After a while, he almost forgot who they were, and that they had threatened to kill him after he published their names and pictures on social media. Abu Omar said that was water under the bridge. And when it came down to it, wasn’t a certain level of attention a good thing? It lent them credibility and made it easier for them to spread the word.
‘Let’s not dwell on the past,’ said Abu Omar and put a teaspoon of honey in Sami’s teacup.
‘Martyrs,’ he continued. ‘God’s sons and daughters who give their lives in the struggle for justice. Innocent teenagers who die for a higher purpose. Is it God’s will? Of course not. But things are the way they are.’
The words blurred together. Abu Omar’s voice was almost as soothing as the honey.
‘Our country is at war and God has his hands full and we have to have faith, and to trust our faith to guide and support us in our darkest hour. Isn’t it better to fall in the struggle than to lie down without resisting?’
Abu Omar stroked his beard and counted his prayer beads. His nails were strangely clean, neatly cut and manicured. Abu Omar and the others talked for hours, or so it felt, while Sami listened in silence. At midnight he almost dozed off, sitting on a cushion on the floor, but then he twitched and was suddenly wide awake.
‘So,’ Abu Omar repeated, ‘will you come tomorrow? We have plenty of beds and our house is safe.’
‘Yes, or I mean, let me sleep on it.’
When the three men had left, Sami gathered up his things and sent Muhammed a message.
I have to leave. Call u later.
* * *
—
He packed only his laptop, camera and water can, and decided to come back for clothes and cooking utensils later, or find new ones.
When he started to move through the city ruins, his heart eventually stopped racing and he was able to think back over the day before. His little brother hadn’t died, it was just a misunderstanding and a mistake. Malik would appear before him any moment.
Had the three jihadists been a bad dream too? Sitting in his flat, talking about martyrdom? Rage surged inside him, caused in equal parts by them forcing themselves on him when he was in the throes of grief, and by it almost succeeding. After hours of talking and ingratiating voices, their words had got under his skin.
Sami tried to conjure a parallel reality in which his little brother was still alive. He heard Malik’s voice, and went over the fights they had had and invented new endings, in which instead of standing his ground, he yielded and compromised. What had they even argued about? Silly things, like which movies to watch and who got the most attention from their parents. The stray dog that Malik had brought home to cheer up their mum. When he told Sami that he wanted to work in IT, just like his older brothers, and Sami had said it wouldn’t suit him, when what he had meant was that his little brother was too social, too loving, to be stuck in an office. When Malik had chosen to stay at the beginning of the siege, as if he wasn’t old enough to make a choice of his own.
He embellished old scenes to make himself less of a big brother scolding and looking for faults, and more of a sibling his little brother could have turned to with questions and problems.
He wished so desperately that he had been better at offering a warm embrace and a shoulder to lean on. But there was nothing in between, no space between the lines to rest in.
33
THE STREET IN Bab Tudmor was deserted. Even the cats had left. That was why he went there: no one would suspect the house to be inhabited. No sane person would ever consider settling there. There was no water or electricity, but the living room and parts of the kitchen and bathroom were intact, and that was where Sami set up camp after Malik’s death.
Sami ran his hand over the cracked bathroom mirror and saw his brother. He stroked his brother’s cheeks and beard and saw his eyes well up with tears. The reflection trembled but he was still, completely still. He saw his brother lean on the sink and only then did he become aware of his lightheadedness and collapsed on the cool stone floor.
When he woke, he saw the blood. He made a fire, boiled half of the water in his can, undressed and washed his clothes in a bucket. Scooped some of the water over his body and dried himself on a shirt he used as a towel.
His new accommodation had only one major drawback and it was a fundamental one: the house, or what was left of it, virtually touched the red line. Which was to say it was right on the frontline between the regime’s army and the rebels. A six-lane motorway separated them; snipers shot at each other round the clock. He didn’t have to worry about airstrikes but the Free Syrian Army’s presence was weak. The regime’s soldiers could at any time sneak across the road to conduct a night raid.
Sami decided to break his promise and buy a gun. Once upon a time Sarah would have been proud of him for daring to join the armed struggle; now it seemed not to matter. Her messages grew ever shorter and more sporadic. She apologized but claimed the power cuts were becoming more frequent, even in the countryside. In the end, Sami couldn’t get his hands on a gun anyway. The prices on the black market had soared and he couldn’t afford one. The irony was that food on the black market was even more expensive and hard to find.
During the day he lived with the constant sound of gunfire. At night he woke up thinking someone was in the house. He crept round and checked the adjacent rooms and peered out at the nearby houses, but it was just the wind. He lay down on one of the sofas and saw the contours of the room slowly take shape in the dark. He pictured the six-lane motorway and the bodies on it, on the red line, where no one could retrieve them for burial. He didn’t believe in jinn, not really, but then there was the soldier who had met a talking cat. What if the spirits were feeling restless and looking for new homes? Maybe one had already taken up residence inside him; maybe he was one of the living dead.
From now on, he was alone. It was too arduous and dangerous to make his way over to Muhammed’s or Leyla’s. He almost hadn’t been able to tell them about Malik’s and Anwar’s deaths because he knew that as soon as he said the words, it would be real. They would be gone. And when he did finally tell them, Muhammed cried, and it felt like he cried for them both.
Sami spent most of his time inside his newfound house aside from short outings every other or every third day to fill up his water can and look for food and clothes. One time he found a fungus growing on a wooden door. He broke it off and put it in his backpack, pondering whether he dared to eat it. He did. He left it to his stomach to work out whether or not it was edible.
Before, street names and addresses, maps and GPS had been used to navigate. But now the city had changed shape; it had turned into a maze and people had to find other signposts. He could go hours without seeing another person. The concrete had risen up like an iceberg and the city was shrouded in a blanket of ash and dust. Sometimes he had an urge to lick the wall of a building or grab a fistful of the reddish-brown, iron-rich ash and put it in his mouth. The whitish-grey ash, on the other hand, he associated only with death. He had heard it could be used as a natural disinfectant in lieu of soap but he couldn’t bring himself to try it.