The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  chapter 34

  Rebel-held Aleppo • Three months later

  By the time Hannah and her driver passed through the first of a series of checkpoints in Aleppo, darkness had settled over the city. The smell of wood fires, raw sewage, and dust was thick, the moon and stars obscured by clouds.

  It was her 121st medicine run.

  As always, they drove with their lights off. Every so often, empty bullet casings and broken glass made popping sounds under the weight of their tires, but Hannah could barely hear them because she was listening to music—mostly Enya, because it calmed her—on her earbuds while exchanging texts with her younger half-sister Allison back in New Jersey, having picked up a weak wireless signal once they’d reached the city limits.

  From Allison she gleaned that their mother was applying for jobs at the Paramus Park mall, hoping to pick up work over Christmas because Allison’s father, a lawyer named George Johnson, who was Hannah’s stepfather, was late on alimony payments.

  What store?

  Victoria’s Secret.

  OMG.

  You should come home for Christmas.

  Maybe.

  “We are being followed,” said the driver, interrupting her thoughts.

  Hannah pulled out one of her earbuds, put down her phone, and leaned forward in the passenger seat so she could use the side-view mirror.

  Her driver, whose wrist cast had come off a month earlier, was on edge because at the zero-point zone between the Syrian and Turkish borders, the Red Crescent had forced them to hand over two laptops that had been hidden at the bottom of a box of bandages. The laptops were needed at a hospital in Azaz, but computers and smartphones were prohibited because the regime considered them potential tools of war, and the Red Crescent didn’t want to cross the regime. Then, two hours later, more of their supplies had been taken when they’d inadvertently passed through a Kurdish checkpoint, and the Kurds had demanded a tribute as the price of passage.

  Which is why Hannah wasn’t sure whether the driver was really seeing something or just being paranoid.

  “I see no one,” she said.

  “Keep looking.”

  “Oh. There.”

  Not far behind them, but nearly swallowed by the darkness, a man on a bike had just passed in front of a dimly lit window, momentarily exposing himself. Hannah couldn’t make out any of his features. She wasn’t even sure it was a man—it could have been a boy, or even a woman.

  Either way, she wasn’t overly alarmed. They had been followed before, sometimes by Free Syrian Army soldiers trying to protect them, sometimes by Islamists who were trying to—and in some cases, did—rob them, sometimes by kids who were just curious.

  She put her earbuds back in, settled back into her seat, and waited for another text from her sister to ping, but as they slowly made their way to the delivery point, she noted that the man on the bike continued to trail them. When a pack of barefoot teenagers stared them down, she wondered whether they were coordinating with the biker.

  The driver pulled up next to a row of brown tents that had been reinforced with sandbags and set up to offer first aid treatment to victims of chlorine gas attacks. A scrawny man-kid with a patchy beard emerged from a door that led to the hospital. Hannah shut off her music and texted her sister.

  got to go

  She then helped establish a bucket brigade from the back of the van to the hospital. One of the things that they unloaded first was a box of fiberglass casting tape, the same kind that Dr. Sami had used on her driver’s wrist, and that Hannah had made sure had been added to the manifest.

  She was about to ask whether Dr. Sami was working inside now—he had been splitting his time between the larger M2 hospital and this smaller clinic—when a whistling screech suddenly sounded. Hannah locked eyes with her driver.

  “Down!” he cried.

  She dove to the pavement, intending to roll beneath the van, but before she even hit the ground the explosion rocked her.

  At first the only thing Hannah was conscious of was a ringing in her ears.

  She thought she must be back in Antakya, sleeping in her studio apartment. So she rolled to her side, intending to hit the snooze icon on her cell phone alarm. She was so tired; she needed more sleep.

  Then she realized she couldn’t breathe, or at least not properly, because when she tried to inhale, she began to cough.

  Her head throbbed.

  For a moment she was confused because her head was resting on a hard surface, her hands too. She must have fallen off the bed, she reasoned. Strange, that hadn’t happened to her in years.

  Her eyes stung. She coughed again and tried to push herself up off the ground to get back into bed.

  A stone wall not far from her crumbled to the ground. Sirens sounded in the distance. People began to scream. The dust was too thick for her to see far through it.

  As she glanced at her legs and arms—to confirm they were still attached to her—she was struck by the paleness of her skin in the gloom. She touched her cheek with a finger. Her skin was so smooth, so thin. But it was that very same thin, nearly translucent skin that was holding the blood inside her body, like a flimsy plastic bag filled with water. A cut here, a cut there, and . . .

  Hannah coughed a few more times then leaned back into a sitting position on the ground. Her ears were still ringing, her head still throbbing, and now her chest burned every time she tried to breathe.

  The baby-blue Nike sneakers she was wearing hovered in the darkness, floating as though they were no longer attached to her feet.

  She inspected her torso, then her arms and legs for signs of shrapnel wounds. Finding none, she wiped her hands over her face, hair, and neck and checked them for signs of blood. Nothing. After a few more deep breaths, she speculated that the pain in her head and chest must have been due to the concussive force of the blast.

  Moans and cries for help sounded from the remains of the clinic. As she stood, a gust of air swept away some of the smoke and dust. Through the lingering murk, she saw that the chemical decontamination tents had been completely blasted away, exposing the drainage pipes underneath them. Where the clinic had been, small fires illuminated tangled bits of metal rods that had once been embedded in concrete. The Isuzu van had been thrown a full car length.

  The side of the van facing the blast was dented and charred, and a spear-like section of stair railing had punctured the cargo bay. The driver’s-

  side tire was burning, and the driver’s window had been shattered. Had she been on that side of the van, she’d be dead.

  Instead, entirely by chance, she’d been on the other side, and the metal cargo bay that had stood between her and the bomb had protected her, even as she and the van had been thrown by the force of the blast.

  Her driver lay face down in the street. She pulled a few bricks off his back then shook him gently. When he didn’t move or respond, she mustered enough strength to flip him over.

  His forehead had been bashed in so that it appeared dimpled, and his neck was covered with blood, but she still felt his wrist for a pulse.

  As she changed the position of her fingers, just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, it occurred to her that she was holding the same wrist that Dr. Sami had repaired.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there. It might have been a minute; it might have been twenty. The sirens grew louder, then stopped. Eventually a woman in nurse’s garb asked if she was okay, and Hannah said she was. Two men in white helmets, khaki coveralls, and black boots, dragged her driver to a spot on the street where other dead men and women had been lined up in an orderly row.

  She checked her phone; it had been badly dented in one corner and, although it would turn on, it wasn’t picking up a signal. At this time of night, she doubted anyone from Bonne Foi would answer anyway.

  At some point it occurred to her that
she should be helping. So she stood, wobbled on her feet for a moment, and walked over to where the decontamination tents had once stood and where people were now picking through the rubble. She watched them, feeling useless, not knowing where to start or whether she’d be in the way.

  One of the men in the white helmets was talking with a nurse who was anxiously gesturing to the remains of the clinic.

  She inched closer and gathered that they were going to try to move the surviving patients to the M2, but that first they needed to evacuate the survivors and salvage what equipment they could.

  “Where are you bringing the patients who need to be transferred?” she asked the nurse after the man in the white helmet ran off.

  The nurse gestured across the street to five-story apartment complex.

  “Where is Dr. Sami?” Hannah asked.

  The nurse stared at the remains of the clinic, and Hannah followed her gaze. Half lay in ruins, just a crater surrounded by brick and twisted metal. The other half was still standing, looking a bit like a dollhouse the way so many of the interior rooms were visible. On one charred wall, Hannah perceived what she thought was the faint outline of a human form, a wartime equivalent of a sun print. A human leg, detached from the owner’s body, lay on the periphery of the crater. Eventually, the nurse brought her hand to her mouth, said, “I would not know,” and turned away.

  Inside the section of the clinic still standing, it was hard to breathe because of all the dust and hard to see because the lights were out. A few of the rescuers had flashlights, and Hannah did her best to follow them in and out of the building. She helped pull a young child, wet with urine and barely clinging to life, from the rubble. She salvaged X-ray equipment, blood pressure monitors, infusion pumps, otoscopes, mismatched blankets, a sternal saw, a General Electric mammography machine, a vaginal speculum, two defibrillators, a stack of sponge bowls, a surgical stapler, a box of scalpel blades, a box of casting tape she had brought with her, and an anesthesia cart.

  A Kawasaki front-end loader arrived, along with a dump truck. Men yelled into walkie-talkies. Someone started using a jackhammer on the collapsed portion of the building, trying to get to the dead below. A makeshift fire truck arrived, with a single hose and no ladders, and doused the sections of rubble that were still smoldering.

  On every run back into the hospital, Hannah asked about Dr. Sami. No one had seen him.

  She finally found him in the basement, on the side of the building that had survived the blast. He was standing in one of the recovery rooms, his back to the door. At first she thought he was just one of the rescue workers, but then, under the glow of the LED headlamp he was wearing, she was able to make out the form of a woman of indeterminate age who appeared to be unconscious. He had her on a regular hospital bed rather than an operating table and he was concentrating intently, peering through a set of surgical loupes as he stitched her stomach.

  Hannah opened the door.

  “Dr. Sami,” she said quietly. He didn’t react, so she called his name again, this time louder. “Dr. Sami, we are trying to move—”

  He turned, blinding her with the glare of his headlamp. She put up her palm to block the light.

  “What is it people find so difficult to comprehend about operating theaters!” he shouted. His voice was muffled because along with scrubs, hairnet, and surgical gloves, he was also wearing a mask. “Leave me be! I have told you I will bring her up when I am finished! Ya Allah,” he added. Good God.

  He turned back to his work, but as though God had chosen to respond, an explosion sounded. Hannah felt a burst of air pressure hit her as she flinched and covered her head with her arms.

  “It is merely an oxygen tank,” said Sami, unperturbed. “There were several in storage. You may expect more of the same.”

  Recovering herself, Hannah asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Sami had been hunched over his patient, but now he stood and faced her again. Again, Hannah put up her palm to ward off the glare.

  “You,” he said, as though just recognizing her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Delivering medicine. What can I do?”

  Sami gestured to the woman on the bed. “My anesthesiologist has left. Can you take her place so that this woman will not wake in five minutes?”

  “I can try.”

  “The correct answer is no, you cannot. Can you finish these sutures?”

  “No.”

  “Then there is nothing you can do.”

  “Will you need help transporting her when you are done?”

  Sami sighed then finished another stitch. He appeared to be arguing with himself for a moment. “Yes,” he said eventually.

  “Then I will stay until you are done, and we will move her together.”

  When Sami spoke next, he sounded more reasonable.

  “There is one thing you can do for me, if you would be willing. Behind me, on the counter, is a sterile dressing. Open the bag in which it is contained, being careful—very careful!—not to touch the dressing inside.”

  Hannah found the bag and ripped open the top.

  “Hold it open,” said Sami.

  Hannah did. Sami retrieved the dressing with a pair of forceps and applied it to the sutured abdominal incision point. Then he taped the dressing in place, removed his gloves, threw them to the floor, and put his hand on his patient’s forehead.

  “She is ready to be moved,” he said.

  “The basement recovery room has been destroyed,” said Hannah. “We will have to take her through the back stairwell.”

  chapter 35

  Adam waited and waited for his father to come home that night. After he heard his mother slam her door sometime after midnight, he decided he would try to sleep too. So he drank half a box of room-temperature milk that was stamped with the flag of Saudi Arabia, then crept back down to the cool, stone-walled storage cellar beneath the kitchen where he and Noora had been sleeping for the past year.

  When he woke again, it was still dark out. After drinking all that milk, he should have tried to pee before going to bed, but the inside toilets had not been working for months, so he had to go to a corner of the courtyard where his mother had pried up a tile and dug a hole.

  As he was passing by the iwan, though, he heard a sound—like an animal panting. Afraid that it might be a soldier, or maybe a thief, he froze. A figure, bathed in cold moonlight, was seated on the floor of the courtyard, back to the fountain. Recognizing his mother, Adam almost called out to her, but before the words could form, he saw that she was hugging herself and still making that panting sound as she rocked back and forth.

  For a moment, he thought he must be dreaming. He had seen his mother crying before. But never like this.

  It occurred to him that if his mother was this upset, something must have happened. Something truly terrible.

  And then he recalled that his father had not come home, even though his mother had been expecting him to.

  The panic that started in Adam’s mind radiated outward. He began to feel a tightness in his chest, as though a bully with strong arms were squeezing the breath out of him. Struggling to breathe, he began to hyperventilate. It occurred to him that he was starting to sound a little bit like his mother.

  This house, Noora, his mother . . . if his father could be hurt . . . He felt his chest tighten even more. Everything, everything could be at risk.

  “Who is there?” cried his mother.

  For the briefest of moments, they made eye contact. “Where is Baba?” asked Adam.

  “I do not know.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I said, I do not know!” screamed his mother, pulling her hair.

  Adam ran.

  chapter 36

  Hannah pulled more bodies from the rubble. She carted more boxes of salvaged medical supplies out of the clin
ic. When the nurse told her to hold a boy’s hand, she held it; when Sami told her to find him a ten-milliliter vial of fentanyl for him, she found it.

  By three in the morning, she was exhausted and unsteady on her feet, tripping over the bricks that littered the street. She’d had no food or water.

  She didn’t know how people like Dr. Sami did it, day after day. She could see him now, leaning over a badly burned woman. The decent thing to do would be to offer to help him, to do whatever he told her to, try to get him whatever he told her to get. But she needed sleep. And then she needed to get the hell out of Aleppo and back to New Jersey where she belonged. What a luxury it would be to slip into her childhood bed and curl up and go to sleep! The problems she’d experienced four years ago—her mother’s divorce from her stepfather, her mother’s subsequent drinking—and which had made her so eager to strike out on her own, seemed so trivial now.

  There was no electricity or running water in the abandoned building where the surviving patients were being sheltered. Just debris—a coffee cup, a child’s riding toy, a heap of soggy books and fashion magazines from Turkey, a pair of ripped sequined jeans, a cracked bottle of hand lotion, empty sardine tins that reeked.

  In an empty apartment on the first floor, she threw a cheap, pink, machine-made area rug over a stained mattress and curled up into a fetal ball. Just a few hours of sleep, she told herself, that was all she needed. But she was too uncomfortable and cold to fall asleep right away.

  Instead, in a sudden flash of what seemed like insight, she realized how lonely she was, and that led her to wonder what her mother and sister and old college and high school friends from New Jersey were doing. What would they think if they knew where she was right now? She always downplayed what she was really doing over here, always said she was being safe, working mostly in Turkey, that they needn’t worry. Would they care if they knew the truth? Her mother and sister would. With her old friends, she suspected she’d been too emotionally and physically distant for too long for them to care much anymore.

  As she wrapped her arms tighter around herself, she pictured her childhood home. It lay in the shadow of the Phillips 66 Bayway oil refinery but on a tree-lined street, with a little backyard where a nearly squirrel-proof bird feeder hung from a Japanese maple. She saw house finches gathering at the feeder and her mother in the basement, tossing an ice cube into the dryer to steam her clothes, while upstairs her sister Allison applied purple eye shadow in the bathroom. Allison smelled of peppermint-scented nicotine vapor and wore skin-tight jeans and a sweater that showed a decent amount of cleavage. She was getting ready to go out, having finished her waitressing shift at Chili’s. “Do you want to come with me?” she would ask.