We took the small child to the market and bought him shoes, which he silently laced up. But he was one child. There were dozens, hundreds, thousands in Aleppo that did not have his tiny shred of luck that day.
War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can’t read. You can’t see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain – everyone is as badly off as you. It’s hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.
If you are critically ill – with cancer, for instance – there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can’t leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return – polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks – from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.
As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can’t get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.
Wartime looks like this.
The steely greyness of the city. The clouds are so low, but not low enough to hide government helicopters carrying barrel bombs, which usually appear at the same time each day, in the mornings and late afternoons, circling for a while at altitudes of 13,000–16,000 feet, little more than tiny dots in the sky, before dropping their payloads.
What does war sound like? The whistling sound of the bombs falling can only be heard seconds before impact – enough time to know that you are about to die, but not enough time to flee.
What does the war in Aleppo smell of? It smells of carbine, of wood smoke, of unwashed bodies, of rubbish rotting, of the heady smell of fear. The rubble on the street – the broken glass, the splintered wood that was once somebody’s home. On every corner there is a destroyed building that may or may not have bodies still buried underneath. Your old school is gone; so are the mosque, your grandmother’s house, and your office. Your memories are smashed.
Then there are the endless fields of garbage. The rooms that are as cold as tombs – having gone unheated now for five winters – are all you know. There are so many abandoned apartments. Remember that beautiful house, what it looked like when someone lived there? Your beautiful life from before is now dead.
The dirt, filth, fear and nausea. All the things you go without – toothpaste, money, vitamins, birth-control pills, X-rays, chemotherapy, insulin, painkillers. Petrol costs 170 Syrian pounds per litre. Today. Tomorrow it might be different.
Then, suddenly, you might catch the odd sight of a man in a T-shirt despite the frozen air, squeezing oranges into juice for the lucky ones with money. Oranges? You wonder who the people are that still have money, and you have dark thoughts about people you used to trust and know well. But with the constant theme of survival surrounding your whole city, your neighbourhood, your life, you really don’t know anybody’s intentions.
War is the corner near the Old City where people are lined up with plastic Pepsi bottles, to buy a small amount of petrol on the black market. War is the wrecked hospital, Dar al-Shifa, bombed on 21 November 2012, which still stinks of carnage in hallways where stretchers once passed, and where doctors in scrubs and rubber gloves once walked. Now it is a twisted pile of cinderblocks and concrete, broken tiles and glass – a shell exposed to the grey sky.
War is empty shell casings on the street, smoke from bombs rising up in mushroom clouds, and learning to determine which thud means what kind of bomb. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you don’t.
War is the destruction, the skeleton and the bare bones of someone else’s life.
* * *
In 2006, Aleppo won the title of Islamic City of Culture awarded by the Islamic Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Historic landmarks were restored. Tourism was up. Aleppo was going to be the new Marrakesh, an exotic destination with pleasant weather, boutique hotels, interesting restaurants and direct flights from Paris or London. An exotic, Eastern city with beguiling buildings made from gold-coloured stone.
Aleppo was famous for its olive-oil soap and its refined houses in the old city. Encouraged by the well-dressed willowy wife of Bashar al-Assad, Asma – who had been profiled in a glowing article in American Vogue just before the government ordered security forces to fire on unarmed protesters – fashion designers, artists and writers who were her friends began to buy property. In Paris, just before the Arab Spring, I met the most elegant people who were proud to be flying to Aleppo to buy art and furniture. When the protests started, and I phoned them to ask about what had happened to Aleppo, to their homes, to their parties, they would not take my calls.
But I have seen this happen before. The celerity with which life as you know it breaks down is overwhelming. The beautiful people stop coming. The water stops, taps run dry, banks go, and a sniper kills your brother. There is nowhere to seek recourse, and barely time to grieve before you see a helicopter flying in the sky and hear the thwack of another bomb. You get used to hallucinations appearing in broad daylight. The dead and mangled return to you, over and over, and not just in dreams. Once you see one dead body – the shoes ripped off from the force of an explosion – you never forget what it looks like.
But what you don’t expect is that ordinary things – those things that you take for granted in life – disappear too. The man who collects the rubbish no longer comes because there are no functioning civil services. The nurses who draw blood disappear because the hospitals are bombed. Your daily newspaper, your coffee shop, then – eventually – every bit of normality you know is gone.
What you yearn for more than anything is for the ordinary to return. The simple pleasure of going to a shop to buy apples; to smoke a cigarette languidly in a café; the ease of a university student driving from one side of the city to the other to get to her psychology or macroeconomics class without encountering a round of gunshots.
When I think back on my time in Aleppo, the strongest memory I have is of watching the baby die. I have my own child at home. He is healthy and lives in the first world; he drinks milk and eats cookies before bed, studies by an electric light, goes skiing, plays with Lego. He does not know war. His heroes are the heroes of Star Wars – the good and evil, the Jedi and the Senators, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. His heroes are not jihadists, fighters, or people who get through the front lines bearing humanitarian aid.
The suffering of children is particularly painful for anyone, but for me, as a mother, when I look into the eyes of the mothers whose children are helplessly dying, I feel like a fraud. I watch this, then I can go home.
It did not take long for this infant in Aleppo to die, maybe ten minutes, possibly even less. The doctor, Khaled – who is so young, only a resident – and the nurses worked on him. They tried desperately to keep the tiny bundle alive. He had come in with a simple respiratory infection. Nothing drastic, not a gunshot wound, not an artery severed by shrapnel.
I watched them huddled over his body. It was like watching an Olympic race: Khaled’s face tense and full of competitive anticipation, the nurses next to him in their hijabs and sneakers. They were competing against time, against death.
But they were losing. They checked the dying baby’s fading eyes with a battered flashlight; they took his pulse, and gently thumped the bottoms of his feet to test his reflexes.
But he was gone. Nicole and Paddy and I watched, standing on the side, feeling awkward and in the way, as the life went out of this baby: someone that had been on this earth the m
oment before was suddenly, irrevocably, dead. Nicole did not touch her cameras; Paddy stood on one side.
Then it was over. His breathing just stopped. The thread was cut.
Now that we were back in the emergency room, I could hear the screams of other people in pain. I was aware of the coldness of my feet against the marble floor and someone else’s blood on the wall. Against my will, I began to cry, with a kind of rush of tears dripping off my face onto my down coat. I could not stop them, with tissues or with Nicole’s startled glance at me, imploring me to get a grip. I summoned the urge to be in control, but it was impossible. I went into a small room, practically a cupboard, where they kept supplies. Nicole joined me after a moment.
‘You OK?’
A nod. She handed me a fresh tissue. I was thinking of my boy, how he had been born seven weeks premature and how, if he had been born in Aleppo, and not Paris, he would probably be dead.
At the time of that child’s death, there were only thirty-one doctors for one million people in Aleppo. Khaled had been promoted by management somewhere – whatever was left of management – from being a resident to heading the hospital. He asked me not to write the name of it, or its location in Aleppo, ‘because then it will be bombed’, like Dar al-Shifa, a hospital that had been deliberately targeted a few weeks before by government bombs because it was heavily used by civilians.
Targeting public spaces during wartime, especially those that are known to be full of civilians – hospitals, schools, etc. – is a violation of the Geneva Convention. But who here cares about the Geneva Convention? Are Assad’s bombers who fly the planes low enough in the sky to drop the bombs, even aware of the Geneva Convention? Has any war ever taken into account the Geneva Convention?
Khaled had a terrible look of defeat on his face as he wrapped the small, dead baby in a triangular blanket, covering the lifeless head before turning to the mother.
She was also young, sitting quietly in a chair next to the examining table, wearing a hijab and a thick brown abaya. Her skin was faintly yellow. Hepatitis? Jaundice? Or just malnourishment, lack of sleep, lack of water and fresh air and good food?
The mother shivered slightly in the cold of the darkened emergency room, but she seemed to be in the kind of pain that goes beyond tears. She looked hollow.
She took the wrapped package, her baby. Her husband touched her shoulder. They stood, with a kind of stooped dignity, and left the room.
‘The thing is,’ Khaled said, turning to me, his glasses on slightly crooked, ‘that the baby died of a respiratory infection.’ A respiratory infection that might have responded to a massive antibiotic drip in another country. Nothing serious, nothing that could not be handled. Outside of wartime.
The parents had waited until the baby had barely any life in him before they brought him in: there had been too much shelling in the city and they feared being killed by a rocket as they made their way from their home to the hospital.
What Khaled needed, he said, are ambulances. They cost $40,000 each and would get the wounded and the critically ill to the hospital faster. ‘It’s not really asking for a lot, is it?’ he asked. ‘One ambulance?’
We kept going back to the hospital at different hours of the day. The same nurses and Khaled were working. More patients. Another woman was brought into the ER suffering from spasms. Her body was convulsed, her legs and arms shook with tremors as a friend tried to quiet her. Her relatives said she had had cerebral palsy from birth, but her condition was worsening – her lungs were filling with fluid, she could not breathe. They each took one of her hands and tried to calm her, steady her.
Then she saw us, Westerners, trying to make ourselves small in a corner, and she screamed out, ‘If I die, take my children!’ She clutched her stomach as though she was having an appendicitis attack. She gave a high-pitched shrill shriek: ‘Take them with you! Take them with you!’
Another relative dragged her away.
Khaled had been known in his high school days as a champion foosball (table football) player. After calming the woman, he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and said he was taking a break. He had been working since dawn – he was on a twenty-four-hour shift.
He climbed up the four flights to the small abandoned part of the hospital near the roof – no one wants to be near the roof because of bombing, but the doctors took over this space to sleep and eat in between shifts. He told us to follow. There was a foosball table – old, but still workable – on the top floor. Foosball, beloved by European kids. Khaled stood over it, fiddling with the knobs. Something resembling a smile seemed to cross his face.
One of the nurses had made a pot of soup from beans, and someone else had brought bread. The hospital had two things going for it: they got petrol from the FSA to keep the generators going long enough to do surgery, using headlamps to light up their patients’ bodies, and they got bread.
‘Grateful for small miracles,’ Khaled said, dipping a spoon into the bowl. It did not taste so bad: it was thick and, most importantly, it was hot.
He didn’t want to talk about the baby, or about the city or the war. ‘I’d like to think about something outside of here,’ he said. All he would say about the baby was that if it had been peacetime, he would have lived.
There was a tiny girl with us in the room, a local celebrity of sorts. She was a singer. At demonstrations, her brothers and sisters marched her in front of the crowd and she sang protest songs in a stunningly clear voice. She ate a bowl of soup that someone handed her, and then began to sing. Everyone clapped to the rhythm of her song. She closed her eyes and held up her hands and moved in a kind of trance.
Khaled was singing, too, but he looked wasted. ‘I can’t cope,’ he said after a while, and went to bed in one of the hospital cots downstairs. ‘See you in the morning.’
A year after I met Khaled, he was married, and his young wife had just given birth in Turkey. I called to ask him about a polio epidemic that had apparently broken out in Syria. He said that his newborn baby had given him hope. ‘There is not much hope left in Syria,’ he said.
‘Are you going back?’
‘How can I stay away?’ he responded.
Salat is the obligatory Muslim prayers, performed five times each day by the devout. The first, called Salat al-Fajr, is at dawn. Prayer takes place again at midday after the sun passes higher. This is called Salat al-Zuhr. Salat al-Asr comes in the late part of the afternoon, Salat al-Maghrib soon after sunset, and finally the Salat al-Isha between sunset and midnight.
The other pillars of Islam are shahada, faith; zakat, giving savings to the poor; sawm, fasting; and hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. But none affects daily life more than the salat in both war and peace.
I have seen soldiers in trenches stop to pray, and farmers in fields, and even my translators have asked to be excused in mid-sentence when they are called to pray.
We had moved apartments, from Umm Hamid’s to a secure house in another neighbourhood, where some FSA rebel soldiers and activists were living. The men here prayed reverently. They gathered together in the main room to pray, eat, talk, and, in between, to strategize on their computers.
They were quiet when Nicole and I walked by to use the bathroom – a good one, we said, it was a hole in the ground, but it was ceramic and it was clean – or to make tea on a stovetop, when there was cooking fuel. We had to stay in our room to eat dinner. A neighbour woman left the food on the floor outside our door on a tray, and we picked it up and sat on our beds to eat. I knew we were not prisoners, but I sensed what it might feel like to be a woman in their world.
Today there was a funeral. It was near midday – the sun had not come out at all – when the call of the muezzin broke the cold greyness of the sky. At the graveyard, called Martyrs Field, in the neighbourhood of Salah al-Din, a man named Mohammed stopped to pray. He worked in the graveyard every day. Sometimes, he took his small redheaded son with him to the cemetery. He wore high rubber boots as he scooped up earth with his
shovels, laying down the bodies in their bloody blankets, and then covering them with more earth.
I was worried for the redheaded child, surrounded by the dead, the haunting he will find later in his life when he combs through the memories – if he lives. If he gets through today, this week, this month, this year.
Sheikh Moisin, a religious leader working with Mohammed, says that the bodies sometimes have no heads. Sometimes, he says, they have no faces.
‘And your boy sees this?’ I say quietly to Mohammed. He looks confused.
‘It doesn’t bother him,’ he answers. ‘Death is like life.’
But not in wartime.
Part of the graveyard used to be a park. But the death toll in Aleppo demanded more room for burials. As of January 2015, the United Nations estimated the figure of the total number of deaths in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict at 220,000; but others give higher figures.
Here in Aleppo, the playground-turned-cemetery was essential. Sentiment was put aside and the ground was readied to accept bodies, rather than to have children play. It is so unlike Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, near where I live, which I often walk through, or, in the spring, ride my bicycle through, in order to think. It is not like the cemetery in America where my father, sister and two brothers are buried, where my mother goes at Christmas, Easter, and on their birthdays to lay flowers and wreaths. It is where the dead go during wartime.
‘It is my duty, my work of God, to bury the dead,’ Mohammed said simply. He is a man completely devoid of drama. He says he does not have nightmares from his work, nor is he afraid of the dead.
The redheaded child, who turned out to be only four years old, clung to his father’s hand – when there wasn’t a shovel in it. Wouldn’t the little boy remember mutilated corpses, children’s crushed and twisted bodies, or those dead faces caught in the agony of the last moments of their lives?
‘Death is death,’ Sheikh Moisin said. ‘The dead cannot hurt you.’
The Morning They Came for Us Page 12
