The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

The colonel made a face. “Aleppo? No, do not worry yourself about that, doctor. ISIS will not come to Aleppo. The Syrian people, they reject these foreigners. You worry about treating my brother and let me tend to ISIS.”

  chapter 26

  Malmö, Sweden • One month later

  Upon returning home from work at the Copenhagen office of the European Development Service, Oskar Lång found his fiancée, Elsa, standing in the kitchen of his third-floor walk-up. She was wearing a lavender tank top with spaghetti straps, the one that she’d taken to wearing with increasing frequency ever since he had remarked that it flattered her. Instead of her normal ponytail, she appeared to have blow-dried her blond hair. Her lips glistened with clear gloss.

  “Well, hello, you!” he said. “This is quite the surprise.”

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He let his leather messenger bag slip from his shoulder to the floor. “No, of course not. Good news?”

  “I wanted to tell you in person.”

  She draped her arms around his neck, smiled, and gave him a quick kiss. Oskar observed that she’d placed her overnight bag on the futon in the next room. And that she had arranged flowers—three white-and-red peonies—in a beer-mug vase on the kitchen table.

  “I went to the center this morning,” she said, referring to the Sahlgrenska University Hospital Cancer Center, which lay three hours to the north in Gothenburg, Sweden.

  “I thought your appointment wasn’t until tomorrow?”

  “They had a cancellation.”

  She kissed him again.

  Oskar felt a small pang of regret for having given her the key to his apartment. It was six o’clock on a Friday, and he’d been looking forward to having the evening to himself.

  “I’m so happy for you, Elsa.”

  “I’m so happy for us,” she said.

  At that, she took his hand and led him to the bedroom, in a way that made Oskar feel a bit like a dog on a leash. As they undressed and then climbed into bed, she talked about the traffic she’d encountered on the E6.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said when, after a few minutes of kissing, his mouth began to drift downward. She brought him back up to her lips, saying, “This is for you.”

  Oskar attempted to perform as though it were. Eventually, he climaxed; she didn’t, but said not to worry about it.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  They’d known each other since preschool, so he knew better than to persist.

  Elsa handed him a wad of tissues.

  As he was cleaning himself off, he said, “By the way, I told Nils I’d meet him at seven. For a run. Kungsparken to the marina. And back.” They made eye contact. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Stupid.”

  “Can you cancel?”

  Oskar sat up, scratched his head, and swung his legs off the bed. “I canceled last week,” he said, adding, “He thinks he’s helping me.”

  “If your leg hurts, just stop.”

  His leg hurt now. Just a dull pain, up by his hip, but it was always there. “I’ll be back around eight, we can eat then.”

  For a moment Oskar listened to birds chirp outside his window. He reminded himself to remember to refill the suction-cup feeder he’d attached to the outside of the kitchen window, then he began to wonder—since she’d come to visit him this weekend, did that still mean he needed to go to Gothenburg to see her next weekend?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “How happy I am for you.”

  “No bad cells at all. Nothing. We can finally start to plan, Oskar. Everything we used to talk about, it can still happen. You’re better. I’m better. Maybe next summer we can . . .”

  Her voice, sounding somewhere between ecstatic and weepy, drifted off. When Oskar didn’t fill the silence, she added, “By then, it will have been over a year. I don’t trust them, but if I’m still clear by next summer. Maybe June at your mother’s house? We can rent a tent.”

  He stroked her hair. “We can.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind adopting?” she asked.

  “Of course not.”

  Oskar met his brother Nils at the base of a set of wide, gently sloping steps that extended into a pond that lay at the southern tip of a public park in downtown Malmö. A weeping willow stood next to the steps, and a family of geese rested under its branches. More geese were down by the water, waddling about in their own droppings.

  Standing next to Nils, hands on hips as she stretched, was his wife, Birgit.

  “I don’t believe it,” she exclaimed upon seeing Oskar. “You actually came!”

  “Birgit!” said Oskar as he hugged her. “So good to see you.”

  That was a lie. He’d been hoping to talk to his brother alone.

  “I owe you a hundred kronor,” said Birgit to Nils. She laughed.

  “Oskar,” said Nils opening his arms. “I knew you’d show up, even if Birgit had her doubts.”

  The brothers embraced. Nils, like Oskar, was tall and lanky. But he was tanned, as was Birgit, both having been on vacation the last two weeks with the rest of Sweden. Oskar, having taken his vacation in the winter to be with Elsa as she recovered in Gothenburg, was pasty white.

  “I actually used to run almost every day when I was in university,” said Oskar, a bit defensively. When he’d been going for his bachelor’s and, subsequently, his master’s in engineering at nearby Lund University, he’d played on the soccer club and had frequently run with his clubmates.

  “You’re here today, and that’s the important thing,” said Birgit. “Have you stretched?”

  “If you count the walk from my apartment, which I do,” said Oskar.

  “I need five more minutes,” said Birgit, adding, “You shouldn’t go light on the stretching! Much easier to prevent injuries than it is to recover from them.”

  Oskar stole a glance at the clock on his phone as he slipped it into the pouch encircling his bicep.

  Birgit, dressed in tank top and spandex shorts, bent over to perform a stretch.

  “You know,” said Oskar, “I’m going to be slow, so I might just start out. You guys will catch up in no time.”

  “South around the Stora Dammen,” said Birgit. “No cheating!”

  Feeling sluggish and stiff, Oskar began to angle south as instructed. The gravel path merged with a paved bike path. An old woman with a rattling rear fender dinged her handlebar bell at him as she zipped by. A mother with two children in a bike cart also dinged her bell at him when he swerved to avoid colliding with some geese.

  His brother passed him well before he’d even reached the traffic circle that lay between the beach and the park where they’d started their run.

  Birgit came up behind him a minute later. Oskar noted she didn’t appear to be out of breath or sweating.

  “You go on,” he said. “I don’t want to hold you back.”

  “No, no—I promised Nils I’d stay with you! By the way, how is Elsa?”

  “Complete remission. She just got the news.”

  “That’s fantastic!” Birgit said. “Amazing, both of you, back as good as new. Now you two can finally get on with your lives.”

  Although it was late in the day, the Ribersborg beach was still crowded with beachgoers, fellow runners, and couples out for a late stroll. Birgit insisted on running on the beach itself, and Oskar labored as his feet, wide though they were, sunk into the coarse sand. He dodged clumps of seaweed gathered on the shore, children making sandcastles, a gaggle of drunk bikini-clad women laughing and dancing to Håkan Hellström, and a woman in a burkini. Dogs and kids played in the cold water as the adults waded in up to their knees. Upon reaching the marina at the far end of the beach park, they ran back the same way they had come.

  Twenty minutes later, egged on by Birgit who w
as now jogging backward in front of him, Oskar finished his run with a sprint, stopping where they’d started, in front of the willow tree next to the pond.

  He was hyperventilating, his heart was pounding in his chest, and his bad leg ached, but by God, he didn’t feel half bad. He would do this more often, he told himself. And he was glad he’d stuck it out for the full run rather than sneaking in a shortcut or stopping to swim. Running was good for him.

  He leaned over, using a bench to support himself as he caught his breath.

  “Are you okay?” asked a boy who was walking by with his mother.

  Oskar gave him a thumbs-up and tried to smile but wound up breaking into a coughing fit. He gave the boy another thumbs-up as the boy’s mother pulled her child away.

  He was okay. The antibiotic-resistant infection that had spread from his rib to his blood was gone, and for the past few months, he’d finally started to feel as though his life was back on track.

  As his chest heaved, he could feel where the operation to remove the infected portion of rib had been. It no longer hurt, but the scar tissue felt funny, as though someone were continually pulling at his skin.

  He raised his head to the sky and the sun.

  “Well done,” said Birgit, patting him on the back and interrupting his thoughts. He was relieved to see that she was at least breathing heavily now, and sweating. When the run was finished, he could even concede that his brother was lucky to have married her.

  Still, he thought, she was no Hannah.

  2014

  chapter 27

  Antakya, Turkey

  On a warm spring day when the orange trees were beginning to bloom, nearly two years after fleeing Aleppo, twenty-six-year-old Hannah Johnson ducked out of the office at the Bonne Foi Aid Coalition at one in the afternoon and retrieved her aging Toyota Yaris from a parking garage in downtown Antakya.

  As she raced out of the city, hurtling past cotton fields and a refugee camp for defectors from the Assad regime, she drank sweetened cherry juice from a box, blasted Turkish dance music over the crackly speakers, and let the wind tousle her hair while she stole glances at her Facebook feed. Her skin was tanned, her hands decorated with faded henna, and for good luck she wore a Hand of Fatima pendant on a leather cord. It had been months since she had brooded about Oskar—a two-week flirtation the prior year with a Turk who had proved himself to be as vain as he was beautiful had cured her of that—and she did not think of him now.

  Two and a half hours later, she pulled up to the back of a dilapidated warehouse in Kilis, Turkey, where a young man named Osman helped her load fifteen overstuffed cardboard boxes into the back of her Yaris and then drove with her to the Öncüpınar border crossing.

  After inspecting her Syrian passport, the Turks let her pass. Minutes later, in the zero-point zone between Turkey and Syria, a sweat-drenched Turkish Red Crescent officer inspected the boxes while she covered her hair with a paisley headscarf and zipped up her lightweight jacket to conceal her figure.

  “You are lucky they let you through,” he said.

  Hannah shrugged. If they hadn’t, she had been prepared to cross the border illegally. Osman knew a smuggler who knew a way through not far away. It just would have delayed her a few hours.

  After a two-hour wait at the Syrian inspection building, a ragtag group of heavily armed twentysomethings who called themselves the Islamic Front asked that she scrawl her name on a piece of tissue-thin notepaper, to which they applied a stamp that read Free Syria.

  “Welcome back, sister,” they said.

  On Hannah’s first incursion into Syria, she had been met on the Syrian side of the border by a clean-shaven, exceptionally slender nineteen-year-old aid worker named Muhammad. This time, Muhammad met her again, but before they began to transfer her cargo into his Hyundai hatchback, he said, “I have bad news. The clinic has closed.”

  Behind Muhammad, on the other side of the road, mud-splattered cars were lined up waiting to enter Turkey. Luggage, cardboard boxes, and plastic bags had been strapped to roofs. People stood to the sides of their cars, killing time. Children sold diesel fuel in recycled bottles. Hannah’s nose twitched at the acrid smell of rotting garbage and sewage that was drifting over from the nearby refugee camp.

  “You mean for today?” she asked, speaking Arabic.

  “No, permanently.” Muhammad dipped his head to his shoulder, a little tic he had.

  “What happened?”

  “Dr. Malki left,” said Muhammad.

  “No one told me.”

  “I think he went to Turkey to be with his family.”

  Hannah bit her lip as Muhammad stood there with his hands in the pockets of his tight Euro jeans.

  “When did this happen?” she asked.

  “Two days ago.”

  “Huh,” she said. “Why was I not told?”

  Muhammad shrugged.

  “You could have sent me a text, no?” she asked.

  “There is another clinic,” said Muhammad. “That ran out of anesthesia last night. If you are willing, we could bring the supplies there.”

  “In Azaz?”

  “Farther south.” Although Muhammad carried a cell phone, he also wore a showy silver watch on his wrist, and he checked it now. “We have time,” he said.

  Hannah stared at the boxes. She had agreed to bring medicine to Azaz, a dusty, low-slung town near the Turkish border, because Dr. Malki, the clinic supervisor, had done work for her employer, Bonne Foi. She trusted him in a way that she didn’t trust other potential recipients of the medicine.

  “Hmm,” she said, recalling that a few weeks ago, in a town just south of Azaz, a British reporter had been kidnapped. She didn’t think Muhammad knew she was an American—she’d insisted Bonne Foi not publicize it—but she couldn’t be sure.

  “Of course, I can make the delivery myself if you like,” said Muhammad, perhaps sensing her reluctance.

  Hannah wanted to trust Muhammad. On her prior trips, he’d been scrupulously polite and protective of her. His eyes, with their long, almost feminine lashes, had always struck her as kind. But part of her wondered whether he was just telling her the clinic in Azaz was closed so that he could sell the medicine on the black market. Bonne Foi was a small organization, with limited resources, and as a result was only paying him the equivalent of a few dollars a day. And Hannah was new at this. Since fleeing Syria, she had mostly confined herself to working on the Turkish side of the border—helping refugees transition from the refugee camps to private housing in Antakya, then serving as a liaison between French doctors on mercy missions and the Turkish refugee camps. She wondered whether Muhammad was trying to take advantage of her inexperience.

  “That would be breaking protocol,” she said diplomatically.

  “I understand.”

  If the clinic really had closed, she wondered, why hadn’t Dr. Malki texted her?

  “Do you think,” she ventured, “We could stop by the clinic in Azaz anyway?”

  Muhammad smiled uncomfortably and dipped his head to his shoulder again. Hannah sensed he was embarrassed.

  “Even if the doctor has departed, there may still be patients in need of medical supplies,” she explained, hoping that would help them both save face.

  “There are no patients,” he said. “I was there yesterday.”

  “The nurses may be treating people. A new doctor may have arrived.”

  Muhammad glanced at the ground then at his car. “Okay,” he said. “We go to the clinic.”

  Azaz had seen heavy fighting at the beginning of the war, but even though the charred shells of tanks still lay rusting in the streets and the central mosque was in ruins, Hannah knew the town had experienced only intermittent violence of late. So she was wholly unprepared for the scene of destruction that lay before her when Muhammad pulled up to the clinic.

 
Or rather, what had once been the clinic.

  An enormous crater lay near where the entrance had stood. Above it, a telephone pole festooned with wires that were no longer connected to anything sagged at a forty-five-degree angle. On its periphery lay a porcelain sink that had stood in the clinic’s common bathroom. Scattered around the sink were bits of brown-and-maroon-striped couch cushions, bright orange carpet fragments, the chrome base of an operating table, a shattered window frame, a woman’s blouse stained with what might have been blood, and a pile of cracked china.

  Without saying a word, Hannah stepped out of the car and over a downed wire. Her feet crunched on broken glass.

  Muhammad followed her, hands in his pockets, kicking at the dirt with his pointy-toed dress shoes. He dipped his head to his shoulder.

  “The regime blames ISIS, of course,” he said. “But ISIS does not have fighter jets.”

  Hannah looked around. The adjacent buildings had also suffered damage, but the epicenter of the destruction was the clinic.

  “This happened two days ago?”

  A pair of goats and a group of school-aged children huddled under a sickly chinaberry tree, observing her from a distance. Aside from that, the street was empty.

  “Yes,” said Muhammad.

  It had been a small clinic, really just a modest home that had been pressed into service when its owners had abandoned it. But the last time Hannah had visited, there had been patients, young and old, in every room.

  “And Dr. Malki?” Hannah asked.

  Muhammad shook his head. “They found him over there.” He pointed to a pile of rubble next to the remains of a corrugated metal roof. Then he tapped out a thin cigarette and lit it.

  “Why—” Hannah was about to ask Muhammad why he lied to her about what had happened, but as soon as she began to ask the question, she realized she could answer it herself. He’d lied because he was worried the medicine runs would stop.

  Muhammad exhaled smoke and waved it away from Hannah’s face. “I will be in the car,” he said.

  Hannah lingered, unable to pull her eyes away from the destruction. Near the pile of cracked china lay a fragment of teacup. She studied it from a distance, fixating on the delicate carnation design, then drew closer and realized she’d seen the same pattern teacup in her father’s apartment, when she’d visited him in Aleppo, what, ten years ago?