A massacre had taken place in Karm al-Zeitoun, one of the poorer parts of Homs. The army had gone in with armoured vehicles, broken into homes and handed the arrested families over to the Shabiha. The bodies needed to be moved before the army attacked again, and Sami and Muhammed’s job was to make way for them.
Sami hurried to his friend’s house and helped empty the rooms of furniture. Muhammed’s glasses were smudged with grease and one of the lenses was cracked; his T-shirt was dripping with sweat. They moved like sleepwalkers, lifting up furniture as if for a weekly clean, sweeping and hosing off the floors. They let the water cool a little before pouring it down the drain to make sure they didn’t disturb the jinn.
Later that night, a flatbed truck pulled up outside the house. The sight that greeted Sami etched itself permanently on his retinas. The bodies were stacked in the flatbed, legs and arms entangled. The smell was of smoke, burnt flesh and hair, sweet blood. The militia had shot or stabbed the people to death and set some of them on fire. Sami turned away and threw up.
‘Hurry!’
Sami, Muhammed and the two men carried the bodies into the house and lined them up in the rooms. As he carried them he thought: One day, someone is going to carry me. One boy looked like he was resting when seen in profile, his eyelashes sticky with sleep. The other half of his head had been blown away, his brain seeping out. A woman was missing her jaw. They stared wide-eyed. Several of the children had knife wounds. What kind of person walked up to a child and stabbed it in the belly?
After midnight they had another call, another car was on its way. The street was dark and deserted. There wasn’t enough room in the house and they had no choice but to leave the bodies in the street overnight. Sami counted thirty-nine dead, in the house and on the street. Nineteen children, thirteen women and seven men, of which three were old enough to be his grandfather. They were going to bury them at first light.
The video camera panned back and forth. When Sami watched the clip back he could hear himself sob, even though he didn’t remember crying. He filmed it even though it felt pointless. But it had to be illegal, according to some international convention or higher law. He didn’t think about revenge or justice, only this one simple thing: that there’s a limit to what you can get away with. That life couldn’t be allowed to continue as if nothing had happened.
A girl, no more than five years old, had been shot in the forehead. The flesh rose from the miniature crater like a flower, while the back of her head flowed out like a flaccid balloon.
As dawn broke, they began the work of burying the bodies. People joined them and cried with horror and shock. Sami regretted having been unable to take the bodies inside to spare them this sight. At the same time, they now had help carrying. Most of the bodies were buried next to a mosque, others in a nearby garden. Others still were collected by relatives.
Later that day, Sami undressed and rinsed the blood off his hands as rumour of the massacre spread and the mass exodus from Homs began.
24
THEIR CITY WAS being taken from them, imperceptibly at first, then more conspicuously. The army shot at the buildings where the Free Syrian Army were said to be hiding, but most of the victims were civilians. In one day, Sami counted forty rockets raining down on them. There were holes in streets and buildings where the metal points had driven themselves in and remained.
Sarah went back to her family outside Damascus. Sami encouraged her to go.
‘You’ll be safer there,’ he told her, not knowing if it was true.
‘I need to be with my family.’
‘I understand, don’t think about it.’
‘I’ll return to Homs soon.’
Soon, he thought, when was soon? They lived one day at a time.
One morning, Sami’s dad put the radio under his arm and announced they were leaving. His mother packed a few changes of clothes. There was no talk of fleeing, no, they were simply going to leave town for a few days until the regime came to its senses. They would stay with a couple of relatives in the countryside. Hiba had already left with her husband and two children. Ali had hung up a handwritten sign on his computer shop: closed for vacation. He was wanted for military service again and had decided to stay hidden. Sami only knew he was staying somewhere in the al-Waer neighbourhood on the outskirts of Homs. Malik filled his backpack with comics instead of school books; the spring term exams had been cancelled anyway. As he helped his parents and little brother pack up the car, Sami said he would join them soon.
‘They’ll give up in a few days. Somebody has to look after Grandpa Faris.’
Because Grandpa Faris had decided to stay. Nabil and Samira had tried to persuade him to come but, in the end, they realized it was futile to ask Grandpa Faris to leave the city where he had lived and worked all his life, where he had met and buried the love of his life.
‘Water the plants,’ Samira said and kissed Sami’s cheeks. ‘And don’t forget to feed the turtle on the roof.’
Sami didn’t sleep at all the night after they left, only finally dozing off when morning had already broken. When he woke up, it was to a new kind of noise: the deep whistling of rockets being fired by the regime’s artillery from the hill that was home to Homs’ ancient citadel. This was different from the shoulder-mounted rocket launchers. Every strike vibrated for miles. Fire and black smoke billowed above the rooftops.
That first day on his own he called Muhammed, who had also elected to stay. Together they went out into the neighbourhood to see if there were any old people who had been unable or unwilling to leave.
Grandpa Faris stayed in his bedroom, where he complained about his aching legs and chain-smoked in bed. After three days, his costume was rumpled and his oil-combed hair dishevelled. The room was stuffy with sweat and pipe smoke. Sami noted the artillery fire seemed to be intensifying. In the silence between the launches he could hear the tapping of Grandpa Faris cleaning out his pipe. Then Edith Piaf’s husky voice from the gramophone on the nightstand.
‘The little sparrow from Paris,’ Grandpa Faris said and drummed his fingers against his leg. ‘That’s one of the cities I’ve always dreamt of visiting. The elegant cafés, theatres, boulevards…Paris seems like a Damascus in the heart of Europe.’
‘When this is over, we’ll go there,’ Sami said.
He sat down and stroked the brown, marbled cane that stood propped against the bed.
‘Walnut,’ Grandpa Faris said.
‘From Aleppo, I remember.’
‘Would you be a good boy and fetch my tobacco?’
The tendrils of smoke rose through the air, giving the room an air of normality, as did the floral bedspread and the gramophone. Sami was reluctant to tell his grandfather but he couldn’t hold off any longer. He was going to call his cousins.