying to get into his email account. Just in case there were clues within it as to where he’d gone.

  She’d never done it before—she wasn’t a snooper—and she never would have done it now if she hadn’t been so worried about him. She wasn’t even sure she knew his password. But she knew he used a Gmail accou
nt, and she knew the password he used to protect his laptop. It was just Oskar1234. She was betting that he’d used the same password for his Gmail account.

  He had.

  The first thing she noticed was a purchase confirmation for a flight from Antakya to Copenhagen—with a stop in Istanbul on the way.

  The existence of such a confirmation didn’t alarm her so much as the fact that it had been made an hour and a half ago. For a flight that was scheduled to depart in a half hour. Which meant that boarding for the flight had probably already started.

  It took her a moment to process. Was he really at an airport in Turkey? Right now? That would mean he had left the hospital hours ago. Last night even. But he would never . . .

  She texted him again. This time he texted right back.

  Sorry, seeing texts/calls now, bd reception. Farid bring Turkey, crossed Yayladagi, hope Istanbul tonignt Germ tomorrow. Pls forgive, Farid can’t wait. Where you?

  She stared at the garbled message, hoping she’d misinterpreted it. She checked the number to make sure it was really from Oskar.

  It was.

  Had he really left Syria without her? How else to interpret a text like that?

  She stared at it again, tempted to reply, but what would she say? She shook her head in disbelief, too angry to be hurt.

  The hospital hadn’t even been overrun. If Oskar and Farid—a Syrian engineer Oskar had been working with—had waited even just a few hours, she could have gone with them.

  Yes, Oskar was hurt and probably not thinking quite right. Yes, he was probably scared. But to leave her like this . . .

  She never would have left Aleppo without him. Never. She was here now, wasn’t she? Why would he do such a thing?

  After closing out the messages app on her phone, Hannah returned to the emails displayed on her phone’s browser. The newest had been from Turkish Airlines, and that’s what her eyes had initially been drawn to. But now she noticed that underneath that email were more messages than she could count from someone named Elsa.