* * *
—
We’ve started a school, he wrote to Sarah. The kids call me Mister Teacher, can u believe it?
For the first time in a long while, she texted a heart.
Mister Sami, it suits u. Bahebak kteer.
I love u too, he answered.
* * *
—
The next winter morning, there were thirty children in the courtyard. At the end of the week, closer to fifty. At first, Sami yelled at them when they fought or talked during class. But then he realized they were bored and viewed school as a break when they could see their friends. War was not constant battles, there were periods of tedium. At the end of the day, the children growing restless and playing was a good sign – better that than the apathetic look he had noticed in some children’s eyes.
Sami changed tactics and practised patience, giving them space to both play and learn new things. Mona and Amin were among the hardest-working students, shy but always helpful.
However, external circumstances made teaching more challenging. The regime’s airstrikes began with a couple of reconnaissance planes. Then the planes returned, circled above them and released their bombs. While the shells from mortars could weigh up to five pounds, the airdropped bombs were ten times bigger. The ground rumbled for miles. Smoke rose in mushroom-like clouds. During the airstrikes, hiding in a basement wasn’t an option; the bombs obliterated everything in their path.
If it was the Free Syrian Army the regime was targeting, the aerial assaults were not particularly helpful. The rebels cleaved to the red line, while the bombs were dropped over the city centre, where the civilians lived. Bombs aimed at the red line would have risked hitting the regime’s headquarters, since their strike radius was at least three-quarters of a mile.
Sami and Leyla continued to document events when they weren’t teaching. Leyla filmed and painted murals, believing art to be a way of reclaiming the city. Our hearts belong here, she wrote. We’re going to return. Sometimes she painted flowers and animals so the children would have something comforting to look at.
In an interview, much later, he heard Leyla describe her work. Body parts were the hardest things to film, she said. The man looking for a hand among the debris. The boy staring straight into the camera, in shock, not realizing he had lost a foot. The suffering of the animals was difficult, too. Limping pigeons and dogs without hind legs. The cats that gave in to hunger and ate human corpses. A porcelain cup could be devastating. Sitting on a table, waiting to be drunk from, no one coming to pick it up.
Sami agreed that the remnants of everyday life were unbearable. The children’s coats on the hooks, covered in dust, in the empty houses where they were looking for food. School backpacks, workbooks and felt-tip pens. Death was ever-present, breathing in their stead, an endless wait. When it stepped in and snatched away a life, it left a black hole that was soon filled with more waiting.
Even so, the airstrikes, too, became a sort of routine, predictable: twice or three times a week the aeroplanes approached. You had to do your errands at the right time of day, in the right place, and keep an eye out for scouting drones.
They tried to continue teaching as usual despite the airstrikes, to distract their students from the world around them. To let the classroom be a reminder of what everyday life used to be. But it was only possible up to a point. Even if the school remained a haven, they couldn’t protect the children for ever.
* * *
—
In the last days of January 2013, after taking pictures in the area, Sami ran into two of the children from school, Mona and Amin. The snow had melted and they were playing next to a blocked-off intersection near their house.
‘Look at my bike,’ Amin said proudly and climbed on the saddle.
‘What do you mean, your bike? It’s our bike,’ said his big sister.
‘That’s great. Where did you find it?’
They pointed in unison at a house whose façade had collapsed.
‘OK, but it’s dangerous in there. Bricks can come loose and fall down.’
‘How much does a brick hurt?’ Amin asked.
‘It depends on how big it is, obviously,’ Mona told him.
While they argued about the brick and who should have first go on the bike, Sami got out his camera. It was the hour before sunset and everything was golden. The evening light was filtered through the spokes, drawing lines of shadow on the asphalt.
‘Take our picture,’ Amin said and leaned one arm on the handlebar.
Mona picked up a white kitten with a black tail, which had come to them in hope for food. Sami snapped a few pictures and said it was getting late; their parents were probably waiting for them.
‘We’re just going to play for a bit longer, sir.’
The mortar shell hit half an hour later.
* * *
—
The shockwave had broken the windows in the adjacent buildings and no people could be seen in the concrete cloud that rose after the explosion. Searching the debris, they found the bike, whose red lacquer finish was blanketed by grey dust. Then they found Mona’s shoes, next to her braid with the pink hair tie. Amin’s body was warm when they dug it out, his jeans soaked with urine.
Their father cried when he saw the picture Sami had taken of the children, the moment when everything was still possible. When the black and white cat was trying to wriggle out of Mona’s arms. When Amin was balancing on the tall saddle with his tiptoes on the ground.
‘Is there anything I can do?’
The children’s father shook his head.
‘Post the picture. Let the world see.’
Sami thought about Nizar Qabbani, who had written about his wife’s death and expressed his grief and rage in poetry, in a poem that had outlived its author. But to what avail? It was still just words, as meaningless as the verses his grandmother had sung to him when he fell off his bike and broke his finger a long time ago. A life was a life. It could never be recreated in words or pictures.
* * *
—
Leyla told the other students about Mona and Amin’s death. She said there was a fixed number of souls on this Earth and when someone dies a metamorphosis takes place, through which the soul from the deceased passes to a newborn baby.
‘Where did you get that from?’ Sami asked her afterwards.
‘It was something my parents used to tell me,’ Leyla said.
‘Do you really think that’s how it works?’
‘What does it matter what I think? What matters is what the children think.’