by Dan Mayland
When she got there, however, she was told that all deliveries had been suspended due to fighting near Castello Road. For now, it was too dangerous for the trucks to pass.
Later that morning her inventory of what food remained in Beit Qarah revealed they only had enough to last for three days. After that they would have to make do.
Make do with what, she wasn’t sure. Tomatoes, green beans, and potatoes from the rooftop garden could supply her and the children with perhaps half of what they needed to survive, and she could and would cut back on her already limited rations, but she had lost so much weight that her clothes were baggy on her frame and the garden couldn’t begin to feed all the patients.
So as the children fought over who got to play with a large, bright-blue marble and the patients lay convalescing in the courtyard, shaded by the iwan, Hannah sat up on the rooftop terrace researching the hoops Sami and his children would need to jump through if ever they were to try to immigrate to the United States.
Just in case.
She quickly became entangled in a web of acronyms and numbers— Section 214(b), Form I-130, Form I-589, Form I-730, USCIS, USMLE, Form DS-260, Form I-864 . . .
After an hour, the better part of which was spent waiting for webpages to load, she determined that the chance of Sami and the children being granted refugee status was a crapshoot at best. Only a minuscule number of Syrian refugees were being let in.
Option B was for her and Sami to get married, at which point she could legally adopt the children. Which she was perfectly willing to do. But even then, there was good a chance that visas for Sami and the children would be denied, especially if the US immigration service suspected she and Sami had married for the sole purpose of obtaining a visa.
As she was reading of one family that had been separated for over two years, Adam called, “Hannah! Hannah!”
She approached the edge of the roof and looked down to the courtyard. Noora was quietly sobbing. “What happened?”
“Noora hurt her knee!”
“Badly?”
“Maybe not.”
Hannah left the roof. Noora, she discovered, had scraped herself while going down the plastic playhouse slide backward on her belly. While Hannah helped to clean out the grit, an explosion—frighteningly close—shook the entire house.
Adam dove under the wicker couch in the courtyard. Hannah reflexively flinched and tried to cover Noora.
For a moment following the blast, everything was silent. Then a shard of glass fell from one of the windows that looked out onto the courtyard and shattered on the hard marble. Dust that had been dislodged from the limestone walls drifted down. The rebel soldiers up on the roof began to yell back and forth, trying to ascertain where the bomb had struck.
Noora, who had stopped crying momentarily, began again in earnest. A burn patient who had been lying on her side, on a bed that had been pulled into the courtyard, moaned.
Hannah resumed breathing then examined the courtyard. The four walls were intact. The children and seven patients in the courtyard were unharmed. She brought a sixty-seven-year-old man dying from bladder cancer some water and brushed dust off the face of a forty-year-old woman who had lost her husband and both her arms in a cluster-bomb blast. Then she embraced Noora, who was still sobbing, and grabbed Adam’s hand. “Hey,” she said. “No one got hurt.”
“Did it hit our house?” asked Adam.
“No,” said Hannah. But it was close, she thought.
“Should we go downstairs?”
Hannah hesitated. On the one hand, the kitchen cellar was the closest thing they had to a bomb shelter. On the other, it was also the closest thing they had to a crypt.
“For now,” she said, “that might be best.”
One of the rebel soldiers from the roof appeared. He had an AK-47 slung across his back and was balancing what looked like a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder.
“What was hit?” Hannah asked him.
“A building on the other side of the alley.”
Hannah said she would help. There might be wounded. But the soldier ordered her not to leave the house. She didn’t think he had the right to order her to do anything, but then the sound of fighter jets flying high above the city intensified.
Twenty minutes later more bombs exploded. The ground shook, but not nearly as much as during the earlier attack. When Hannah checked on Adam and Noora, she found them inside their sheet fort, with Adam reading an Arabic translation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone out loud to Noora.
Sirens, muffled by the walls of Beit Qarah, wailed.
A few hours later, and after conferring with the soldiers on the roof, Hannah asked Adam to start the generator, then let both children play in the courtyard while she administered medicine, changed bandages, and cooked dinner. Bombs were going off all the time, she reasoned. The children couldn’t hide underground forever.
When the third attack came, at least they had a warning. First there were sirens, then calls from the roof. Hannah ran out from the kitchen to the courtyard and heard the faint thump-thump-thump of a helicopter and caught a glimpse of one of the soldiers on the rooftop aiming his gun at a distant point in the sky.
“Adam! Noora! Into the cellar!” she screamed.
Noora started running, but Adam was nowhere to be seen. Hannah glanced up at the sky. In the corner of the rectangular patch of blue that was visible from where she stood, she saw a regime helicopter, its nose tilted down as it raced toward them.
Directly toward them, she noted and was suddenly gripped with fear. She held her breath as she glanced at the old man with bladder cancer and saw the look of fear on his face too.
“Go, go!” said Hannah as Noora ran past her. “Go to your bed!” Then, “Adam!”
She ducked into the kitchen, but he wasn’t there. She ran into the living room and then the kitchen yelling for him. The sound of the helicopter grew louder. At the stairs to the second floor, she hesitated for a split second—torn.
“Adam!” she yelled again, and then charged up the steps.
She pulled open the door to his old room. It was empty. Then she heard a faint sound coming from the end of the hall. Music. It was Fairuz singing. Adam had been told by his father not to use the stereo by himself so that he wouldn’t scratch Mémère’s old records. But he’d been so mesmerized by the music . . .
Sirens were blaring. One of the soldiers who’d been on top of the roof raced past her.
Hannah sprinted to the end of the hall and yanked open the door to the yellow room. Lying on the floor, with his head next to the speaker as he tried to solve a broken Rubik’s Cube, was Adam. His eyes widened with a look of guilt when he saw her.
“I was—”
She grabbed his hand before he could finish, yanked him into her arms, clutched him tightly to her chest, and ran down the steps and across the living room. As she stumbled on the rug, she fell to her knees and, through a window, caught a glimpse of the helicopter hovering far above them. She could make out the Syrian flag on the tail and the desert camouflage paint job. Its rotors appeared to be slowly moving backwards, an optical illusion that mesmerized her for a fleeting moment. Hanging below it was a large black cylinder. Shots were being fired from a machine gun mounted to the helicopter. The sound filled her with terror.
Adam shrieked. One of the patients in the courtyard screamed. Another chanted Allahu Akbar . . .
Hannah ripped open the door to the cellar, slammed it shut behind her, raced down the steps as fast as she could, and threw Adam to the floor at the entrance to his tent fort.
“Go to your bed!”
The children’s beds had been arranged under a low arch, between two support pillars—Hannah had been told that Tahira had chosen that spot because she’d thought, if the worst ever did happen, it would be the safest, strongest place to be in the w
hole house.
Adam scurried into the tent fort. Hannah dropped to her knees intent on following him, but then the blast hit.
chapter 52
They called them barrel bombs.
And indeed, many were made of old metal barrels, only instead of oil or chemicals the barrels were packed with massive amounts of explosives, nails, used ball bearings, and any other metal scrap that was close at hand.
Sami was on the third floor of the M2 when he heard the latest one detonate.
At the time it even occurred to him that the blast must have been near Beit Qarah. A bit to the south from the sound of it, perhaps near the Qinnasrin Gate.
Although moderately worried, he was not alarmed.
A blast near Beit Qarah was, if not a daily or even weekly event, by no means a singular one. And anything other than a direct hit—the odds of which were low, even given the recent escalation of hostilities—would not do much damage.
Just the same, he tried to call Hannah, as he had when he had heard bombs going off near Beit Qarah earlier in the day. But this time there was no answer. To reassure himself, he jogged up to the roof of the M2 to try to get a better sense of what had been hit.
And that was when he saw the trail of black smoke curling up from a point that was a bit to the north of the Qinnasrin Gate. Just about where . . .
He ran.
Out through the sandbag-reinforced entrance, down Said Bin Al Ass Street and into the narrow alleys of the old city. As he drew closer to his neighborhood, he heard men shouting. The dust was thick. The heat from the blast lingered.
He coughed and lifted the collar of his shirt to his mouth, and he told himself that the odds were good that, even if the house was damaged, Hannah and the children would be okay and most of Beit Qarah still standing.
Moments later, he stopped short, his black leather shoes skidding on the cobblestones. Then he fell to his knees.
The front of Beit Qarah had been utterly pancaked. The rear still stood, but most of the walls that faced the courtyard had been blown away, exposing the interiors of the rooms. Electrical wires dangled from ceilings. Where a stairway once stood, all that remained was a handrail hanging from a single post. He could see his own bedroom and the remains of the bed he had shared with Tahira. The kitchen, the living room, the dining room—all those had been reduced to rubble. Flames licked up from where the front reception room had been.
“Noora!” he cried. “Adam!”
He tried to lift himself off the ground, intent on moving toward the destruction, but for a moment it was as though he were made of stone. He was unable to move his arms; his knees felt glued to the ground.
He swallowed, blinked, took a breath, forced himself to stand, and stumbled toward the smoldering pile.
“Noora! Adam!”
His gaze fixed upon a little patch of painted ceiling, and he began to climb up the pile of rubble toward it. Underneath the ceiling fragment, he found a gilded seventeenth-century glass mosque lamp that used to hang from the iwan in the courtyard. Tahira had moved it to the main reception room during the renovations, and it had never been reinstalled.
Half of it had shattered, but half was still intact.
He reasoned that if even a part of something that fragile could have survived the blast, then it was possible that Noora and Adam . . .
He surveyed the ruin again. Where the courtyard had been, there was now a crater.
The entrance to the cellar staircase had been directly off the kitchen. It would have been . . . Sami took a moment to get his bearings, then his eyes focused on where he thought the entrance to stairwell must lie, buried under the rubble.
He turned to a cluster of men standing on the periphery of the destruction. “There is a storage cellar. We used it as a bomb shelter. If my children and my”—he did not know how to characterize Hannah—“the woman who cares for my children, if they heard the helicopter before the bomb dropped, they would have run to it.” He half stumbled, half crawled to a section of rubble and heaved a limestone block off the top, exposing a section of roof covered with dirt and mangled tomato vines. “We need to start digging here.” He threw off several more blocks and bits of wood.
After maybe ten minutes, he stepped back to catch his breath and noticed two men in white helmets staring at him.
One of them held a dust-covered human arm in his hand.
Sami examined it and determined it did not belong to Hannah or his children.
“Please!” he pleaded with the men. “Help me dig!”
They did.
Soon, though, they heard another helicopter. When Sami eyed the sky, he saw it screaming over the Citadel, headed straight for them. A black barrel swung beneath it.
“Go!” said the men in white helmets.
Sami refused, preferring to die with his children, but the men in white helmets pulled him away.
chapter 53
Brick by brick, relying solely on touch because the darkness was absolute, Hannah tried to clear away the pile of rubble at the base of the steps. But it was as though she were trying to remove grains of sand from below the narrow neck of a sand-filled hourglass—the more bricks she pulled away, the more slipped down the stairwell.
Still, she kept digging until the earth shook when a second barrel bomb detonated. A few pieces of stone from the arched ceiling tumbled down, and she covered her head with her hands and crouched into a ball.
“Are you okay?” she called to the children, coughing as she spoke, because the dust was so thick.
“What was that?” asked Adam, still inside the sheet fort with Noora.
“Maybe people above trying to get to us,” she lied.
The second bomb had created more dust, and she coughed again then slipped back into the sheet fort, which had turned out to be a stroke of genius because the sheets acted like a dust filter. As a result, the air inside the fort was much easier to breathe.
She slid between Adam and Noora on the bed. With an arm around each of their shoulders, she said, “I imagine they are working very hard up there.”
It was smoky, even in the sheet fort, and terribly hot. Hannah worried that the fire would spread to the cellar.
“Should we yell again?” asked Adam.
“I think we can wait,” said Hannah, coughing.
The act of shouting all together in the dark and receiving no response had unnerved Hannah as much as it had the children, so she had resolved to keep quiet unless they genuinely heard something from above.
“I think it was a bomb,” said Adam, sounding worried. Then he coughed.
“Maybe,” allowed Hannah, trying hard to sound upbeat and calm. In truth, she was terrified. The first bomb had collapsed half the ceiling and the wall closest to the courtyard. She didn’t know how stable the rest of the ceiling and walls were. Her lungs hurt. “But if it was, it seemed like it was pretty far away.”
She felt around again for the windup flashlight that the children usually kept near the bed but now was nowhere to be found. After cursing under her breath, she suddenly recalled seeing . . .
“Adam!” she said excitedly. “Last week you were exploring Mémère’s armoire. The bottom drawer. Do you recall?”
“No.”
“I am not angry with you; I only ask because you were using a flashlight. Do you remember?”
“Maybe.”
“Adam, please.”
“I was looking for more records.”
“The flashlight—what happened to it?”
“It is in my pocket,” he said and produced it. When it wouldn’t turn on, he confessed that he had removed the batteries to make a device that, when paired with steel wool, could light paper on fire. They were in a shoebox inside his fort in the courtyard, he said. He promised to get them for Hannah once they got out of the cellar.
They lay i
n silence for a time. Hannah guessed it was around nine o’clock. The sun would already have set.
She wondered—what if no one was looking for them? Sami would come eventually, but what if he stayed at the hospital tonight? And when he did come home, would he think to look in the cellar, or would he just assume they were dead?
Would the smoke get worse? Would they have enough food and water?
Water, good God, she realized, they didn’t have any water! How stupid of her! That should have been the first thing she thought to keep stored in the cellar.
Hannah’s anxiety spiked. Her breathing rate increased, but it was painful to take deep breaths. She told herself she had to stay calm, that if she didn’t panic, the kids wouldn’t. But then she pictured the pot of bulgur she’d left on the hot plate. She’d been about to serve dinner. They were probably too upset to think about food now, but they’d get to thinking about it soon enough.
She gave both children a squeeze and said she was sleepy, which was another lie, but she thought if she could get the kids to go to sleep early, it would buy her time before they complained of being hungry.
Adam said he wasn’t tired.
Noora said she wasn’t either.
“We could just rest then. Being very quiet with our eyes closed.”
After an hour or so, the children did drift off to sleep. But Hannah couldn’t. Thinking about how much of the house might have collapsed on top of the cellar made her feel claustrophobic. She could hear the children breathing, and it made her worry again about the air supply. Her hands were sweating.
She crawled back out of the sheet fort and pulled more bricks off the pile of rubble that lay near where she thought the staircase must be, but then she ran into a wall and realized she had been digging in the wrong place.
Noora stirred.
“How will they fix our house?” she asked, sounding worried.
Hannah didn’t answer at first.
There is plenty of air down here, she told herself. You’re not in a sealed compartment.
