‘My friend.’ Muhammed embraced him on the doorstep as if it had been a lifetime since they last saw each other.
‘It felt like I lost you at the same time as your little brother and Anwar. How are you?’
‘You know.’ Sami shrugged, then suddenly noticed the grey wool sweater Muhammed was wearing. ‘Is that Malik’s?’
‘Do you mind that I’m wearing it? It’s been difficult to find warm clothes.’
‘No, not at all. It was just…’
His voice broke and the grief came over him without him being prepared for it. They walked inside and Leyla rose from the couch. She took his hands and kissed his cheeks, her lips cold and her fingers blue. Both she and Muhammed had become thinner since he last saw them. And although Sami was happy that they were all together again, he felt discouraged, because in their empty eyes he saw himself.
‘How about your plans to start a new school?’ Sami asked.
Leyla sat down heavily. ‘It’s not possible any more.’
She held out an arm and Sami sat down beside her on the sofa. Muhammed fiddled with a stereo until they could hear quiet music, then took a few steps into the room and declared that they were not under any circumstances to talk about sad things, for this evening was a feast.
‘Did Abu Omar ask for me?’ Sami interrupted and felt his legs shaking.
Muhammed nodded. ‘But don’t worry, I said you were dead.’
‘Which is almost true. You look like a ghost,’ Leyla said.
‘You too. Both of you. Which makes this a ghost party, I guess.’
Muhammed raised the volume and Sami recognized the mixed rock classics they had played during the car trips as teenagers.
‘Can you remember when you last had a decent meal?’ Muhammed asked and waved a wooden spoon in the air.
‘I remember the arsenic pancake,’ Sami said.
‘This is different, I promise. Smell that meat?’
Sami remembered the smell of roast chicken in Karim’s restaurant and his mother’s lamb stew; he remembered juicy steaks, kebabs and steaming beef kibbeh. And this, which Muhammed insisted was meat stew, smelled nothing like meat.
‘Are you sure? Have you tried it?’ Leyla asked and pulled her scarf tighter around her shoulders.
‘It’s one hundred per cent animal. You won’t be disappointed,’ Muhammed reassured her. ‘When the revolution is victorious and we’re living in a villa by the sea, I’m going to write A Survivor’s Cookbook. It’s going to be a bestseller.’
Their expectations rose dizzyingly. Something akin to saliva moistened their mouths. Sami and Leyla nestled into the sofas; Muhammed handed out bowls. A charred cooking pot sat on a moth-eaten jumper on the coffee table. Muhammed waited for silence, like a magician waiting to pull a rabbit out of his black hat. He lifted the lid. The pot contained a watery, brownish soup with flat rectangles floating in it. Their excitement was dampened somewhat, but they held out their bowls while Muhammed served. Leyla put a spoonful of broth in her mouth.
‘You should probably come up with a plan B in case the cookbook thing doesn’t work out,’ she said.
‘It’s not that bad, is it? Sami, what do you think?’
He stuck his spoon in the soup and fished out a piece of meat. Sami chewed and thought to himself that it was like chewing a rug. A sheepskin rug, that had spent years on a dirty floor, collecting dust and grime, and then been picked up, rinsed tolerably, cut into squares and boiled for hours.
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Muhammed said. ‘You just cut off the wool and boil the skin for a few hours.’
Sami was surprised to find it was possible to fall short of his expectations. But the so-called meat was in fact inedible. Afterwards they had tea with shaving gel, which gave the beverage a hint of sweetness.
Moments like this cut through the meaninglessness with a metallic white light and almost made him smile. What if anyone could see them there, in the basement, chewing boiled sheepskin? Wasn’t it comical, this human existence? How your life contained many lives, layer upon layer, like a nesting doll or an onion? How you never knew what to expect?
Before, he would never have been able to imagine this. The way the rest of the world would never have been able to imagine this, because most people only know about their own lives and one or two generations back. If the world knew this, it wouldn’t let it continue, naturally. And so Sami laughed, at the ignorance of other people and at himself, who only now realized that everything he had ever learnt was meaningless. He should have been learning how to make fire and to dress in layers. How to determine whether a plant is poisonous or not. How to find and purify water.
In the before times, he had worried about unfinished homework or a spilled drink. In the before times, he had been able to obsess about a rash word or a rash action. All of that was nothing. Insignificant. It was about finding warmth, shelter and water, in that order.
35
THAT WINTER, THE last one in the siege, brought a white storm in over Homs. The snow rose in plumes of smoke and whipped across the rooftops. The wind howled and whistled through cracks as though the house were an organ. Sami kept the small wood-burning stove lit around the clock. His fingernails were purple and his cuticles black with soot and oil. The sofa was too short to stretch out on; he spent his nights with his legs pulled into his chest, counting the seconds between the rumblings. His hair, which had grown long once more, started to fall out. He slept with two hats on and in the mornings they were full of tufts. He cut it himself with nail scissors but kept part of his beard for warmth.
It was during the protracted blizzard that Sami stopped praying. He had never performed the daily prayers with much dedication; he preferred to pray when he felt a need for it. But now, after burying his little brother, in their hometown, which was no longer theirs, what was there to hope or pray for? Sometimes he felt guilty about the shoes, that he hadn’t let his brother keep his shoes.
* * *
—
A gun battle broke out in a nearby house; one half of the building was dominated by the rebel army and the other by regime soldiers. They were so close they could see each other’s faces, so close they would be able to recognize an old classmate or neighbour or barber among the enemy, through the bullet holes in the wall.
But it was as though the fighting no longer concerned Sami. He slept and watched reruns of the cooking show Fatafeat, a kind of elaborate self-inflicted pain that still gave him some pleasure. Despite his hunger, he knew it wasn’t hunger that was going to kill him. It was more likely he would die from dehydration or exposure on a night with sub-zero temperatures, or that a blood infection would eat him up from the inside. And yet, all those thoughts of food. It would be a long time before he could pick the first spring grass and the delicate green leaves of the bushes, and another few weeks after that before the first unripe fruits would appear on the few remaining trees.