* * *
—
Everything would change that spring, 2011. Sami had almost completed his military service and was counting the days until he would be discharged when rumours started flying around the base. At first he didn’t believe them because they were so improbable. There was whispering about a demonstration in Daraa, a city on the Jordanian border.
The police had caught some schoolboys writing on a wall, Ahmed told Sami when they were making a map together, something about the people wishing for the fall of the regime. Their families were forced to hand the boys over to the secret police, who tortured them. The whole city was in uproar.
The officers at the camp didn’t say a word about the demonstrations. They did, however, cancel all leave and announce that everyone in the military would have their service extended.
‘For how long?’ asked Ahmed and polished his glasses on the uniform, like all of this was normal procedure.
‘Indefinitely. Probably a couple of weeks, maybe months. This decision comes from higher up.’
Sami swallowed hard. The buzzing in his ears intensified as though there were a wasp in his head. Indefinitely. After that, the rumours spread like wildfire. More demonstrations had been organized, it was said, in Damascus and Homs and Hama. Not Hama? Yes, even in Hama. The state news showed a sea of people marching through the cities, waving the Syrian flag.
‘They want to show their love and respect for the president,’ the reporter said.
In later broadcasts, the demonstrators had switched to the revolutionary flag used to protest against French rule in the previous century. At that point, the reporter looked straight into the camera and said, matter-of-factly and without batting an eyelid, that the people taking to the streets were junkies and criminals. Only now did the officers start talking openly about the demonstrators. They were terrorists, armed terrorists.
* * *
—
One day at the end of March there was an order to confiscate all TVs, satellite receivers and mobile phones at the base. It was to be done within twenty-four hours. The next day, the military police went through each and every room to make sure no prohibited equipment had been overlooked. The military base was allowed to keep one TV set that showed state and Lebanese channels.
Sami didn’t know what to think. Before he handed in his mobile phone, he had read news from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya that the people in those countries were demanding freedom and democracy. But the demonstrators were said to carry weapons, which made him feel torn. An armed struggle? Led by whom?
One of the generals showed Sami a video of a colonel supposedly shot dead by Syrian protestors. The film showed his bloody corpse and grieving family.
‘This is what the terrorists’ so-called fight for freedom looks like,’ said the general.
Sami asked Ahmed about the murdered colonel. He told him there was a rumour that the colonel hadn’t been shot by protestors at all. No, he had been stopped at a checkpoint and refused to show his ID card, which led to him being shot by a member of a regime-friendly militia.
Regardless of one’s opinions, it was safest to keep them to oneself.
‘Finally, the people are rising up,’ one soldier said during breakfast.
Sami looked around to make sure he wasn’t the only one who had heard it. Even Ahmed, who usually didn’t hesitate to speak up, stayed quiet.
The next day, the soldier was gone.
* * *
—
Sami’s doubts soon crystallized further. From time to time, he was asked to take notes or send deliveries to other battalions. He was also good friends with Issa, a soldier who received messages from other battalions in a bunker. Issa had managed to hide a TV that received international channels, partly to follow the news, partly to watch soap operas to help pass the time. Sami immediately won his affection by humming the theme music to Kassandra.
‘I wish I was rich and could pay my way out of here,’ Issa said dreamily. ‘A bunker, seriously? If someone had told me that from the start, I would have been born a girl. No doubt. I would have stayed in my mother’s womb until my dick turned into a vagina.’ He quickly scrolled through the channels. ‘Ah, look at her! Gorgeous. And don’t get me started on the uniform. I need more colour in my life.’
It was on one occasion down in the bunker that Sami saw a report about a demonstration that had been organized recently. Unarmed. Sami read the sentence over and over. There it was, in writing, in a military report: the protestors were unarmed. And the army had responded with teargas and bullets.
Ahmed had handed over only one of his phones to the officer and hidden the other under his mattress.
‘God, you’re crazy,’ Sami said.
‘God is dead,’ Ahmed shrugged.
‘We can take turns to hide the phone if you sometimes let me use it.’
In the evenings, when Rafat was out and they were sure to be alone, they took it out and listened to the revolutionary song ‘Ya Haif’. They listened to it over and over again, its lyrics and melody like a drug.
In the mornings, the military speaker car would stop in the yard and regime songs would fill the air. Then the president’s voice came on, blaring out his message for the public. The demonstrators were a disease, he said. A virus to the body of their country. And the only cure was to cut off the sick parts.
* * *
—
In April, thousands of people in Homs filed into the square around the famous clocktower for a peaceful sit-in. Sami watched it on the TV in the bunker with Issa. The minarets urged everyone to come to the square. Young people cut up their ID cards to show that they were not going to leave the country until the dictator was gone. Sami glimpsed people in T-shirts whose logos he knew all too well – they were from Abu Karim’s restaurant, his first place of work – handing out food to hungry protestors.
As they watched, three words echoed out across the crowd: freedom, dignity, democracy.
We are blossoming like an infatuation, Sarah wrote to him from Homs, texting Ahmed’s secret number.
Sami read her messages and erased them, in case someone found the phone. Sarah seemed to have entered a state of bliss, as though she and the other protestors were in the process of writing their own future, their own history. Maybe it was the adventure she’d always been waiting for.
We’re like a kaleidoscope, Sarah wrote. Voices and hands are raised in the square, a cascade of mirrors. We are glass, shards and fragments, and no matter which way you turn, twist and shake us, we overflow with colour, improbable patterns. We fit inside a single broken ray of light that contains the echo of every spring.