The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  She walked for an hour. Gaziantep Avenue was clogged with cars, decades-old minibuses, and crowds fleeing on foot. Women in abayas pulled roller suitcases behind them. Men in flip-flops carried kids piggyback on their shoulders while lugging overstuffed plastic bags.

  Hannah tried to hop on a minibus, but it was packed too tightly with bodies, as were the private cars, so she resigned herself to walking. She was young and wearing sneakers with good soles. She had food and water. No children. If anyone should have to walk, it should be her.

  Fields of wheat and barley began where the city ended. Low-slung houses fronted by privacy walls anchored groves of fig, lemon, and olive trees. Modest minarets rose from neighborhood mosques. Salt from the sweat on her face stung her eyes. Her bra chafed, her feet ached.

  She finished her food. Then her water.

  It occurred to her that Oskar had likely traveled the same road not twelve hours earlier, only far faster. Farid would have been driving. Oskar would have been in the back seat.

  Would the passenger seat have been empty?

  The shithead. Even if he had been cheating on her, he could’ve at least had the decency to give her a ride.

  She heard rumors there was more fighting ahead, in the villages on the way to Turkey, at a military airport. Everything was colliding, falling apart faster than she’d ever anticipated it could. At times she heard bombs exploding.

  She tried to buy food at a store attached to a gas station that had no gas, but the shelves were bare. There was running water in the bathroom though, and she craned her head underneath a dirty sink faucet and drank as much as her stomach would hold, as mosquitoes bit the back of her neck.

  By nightfall, she reached a town that lay nearly halfway between Aleppo and the Turkish border. Desperately hungry, she ducked behind a furniture store where several fig trees were laden with unripe fruit. She picked a fig, bit into it, and grimaced at the bitter taste.

  Then Oskar called.

  She stared at the caller ID for a moment, unsure whether she wanted to answer. She clicked the talk icon just before it went to her voicemail.

  “Hannah?”

  She didn’t know what to say to him, so she said nothing. She’d never pegged him as a cheater. She thought he’d been better than that. Kinder than that.

  “Hannah?”

  It annoyed her how panicky he sounded, especially when she contrasted it with how she used to look up to him as being relatively unflappable. “I’m here.”

  “It’s Oskar.”

  “I know.”

  “Where are you?”

  She took a moment to respond. “Ah, somewhere north of Aleppo?”

  “So you made it out. Thank God.”

  Thank God for what? thought Hannah. She may have made it out of Aleppo, but she was still in Syria.

  “I’m in Istanbul,” he added. “At the airport. On standby for flights to Copenhagen.”

  Well, good for you, she thought. Copenhagen was just a short drive, across the Øresund Bridge, to his family home in southern Sweden.

  He paused long enough so that she wondered whether the call had been dropped, then asked, “Did you get my text?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” she said.

  Was he even going to apologize for having left her? Or ask why she’d been delayed? She’d been detained, accused of being a spy, had walked halfway to Turkey, and now had no food. Did he even care?

  “I didn’t get a text back.”

  “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “I’m sorry. I . . .”

  “I know about Elsa,” she blurted. “I read your emails. When I was trying to find you.”

  No one spoke for a long time.

  Finally, Oskar said, “Hannah, it’s—”

  “It’s what, not what I think? Don’t insult me, Oskar.”

  “No, it is what you think, it’s just . . .”

  She heard something that sounded like a grown man trying not to cry. Which she thought was ironic, given that she was the one getting screwed over.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have someone meeting you in Copenhagen?”

  As she posed the question, it suddenly dawned on her that the reason he’d been so eager to leave without her. He must have been worried she would try to accompany him back to Sweden. And then he’d have his two women in the same city at once.

  “My mother.”

  Hannah rolled her eyes. His mother. Her phone beeped—a low battery alert. “I have to go.”

  “I’ll call you when I get to Sweden. We have to talk.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Hannah.”

  “I can’t do this, Oskar.”

  “Hannah, we have to talk. And not like this.”

  He sounded desperate. She was too tired and hurt and hungry to care.

  “There’s nothing to talk about. No matter what you say, no matter what your excuse, I’m not spending any more time, much less the rest of my life, with a man who would do to me what you’ve done.”

  chapter 19

  Inside the Aleppo property registry office—a labyrinthine tangle of ancient filing cabinets, metal desks, and corded phones—Rahim Suleiman, still dressed in his black anti-riot uniform and laden with combat gear, sat outside the director’s office in a wobbly, decades-old easy chair that had been placed next to a plastic fern.

  His right leg, though bandaged with a field dressing, oozed blood out onto the scuffed, cracked leather. His expression betrayed no emotion.

  He had arrived five hours ago, just in time to catch the lone clerk trying to slip out of the office, and yet he was still no closer to learning where Dr. Hasan lived. Unable to justify continuing to retain the junior intelligence officer who had assisted him at the hospital, he was alone.

  Rahim checked his watch. His orders were to report to the Military Intelligence Directorate in two hours.

  He waited five more minutes, then checked his watch again.

  O you who have believed, seek help through patience and prayer. Indeed, Allah is with the patient.

  He repeated this verse from the Quran twenty times in his head, then clenched his fist and thought: This clerk is useless! Over five hours to look up a simple address! With a government such as this, is it any mystery why people are protesting?

  Minutes later, however, the clerk—a frail man with rimless glasses and a face marked by deep wrinkles and an overabundance of liver spots—hobbled out from the canyons of filing cabinets looking especially stooped, as though he had been bending over for far too long. With both his hands, he gripped a piece of paper.

  Rahim stood, for though the man was just a clerk, and a remarkably inefficient one at that, his advanced age demanded that he be afforded respect.

  “I have it, Lieutenant!” the clerk declared, both his voice and arms trembling as he offered the paper. “The address of your doctor.”

  Rahim took the paper and stared at it for a moment. “God bless you,” he said.

  As battles continued to rage in Salaheddine and other districts, sending sounds of gunfire and exploding mortar shells booming out over the city, Rahim raced to the wealthy New Aleppo district just west of the hospital—stopping abruptly outside a three-story, white-limestone building which, even though half the city had no electricity, was illuminated by a nearby streetlight. The third and highest floor was marked by a series of floor-to-ceiling windows that were framed by decorative pointed arches.

  Rahim eyed the windows, noting with dissatisfaction that they were dark.

  The common front door was locked, but Rahim used a combination jack-handle, lug-wrench bar from the trunk of the Peugeot to pop the latch. Upon limping up the interior stairs as quickly as he could, he arrived at the third-floor landing. Seeing that the heavy oak
door was secured with both a latch and a dead bolt, he stepped back down the stairs and, using an oak baluster to partially shield himself from ricochets, set the firing selector on his AK-47 to automatic, and shot up the wood casing to the right of the locks.

  The door popped open when he threw his shoulder into it. He stepped inside.

  Light from streetlamps glinted off an expansive marble floor in what appeared to be a living room. But the room was empty save for a small circular table. Nothing hung on the walls. The windows had been stripped of their curtains.

  Rahim moved cautiously toward the table, gun to his shoulder. The sound of his steps echoed off the hard walls and floors. On the table lay a stack of papers which he bent down to examine, using his cell phone flashlight for illumination.

  It was an advertisement for an apartment. Four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, twenty-two thousand Syrian pounds per month—an absurd amount of money. Photos of the apartment—including the room in which Rahim was standing—had been printed under the description.

  At the very bottom of the page was a number. He called it, but no one answered.

  Rahim drove back to the University of Aleppo Hospital.

  Finding no one at the reception desk, he grabbed the first male doctor he could find, brandished his military intelligence ID, and demanded to speak to someone who could tell him where Dr. Hasan lived.

  A harried, portly man wearing blue scrubs stained with blood soon met him at the reception desk and introduced himself as Dr. Issa.

  “Where is Dr. Hasan?” Rahim demanded, declining to shake Dr. Issa’s hand when it was offered.

  Gesturing with his already outstretched hand that Rahim should calm himself, Dr. Issa said, “What I came to tell you is that Dr. Hasan, he . . .”

  “He what?” demanded Rahim.

  Dr. Issa looked at the ceiling, then said, “He has been called to God.”

  The two men stood facing each other for an extended moment.

  Rahim clenched his jaw. “How?” he demanded.

  “I was not here, but I was told there was a misunderstanding of sorts this afternoon—”

  “There was no misunderstanding.”

  “You know of this incident?”

  “Do not evade my questions, doctor,” said Rahim, unclipping the snap that kept his pistol secure on his belt holster. “You tell me Dr. Hasan has died. How?”

  “He was shot!” cried Dr. Issa. “While trying to flee to Turkey. His wife called the hospital for help as he was dying. She needed an ambulance, but there were none to spare. It would not have mattered because he died well before any ambulance could have come, but still, I fear we failed him.”

  “I do not believe you. Where did this happen?”

  Rahim placed his hand on the grip of his pistol.

  “Lieutenant, please—”

  “Where?” Rahim shouted.

  “Castello Road!” cried Dr. Issa in a panic. “His wife said he was shot by rebels. I do not know whether it was an accident, or whether they tried to get him to join them and he refused or . . .”

  Dr. Issa’s stopped speaking as he glanced at Rahim’s pistol.

  “This Dr. Hasan, where is his home? And do not try to send me to his clinic next door as your colleagues did earlier today! That is not where he lives. Nor does he live in the apartment he owns in New Aleppo.”

  “He moved to somewhere near the old city, I think,” said Dr. Issa, speaking quickly. “He mentioned it some time ago, but I have never been there. But he works so much, his clinic is like his real home.”

  “What is his number? His personal cell phone number. And the number his wife used to call you.”

  “I have it,” said Dr. Issa, as though grateful to be asked to perform a task he was capable of performing. He retrieved his cell phone from the back pocket of his scrubs. “Here, I will look it up.”

  The number Dr. Issa provided for Dr. Hasan’s wife matched the number Rahim had found at the bottom of the apartment advertisement. The other number was new.

  “You will wait with me here,” Rahim said.

  He made a call to the Military Intelligence Directorate and asked a signals intelligence officer he knew to tap into the directorate’s cell-site simulator network.

  Ten minutes later he was told that Dr. Hasan’s phone was still transmitting a signal somewhere in or near the northern portion of the Sakhour neighborhood, not far from Castello Road. And that the phone belonging to Dr. Hasan’s wife was up in the town of Azaz, near the border with Turkey.

  Rahim considered—if Dr. Hasan had been shot, it was plausible that his phone would have remained near the scene of the shooting. And if his wife had felt threatened, she might very well have continued to flee to Turkey, taking whatever children she had with her, perhaps relying on remaining family to bury her husband if it had not been done already.

  It was impossible to say for sure, short of searching for the phone and the doctor in Sakhour. But Sakhour was, for the moment, behind enemy lines.

  “If you are lying to me,” said Rahim.

  “By God, Lieutenant, I speak the truth.”

  Rahim studied Dr. Issa’s face again, then checked his watch. He had ten minutes to get to the Military Intelligence Directorate. It would be just enough time. After his next shift, and after he had slept—he had already been awake for nearly forty hours—he would investigate further.

  For now, he decided to accept that he had been patient, and God had rewarded him.

  chapter 20

  Istanbul Atatürk Airport, Turkey

  They almost didn’t let him board. But he’d told them he’d come from Syria, and that had bought him some sympathy.

  “Are you ill, sir?” asked the airport assistant assigned to help Oskar from his airport wheelchair to his seat on the plane.

  “No. It’s just my leg,” he said.

  But it wasn’t just his leg. Despite popping as much extra-strength Tylenol as he thought his liver could tolerate, Oskar was feverish, had a splitting headache, and his chest wound was burning as though a live coal were buried under his skin.

  Breathing was a chore.

  “You look pale. Are you sure you don’t need a doctor?”

  He wore a T-shirt over his hospital robe. His broken leg was extended over the wheelchair footplate, nearly dragging on the ground, and he’d tied his engineer friend’s undershirt over the sutures on his leg where blood had started to seep through the bandages.

  “It’s just the pain,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

  The airport assistant helped lift him out of his wheelchair and onto his crutches.

  “Don’t forget your passport, sir.” The assistant picked it up off the wheelchair, slipped into Oskar’s hand, then asked, “You have someone meeting you in Copenhagen?”

  The other passengers were staring at him. Giving him distance, not wanting to contract whatever it was that he had. It occurred to Oskar that he’d lost track of his laptop.

  “Yes.”

  It was the second time in his life he’d flown first class, the first time being the flight from Antakya to Istanbul. Given his height, and the fact that his leg was in a brace, it was the only way he could fit into a seat.

  The stewardess brought him a blanket shortly after takeoff. He tried to sleep but could never manage more than an anxious semiconsciousness.

  The idea that the woman he’d harbored secret hopes of marrying was leaving him seemed like something he’d dreamed up while sleeping off too many glasses of wine. Fucking Elsa.

  He became paranoid, worried that people from Syria were following him.

  Needles were pricking his skin, pricking his eyes. Those Syrian doctors, they’d messed him up.

  God, his head hurt. He pulled the blanket tighter and forced himself to imagine what it would be like to lie under the birch trees in b
ack of his mother’s house. He tried to hear the rustle of the leaves and the chirping of the willow warblers, but whenever he started to nod off, the image of that boy Adel’s last moments on this earth would form in his mind, and he’d get panicky and wake up.

  The woman sitting next to him edged closer to the window. He didn’t blame her. It wasn’t just his leg, and the fact that he’d witnessed a murder. Something was terribly wrong with him.

  2013

  chapter 21

  Rebel-held Aleppo

  Before the war, it had been known as the Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Hospital, named after a respected eighth-century caliph. Now Dr. Sami Hasan, and everyone else who worked there, called it the M2.

  Nestled among apartment buildings in a poor section of the city, it was far smaller than the regime-controlled University of Aleppo Hospital and not nearly as well equipped. But the M2 had been built when the French ruled Syria, at a time when it was not considered profligate to add decorative motifs to an exterior facade or star-shaped inlay to the tile floor of an operating room, and so it had a certain faded elegance to it that the university hospital lacked and which Sami, its chief surgeon, had come to appreciate.

  Indeed, there were many things about the M2 Sami had come to appreciate, not the least of which was the dallah coffeepot one of the nurses had donated to the staff room and that from the smell of it, had already been refreshed.

  Sami opened his eyes and checked his phone. Seven fifteen in the morning. Which meant he had been able to catch five hours of sleep and explained why he was feeling particularly well rested.

  He swung his legs off his narrow cot, poured himself a cup of coffee, and began washing his face and hands in a small utility sink. The bright, foresty smell of laurel oil in his wife’s soap, paired with the feeling of the strong coffee settling in his stomach, made him smile. Yes, the winter had been interminable and bloody, but now it was nearly summer and after a year of war, the rebels were winning. In a month or two, Aleppo might be fully liberated.