The lorry he was placed in was followed by two more vehicles. Similar convoys drove off in different directions. From above, it must have looked like a snake pit scattering; caravans of dark military vehicles slithering through the barren landscape.
Sami didn’t speak during the drive. He wore the same clothes as when he was arrested, the jeans and black T-shirt now covered in white sweat streaks. The sports bag his father and older brother had managed to give him in prison sat by his feet. It contained a change of clothes, a first-aid kit with plasters, antiseptic and gauze. His mother had also put a miniature Quran in it, so small it fitted in the palm of his hand. He had held it since he took his seat on the lorry and now, as he opened it, a folded note fell out.
I love you, my son.
14
THEY HAD PASSED evergreen forest and little villages and turned on to a dirt road. Now, the military convoy slowed down. They were in the mountains, somewhere outside Damascus, that was all Sami knew. Up here, the air shredded his breath and he shivered in his short-sleeves. Everyone climbed out of the vehicles, hundreds of strangers eyeing one another. Some tried to find reasons to laugh, spotting an acquaintance or relative to talk to, but Sami kept quiet.
‘Can anyone here write quickly?’ the soldier who had driven them asked.
When no one raised their hand, Sami did, if hesitantly. Considering the soldiers he had encountered so far, he thought it safest to show a willingness to help from the start. He was told to make lists of the new recruits. First he was to tell them about himself.
‘I’m twenty-two years old and from Homs.’
‘Do you have any special skills?’
‘Networks and computers.’
The soldier contented himself with that and Sami breathed a sigh of relief. The row of soldiers-to-be inched forward and Sami noted down their names and details, one after the other. They were from Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Idlib and other places all over the country. They had studied law, economics, art history, medicine or just graduated from secondary school. They were pimply, thin, muscular, long-haired, shaven, swarthy, ginger, freckled, with or without facial hair. What many of them had in common was that this was going to be the first time they had lived away from their parents.
‘Name?’
‘Hussein,’ said a young slim man in an ankle-length shirt, whose long, dark eyelashes framed his serious eyes. He was from a village outside Raqqa in northern Syria, where white cotton fields spread out from the shores of the Euphrates. When asked about his education, he looked the soldier straight in the eye and answered calmly, in the accent typical of the northern countryside, ‘I have never been to school.’
‘Do you have any special skills?’
‘Herding sheep,’ Hussein said.
The other recruits smiled, someone laughed, but the soldier in charge of the registration nodded curtly.
‘Next. What’s your name?’
‘Look, I don’t speak Arabic,’ a large man said in English. He had a bleached fringe that hung down over his eyes and wore a Nirvana T-shirt, apparently unaware of the regime’s views on rock music. ‘There must be some mistake,’ he continued. ‘I was at the airport. I have no idea why I’m here. I’m from Canada, I’m a Canadian citizen. I was just visiting my father’s family. You have to call the embassy.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘I don’t understand Arabic. What’s he saying?’
‘He wants to know your name,’ Sami translated.
‘Bill. Or, well, Bilal, but everyone calls me Bill.’
The soldier flipped through his papers and said they would check his documentation again. But, he said slowly, according to the government’s information, he was eighteen years old and a Syrian citizen and therefore obliged to do military service.
‘What’s he saying?’ Bill asked.
‘He’s saying he will look into your case,’ Sami replied. ‘Don’t worry.’
The Canadian swallowed several times.
‘Next,’ called the soldier.
When everyone’s names were on the list and any mobile phones had been confiscated, they were shown around the camp. It sprawled out in every direction as far as the eye could see. The division consisted of almost twelve thousand soldiers.
The soldiers giving them their tour were patient and almost seemed sympathetic. Not too long ago, the soldiers had been in the new recruits’ shoes. It’ll be easier if you let go of the past, they said.
‘Forget about free time, forget about sex, forget about girlfriends. From now on, you’re going to have to get used to a different way of life.’
Their new way of life would entail basic training, then more advanced training over six months. Then they would be given their assignments and the work would start in earnest.
Sami and the others were shown to a bare barracks with rows of triple bunk beds. They each signed out blankets that were to be returned at the end of their service: in one year and nine months. The time could not be fathomed. Sami tried not to think about the hundreds of days and nights ahead of him.
Before bedtime they were allowed a couple of minutes in the showers, Sami’s first since he was arrested two weeks before. He rubbed the hard piece of soap until it lathered. Afterwards, he noticed the others were no longer keeping their distance and he remembered something he had forgotten over the past two weeks: the smell of his clean body.
Sami claimed a bottom bunk and put down his coarse blankets – two as a sheet, two as a cover. He lay down on the solid mattress and looked up at the doodles drawn on the underside of the middle bunk by soldiers who had slept there before him: genitals and women’s names, a countdown of days, a pig with initials Sami assumed portrayed an officer. The bed squeaked and moved under the weight of the Canadian, and Sami heard a short sob muffled in a pillow.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll be all right,’ Sami whispered.
The crying stopped and for a long time he heard nothing else; maybe the Canadian had fallen asleep. But then, ‘You really think so?’ Bill said softly.
Sami couldn’t remember what he answered as he sank into the much-needed oblivion of sleep. He fell deeper and deeper, and remembered none of his dreams the next morning when they were woken up by a persistent banging on the steel door.
* * *
—
Sami, Bill, Hussein and the other men shuffled out of bed, half dressed and with their blankets in a tangle. Curses rained down on them and moments later their beds were made and everyone was dressed.
Hussein, the Bedouin shepherd, was the only one who seemed happy and relaxed. He didn’t talk much but had eaten his meagre meal as though it were a feast, praised the hot water in the shower and contemplated his bunk for a long moment before tying his arm to the frame with a scarf.