Hundreds of people had been killed and arrested. With the help of their map, which he had coloured in. Just like he always did. Filled it with colour.
Now the colours became reality, in the images that flickered past and blended together. The green fields and the shadows of the mountains, which surrounded the settlement in the heart of the valley. The water – wild swirls, deep streams – flowing past under the bridges lined with lampposts, where tanks and soldiers were pushing forward. Soon, black smoke rose over the rooftops.
Sami sat dead still in the blue light. To his shock, Ahmed collapsed on to the basement floor and wept.
Issa, who minded the fax machine, had his head in his hands. His aunt wasn’t answering her phone. She lived in the town with her two sons, his cousins.
‘Maybe they fled,’ he mumbled. ‘Or were arrested. If they were arrested, there’s still a chance.’
* * *
—
Later on, a returning soldier told them the takeover had been smooth. They had lists of people to arrest but were told to bring in more. The names went on and on, page after page. On TV, they said about one hundred and seventy people had been killed – it was probably more, said the returning soldier. Because he had seen the army load dead bodies on to trucks and remove them.
Sami closed his eyes and the sound of the TV turned into a distant buzzing. He and Ahmed and Rafat had followed orders and in that moment crossed a line. And it was just the beginning. There would be new orders. They would draw new maps. Every time he reached a line in the sand, there would be another one beyond it, and when that was crossed, another. It would never end. It would continue for ever, until nothing human and decent remained in him.
How much remained in him now? He had drawn the map. Beyond this line there was no turning back. The bunker walls closed around him, numbing in their colourlessness.
III
There is a picture of the little boy in the penguin jumper. In another, he’s wearing a camouflage uniform and cradling a rifle in his arms, squinting at the sun, his boots resting in the tall grass. The pictures blend together and drift apart. I try to make them co-exist in my mind, understand how they can both be of you.
What would another person have done in your situation? What would I have done?
My writing is becoming an obsession. It breaks free of my computer and becomes part of everything I do, a snake skin I can’t shed. We watch the hundreds of video clips you have filmed. We flip through nearly twenty thousand photographs you have taken, most of them from the siege. We cook your favourite dishes, stuffed vine leaves and lamb-filled zucchini in a saffron stew. We listen to your father’s favourite singer, Umm Kulthum. We study maps and street addresses, read reports on mass executions in the prisons and the composition of sarin gas. The more I think and read and see, the less I understand.
When I see the ad for the Swedish army’s survival course, I think that’s a step closer. I regret my decision before I even get there, but am given a uniform and a green plastic tube of chapstick. Sleep in a steel bed, fire a Kalashnikov and bandage a gunshot wound. Have a hood put over my head and am interrogated with blinding lights in my eyes. I’m surprised at the ease with which I and my fellow prisoners get used to it, how willingly we adapt to the rules of the game before they’re even presented. Forget that you have a body, keep control of your mind. But can a protest live only in the mind without being embodied? How quickly we fall silent when someone else has a gun pressed to their forehead.
An obsession, yes. To understand you and what you’ve been through. And a vague sense of unease which refuses to subside, telling me that no matter what I do, I will never understand.
19
SLEEP PULLED SAMI under. When he awoke for short periods, it lingered like a cold in his throat, a heaviness in his arms and legs, like an apathy towards the things going on around him. Shadows moved back and forth in the doorway. Sound and light blended together, there were unfamiliar voices and dirges, he imagined bridges hovering above his bed.
After three days, Rafat woke him up and said enough already. The brigade general had not given them any new assignments but it wouldn’t be long before they had to go back to drawing maps. The problem was his hands would no longer hold pencils. He kept crumpling up sheets of paper. Lines were erased and blurred. He carried the maps inside him. He folded and unfolded lakes, forests and valleys. Moved cities and villages around. Watched a flame take hold in the paper and eat its way towards the edges, until he himself caught fire and burnt. In his dream, his face and skin were seared until he had no eyes to see with, hands to draw with or heart to feel with.
As day turned into dusk, the black dog appeared. A wild dog. The soldiers loathed them. They roamed the hinterlands and didn’t hesitate to attack if you stepped into their territory. The black dog was mangy, its ribs visible and its breath acrid. Even other dogs disliked it: its right ear had been torn off by a pack that had lain in wait and ambushed it. The soldiers shooed it away with kicks and curses but the black dog continued to visit the military base. It slunk by, panting with hunger.
Then, one evening, it didn’t come. Sami went for a walk in the mild summer night without admitting to himself that he was looking for the dog. There was something about it that reminded him of the mutt his little brother Malik had dragged home when they were younger. The next night, the dog was back and he felt involuntary relief. Sami gave it the remains of his dinner: a bowl of chicken stew to lick clean and a crust of bread to chew. From that day on, the black dog followed him wherever he went.
‘What’s the name of your stinky dog?’ the other soldiers asked.
‘It’s not mine,’ Sami replied.
But he continued to put out bowls of leftovers and, after a while, the dog’s ribs were no longer visible. The dog slept outside at night, except for when it managed to sneak in and lie down outside his room. At first, he scolded it, but then he got used to it, and eventually he looked forward to scratching it behind the ears. The black dog became a reason to wake up in the morning. To gather up his limbs and exist.
* * *
—
After weighing up different scenarios, Sami, Ahmed and Rafat agreed that they would desert if ordered to fire at people. At present, however, it was safer to stay where they were. The revolution had blossomed during the first tentative, passionate spring months, and matured and gained new force over the summer. Then the temperatures fell. An undertone of pine needles and wet soil infused the mountain air and the leaves changed colour. There was no sign of the revolt cooling off or dying down.
Sami was normally woken up by the dog’s eager scratching at his door, but one early autumn morning he was instead awoken by Rafat sitting down on the edge of his bed.
‘Ahmed’s gone,’ he said and held out a mobile phone.