A Woman in the Crossfire

by Samar Yazbek

  Today there is a demonstration at the Damascus University Faculty of Letters; they detain all the students and confiscate their cell phones. The town of Talbiseh is still under siege, and all lines of communication are cut; they receive their children’s dead bodies from the security forces. In al-Ma‘damiya, near Damascus, the people tear down a giant picture of President Bashar al-Assad4, and a young man is killed. In Latakia eight prisoners are burned to death in the central prison.

  In a moment we are about to reach my house.

  I am trembling. I can see that bloodshed only begets more bloodshed. I can see gaping holes in life, holes bigger than existence. I notice them in the chests of the martyrs, not in the faces of the killers. Back at home I think about how I will infiltrate the sleep of the killers and ask them whether they ever noticed the holes of life as they took aim at the bare chests of their unarmed victims.

  8 April 2011

  ..............................

  This is Damascus: a phrase we all used to hear on the radio when we were children. Every Syrian knows the timbre of that phrase. Obviously this is Damascus. But ever since Syrians started to migrate from their small cities and villages and deserts, Damascus has become a transfer station, like the humdrum chore of a woman making dinner for her husband without a trace of love.

  But still: This is Damascus!

  Today is Friday. A soft drizzle stops long enough for people to go out into the streets and demonstrate in the squares and the mosques.

  Who even remembers that every demonstrator is marked for death?

  Death is a game whose rules are unclear. These diaries turn death into a canvas for painting, a darkened mysterious canvas that appears before me upon the chests of unarmed young men going out to die. How will the gently rocking mothers ever forgive those murderers? How can all these Don Quixotes tilt at justice amidst those hordes and so much injustice, when working for justice only rarely amounts to anything at all? But heroism isn’t the glory of a crown of laurels; that’s a Greek illusion. Heroism is to stand on the side of the weak until they are strong, for me to spin the world on my fragile fingers and rewrite it with a few gauzy words. Shall I do as Rimbaud wrote in his A Season in Hell: ‘To the devil, I said, with martyr’s crowns, the beams of art, the pride of inventors, the ardour of plunderers; I returned to the Orient and to the first and eternal wisdom.’5

  The drizzle stops. A miserly sun shines through until the rain returns to roll down my cheek once again. I drink a few droplets before getting into a taxi and heading to Douma. I conceive of these diaries as deliverance or an exclamation, but in the end they are just words. People around me may think them courageous, but they are wrong, because as soon as the car sets off in the direction of the demonstration, my knees become weak, my throat dries up and I can hear my fear pounding.

  Fear is a human condition that humanity has never given its due, a mysterious commentary on meaning or love. Fear means you are still human amidst the rubble.

  We approach Harasta, the suburb we have to get through in order to reach Douma. My driver is a young man in his midtwenties, taciturn; I would later discover he is also courageous.

  “Road’s closed,” he tells me.

  I snap out of my reverie and notice the long line of cars. Utter silence. It was the first time I have ever seen a place that crowded with people yet so quiet. I get out and walk past a few parked cars in order to see what is going on. Several green public buses with yellow seats are stopped, blocking the flow of traffic. Young men are jammed inside the buses, standing up, sitting down, one on top of the other. When they step off they are deployed on both sides of the street. The hordes pour out in silence. The marching young men are led by others wearing navy and grey uniforms. The young men’s faces are severe, exhausted; most have shaved heads and poverty seems to be written all over them. I approach one of the men directing them all and ask, “What’s going on?” He frowns and ignores my question. There are almost no women in the street, just one I can make out from afar, draped in a black niqab and dragging a child behind her as she runs in panic. The man in the car sticks out his head and says, “Get back in, sister. Those guys are security agents.”

  “And the guys coming out of the buses, what are they for?” I ask.

  Although he doesn’t respond, I can guess. There are hundreds of them, maybe more. We wait there for half an hour, until they all get out and deploy up and down both sides of the street, forming a small army, while people retreat from the sidewalks and disappear, with horror all over their faces.

  There is a military checkpoint outside Douma. Legions of security forces inspect trucks and check IDs, as scores of cars turn around and return the way they had come. Young men are standing off to the side as groups of security forces question them. I am unaware that, at that very moment, Douma is surrounded, and there is a military chokehold around Damascus and its suburbs.

  Beyond the security forces, a lot of men dressed in military uniform, replete with helmets, stand at the ready on both sides of the street. They stop the car, and one man asks me brusquely, “Where to?” When I tell him I have a meeting, he looks at me with the same brusqueness and orders me to get out of the car. After I do that, he curiously scrutinizes me. He is short, and perhaps it infuriates him that I am taller than he is, so he backs away a little bit and demands my identification. After turning over my ID, he says, “Madame, there are thugs around here, I must ask you not to go any further.”

  “But I have an appointment at the seamstress. It will only take ten minutes,” I say.

  Luckily I know a seamstress there. I give him her name and say, “Call her, if you want.”

  He opens the car door for me and asks the driver to move along. I take a breath, and then naively ask, “What’s happening here?”

  “Oh, nothing at all, there’s nothing happening here.”

  “So why are they so many soldiers, why all this security?”

  “It’s nothing, I swear to God, it’s nothing,” he adds. I take comfort in the fact that I have perfectly played my favourite role, pretending not to know anything in order to learn everything, remaining silent in front of others who love to talk, and the most important thing of all: observing.

  The car starts to move. I have just turned to face forward when I see both a military and a security checkpoint. What’s this? Between one checkpoint and another checkpoint there’s a checkpoint? I tell the driver, “We’ve got to take one of the side streets.”

  “Let’s just go back,” he says. “Seriously, I’m worried about you.”

  The second checkpoint is a big one. Soldiers line up next to each other, forming a roadblock, and in front of them there is another roadblock made up of security men. I feel like I am in a movie about an occupied Palestinian town. What a terrifying vision. In fact, it isn’t just visual, because my knees start to tingle and shake. When the officer opens the car door and says in a gruff voice, “Get out,” my knees crack as I stand up. He watches me suspiciously as he takes my ID. He is dressed in civilian clothes, and beside him there is a man who I know by his accent comes from the Jazira region. The man checking my passport is from the coast. What is this? The security and the army are all either from the Syrian Jazira region or from the coastal region. Maybe this is just a coincidence today, because I have had my share of run-ins with the security forces, – in this I am no different from every other Syrian – but the unifying feature is that they are all minorities.

  The Jazrawi man looks at me and asks, “Are you a journalist?”

  “No,” I reply.

  He scrutinizes me, and suddenly reaches out his hand to grab my sunglasses, pulling me hard by the hand, and demands, “What are you doing here?”

  Then a second man jumps in, “A journalist? Oh yeah, I know your name. I’ve seen you on TV.”

  Growing despondent, I tell him, “You’re mistaken. I have an appointment with the seamstress.” Feeling a little bit emboldened, my voice gets louder, “And you, sirs, are sca
ring people, can’t you see? What’s going on here, anyway?”

  The coastal man says, “You used to host a show called Ladies First, I know you. My wife used to watch that show.”

  He jumps to his feet and shouts to the other guy, “Sir, she’s from Orient TV,” and within seconds the world turns upside down. Surrounded by scores of armed men, civilians too, I become like a dot at the centre of a bull’s eye. I cannot see anything any more and the odours suffocate me.

  “Sir, I’m a writer,” I insist. “It’s true that two years ago, for about three months, I hosted a program on Orient, and before that I used to host a cultural program on the Syrian satellite network. But please, let me just be on my way.”

  “Sir,” one of them asks, “won’t she leak information to those dogs at Orient?”

  He draws in closer to me, and grabs me by the shoulder. “Please, sir, I don’t have anything to do with any channel, and if you do know me, you should be respectful and just let me go. You work for the security services, and it’s your job to protect me, not intimidate me. Besides, won’t you at least tell me what’s going on here?”

  They all come back in a single voice, “Nothing’s going on, nothing.”

  “Then what are all these soldiers and security personnel doing?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” they repeat, “it’s nothing.”

  To the man who appeared to be the most senior, I say, “All right then, then let me just get out of here.”

  He is silent for a while, nodding his head, and I am about to suffocate from how close they are to me as my hand edges closer to the knife in my bag. These are long moments, but finally he barks at me, “Get the hell out of here!” They all scatter but before I get back in the car he says in a Bedouin accent, “I swear to God, if you ever come back to here, I’ll use your skin to make a hand drum.”

  I close my eyes and squeeze them shut so he cannot see my tears, as I imagine human skin turned into a drum and beaten in order to make hips shake. We cross the second checkpoint. Why are there all these soldiers and security forces? Where are all the people who live here? Is it now a ghost town? I try to call my friend and tell her I am in Douma, but there is no service. So the town is blockaded from without and from within. There are two more identical military checkpoints, and beyond the second one I see the same giant government buses, from which even more young men are streaming out. Are they the same young men I saw in Harasta? I assume the entire security apparatus has been called up today, because the effort is clear and their heavy presence indicates they must have come from multiple branches. I pity those starving men stuffed into the buses, a tiny monster lurking inside each one of them. I promise the officer at the fourth checkpoint that I will leave Douma. But at the end of the broad street where the town ends, I ask the driver to turn off, and we drive down the alleys. A ten-year-old boy riding a bicycle helps us, and we follow him as he shows us the way to the municipal square near the Great Mosque. We loop around agricultural land with olive trees, which pains me, because a few days ago I heard a Palestinian from Lyd on television talking about how the Israelis had forced him to demolish his own house. “They asked me, who’s your master?” he said, crying. “Then,” he said, sitting down under an olive tree outside his demolished house, “The olive trees are my master.”

  An expanse of small houses, cattle pens, goats and the stench of poverty.

  Most of the men have long beards, and the women are wrapped in black, they’re entirely in black, nothing showing but their eyes. I find out later that scores of people are also assembling in adjacent neighbourhoods in order to join the demonstrators in the square. That must be why there are military and security checkpoints set up all over the place: to prevent the demonstrators from reaching the square. There are even checkpoints in the alleyways. Always the same script.

  “Pretend you’re lost,” I tell the driver. “We’re trying to get out of here, but we got lost, that’s what we’ll tell the security and the soldiers.”

  I repeat these words to the military checkpoints and to the security men. “We got lost trying to find our way out of here. But what’s going on here?”

  They each respond with the same answer, “Nothing.”

  Once I get past I see some residents and ask them where the town square is. At least we reach it, and the car parks beside a Red Cross vehicle. The square is surrounded with security agents, who don’t approach the demonstrators, at least not before 3 p.m., which is when I am there until. There are no more than two thousand demonstrators, but soldiers and security forces are everywhere, and the demonstrators hold up Syrian flags and banners with slogans like God, Syria, Freedom, That’s It! and No Sunnis, No Alawites6, No Druze, No Isma’ilis, We are all Syria. Some hold olive branches. Apparently the olive trees are their masters too. No women are present, and as I try to get closer three men approach, taking me by the hand and whispering, “What do you want?”

  “I’m just watching. I got lost.” I answer, playing dumb. “Why, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing, it’s nothing.” The two men let me go, and one of them commands, “Yalla, get out of here at once.”

  On my way back, I ask people what happened. They are reticent and sad, but they tell me how they went out to demonstrate peacefully, and how gunfire came raining down on their heads, how they were forced to set fire to the building across the square in order to bring down the snipers who had climbed up onto the rooftops and were killing the young men. As the men talk about the virtuous martyrs they refuse to look me in the face. Even a woman I speak to stares back at me in fear. When I approach someone else to ask about it, he evasively replies with the oath, “I seek refuge in God from the accursed devil.” I understand now what my presence as an unveiled woman means: an agitator. Since I am trapped, I find a way to ignore whatever they say to me and keep walking. I am truly lost now, not just pretending, and I want to get out of here. Checkpoint upon checkpoint, so many security agents and soldiers. By the last one, I am exhausted and starting to get annoyed. I take one last look back at Douma, an occupied city. I am armed only with stories.

  On my way home, passing through Harasta, I think to myself: A day without bloodshed? That would be wonderful. I don’t know how much blood is actually being spilled in Dar‘a, that there are more than 40 martyrs on this Friday and that every Syrian city is witnessing a comparable protest movement. Even inside Damascus there are protests and beatings and bullets. In Homs, on top of the beating and the arrests, I hear about the story of an officer killed by the security forces. They shot him twice in the head for refusing to order his troops to fire on the demonstrators. I also don’t know that this particular Friday, which the demonstrators have dubbed the Friday of Steadfastness, is going to become a turning point in the history of Syria. This Friday constitutes the largest and most broadly based protest campaign the cities have seen, with the largest number of martyrs, and the Kurds participating alongside the Arabs despite their newly granted citizenship. This Friday proves, in all simplicity, that everything the president has said about reforms only means one thing to them: that he refuses to make any reforms.

  What I also don’t know until the very moment that we pass back through Harasta and leave Douma behind is that soon I will, for the first time in my life, see a dead man’s face and a murderer’s shadow.

  On the way back from Harasta I notice the young men have got out of the buses, and the men directing them have disappeared. The security forces remain spread out all over the place, and become the only ones I see. I hear that more have been brought and that they are cracking down on the demonstrators. Someone later tells me those guys call themselves supporters. As I try to get closer, I see men holding up the sticks they use to beat people, the sounds of gunfire grow louder, and I run to stand outside a shop, where I see those young faces that had got off the buses attacking people. The eyes of the attackers are all white, or maybe I just imagine that as the illusive sun occasionally peeks through to illuminate their features, but
to me their eyes seem empty and white, and that’s when I notice all the blood. I have no idea how it happened. I crouch down among all the feet, trying to get away. I am surrounded, and suddenly I find myself down on the ground. I see a sleeping face, eyes half-closed: my grandmother used to call this the ‘Gazelle’s Sleep.’ People are pushing and shoving all around the sleeping face. I call it sleep, because death is like sleep. The only difference between sleep and death is that we disintegrate after death. In sleep, we prepare for another kind of disintegration – a subtle distinction. Will this young face disintegrate after a while? How will his mother kiss his forehead before it is swallowed up by the dirt? My skin turns to stone.

  I run away from the surging waves of people, and a hot wallop catches me across the back. I wheel around to look behind me, and all of a sudden I see a leather strap in the hands of the security forces. I have no idea where the blow came from. Pain sears my lower back, moving down to the soles of my feet. Terrifying eyes stare at me. I start running as soon as I can stand, catching sight of the dead man’s face a second time, with the faces of murderers all around him. Who is opening fire? Where are the shots coming from? Maybe there are snipers, maybe my head is a target. A young man shouts and points to a man up on top of a building. Two young men grab me and pull me out of the group, screaming, “Please get out of here, sister!”

  Everyone here calls women “sister”. Most women wear niqabs and the rest are veiled. I think of Saadallah al-Jabiri7, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1944 when Shukri al-Quwwatli8 was president. During that era some Damascene families allowed their daughters to go unveiled, and mixed associations with both men and women were formed, but then the clerics made a fuss and demanded their dissolution. They went to see al-Jabiri and there were altercations and gunfire. Then he asked them to form a delegation in order to discuss the matter calmly with him. He addressed them at the Orient Palace Hotel in Damascus, responding to their demand to dissolve the associations by asking them, first of all, to stop their practices against unveiled girls, which was to throw acid in their faces, telling the shaykhs, “Listen, shaykh, if you want to cover your daughter, nobody’s going to tell you no. But it’s none of your business whether another person wants his daughter to go unveiled. Now go in peace.”