The Doctor of Aleppo

by Dan Mayland

  She explained what had happened and where she was.

  “Give me a half hour,” he said.

  “Be careful.”

  “There is no need. With you and the children free, I have nothing to fear.”

  As he was leaving the M10 via the stairs that led up from the underground emergency room, an older man who had been helping with patient intakes followed him out.

  “Dr. Sami!” he called, looking flustered. “Dr. Sami, please wait!”

  “I must speak with you,” said Sami, when the man—who wore a pink rugby shirt but was really one of Ibrahim’s soldiers—drew close.

  “Commander Antar has requested—”

  “I do not care what Ibrahim has requested. We must talk.”

  Sami gestured to what had once been a park and where, despite being scarred with several deep bomb craters, several tall cedar trees still stood.

  As the soldier’s gaze drifted from Sami to the park, Sami swung his gloved fist into the man’s face.

  Two hospital orderlies who had been lugging boxes of sutures from a nearby underground medical supply warehouse ran over.

  Sami explained to them that Commander Ibrahim Antar of Ahrar al-Sham had kidnapped his family and had been holding them hostage for two weeks. A few minutes earlier, such a declaration might have led to Hannah and the children being harmed. Now, it simply resulted in the Ahrar al-Sham soldier’s teeth being kicked in.

  chapter 59

  The vast cemetery lay due south of the Citadel and east of the M2 hospital. The dirt road that snaked through it led Hannah to a green-domed mosque, which stood just a block away from the newly reopened M2 hospital, which in turn was just a short walk away from the Qinnasrin Gate where she’d agreed to meet Sami.

  When she and the children were finally in sight of the gate, they hid behind an abandoned drainage pipe in a patch of undeveloped land that lay just south of the walls of the old city.

  While waiting for Sami, Hannah tried to call the Bonne Foi warehouse in Kilis, Turkey, hoping that maybe someone had remained after the main operation had shut down—someone with connections to either smugglers or the Turkish Directorate General of Migration Management. Someone who could help get them the hell out of Syria.

  The line had been disconnected.

  So she looked up the number for Bonne Foi’s headquarters in France, and she even spoke with a woman who was sympathetic to her plight but had no connections to the Turkish ministry officials who could determine whether Sami and the children would be allowed entry into Turkey.

  Hannah asked if they at least still had a copy of her American passport on file. Because all of her identification had been destroyed, buried under the rubble of Beit Qarah, and if she and Sami and the children just showed up at the Turkish border without identification, then confinement in one of the unofficial refugee camps on the Syrian side of the border would be the best they could hope for.

  They did not.

  After hanging up with Bonne Foi, she tried the European Development Service at their regional office in Ankara, hoping that she might still know someone there who could vouch for her and help arrange for Sami and the kids to be granted temporary protection status by the Turks. EDS was a bureaucratic behemoth with deep ties to nearly every country in the Middle East, and even though the satellite office in Antakya had been shut down, they were still active in Turkey.

  Four years ago, she’d been in frequent communication the office in Ankara. With a bit of luck, someone might remember her.

  “Well, would you at least know where I can reach Greta Becker?” Hannah asked after she’d explained her predicament and was told there was nothing the European Development Service could do for her. “I used to report to her.”

  “No.”

  “What about Clara Braun?” Clara had been Greta Becker’s boss. Hannah had met her once, five years ago.

  “No.”

  “Is it possible to look any of these names up? To see whether they’re still with the company, and if so, where?”

  “Employee records are confidential. I’m sorry, the connection isn’t that good, your voice is going in and out. What did you say your name was?”

  “Hannah Johnson,” she said slowly, practically yelling into the phone. “I worked for the company until 2012. In Aleppo. We were trying to develop a park just outside the old city.”

  “Oh, sure. I heard about that project. Lucky you.”

  “I’m sorry to press like this, it’s just that I’m a bit—” She was about to say desperate, but then she glanced at Adam and Noora. They were sitting on either side of her, staring at her. She didn’t think they understood any English, but she didn’t want to worry them more than they already were. “It’s just that I could really, really use some help.”

  Her voice began to crack. The cell phone had only been holding a nine percent charge when she’d started the call.

  “I understand that, but I just don’t see how—”

  “What about Oskar Lång?” Hannah asked, interrupting.

  A pause. “And what is your relationship to Mr. Lång?”

  “We worked together for two years.” After another pause, this one longer than the first, she said, “We know each other. He’ll want to talk to me, I swear. Do you know where I can reach him?”

  “Hold on.”

  Enough time passed that Hannah worried that the connection had been severed. She checked the battery level on the phone—it was down to seven percent.

  chapter 60

  Ankara, Turkey

  Oskar noted with satisfaction that the site of the infiltration basin for the energy-efficient waste disposal center in Sivas Province, Turkey had been excavated on schedule. Good, good, he thought, skimming over the email.

  The administrative assistant he shared with three other engineers poked her head into his office.

  “Someone on line six who wants to speak with you. She claims to be a former colleague.”

  Oskar had started wearing low-magnification reading glasses the month prior; he glanced over their imitation tortoiseshell frames now.

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Jana something. Says she worked with you in Aleppo, before the war.”

  Oskar furrowed his brow and stared past his computer screen. Jana . . . no, to the best of his recollection he had never worked with a Jana.

  Then it hit him that Jana sounded a bit like . . .

  “I’ll pick up,” he said. As soon as the door to his office closed, he took a deep breath, pushed line number six, and said, “Hi, this is Oskar Lång.”

  The shock of hearing her still-familiar voice, paired with the revelation that she was in Syria when he’d assumed she’d been living in the United States these past four years, prevented him from immediately grasping the full nature of her predicament.

  “So it would be me, Dr. Sami Hasan, his son Adam, and his daughter Noora,” she said, the words tumbling out of her mouth with a speed he found hard to keep up with. “You met Dr. Hasan four years ago—he was the one who set your leg. It’s a long story, but we’re seeing each other now, and I’ve been caring for the two children he had with his wife, and I may be pregnant with his third child. I’d be willing to marry him and adopt his children, if it helps.”

  At that, Oskar took off his reading glasses and leaned over his desk, one hand on his forehead, the other pressing the phone to his ear. He felt his face flush. At some point, he realized Hannah had stopped talking and was waiting for him to respond.

  “Oskar?” she said.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just . . .” He inhaled, then exhaled. “It’s just that I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that you’re in Aleppo again, and . . .” He paused.

  He’d tried to contact her two years ago, after Elsa had died. But she’d changed her phone number, her old EDS email had been
shut down, and she’d left no forwarding information. She used aliases for Facebook and Instagram, he’d recalled, but she’d changed whatever those aliases were, so he hadn’t been able to find her online, and he’d tried hard. He’d even mailed a letter to her childhood home in New Jersey.

  No response.

  But he’d never forgotten her.

  “My battery on this phone is about to go, Oskar, can you help me? Will you try?”

  She was still speaking quickly, and the connection was bad. He felt flustered.

  “You’re—you’re seeing the doctor who set my leg?” Oskar stuttered. “How . . .”

  “We met again after the war broke out. Oskar, please.”

  Virtually married. Possibly pregnant. Completely unavailable. She hadn’t called him because she cared about him or had been thinking about him. She just needed a ticket to get into Turkey.

  And she would never come back to him.

  But he still loved her. More, although it pained him to admit it, than he’d ever loved Elsa. He realized that now, hearing her voice again.

  “Yes,” he said, “Yes, of course I’ll help you. Let me give you my cell number, so that if we get disconnected, you can call me back directly. Are you ready?”

  He recited the number, wrote hers down when she gave it to him, then said, “Give me an hour or two to see what I can do.”

  After Hannah hung up, Oskar just sat there, staring at his phone.

  The Turkish government was distracted and in turmoil, having just crushed an attempted coup. But he figured if anyone could find a way to get Hannah and her adopted family into Turkey, it would be Clara Braun, a woman both he and Hannah had indirectly reported to when they were in Aleppo. She was now a deputy director of the Middle East and Southeast Europe Development Group, and the most well-connected person he knew in the company.

  He picked up the phone, called the human resources department in Brussels, and asked to be put through to her.

  chapter 61

  Rebel-held Aleppo

  Hannah stared at the number she’d scribbled in the dirt. Oskar, she thought. After all these years. She quickly transcribed the number to the phone she’d stolen from the boy.

  “Who was that?” asked Adam.

  “Somebody I used to know.”

  “Will he help us?”

  “I hope so.”

  She scanned the road beyond the drainage pipe for signs of Sami. That was when she realized that they were just a stone’s throw away from what she and Oskar and so many others had, before the war, tried their best to make into an urban park. Just beyond a half-collapsed building that had been covered with a fraying blue tarp, sewer drains had been dug according to Oskar’s specifications. She recalled architectural drawings that had depicted pedestrians holding ice cream cones strolling through landscaped gardens, and she contrasted those drawings with the weedy piles of rubble that lay before her, and—

  “Adam! Noora!”

  Sami’s voice boomed across the broken ground.

  The children rushed out to greet their father. Hannah followed a step behind. She and Sami exchanged a long look. She took his hand.

  “We should leave now,” she said. “On foot if we have to. I have a friend in Turkey. He may be able to help us if we can get to the border.”

  “Castello Road has been taken,” said Sami.

  “Then we will have to find another way out.”

  “There is no other way.”

  Noora said she was thirsty.

  They went back to their old neighborhood.

  The old woman with whom Hannah had shared tea during the cease-fire invited them into her small ground-floor apartment. She had only a half-liter of water, so Sami fetched several more from a nearby public well.

  With the city surrounded, no one—save for the enterprising few who were melting down oil-based plastics—had any diesel to run the generators, but the old woman knew of another neighbor who had a small solar charger.

  Making use of the last light of the day, Hannah huddled at the end of a west-facing street and, bathed in sun, charged her phone as much as she could. Sami used half of the remaining charge on his phone, calling people, trying to find a way out of the city.

  At dusk, as the children lay together on a threadbare couch in the living room, staring blankly at the concrete floor, and as the old woman embroidered a waistcoat by candlelight in what passed for a kitchen, Hannah and Sami talked outside on the front stoop. He told her about Rahim Suleiman’s role in her kidnapping and possibly in the bombing of Beit Qarah. She leaned into him, placed a hand on his thigh, and whispered that, by the way, she suspected she was pregnant.

  “How many weeks?” he asked.

  She did the math in her head again, just to be sure. It was around the beginning of June that she’d run out of pads and had needed to make do with a baby’s blanket she’d cut up into squares. So around fourteen days after that . . .

  “Six, maybe seven? I could just be late.”

  But she didn’t think she was late. He had never pulled out, and she had never asked him to.

  He sighed. Which wasn’t exactly the reaction she was hoping for, but she knew he wasn’t a man given to outpourings of emotion.

  “You are upset,” she said.

  “On the contrary. I am relieved.”

  She faced him. “You are?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it ties you to Adam and Noora. And they will be safer that way.”

  “So you wanted this?”

  He shrugged. “Want is a complicated word. Suffice it to say, I was not opposed to it. I thought that was evident.”

  Hannah didn’t answer.

  “I sensed you were not opposed either. Did I misjudge the situation?”

  Hannah held his gaze for a moment then stared down at the ground, thinking—did he always have to be like this? This calculating? Would it be too much just to say he was happy, for her and for them, and that he cared for her, and leave it at that? “No. I guess not.”

  After the children went to sleep, Hannah phoned Oskar back.

  He had made progress, he informed her. Great progress! If they could just get to the Bab al Hawa border crossing anytime from tomorrow evening on, he could meet them there with an official letter from Turkey’s General Directorate of Migration Management that should allow her, Sami, Adam, and Noora to enter Turkey on a provisional basis, after which they could begin the process of obtaining replacement passports.

  “Thank you, Oskar. Thank you so much.”

  “Thank Clara,” he said, referring to their former boss. “She was the one who fixed it. Now you just need to get to the border, and there’s good news on that front too—they’re opening corridors from the rebel side of Aleppo to the regime side. So that civilians can escape the fighting. The regime has promised safe passage. It was on the news.”

  “But it wouldn’t be safe for us,” said Hannah. She told him about Rahim Suleiman, the father of Oskar’s roommate at the University of Aleppo Hospital before the war, did he remember? “He hates Sami, and maybe me. So we can’t go to the other side of Aleppo, we have to find another way.”

  “But Dr. Hasan didn’t kill that man’s son,” said Oskar.

  “Well, not on purpose,” said Hannah.

  “No, I mean he didn’t kill that boy on purpose or accidentally.”

  “He mixed up the medications, Oskar. I was there.”

  “But that’s not what killed the boy. And I know, because I was there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  chapter 62

  Ankara, Turkey

  Oskar was seated on a bench in Kugulu Park, cell phone pressed to his ear, half watching an old man throw breadcrumbs to collection of white swans in a man-made pond.

  B
ut in his mind, he was in Aleppo, and it was 2012. His fever was just beginning to spike, evidence—although he didn’t know it at the time—that the infection in his rib, the infection that would nearly kill him, was spreading to his blood . . .

  Four years earlier • Aleppo University Hospital

  A nurse entered Oskar’s hospital room. Wide hips, red lipstick, painted eyebrows. Yellow scrubs paired with a black headscarf that made her look a bit like a bumblebee.

  Oskar put down his phone.

  “I need Tylenol,” he said, in poor but passable Arabic.

  “Yes, of course,” answered the nurse brightly as she brushed by Oskar on her way to Adel, who lay behind a curtain that divided the room. “Very soon. Very soon.”

  “Do you mean very soon as in an hour?” demanded Oskar, as the nurse ducked behind the privacy curtain. “Or very soon now?”

  The pain in his leg was intense.

  “One hour, I think, would be best. Now is too soon.”

  Oskar was as annoyed as he was desperate. The nurse in question hadn’t been the one who’d given him Tylenol earlier in the day. So how could she know it was too soon?

  “Are you sure, because—”

  “Please, sir. I will tend to you shortly.”

  Oskar picked up his phone again. Maybe the nurse from earlier in the day had communicated his medication schedule with this nurse? It would have been a first, but it wasn’t inconceivable.

  It was only because he lost a life in the Candy Crush game he was playing that he looked up a few seconds later. When he did, he squinted and frowned.

  The chrome paper towel dispenser affixed to the wall opposite his bed had been hung in such a way that it inadvertently served as a mirror of sorts, allowing patients to see around the privacy curtain from one side of the room to the other. The angle wasn’t quite right, and the reflection was dull and wavy, but when Oskar leaned to the side of the bed to put down his cell phone, he saw the nurse had her fingers pressed down on either side of Adel’s throat.