He needed someone to talk to about all of this. On occasion, he caught himself saying words or full sentences out loud to his little brother or his childhood friend. The mice squeaked in response and darted about the floor. There was nothing to look forward to; loneliness enveloped him like a blanket. He rarely left his room.
But he had a small quantity of ground coffee beans left, which Muhammed had given him before he attempted the leap across the red line. A good day was a day when Sami could make coffee, had enough tobacco to roll a cigarette and it was warm enough to sit on the roof. He took up a couple of sofa cushions. Turned his face to the sun and studied his garden: a six-by-six-foot patch of sand, rat shit and soil. He had found the radish seeds in an abandoned house. There wasn’t time to let the roots grow; he picked the tender leaves and ate them like lettuce.
It was there on the roof that Sami pondered his future and finally concluded that there was only one way out. The way he had already rejected. The way that had claimed Muhammed’s life: crossing the red line.
36
IT WAS THE biggest decision of his life. It was not only about escaping the siege. If he succeeded, he would also have to leave the country. To stay in the regime-controlled area would be too dangerous.
Having made his decision, Sami got in touch with a few people who might be able to help him: a distant relative, a childhood acquaintance and a woman he had got to know online through his work as a photographer. They in turn negotiated with people on the regime side.
While he waited, he found lentils. Sami ran his hand over the dusty kitchen counter and gathered them up: twelve pale red lentils. They were tiny, round discs, like miniature versions of doughballs before the baker rolls them flat. He put the lentils in his jacket pocket, scraping the last one from his greasy fingers and pulling the zipper closed. Not today, maybe tomorrow. It was easier to endure the hunger when it was voluntary, when he knew he could make a soup of water and twelve lentils whenever he wanted.
The question was whether he could have eaten if he had decided to make soup. As so often, his worries had lodged themselves in his stomach.
Then he was given the go-ahead, and told a time and a place. After midnight, at a certain corner of Bab Tudmor. The only thing Sami had to do was cross the six-lane motorway; a regime soldier would be waiting for him on the other side. It sounded easy but required high-level strings to be pulled both politically and militarily. Could he really trust that every last soldier watching from rooftops and through cracks in walls was aware he had permission to leave? And what was waiting for him on the other side?
After weighing up all possible scenarios, there was only one way to know for sure: to cross the road and trust that his contacts had done a good job.
* * *
—
Sami closed his social media accounts, put his laptop in a plastic bag and buried it outside the house. He texted his parents and siblings, without telling them what he was about to do. It had been weeks since they last talked; messages didn’t use up the battery so fast. He thought about calling them now but was afraid that his voice would give him away. He then wrote to Sarah.
Bahebik kteer. I love you.
But before sending the message, he erased it. It had been too long since they had used those kinds of words and she would only get worried.
I’m thinking about u, he wrote instead.
He waited for an answer but the phone remained silent. Finally he took the SIM card out and broke it. He shook out the sofa cushions and swept the rug, even though he wasn’t coming back. And at midnight he left.
* * *
—
The full moon hung high in the warm sky, round and so bright its craters were visible. It spread enough light to guide Sami without him needing a torch. At the same time, the moonlight made him an easier target. He stood in a doorway without a door and listened for strange sounds. Maybe in all of this destruction it was possible to see how the world had been when there were still no people in it. Once, all of this had been under water; once, there had been nothing but mountains and valleys under a scorching sun. Aside from the sound of gunfire and the airstrikes and the stones under his shoes, in the beginning there was only this: silence.
An empty tin can was being pushed along by the wind, rattling out into the road. Half an hour before the appointed time he moved to the front of the building, hiding behind a shot-up car but still able to keep an eye on the road. He had never been this close to the red line before. The car was practically in the line of fire and its metal body was scant protection – bullets would easily pierce it if anyone spotted him.
Sami stiffened. A creaking followed by a muffled curse came from diagonally behind him, up in one of the rebel positions. He hunched down behind the open car door and glanced up. He couldn’t see anyone but he heard footsteps receding. It was probably a patrolling FSA soldier. He had warned them he was leaving and hoped they would honour their promise of letting him go.
While waiting for the signal from the other side, he examined the road ahead. Before the revolution it had been one of Homs’ busiest thoroughfares, especially during rush hour. In the moonlit night it looked like a tsunami had crashed over it – car parts, tree limbs and blocks of concrete covered the asphalt like ancient beasts. Weeds grew out of every crack.
There were other shapes too: twisted, cramping. The bodies had reached various stages of decomposition. A few feet away lay a pile of what looked like clothes that concealed the skeleton of someone who must have been killed during the earliest days of the siege. Further on was a fresh body emitting a stench of dead flesh and excrement. Probably one of the FSA soldiers he had been told had been shot the other day, who, like Muhammed, had been unlucky or deceived in his negotiations for safe passage. Maybe the same fate awaited him.
Then he saw it: a light in the darkness. The dot was no bigger than the glowing end of a cigarette. He held his breath and stepped out.
Sami couldn’t make out the faces of the bodies he stepped over but he thought he saw Muhammed’s lanky frame, curled up in the foetal position, with red spatter in his dark curls and among the freckles on his forehead.
He saw the body of a fifteen-year-old boy, who he could have sworn had the same black eyes, bare feet and thin layer of dust on his downy top lip as his little brother.
There was the faint smell of fire and he saw around forty bodies belonging to men, women and children, a girl with half a head.
Further on lay an older man with a walnut walking stick, a pipe in the corner of his mouth and a red rose in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Sami accidentally kicked a cracked gramophone. Passed a turtle with a broken shell. A grey kitten with a broken neck. He saw two schoolchildren, a boy and a girl, with a red bike between them. How could death, being so violent, give such a deceptive impression of innocence?
When Sami raised his eyes, it was as though the entire road had been transformed into a bridge under his feet. A bridge covered in blood and corpses, all turning their eyes on him. A tunnel with twelve men face down on the ground, with their hands tied behind them and bullets in the back of their heads.