A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  Bouthaina Shaaban1 appears on television. My mother tells us all to listen up, “She’s talking about traitors and sectarian strife! Oh, the horror! Shut the windows!” Images of the tortured children and dead little boys return. The face of the little boy I held in al-Merjeh Square, as he watched his family getting beaten and arrested. I hear a man on television talking about the blood of the martyrs in Dar‘a, calling for revenge, “We won’t respond to this woman [he means Bouthaina Shaaban], we don’t respond to women. They expect us to listen to a woman?!” Nothing that is happening seems anything like me: my family cheering for this lady, my friends cheering for the blood of the martyrs.

  I am ashamed of the blood of the martyrs. Oh Lord in Heaven, if there is human sin, and it turns out You are sitting up there, unwilling to come down and witness what is happening, then I will reach up and drag You down from your seven heavens, so that You may hear and see.

  As I step out onto the balcony, the lemon trees revive me. This place is calm for a few moments, then gunfire breaks out. Everybody knows that the city’s calm before was not a natural calm, since nobody could challenge the power of the security apparatus. Agents are always in the street. Suddenly the streets are transformed into a carnival of horror. Chaos is everywhere. Security forces watch the people: some flee, others get arbitrarily eliminated. The gangs sprouted out of the ground just like everything here, out of thin air, without any rhyme or reason. How could armed men suddenly appear and start killing people? How did all this happen? I have been exiled from the city, from the village and even from the sea air itself. Everyone glares harshly at me, from all directions. I understand both sides. I know the other aspects of life in Damascus, where the city was transformed into another kind of village.

  What am I doing here?

  Waiting around to die?

  As the debates start up once again – the saboteurs, the infiltrators – I cower inside myself. Now I am an infiltrator among my own family, an infiltrator in my own bed. Now I infiltrate everything and I am nothing. I am a lump of flesh curled up under the blankets, infiltrating below the asphalt on the street. I infiltrate the sorrow of every Syrian who passes before my eyes. I hear the sounds of gunfire and prayer. I am a mass of flesh, trudging each morning from house to house, trying to find one last document for salvation, claiming to be doing something adequate to my belief in the value of working for justice: but what does that even mean anymore? Nothing. All the slogans, all the pain, all the murderinciting hatred and all the death have become meaningless in the face of this reality: empty streets, a ghost town. Military convoys are dispatched every which way, but there’s no army presence. Where has the army gone? Who can believe such a farce now? The army lets these gangs kill people and intimidate them; it won’t intervene. In the face of these gangs, the security forces that once terrorized the people are suddenly transformed into the downtrodden.

  What is this madness?

  Death is a mobile creature that now walks on two legs. I hear its voice, I can stare right at it. I am the one who knows what it tastes like, who knows the taste of a knife against your throat, the taste of boots on your neck. I have known it for a long time, ever since I first escaped that narrow world, then a second time, then a third. I am the crime of treason against my society and my sect, but I am no longer afraid, not because I am brave – indeed, I am quite fragile – but you get used to it.

  Today, on the Friday of Dignity, the Syrian cities come out to demonstrate. More than two hundred thousand demonstrators mourn their dead in Dar‘a. Entire villages outside Dar‘a march toward the southern cemetery. Fifteen people are killed. In Homs three are killed. People are killed and wounded in Latakia. In the heart of the capital, Damascus, in the al-Maydan district, demonstrators come out; some are wounded and then moved to al-Mujtahid hospital. Army forces surround Dar‘a and open fire on any creature that moves. In al-Sanamayn the military security commits a massacre, killing twenty people.

  I am no longer afraid of death. We breathe it in. I wait for it, calm with my cigarette and coffee. I imagine I could stare into the eye of a sniper on a rooftop, stare at him without blinking. As I head out into the street, I walk confidently, peering up at the rooftops. Crossing the sidewalks and passing through a square, I wonder where the snipers might be now. I think of writing a novel about a sniper who watches a woman as she walks confidently down the street. I imagine them as two solitary heroes in a ghost town: like the street scenes in Saramago’s Blindness.

  I return to the capital, and I know this place will never be the same again. Fear no longer seems as automatic as breathing. Once and for all, and all at once, life here has changed.

  I return to the capital, knowing I will not despair from tirelessly fighting for justice, even if death rips open my chest. Like I said: You get used to it. Nothing more, nothing less. I am waiting for death to arrive, though I will not carry flowers to my own grave.

  5 April 2011

  ..............................

  I will infiltrate the sleep of those murderers and ask them, “Did you look into the eyes of the dead as the bullets hit their chests? Did you even notice the bullet holes?” Perhaps they glance for a moment at the red holes left behind in foreheads and stomachs, the same place where our eyes always come to rest.

  Here in Damascus the murderers will soon fall asleep, and we’ll remain the guardians of anxiety. Death is no longer a question. Death is a window we open up to our questions.

  Damascus is just like any other city. It becomes more beautiful at night, like a woman after making love.

  Who kills from the rooftops? Is it a cowardly killer? It most certainly is – how could he be deemed courageous when he has already been stripped of his morality?

  From my house I head out in the direction of the squares and the mosques. In the middle of the afternoon, I need to see the city streets, street by street, square by square. I don’t believe anything but my own eyes. The squares are empty, possibly because today’s a holiday. Everyone is holed up inside their fear.

  Security patrols roam dense in the streets; everywhere I go cars are coming and going, fast and slow; giant buses are jam-packed with security forces; men wearing helmets and military uniforms fan out in the markets and the squares, in the broad intersections and anywhere else demonstrations might break out.

  Men in plain clothes congregate here and there, but the size of their presence gives them away. How did I learn to distinguish between a security agent and an ordinary man on the street in Damascus? The truth of the matter is that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this game I play actually started, when my acumen became more reliable than any question or conversation. I know them by their eyes, by the drape of their clothes, by their shoes. Today more security forces than ordinary people are on the streets, in the alleyways, beside the kiosks, in the squares, outside the schools: security forces everywhere I go.

  Patrols are deployed near the entrance to the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh2, and near Bab Touma they stop some men for questioning, grabbing their IDs. I can’t wait around long enough to find out whether they kept their IDs in the end; I must keep moving. I glance at them out of the corner of my eye as I pass them, and then turn into a crowded alley. Here, almost, is human life. The security presence is heavy all around the Umayyad Mosque, and hordes of people are holding up flags and portraits of the president.

  The mosque is closed, they won’t let me in, they claim there are people inside praying, but before leaving I sit down outside to smoke a cigarette and calmly watch the situation.

  Suddenly I start to notice strange figures I haven’t ever seen before materializing in the street. Oversized men with broad and puffed-out chests, their heads shaved, wearing black short-sleeved shirts that reveal giant muscles covered in tattoos, seething at everything that moves. Glaring as they walk, their hands swinging at their sides, figures that sow terror wherever they go, thickening the air all around them: Why have I never noticed them in the city before? Where do they liv
e? And why have they appeared today?

  I walk back through the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, nearly empty except for a few street vendors. The shops are all closed. Nothing but security forces scattered all around while at the end of the market even more buses sit packed with armed men. I can now appreciate the meaning of the phrase ‘tense calm’. I have heard this expression before, thinking it more a figure of speech than an actual description. These days in Damascus I can understand ‘tense calm’ by people’s eyes and movements. I walk out of al-Hamidiyyeh towards al-Merjeh Square despite having resolved not to go there any more after what happened one day a few weeks ago outside the Interior Ministry.

  Al-Merjeh Square is empty except for security forces who are lined up in significant numbers, spread throughout the square. Not too far off there is a bus filled with men and weapons. With its wretched hotels Al-Merjeh Square seems more distinctive when all the people have disappeared and its shops are closed.

  It looks nothing like it did on 16 March, when dozens of prisoners’ families assembled outside the Ministry. Nearly assembled, they did not actually succeed. Standing there in silence, they looked odd, almost elegant, holding pictures of their loved ones who had been imprisoned for their political opinions. I stood with them, beside the husband and two sons of a female prisoner. Suddenly the earth split open with security forces and shabbiha3, who started beating people. The small group started to panic, and I, staring right at those men, screamed, “Anyone who kills his own people is a traitor!” The people didn’t fight back, they took all the blows and the insults and then started disappearing one after the other. They were taken away by men who had emerged just then out of the street, men with huge rings and inflated muscles and gaunt eyes and cracked skin – they created a human wall as they flung themselves upon the demonstrators and beat them, throwing them down on the ground and stamping on them. Other men captured people and hauled them away, made them disappear. I saw them open up a shop, throw a woman inside and shut the iron door behind her before heading after some other woman.

  The group, while trying to stand together, got broken up. The husband beside me vanished, leaving his small four-year-old son behind. Several men grabbed the father along with his ten-year old son. I stood there, like a defiled statue. I pulled the little one in close to my chest, as if I was in a movie scene. Is there really any difference between reality and fiction? Where is the line that separates the two? I was shivering. Suddenly I noticed the little boy gaping at his father and his brother as they were beaten, watching as the two of them were stuffed inside a bus. The face of the tenyear- old was frozen, as if he had just been administered an electric shock, and a powerful fist came flying at his little head: THUMP. His head went limp, and after a second, they kicked him along with his father inside the bus. I recoiled and turned the little boy’s head away so he wouldn’t be able to see what was happening, slung him over my shoulder and ran. Just then a friend of mine appeared nearby in the square, and three men pounced on her. I grabbed for her arm, screaming, “Leave her alone!” They threw me aside, along with the little boy who was by now weeping in my arms, and took her away. I kept running, stopping outside a store where the owner shouted at me, “Get out of here! Can’t you see we’re trying to make a living?” As I ran away, one of the demonstrators ran up alongside me to help carry the boy. We then continued briskly walking. Why had I run? The little boy asked me to stay with him; he was going to wait for his father, saying how scared he was now that his father and brother had left him, and that he was going to hit the policeman who had struck his brother. When he asked me whether they had been taken to prison just like his mother had been, I was silent, unable to respond, until I simply told him, “You’re coming with me now.”

  Actually it wasn’t the police who beat up his father, the police just watched while people got punched and kicked and insulted and arrested; they just stood there, silent. Then a group came out chanting slogans and carrying flags and pictures of the president, including some of the very same people who had carried out the beatings in the first place, as well as others who had appeared suddenly. They, too, started beating people with their flags, and the people who had almost managed to assemble there dispersed, bewilderment all over their faces. That night the news reported that infiltrators among the demonstrators had picked a fight, and that the Minister of the Interior had received complaints from the prisoners’ families. I heard all this on Syrian state television, still haunted by the eyes of that little boy I had carried away, imagining him instead lost beneath the stampeding feet, wandering the city streets alone in search of his father and his brother.

  Crossing al-Merjeh Square weeks after the incident, I see those phantasms, behind sliding metal prison bars. Then I hop in a taxi and head toward a mosque I hear remains under siege. There is no crowd there. I think there has to have been some mistake or some kind of media distortion. Through the car window I observe the city between al-Merjeh Square and the Kafr Sousseh roundabout. I don’t want to rely on anything but myself and what I can see with my own two eyes. Scanning the internet on my mobile phone, I find reports that the mosque has been surrounded, but the radio broadcast says the entire city is calm.

  Security has been deployed at the Kafr Sousseh roundabout, patrols the Syrian people know all too well. Foreigners would never imagine there could be so many cars in the squares. They prevent me from entering: the road is closed. We pass through the square and turn down a side street. Elsewhere the situation seems calm; there are places far removed from what is going on, especially wealthy neighbourhoods. I get out of the taxi and head towards the mosque, but it is hard to get close. Motorcycles. Shouting and chanting. High-ranking security officers. Crowds holding flags and pictures of the president. I ask what’s going on. Everyone says there is a deadly silence inside and advises me to get out of there. There are no other women present, and one of them scornfully asks me, “What are you doing here?” I turn my back on him as the chanting rises up alongside the flags and the pictures. Security forces surround the mosque; it truly is under siege. I don’t know if I can get inside; the only way would be to infiltrate those who are holding pictures and flags.

  It’s not easy to find yourself among men in civilian clothes who appear all of a sudden and beat up a young man, throw him to the ground and take away his phone. Some of them climb up onto the buildings overlooking the mosque. I overhear them say they want to make sure nobody is filming, but I can’t confirm anything except the fact that the whole place is surrounded by security forces, police and military officers – and by the flag and picture carriers who are really no different than security forces, alternating between beating up demonstrators and holding their pictures of the president. People outside the mosque are talking about negotiations under way inside between an imam and the security forces so that everyone can come out peacefully, without violence or bloodshed. I would later discover that when the young demonstrators finally came out of the mosque they were taken straight to prison.

  My heart shudders. I can hear it beating like someone addressing me, warning me of danger. My heart is a better guide than my head. I spot an angry-eyed man with a picture of the president walking towards me. I dash for the car. The man follows me, pointing menacingly. I ask the driver to step on it. The man rejoins the flag-bearers.

  “Sister,” the driver asks, “why are you getting involved in all this? They don’t treat women any better than men!”

  I keep silent. My eyes cloud over. The image of the besieged place terrifies me. What is going to happen? I hear news of killing in Douma, news that my friends have been detained, news of injured people and hospitals overcrowding with demonstrators after the army opened fire on them. Lots of news comes from all directions. I ask the driver to take me to see the situation in Douma, but he nearly jumps out of his seat, shouting, “My God, you can’t go there!”

  I am armed with nothing but my conscience. It doesn’t matter to me whether the coming period brings moderate Islam and all
they say comes with it. The faces of the murderers don’t matter to me, and neither does all the talk nor all the lies. All that matters now to me is to break my demonic silence, as people speak only the language of blood. What matters to me is that with my own two eyes I have seen unarmed, peaceful people getting beaten up and locked away and killed for no other reason than that they were demonstrating. I have seen the children of my people fall one by one like unripe peaches from a tree.

  The driver turns into a guardian and a preacher, saying, “The road to Douma’s closed. It’s forbidden to enter.”

  “Is Douma under siege as well?”

  “Don’t talk like that, sister. What have I got to do with all of this?”

  “So who told you, then?”

  “The army’s there, there’s gunfire,” he says.

  “What do you think, uncle? What’s going on?”

  “What have I got to do with it? I can barely make ends meet.”

  “But people are dying,” I reply.

  “God have mercy upon them, but we’re all going to die someday.”

  “What would you do,” I ask him, “if it were one of your children who was killed?”

  He is silent for a moment, then shakes his head and says, “The world wouldn’t be big enough to contain me!”

  “I heard,” I say, “that they put a young man in Dar‘a into a refrigerator. While he was still alive. And when they pulled out his corpse, they found he had written with his own blood: When they put me in here I was still alive send my love to my mother.”

  He shakes his head in silence.

  “I hope it’s not true,” I say.

  He remains silent, his ears turning red.