‘They’ll come and get you as soon as they can.’
Grandpa Faris didn’t object, just nodded and said there is a season for everything.
‘Don’t forget your bottle of hair oil,’ Sami said.
‘You don’t want to keep it? I remember you used to like it.’
‘I don’t have much use for it any more.’
He stroked the closely shorn hair at the back of his head, one of the habits he had picked up in the military. They listened to Piaf’s raspy voice, Non, rien de rien, and the distant booms, Non, je ne regrette rien, blending together.
‘I know you and your father don’t always agree,’ said Grandpa Faris. ‘But you know, parents have a different job from children.’
Sami jutted his chin out and shook his head, mostly to himself. ‘They could have protested when they were young.’
‘Some did and paid a steep price. Others tried to protect themselves and their families by keeping quiet, but it didn’t always help. There is something you need to know,’ continued Grandpa Faris. ‘Just after the massacre in Hama, before you were born…did you know that the secret police searched thousands of homes looking for people who might have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? One night, they broke into your home.’
‘Our home?’
‘Yes, your older brother was still a baby.’
Grandpa Faris coughed and took a couple of deep breaths before he started smoking again.
‘Your mother tried to push past the soldiers to get to Ali, who had just started sleeping in his own bed. She was stopped and pushed back on to the bed while your father was pulled out of the blankets. By streetlight, Nabil was dragged outside. He was taken behind a car, in nothing but his underwear, and surrounded by soldiers aiming their guns at him.’
Grandpa Faris held up his hand and looked in the palm as if it was a mirror.
‘The general studied Nabil in the rear-view mirror. Then he waved his hand and your father was released.’
Sami blinked and tried to take that in. His dad, dragged into the street.
‘I don’t understand…did he have anything to do with the protests in Hama?’
‘No, nothing at all. Your father was always eager to do right. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.
‘Sami,’ Grandpa Faris continued, ‘I could tell you that you will never be able to save yourself or anyone else by keeping on the right side of things. That the only thing that can save you is to fight for what’s right. But it’s more complicated than that. How do you know, at any given moment, what the right thing is? Even just talking about this and showing signs of hesitation would be seen as treachery by the regime.’ He waved his hand through the air, scattering smoke. ‘Yes, I know, the walls have ears and all that. But they’re still our walls and our home. Right?’
Grandpa Faris smiled but it looked forced. He leaned back into his pillow, stretched his legs out on the bedspread and sucked on his pipe.
* * *
—
The next day, Sami’s cousins came by and took Grandpa Faris out of the city.
It’s going to be over soon, Sami thought, and every morning it continued unabated. But there was still water in the taps, still food in both fridge and pantry, and his photography gave him a reason to get out of bed. He shortened his walks and avoided the regime checkpoints. He spent most of his time at home. He watered the house plants. Played the gramophone and was soothed by the crackling tones. Grandpa Faris hadn’t wanted to take the gramophone – that would be tantamount to admitting he wasn’t coming back.
Sami flipped through the comic books Malik had left behind. He found a whole box of pictures of his brother as a young boy and surprised himself by feeling jealous. Malik would always be a child in their parents’ eyes. The child who was conceived at the eleventh hour, possibly not planned, but deeply wanted. Maybe Sami had been wrong about his little brother. Maybe all his joking and talking wasn’t a way to please and be loved, but a sign that he already was loved.
He tested out the chair in Nabil’s study. On the desk a marble ashtray, a fountain pen engraved with his father’s name, a portrait of Samira. He spun the ashtray around and discovered a small, flat key underneath. He held the key in his hand; it weighed almost nothing. It reminded him of the keys Hiba had used for her diaries when they were little, the diaries Sami was strictly banned from reading. He read them anyway, and realized with disappointment that she only wrote pointless nonsense about boys in the other class in school and who had the coolest trainers.
Sami looked around and pulled out the desk drawers at random. In one he found a silver flask with a couple of coffee beans next to it. He already knew Nabil drank on the weekends sometimes, that he preferred to do so alone out of respect for Samira.
None of the drawers contained anything the key might be used for. He opened the top drawer again and there, under a stack of papers, he could feel a sharp corner. He pulled out a box and put the key in the lock. It fitted. Inside was a collection of letters tied together with yellowed string. Sami touched the paper but snatched his fingers back as though they’d been burnt. These letters must be very important to his father, so much so that he kept the key to hand, yet hidden. Sami felt embarrassed for his father. Another woman, could it be that banal? Someone at his work, since he was always home early and never travelled. Whatever his secret was, Sami didn’t want to know. Even so, he untied the string and picked up the first letter.
Dear Nabil, it started. Sami’s cheeks flushed, but he forced himself to read on. You have no idea how much I appreciated the book of poems by Qabbani. I know my parents don’t want me to write to you any more, but I can’t possibly stop myself…
A young girl too! This was too much. Sami read on and his cheeks turned redder. She wrote about his hands and lips, even complimented his sticky-out ears. Your moustache, she wrote, is the most handsome one I’ve ever seen on a man. When he turned the page, he saw the name. It was signed Your Samira, for ever.
Sami smiled to himself, still embarrassed but for a different reason now – for catching a glimpse of his parents as young lovers. He tied the string around his mother’s love letters and locked the box. He wondered what kind of person his father had been back then, when Nabil met Samira and tried to get her attention with poetry, the oldest trick in the book for the infatuated. He thought about who he had been a few years later, when they were married and his older brother was a baby and the secret police had forced their way into their home. When they pulled out books, opened drawers and toppled furniture. When his father was dragged into the street and his fate was decided by a glance.
Sami put the key back under the marble ashtray. You could get used to most things, even the whistling sound of incoming rockets and missiles. But maybe not the knowledge that everything can be taken from you.