by Dan Mayland
“I have been told that is not possible.” Hannah replied.
“But tomorrow?”
“I think.”
Sami considered all the medicine that Hannah had delivered over the past year, all the patients that medicine had saved. “Wait here,” he said.
He left the room, retrieved a black niqab veil from a collection of clothes that had been salvaged from the dead, and returned a minute later.
“Put this on,” he said. “You will come to my house. My wife will care for you until your people come. It will be safer than staying here.”
chapter 41
Hannah followed Sami through a sandbag tunnel and out the rear of the hospital. She wore the veil Sami had brought her, while he wore a gray baseball cap, a fraying red jacket emblazoned with the symbol of the German soccer club Bayern München, and Adidas sneakers that had holes in them.
She thought he looked more like a someone who might sell diesel fuel on the side of the road than one of the last orthopedic surgeons still practicing in Aleppo.
“Every day I take a different route home,” he explained, calling over his shoulder. “Impossible for your enemies to learn your routine if you do not have one.”
He was tall and his natural pace was fast—faster even than Oskar’s had been, and he’d been the tallest man she’d dated—so she found herself struggling to keep up, regularly taking two steps to his one. Her head and neck ached, she felt weak, and the niqab restricted her vision, so although she knew Aleppo well, she quickly lost track of where they were.
She was too proud to ask him to slow down though, and he didn’t seem to realize how fast he was going, so instead, she kept pushing herself even as they doubled back on their tracks.
Just past a still-functioning barbershop, they ducked down a narrow alley lined with corrugated metal fencing and into a bombed-out apartment building
She followed him up a narrow staircase defaced with graffiti which read La ilaha illallah—There is no God but God—and which popped out on top of what he said was a neighbor’s roof. From there, they made their way over low stone rooftop parapets, passing rows of carpets that had been hung from clotheslines to provide blinds from snipers.
The sun had set by the time they came to a roof marked by what appeared to be the remains of a raised garden. Even in the weak light, Hannah could see that while perhaps a good idea in the abstract, the garden had caused the center of the roof to sag, suggesting the ceiling beams below hadn’t been able to handle the weight. Pigeons roosting on the periphery of the roof were cooing. Hannah pulled off the niqab.
“My mother and my children brought the dirt up,” Sami explained, “but when my mother passed away, we had to give up on the garden.” Noticing Hannah’s condition, he added, “You are okay?”
Hannah took a moment to catch her breath. “Of course.”
To avoid talking, she fished her phone out of her back pocket, powered it up, and noted she was now picking up a weak signal.
As she texted the Turk in charge of logistics at the Bonne Foi warehouse in Kilis, Sami unlocked the door to an interior stairwell.
“Baba!” cried a voice.
From the stairwell bound a gangly, gap-toothed boy with shaggy brown hair and a face that, despite the lingering baby fat on his cheeks, reminded Hannah of Sami’s.
The boy’s pants barely reached his ankles, suggesting a recent growth spurt, a lack of new clothes, or both. He had used gold and blue magic markers to draw what looked like armor on both his forearms.
Sami descended the stairs, and when he got to the bottom, the boy bear-hugged his waist.
“Where have you been, Baba? It has been five days.”
“I was working,” said Sami as he placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “There was a small problem. Where are Noora and Mama?”
“Noora is in the ribat. Mama has left to buy food.”
Once Hannah had also descended the stairs, Sami said, “This is Adam, my son.”
Hannah bent down to Adam’s level.
“This is our guest,” said Sami to Adam.” And you must be extra kind to her because she has been helping to bring medicine to the hospital where I work. Her name is Hannah, and she will be staying with us until her friends can pick her up.”
“As-salamu alaykum, Adam,” said Hannah.
“Wa alaykumu as-salam,” Adam said back, quietly but politely. He turned back to his father. “Would you like to see the ribat? We made it much bigger.”
Sami said he did, and Hannah followed them down a long stone-walled hallway. Along the way she paused in front of a wide window with a long marble sill. Below the window lay an expansive but cluttered courtyard. There were riding toys that looked too small for Adam, a deflated soccer ball, a plastic playhouse with a red plastic slide affixed to it, random pieces of scrap wood, an exterior wicker table with matching wicker chairs, a new-looking generator with a Medusa-like tangle of multicolored extension cords snaking away from it, and several rain buckets that had been placed under roof drains. Fraying, knotted ropes were strung between a decent-sized laurel tree, a fountain, and the plastic playhouse; ripped sheets had been suspended between the ropes, forming a rudimentary child’s fort.
Eventually, Hannah noticed that under all the clutter was a marble-tiled floor and that the fountain was made of marble and indigo blue tiles and the walls of the courtyard were striped with golden limestone and black basalt in the ablaq style. The main entrance to the courtyard was marked by a two-story-tall pointed iwan arch that could have been a museum piece.
She eyed the bronze seahorse spouts on the fountain.
This was one of the old Ottoman-era houses that Aleppo and Damascus were famous for, she realized. Before the war, she and Oskar had looked into staying in one that had been converted into a boutique hotel, but it had been far too expensive.
Sami had stopped to wait and was staring at her, looking tired.
“You have a beautiful home,” she said, and then followed him down to the courtyard.
Sami left to find his daughter and soon reappeared with a small girl in his arms.
“And this is Noora,” he said.
The girl’s long brown hair had been tied into pigtails, and she had decorated her arms with the same gold and blue markers that Adam had used, only it had come out looking more like an attempt at abstract art. Instead of acknowledging Hannah, she buried her head in her father’s neck.
“Noora is a shy one,” said Sami.
“I get shy around strangers too,” Hannah said to Noora.
“Did Mama say how long she would be gone?” Sami asked Adam.
“No.”
“When did she leave?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure?”
“After I went to sleep, she woke me to tell me I must watch Noora.”
Sami froze. “You spent all day alone? Just you and Noora?”
Adam nodded as Noora hugged Sami tighter.
Furrowing his brow, Sami asked, “But who made you breakfast? And lunch?”
“I know how to turn on the generator,” said Adam, his pride evident. “And how to fill it with diesel. Only one-half liter per day! I cooked bulgur and cauliflower.”
“You are certain Mama left to purchase food?”
“And a new phone because her old one stopped working.”
“And where did she say she would get these things?”
Adam shrugged.
“Is there food for dinner?”
Chest puffed out as though he were answering a question in front of a classroom, Adam said, “We have bulgur, olive oil, and milk.”
“What can I do?” asked Hannah.
“Find an empty room to sleep in. I must look for my wife.”
chapter 42
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When Sami locked the doors behind him, the ka-chunk of the locks engaging echoed through the stone hallways of Beit Qarah. Noora began to cry.
Hannah sat cross-legged on the marble floor in the front foyer and rested her back against the wall. Her head was pounding.
After a time, she professed to be hungry. Which wasn’t true—in fact, her stomach was still upset. “Is anyone else hungry?” she asked.
Adam didn’t answer. Noora’s crying shifted to whimpering.
“The only problem,” added Hannah, “is that I am very bad at cooking food.”
She was about to ask for Adam’s help in cooking dinner, when Noora ran away. Hannah heard a door slam. She looked at the floor, then at Adam. “Do you know where she went?”
Adam shrugged. “The ribat, I think.”
“What is the ribat?”
Adam ran away, but then came back with a flashlight. “Come. I will show you.”
Hannah had seen hints of Adam and Noora’s enthusiasm for constructing sheet forts—what Adam called ribats—in the courtyard, but in the kitchen cellar they had outdone themselves. Save for a section where Sami slept, the entire room was covered with overlapping white sheets suspended from ropes tied to limestone pillars and wrought-iron hooks. The effect was to form a second, much lower ceiling.
From her perch on the stairs, Hannah had the sense that she was on top of a mountain, peering down at clouds below her. The sheets reflected the beam of Adam’s flashlight.
“Follow me,” he said, and he dropped to his knees and ducked into an opening between two sheets.
As when she’d first entered the Beit Qarah, Hannah had been struck with the sense of passing through a portal into another world. But this was the inner sanctum, even more secluded than the house itself was.
The children had covered the floor with cardboard, so they could crawl around without hurting their knees. Once inside, vertical sheet walls divided the space into several rooms. The walls had been decorated with magic marker drawings—some just scribbles, others clear depictions of airplanes and houses and flowers and people. Similar drawings on recycled scrap paper had been hung from the sheets with a hodgepodge of paperclips, pins, and nails.
Filtered light cast strange shadows over everything, and because Hannah had brushed against the sheets when she’d entered the fort, all the shadows were quivering.
“These are my planes,” said Adam.
He retrieved a spare LED flashlight that could be charged with a crank handle and handed it to Hannah. She turned the handle and pointed the resulting beam of light at a mobile-like collection of more paper planes than she could count. All of them had been decorated with either magic markers or paints, and each had been individually suspended from the sheet ceiling with sewing thread.
“You made them all?” asked Hannah.
“Yes.”
Adam kept his own flashlight trained on the planes, so Hannah obliged him by crawling closer to examine his work. They weren’t just your average paper planes. These were intricate origami creations involving complex folds.
“Where did you learn to do this?”
“I have a book. But most I made myself. Special designs. Follow me,” he said, then crawled around another sheet wall.
Noora was on the other side, surrounded by dolls. Some were in plastic cradles, one sat at a circular table that had been fashioned from a tambourine. In Noora’s arms lay a large doll dressed in a glittery shirt. The doll’s long hair was dark brown like Noora’s and had been arranged into two pigtails. Noora was brushing the ends of the doll’s pigtails with a plastic comb.
“She is so pretty,” said Hannah. And then, “Her hair reminds me of yours.”
Noora just kept combing her doll’s hair, making the same repetitive motion again and again.
“Adam and I were going to make dinner. Would you like to help us, or would you prefer to stay here?”
Noora didn’t answer. Hannah had seen kids go mute because of the war. The stress became too much to bear, and they retreated into themselves. It was a defense mechanism, the mind trying to protect itself. She wondered whether something like that was going on with Noora. Maybe she just didn’t like strangers.
“I think she wants to stay here,” said Adam.
In the kitchen Hannah marveled at the long granite countertops. Above them, hand painted tiles depicting cypress trees formed a backsplash. A shiny brass gooseneck faucet serviced the wide, stainless-steel double sink. Under the countertops lay open cedar shelving filled with copper pots and pans, and on them sat a stainless-steel microwave and espresso maker. French doors opened out onto both the courtyard and the dining room. The four corners of the ceiling were marked by intricate honeycombed muqarnas vaulting. A flat-screen television hung from one wall.
Sami had been lucky that the place hadn’t been looted, Hannah thought.
The open shelving underneath the countertops was largely bare, though, and the appliances were no longer being used. Instead of the main refrigerator, a dented, far smaller one had been set up in front of it. On top of the stove lay a single-burner electric hotplate. Hannah guessed that the portable generator wasn’t strong enough to run larger appliances.
“Okay,” she said, “so, what do we do first?”
Adam showed her the sealed container where they stored the bulgur and the plastic water jugs that they kept out in the courtyard.
They poured water into a pot and mixed the bulgur into it. As they were waiting for the water to boil, Hannah inspected the cabinets and found a can of tomato paste, some olive oil, and an onion. She wasn’t much of a cook, but as a girl she’d often helped her mother make spaghetti sauce from scratch and remembered that the recipe had called for tomato paste, olive oil, and onions. Granted, it had also called for fresh tomatoes and sugar and basil and half a dozen other ingredients, but they would just have to make do.
“You are a very lucky boy, Adam,” she said.
“I am?”
“Yes. Because tonight we are going to have a special treat I call bulgur spaghetti.”
chapter 43
No one at the local market had seen Tahira.
In the sandbag-reinforced basement of a nearby bakery, where the clay ovens were still warm, and the tile floors dusted with flour, the baker told Sami that he hadn’t seen her in months, not since bread deliveries had been taken over by the local council. Nor had the baker’s sister, who lived in a neighboring block. Nor had the brother-in-law of this sister, who evidently used to buy soap from Tahira’s family.
By ten at night, Sami had three loaves of flatbread—but no Tahira.
Unwilling to give up, he began walking the empty streets. Fighter jets roared above, but they were dropping their bombs far to the north. When he did encounter people, he described his wife, said she may have been looking to buy a phone—had they seen her?
No one had.
When Sami arrived back at the alley that led to his front door, instead of pulling out his keys, he leaned against the alley wall, slid down to the ground, and looked up into the dark sky.
Something terrible had happened to her, he thought. There was no other explanation. Adam was only seven years old; Noora, five. She never would have left them alone all day intentionally. What if one of them had been injured? Or if looters had broken in? Or if the generator had caught fire?
Unless . . .
Unless, Sami considered, she had become too depressed to care about the children. Unless she had—
Sami forced himself not to think it. But he knew she had been close to the edge. And that he had largely ignored the signs, trusting that she would find a way to pull herself through.
He stayed in the alley for what felt like an hour, resting, perhaps even drifting off to sleep for a moment. Having been on his feet nearly nonstop for the past thirty-six hours, he was exhausted.
She was wearing soft-soled shoes, a black abaya, and a black headscarf, so Sami didn’t see her until she was almost on top of him. But he did recognize her smell—it was a laurel-scented perfume that she had favored before the war, it smelled like her soaps—so when she saw him and startled, he knew it was her.
She asked what he was doing in the alley.
Sami swallowed then pressed his lips tightly together. He was so relieved to see her, so grateful that she was still alive. “Waiting for you, of course. Where did you go?”
She brushed by him on the way to the front door, inserted her key in the lock, cursed when she could not get it open.
“Tahira,” he said, “Wait.”
She tried the lock again and again cursed.
“Let me,” he said.
“I can do it!”
He placed a hand on her shoulder. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, sounding ashamed.
“But the children were alone. All day.”
“I had intended to come back earlier. I was delayed.”
Her voice cracked. Sami felt her shoulder tremble beneath his hand. “Tahira, where were you? Adam said you were buying food, but . . .”
He let his voice trail off. She was not carrying any food.
With her mother, sister, and all her close friends gone, there were few people he could think of she might have gone to visit. For a moment he considered—could she be seeing another man? Even with his extended absences, he did not think it possible. But then, why this?
She met his question with a question of her own. “And where were you last night?”
He told her how the hospital had been bombed and that he was sorry—he should have texted her. He had not intended to cause her pain.
“You must not worry about any pain you might cause me, Sami, you must worry about your work!” she cried. “I have heard it said that you are worth one hundred soldiers, and I believe it. As for the children, I am sorry they were left alone, but it was for them I left.”
