29
‘WHERE DID IT hit? Around yours?’
‘No. And you, is everyone on your street OK?’
Sami let out a sigh of relief when he heard Leyla’s voice but then they fell silent. Someone else had been hit instead, in one of the myriad airstrikes that had finally forced them to close the school, in the beginning of summer. Someone else was lying in the dark, staring up at a ray of light and a corner of blue sky, a window in the debris.
He ran outside and forgot for a moment where he was going. There, the silvery cypress trees. There, the sun shimmering over the rooftops, over the houses that still had rooftops. There, the wooden fence and, behind the fence, the park with its swings and patch of greenery. Sami had played there as a child, swinging higher and higher until he almost reached the sky. One time Sami had challenged his little brother to jump from the top, after he himself had made a perfect landing in the dust. Malik tried and scraped both knees, and Sami made him promise not to tell their mum. But even though Malik was hurt, he was the one who joked about it, so Sami wouldn’t feel bad.
‘Better practise,’ Malik said and dusted off his wobbly knees.
‘Practise for what?’
‘For when God throws us out of heaven.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Sami laughed. ‘You’ll go to paradise, I’m going to hell.’
‘Yeah, I know. But someone should keep you company, right?’
Other times, Sami and Muhammed used to go to the playground in the evenings, sharing a cigarette, his friend’s pale face and curly hair illuminated by the soft glow. All this seemed so long ago.
Sami took a step forward and felt a pain rise when his foot hit a brick. That was when he remembered – the missile.
After helping to dig out the dead, they buried the bodies in the former playground. Sami recognized one of the women he had seen as recently as the week before. She had been hiding in a stairwell, kissing a rebel soldier she had met at a checkpoint. She wore the same red headscarf now as they put her in the ground.
That night, Sami and Malik made a fire to cook soup, and the next day Sami went out and chopped down the fence by the playground. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before; the fence was dry and old and would burn well.
Sami chopped wood once or twice a day, usually at dawn before the airstrikes began. It might be old chairs, kitchen tables or thick limbs from damaged trees. Every other or every third day he scavenged for food, usually after a bomb raid when there was reason to expect a moment’s peace.
The mortar shells, on the other hand, rained down on them both day and night. Sami brought his camera and took pictures, then returned before nightfall and hung out with friends until late.
He felt both relief and sorrow when the room began to grow lighter. It was all going to start over again. The future was narrowing until it was no wider than the barrel of a rifle.
I dunno if u were brave or crazy to stay, Sarah wrote.
Neither, he answered. I was feeling guilty.
But guilty over what, exactly? That he hadn’t done enough or that he’d done too much? Or guilty to have survived so far, when so many others hadn’t?
* * *
—
After a while, Sami forgot his own smell. He reeked in the heat but there was no way of differentiating his own body odour from the smell of dirty and unwashed clothes. Sami washed when he could, but the choice between drinking water and clean clothes was a no-brainer. He boiled the water to kill the worst of the bacteria but his bowels were chronically unsettled.
It might have been the food they ate. Rice that had lain on the floor of bombed-out shops for over a year was collected and rinsed. Unripe fruit was eaten, peel and all. ‘Bread’ consisted of wheat husks they did their best to separate from rat droppings, glass and stones, kneaded together and baked over embers.
‘One day, we’ll be eating rats,’ Muhammed said.
That was the line in the sand; the day they had to eat rats, it was over. Sami couldn’t bring himself to eat cat either. At the start of the siege, when there was still food to be found, he had given the stray cats expired tins of tuna. They still gathered outside his door and meowed when they saw him, long after he had stopped feeding them.
One time, he saw a man aiming into the foliage of a tree.
‘Shh,’ the man said and looked up at two almond-shaped pupils.
‘Shame on you, you can’t shoot a defenceless cat.’
‘My stomach’s not ashamed. Would you prefer I shoot you? Great, now it got away.’
During another one of his careful walks, Sami heard his name being called from across the street. He looked up and couldn’t believe his eyes. It was Younes, the electrician who had been arrested shortly after the raid on their IT company.
Four years had passed since they last saw each other. Sami looked around and dashed across the street, and Younes embraced him. It really was him. And he looked the same, if skinnier and with his hair grown out and a scar across his forehead. There had been no trial, Younes said. They asked questions about Esther, his half-French girlfriend in Tel Aviv, and his work for the IT company, and then they read out the sentence: terrorist and spy for Israel. He was taken to a prison outside Aleppo and subjected to torture. The scar on his forehead was from a cable. His back looked even worse, he said. He thought he would die in his cell, as so many prisoners had done before him. But then, one day, he heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions and unfamiliar footsteps in the hallway. The Free Syrian Army had taken over the prison. They spent a week going through the prisoners’ files, then Younes and other people they considered innocent were released.
‘And now you’re here,’ Sami said.
‘This is freer than I’ve been in four years.’
Younes carried a belt of cartridges over his chest and said he had joined the Free Syrian Army. He didn’t have to pretend his street style any more, Sami thought.
‘And Esther?’
The same moment he asked, he regretted it. What were the chances of them staying in contact over the years? But Younes smiled.
‘She’s good. We keep in touch. She was the first one I contacted when I came out of prison.’
A couple of days later, on Muhammed’s birthday, Sami invited Younes for dinner. On the menu was, incredibly enough, pancake. Muhammed had managed to buy a batch of flour from a regime soldier – on a few occasions during the siege, a temporary smuggle path would open across the red line. Buying food from the enemy didn’t make sense but he was a good contact and Muhammed trusted him.
They gathered on the sagging sofas. There was Sami and his little brother, who had turned fifteen and didn’t seem so little any more. Younes was half lying on the couch, texting someone and smiling. Leyla, with her scarf tied round her head, talked with Anwar about opening a new school in the besieged area.