by Dan Mayland
The farther Sami traveled from the familiar neighborhoods of old Aleppo, the more untethered from reality he felt.
A mist had descended over the northern stretches of the city, and soon it began to drizzle, then rain. The air was cold enough that he guessed the rain would turn to snow that night. The apartment complexes showed no signs of harboring life within, but it was impossible to tell whether that was because they were abandoned, or simply because the inhabitants were huddled in the inner rooms, far from the windows.
Two hours after leaving the M2, Sami reached a muddy parking lot packed with cars and vans in various states of disrepair. The lot lay in front of a two-bay garage. One of the bays accommodated a collection of grease-laden pneumatic tools and a large, purple air compressor, the other, a green Fiat sedan. In the back of the garage, a dented brass samovar sat atop a small wood stove.
Rainwater dripped down Sami’s forehead and into his eyes. It was four thirty in the afternoon. The sky was darkening.
“Salaam?” he called, not even certain he was in the right place. There were no street numbers or signs. He had been directed to his current location by a diesel-fuel vendor who had claimed that his nephew worked at the garage.
“Salaam?” he called again.
From behind the green Fiat came the clang of metal hitting concrete. A teenage boy slid out from under the trunk of the car, his face, hands, and orange sweatshirt smudged with grease. His gray ski cap had been pulled down low on his forehead.
Sami gave his name and said he was looking for Abdul.
“Stay here,” said the boy.
Sami ducked into the garage. On a work bench, a collection of ratchets, pneumatic tools, and wrenches caught his eye, and it occurred to him that, on some level, what he did and what the people who worked in this garage did was not so different.
A door at the back opened. The woman who appeared was either elderly or prematurely aging, Sami could not tell which. A thick, woolen shawl and a woolen headscarf that she wore over a lighter headscarf weighed heavily upon her.
She gestured that he should follow.
Paths had been cut between piles of rusting car parts behind the garage. The woman led Sami down one that ended at a collection of tires that had been piled up against a deteriorating limestone wall. At the base of the wall, lying face up and covered with a sheet that was once white but was now translucent because it was soaked with water, lay a body.
On top of the body sat an abnormally thin, one-eyed cat with patchy fur.
“Tsk, tsk,” cried the woman. She darted towards the cat, which had backed off but appeared reluctant to leave. “Tsk,” she hissed, kicking feebly in the cat’s direction. The cat just backed up a bit more so that it was crouched between two tires.
“Who is this?” demanded Sami.
“May God have mercy,” she said.
Sami dropped to his knees in the mud and bowed his head. When he pulled back the sheet, an involuntary cry of despair escaped his lips.
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” the woman chanted softly and repeatedly. We belong to God and to him we shall return.
Tahira’s eyes were closed. Blood had pooled in the mud on the right side of her body. A brief examination revealed that two bullets had pierced her torso.
The first had penetrated her chest on the left side, shattering her first rib. From the placement of the exit wound near her spine, Sami guessed that the bullet had nicked the upper lobe of her left lung, perforated her left subclavian artery, and passed through her lower trachea. The entrance wound of the second bullet was between the fifth and sixth ribs and had likely pierced the left ventricle of her heart.
He clasped and unclasped his fists as he considered what must have been uncontrollable hemorrhaging of the subclavian artery, perhaps a collapsed lung, blood rushing into the pleural cavity . . .
It began to rain harder.
She would not have died immediately; her heart would have tried to keep beating.
He continued to kneel by her side. Night fell. He remembered how she looked in her white gown on their wedding day, the sweet expression on her face as she had held Adam in the hospital room hours after his birth, and the crushing bouts of anxiety and apathy that had consumed her of late. Eventually, he crossed her hands over her stomach, pulled the sheet back over her body, and stood.
The cat had returned. Having seen animals feeding on the dead before, he scooped up a handful of pebbles and tossed them near the cat’s paws.
“Go,” he whispered gently. “Not this one.”
The old woman was waiting for him in the garage, sitting on the wicker chair next to the wood stove and a lit candle. The chair that held her was no larger than normal, but she made it seem so.
“She was placed there with respect,” she said quietly, as she brought her hands to her heart. “Covered and facing Mecca.”
“And where is Abdul?” Sami demanded.
“He has gone home.”
It was irrational, he knew, the anger he felt rising. But his inner voice was shouting at him, insisting that Tahira’s death was a grave injustice, that someone needed to acknowledge that injustice and pay for it.
“How did it happen?”
“There was fighting. On the road to Khanasir.”
“What was she doing on the road to Khanasir?”
“Going to the other side, of course.”
“The other side?”
“Of the city. She has a friend there she visits.”
And then Sami understood—understood why Tahira had been sneaking off, and why she had been hiding it. She had been visiting regime-held Aleppo. Making an all-day trip, down to the south through dangerous stretches of no-man’s-land before crossing to regime-held territory and coming back north.
Upon being questioned, the woman revealed that Tahira had first hoped to stay in an apartment she claimed she and Sami still owned in regime-held Aleppo, but finding it occupied by soldiers, she had turned to a friend who had offered her and her children a spare room.
Had Sami not known this? It would have been better for his children, of course. Tahira had been planning on moving them soon. This last trip had been to make the final preparations.
Sami pictured Tahira sitting on a bench in the park off Saadallah al-Jabiri Square, in the shadow the statue of the poet Khalil Al Hindawi. Maybe eating at a café by the Queiq River, sitting across from med students preparing for the national exam. It was true the regime-held side of the city was no paradise—every day the rebels bombarded it with jury-rigged gas-canister bombs that they shot from homemade cannons—but the range of the cannons was limited, and the rebels had no air force. Sami imagined that on the regime side, she and the children would have been able to live without the same degree of daily fear.
She would have felt horribly guilty leaving him though, taking the children with her to live with the enemy. So, she had kept her plans secret. He wanted to tell her he would not have tried to stop her. That it would have been enough just knowing that she had pulled herself back from the edge and was trying to do what was best for the children, and that the children were loved. She could have trusted him with her secret!
“Who was fighting when she was killed?”
“Daesh,” she said, using a common term for ISIS, “attacked a checkpoint. Your wife and Abdul and two others were trapped. Two of Abdul’s passengers were shot. One was your wife.”
The woman paused for a long time, then said, “You must have family. That can help you.”
“No.”
“And yet, she must have parents.”
“Her mother still lives. But she is in Jordan, with her sister. They are all gone, her family. They left two years ago.” As Tahira and the children should have, Sami thought. He should have encouraged her to leave then, to have taken the risk. “I have my children, but . . .” Sami’s voice trailed
off.
“She must be washed. And you must to buy a kafan. And bury her. I can arrange to have people help you with this, if you wish.”
Sami resisted the idea of Tahira being buried in the Muslim way. But he knew that every Ramadan, she had fasted, or had at least pretended to, along with her mother, sister, and brother-in-law. And that on the Eid al-Fitr feast that followed, she had always prayed and sung songs with her relations as her family had done for generations. It was true that, even before the war, her attendance at Friday prayers had been intermittent, but her dedication to the family meals that had followed—stuffed grape leaves! stuffed intestines! stuffed eggplant!—had been something approaching absolute.
There was no doubt in his mind that she would have wanted a traditional funeral.
So he turned to the woman, exhaled, and said, “I would be grateful if you knew people who could help. The cemetery in Aleppo where her relations are buried is full. Is there one near here that we can use?”
“It is not a cemetery, but there is some land where we can dig a grave.”
The woman’s grandson ran to get help, and soon Tahira was laid out in the garage on a table. A few sticks were added to the wood stove. Dua death prayers were chanted. Buckets of clean water were brought in, and the body washed three times, as Sami sat outside on an overturned crate.
After Tahira was washed, she was dressed in a five-piece white-cotton kafan burial robe that the old woman managed to buy from a friend. It cost Sami every last cent he’d brought with him.
Two men Sami had never seen before brought her to a patch of land that lay next to what had once been a busy road, next to other newly dug graves. The rain had turned to wet, clumpy snow, and the men slipped while lowering her body.
More prayers were offered.
“Oh, God, elevate us in faith, obedience, and piety . . .”
When the woman assured him that only other Muslims had been buried in the makeshift cemetery, Sami thanked her for her help and for being so thoughtful. The teenage boy and the two men helped him dig the grave. It took a long time and his hands were cold, blistered, and filthy before they were through. When they moved the body close to the grave, in preparation for lowering Tahira into it, Sami fashioned a dirt pillow under where her head would lie and left fist-sized clumps of dirt under where her chin and shoulder would rest.
She was laid on her right side, her face looking toward Mecca, then buried.
Although the grave was unmarked, Sami found a collection of old bricks by the side of the road and arranged them in the form of a rectangle at the head of her grave. He noted the angle and distance from it to a nearby street sign.
One day, when they were older, he imagined he would take the children there.
He walked back to Beit Qarah that night—trudging for hours through the darkened, battle-scarred city—never becoming completely lost but sometimes straying from the most direct path. The snow had turned back to rain, transforming what little had accumulated on the ground to slush. By the time he fell onto his mattress in the cellar, still fully clothed, wet, and freezing, it was three in the morning. He was exhausted but still could not sleep.
He did not go to work the next day, or the day after that. He burned a prized beechwood couch his mother had brought with her from Damascus in the wood stove.
He did not wash. Nor did he eat.
Adam asked him, “Baba, what is wrong?” and “When is Mama coming home?” but Sami could not bring himself to answer.
“Later,” was all he said. “We will talk later.”
They came for him on the third day. Two representatives from the M2, nurses Sami had worked with for a year, along with a rebel commander named Ibrahim Antar.
Ibrahim was a cousin of one of the nurses and claimed that Tahira and his own late wife had been friends. They had known each other from the cheese shop, by the Antakya Gate. Ibrahim had brought his son Selim with him, and within minutes Adam and Selim were playing soccer in the courtyard.
“As our wives were friends, so are our sons, as you can see,” said Ibrahim.
Sami could not see because he did not bother to look.
The nurses and Ibrahim extended their sympathies and asked what they could do to help. Then they asked when Sami intended to return to work because he was sorely needed at the hospital.
He could not return to work, Sami said, because he had to care for his children.
But Ibrahim offered a solution. “My mother, she lives on a farm outside of Aleppo. She cares for Selim and his sister and several of his cousins. I am certain she would welcome your children as her own.”
When Sami didn’t respond, Ibrahim added, “It is far from the battle lines, much safer than Aleppo. And of course, it would be easy for you to visit whenever you wanted.”
Sami said he would consider it, and then did nothing of the sort.
That night he told the children about the death of their mother, that she had died trying to find them a better home. Adam became despondent, Noora mute. Sami attempted to console them but instead, wound up ruining part of their sheet fort when he tried to squeeze into it.
He burned the tulipwood foyer bench that Tahira had bought just before the war. And the shoe rack that had stood next to it. They ran out of bulgur.
Five days after Tahira died, he was again visited by the nurse who was Ibrahim’s cousin, only this time she was accompanied by a bleary-eyed Dr. Wasim who, after asking for Sami’s advice concerning a patient whose jaw had been shot off, begged Sami to return.
“This Selim boy, you like him?” Sami asked Adam that night.
Adam said he did, though he did not care for Selim’s father.
“If Selim’s grandmother were to care for you, and I were to visit often. What then?”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.
His mother was a sweet woman, Ibrahim assured Sami the next day. She lived an hour west of Aleppo, in the farmhouse Ibrahim himself had lived in before the drought that had ravaged Syria had forced him to go to work at his uncle’s cheese shop in the city.
Sami visited the house. It was modest, but it had heat, there was food, and Ibrahim’s mother appeared to be responsible and willing to help.
Within a few minutes of arriving, Adam and Selim were holding hands and taking turns riding Selim’s bike. Selim’s young cousins flicked marbles in the dirt and played blind man’s buff with stick swords.
Arrangements were made.
Sami would continue to work in Aleppo, and he would visit his children every week or two. Tahira, he hoped, would have approved.
“Mashallah,” concluded Ibrahim. God has willed it.
Sami doubted very much that the offer had anything to do with the divine, and he was leery even then about what he recalled was Ibrahim’s affiliation with Ahrar al-Sham, a rebel group which hoped to impose an Islamic state upon Syria. But he reasoned the war had led to many strange alliances of convenience—even the Americans were supporting many of the radical Islamists—and therefore, he would not judge Ibrahim too harshly for supporting them as well.
chapter 47
Antakya, Turkey • Ten days later
Hannah was finally going home.
Not because she wanted to—even after nearly being kidnapped by the Mukhabarat, she had continued to venture into Syria, although she had limited her medicine runs to day trips in and around Azaz. But two weeks ago, the Turks had refused to renew Bonne Foi’s registration permit. Which meant her work visa would not be renewed either. Other aid groups were getting kicked out or forced to hire only Turkish workers.
The message was clear: the Turks were done with playing host to the do-gooders of the world. So, having nowhere else to go, she was headed back to live with her mother and sister in New Jersey and apply to graduate school.
But before she could go, she needed to get her suitcase zipped
up, a task she was finding was a little bit like trying to stuff a big balloon into a small box, in that pushing on one part just caused another to pop up.
She tried sitting on the top of it, which helped, but the gap was still too great, so she flopped over and pressed her chest against the lid. That method gave her a better purchase on the zipper, but she still couldn’t advance it more than halfway.
Her purse and carry-on daypack were stuffed tight, and she was already planning on wearing her bulkiest shoes and winter jacket, the pockets of which she’d stuffed with socks, so the suitcase had to fit the rest.
Taking a deep breath, she executed a little belly flop onto it. Just as she managed to advance the zipper a bit more, her phone, which lay on the bed, rang.
Unwilling to release the suitcase lid and have it pop back up, she ignored the call and instead, shifted her weight on the suitcase lid in a way that allowed her to advance the zipper farther.
As she took a moment to catch her breath before shifting her weight yet again, her phone pinged, indicating a text had come in. Then it rang again.
Worried that it might be the airline alerting her of a change in plans or her sister saying that she could not, in fact, pick her up at Newark when she landed, she reached for the phone, but her arms weren’t long enough.
Cursing, she stood, grabbed the phone, and swiped the talk icon without looking at the caller ID.
“’Allo?” she said.
No one responded.
Forced open by the pressure, her suitcase unzipped on its own. She sat back down on the lid.
“’Allo?” she said again, then in Arabic, “This is Hannah, who is this?”
It was one thirty in the morning, a taxi was coming for her at six, and she wanted to get at least a little sleep. She came close to hanging up. In another second or two she would have. It was only the faintest of sounds that prevented her from doing so. The wind, or maybe static on the line.
“Is anyone there?”
More silence, then, “Can you come here?”
The voice seemed too low to be a woman’s and yet still too high to be a man’s. The connection was crackly, and Hannah wasn’t even sure she’d heard correctly.
