‘I could put a bullet in the back of your heads and no one would care. I could fuck your sisters and little brothers.’
Sami was just getting up from doing push-ups when the world went black and he lost his balance. A foot between his shoulder blades and the sergeant’s scornful voice: ‘Eat shit.’ White lightning shot through his body. Sami got up slowly and groggily, braced himself and kicked the sergeant so hard in the stomach that he fell headlong on to the stony ground.
In the barracks, several people patted Sami on the back and laughed at the whole thing. Except Hussein, who shook his head.
‘They’re going to punish all of us.’
The next night, they lined up as usual, dressed only in their underwear. It was cold, well below freezing. This time their instructor was present to personally oversee the evening’s punishments. A few people bent down to start the push-ups.
The instructor held up his hand. ‘No. Tonight, we have a different task for you.’ He wrapped his scarf around his neck, pulled up his leather gloves. ‘It’s very simple. Tonight you are to stand still.’
A numb feeling spread through Sami’s body. Stand still? He had expected some sort of consequence after the kick. For them to pull him out of bed in the middle of the night for extra punishment. For them to send him to the clink, even though soldiers weren’t supposed to be sent there during their basic training.
At the same time, he figured the sergeant was ashamed. The instructors were supposed to demonstrate good morals and serve as an example for the new soldiers. In order to explain the kick, the sergeant would sooner or later have to admit that he had broken the honour code of the army by insulting the recruits’ families.
Sami had almost started thinking of his kick as a nightmare, as something imagined, a cat standing on its hind legs asking the time. But now, with the instructor right in front of him, the event acquired a crisp clarity. After a few minutes, he began to understand the severity of the punishment. Because standing still was much worse than moving around. Doing exercises made the body warm and gave the mind something to focus on instead of the cold.
After a few minutes, his teeth started chattering uncontrollably. He clenched his jaw but the shaking spread through his body. After half an hour, he couldn’t feel his legs. After an hour, he heard a thud, then another. Sami didn’t dare to turn to look, but out of the corner of his eye he saw soldiers dropping around him. They fell and stayed down. Their hands were claws in various shades of purple. Only after some time did the instructor signal to the medics to take them to the military hospital. Bill managed to stay up, as did Sami. Hussein seemed unperturbed by the cold, but when they got back inside their barracks he wrapped himself in all the clothes and blankets he had.
* * *
—
The next morning, the ground was covered with glittering ice crystals, the tussocks of grass stuck up like spiky hedgehogs. Fourteen people were in the hospital with frostbite. The others were woken up to begin the day’s drills as though nothing had happened.
16
WHENEVER SAMI HELD a new pen, he would assess its weight. See what kind of nib he was dealing with: wide or thin, straight or diagonal. It was the pen that inspired the writing, not the other way round. In the beginning was the word, his mum used to say. He pictured instead a golden pen, the original pen that wrote the world into existence, that drew light in the night of the universe.
Quite unlike the pen in front of him at this moment, which was barely usable. Sami moved the broken-off felt tip across the paper. A broken line of ants, a parade of grasshoppers. The sergeant held up the notepad and studied it in silence.
‘What’s your name, what’s your number?’
After almost six months of basic training, Sami and the other recruits were about to be split up. They continued to perform the same drills but noticed they were watched less meticulously than before.
One day, a jeep had pulled up to where they were doing their morning workout and a sergeant had climbed out. If anyone were to draw his face, lead pencil would have been the inevitable medium: grey eyes, placed close together, a thin moustache and a thin mouth. Outside of the army, he would have been someone you found in an office, in some unassuming bureaucratic post. But here everyone looked up when he cleared his throat. The sergeant had come from a military base outside Damascus and he was looking for someone with good handwriting. Since the military base in question was the core of their division, where the important decisions were made, it was a place most people wanted to be. Most of all because administrative work was a dream for the soldiers. Being there meant not being in active combat, not getting punishments. And certain perks could be negotiated, too.
‘Who here has the best handwriting?’ said the sergeant.
Sami was just about to raise his hand when the group thronged in front of him.
‘Me, me!’ one of them shouted and was given the notepad to write a sample.
The sergeant raised his eyebrows and sent the pad on to the next volunteer.
‘Write in your neatest hand,’ he urged them, and one after the other, they were dismissed.
‘Please, try your best.’
One of them tried so hard he broke the blue felt tip. When it was Sami’s turn, the pen was all but unusable. Did he have another? The sergeant shook his head. Sami wrote as best he could and tried to perfect all the fine lines, curlicues, dots and marks needed.
‘Which script?’ the sergeant asked, scrutinizing the paper.
‘Al-diwani,’ said Sami.
‘Do you know others?’
He filled the page with sentences and words. For a moment, he was so engrossed in the familiar task – taken back to the writing competitions in school and writing signs for his siblings’ doors – that he forgot the officer.
‘OK, that’s enough.’
* * *
—
During the following weeks, Sami and the other recruits waited to be given their assignments. If there was one silver lining, it was that their bodies slowly adapted to their trials. Sami suffered from constant sleep deprivation but was now able to do the drills without too much pain.
They had a day and a half off every other week. When they rejoined the camp, they would have a potluck with the food brought back from home: bulgur balls filled with lamb and pine nuts from Aleppo, rich red wine from Suwayda and grainy, matured cheese from Homs, dipped in silky smooth olive oil from Afrin.
Every morning, they ran out into the vast evergreen forest and back again. Whoever made it back first was given an extra day off. It was an almost unimaginable luxury. Yet even so, no one wanted to be the fastest, because that meant being added to the list.
No one had seen the list but they all knew about it. The soldiers in the combat battalion had the hardest physical job and the list contained the names of the recruits assigned to it for the final part of their service. So they jogged at a leisurely pace, careful to return to camp in a group.