‘I barely recognize you,’ Samira said. ‘Has Mother fed you?’
‘Of course I’ve fed him,’ his grandmother said and shook her head. ‘But the poor thing doesn’t eat much. I’ve set the table in the kitchen. Follow me.’
Their reunion was warm and tear-filled, and yet it was as though he was looking at himself from the outside. This is how a son who has been separated from his family for two years should act, he thought, and tried to fill out his own contours. He sat down at the table and attempted to drink and to eat, but he knew they would ask at any moment. As soon as he found his breath, he would have to tell them.
Nabil’s eyes were wet and he said very little, but as they sat there he continued to kiss Sami’s cheeks and stroke his hands. In the end it fell to Samira to tell Sami what their life had been like, all the things they had never been able to discuss over the phone.
His parents had been staying with a relative in the countryside since the start of the siege, and avoided the worst of the airstrikes. Instead, they had watched through their windows as their neighbour’s house exploded in a sea of fire. Not even during iftar, when the fast was broken during Ramadan, did the regime’s bombs stop falling.
And his sister and older brother? They only had sporadic contact with Ali. He was wanted by the secret police and was still in hiding. Hiba, her husband and two children had fled across an open field but had been spotted and shot at by regime soldiers. Hiba’s daughter was now in a wheelchair after being hit in the back by grenade shrapnel. Hiba had tried to cross the border to Turkey to seek specialist medical care, but the aid organization they had been in contact with had told them their daughter’s injuries were not considered sufficiently acute for humanitarian response.
Then his mum grew quiet and Nabil looked at her, and she looked at Sami. She folded her hands on the table and his dad moved a cloth napkin to his nose. Sami knew then that the time had come.
‘We already know,’ Samira said, ‘but we want to hear it from you, in person. Tell us about Malik.’
And so he began to tell them how Malik, their youngest and most beloved son and his little brother, had died. He told them about his last days. He told them about his unquenchable spirit. And he told them how he had given Malik’s shoes to someone who needed them more and then buried his body in the stony ground.
* * *
—
The next day Sarah came to visit. He heard her voice from the open window, from under the orange tree where his grandmother was collecting fruit.
‘Is Sami here?’
He opened the door and there she stood. Her cheeks were slimmer. Her eyes seemed brighter. Her hair had grown out and turned black; only the ends were still red.
‘Sarah.’
They hesitated on the front steps as though they were each waiting for the other to set the tone for their meeting. Sarah had already told him she wasn’t leaving Syria, that she couldn’t go with him. Maybe things had ended between them two years ago, the day he chose to stay in Homs, at the start of the siege. But now, were they friends or lovers? To what extent had time and circumstances made them strangers? Then Sarah leaned in and kissed him on his cheeks, gave him a brief and hard hug. Friends. Something sank down inside him.
* * *
—
They ignored the risk that someone might see them and sat outside on the warm stone steps with tea that Sami had made. Sami had to feel the sun on his skin, if only for a while. When he passed Sarah the cup, she smiled, and there was the dimple, the most perfect shape he had ever seen.
‘You have to come with me,’ he said.
‘I have to stay,’ Sarah answered. ‘I can’t leave the children I’m teaching.’
She saw them almost every day, practised grammar and spelling, blew on their scraped knees and stroked the hair out of their eyes. She was their big sister and their friend. A light breeze rustled the leaves and when he looked her in the eyes, he realized they weren’t brighter but filled with a translucent darkness.
‘How has it been outside Damascus?’ he asked.
She folded her hands around her cup. ‘Not easy.’
Their neighbours had been suspicious of the city people seeking refuge in the villages. Since when had they ever cared about the countryside? Since when had the city people taken any interest in things like drought, water shortages and the other challenges farmers faced? It served them right to have to pay through the nose for rent and food now that the countryside was suddenly good enough for them.
She talked until she was almost out of breath, then they sat in silence for a moment.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sami asked, finally.
‘Nothing, nothing at all. It’s just that…your cheeks, and your wrists – they look like they would snap like twigs.’
Sami had changed. Of course he had changed. He had, for instance, lost twenty-five pounds, and he had been skinny before. But somehow he had managed to forget or deny it in the lead-up to her visit. He figured she wouldn’t be able to tell, that it wasn’t too bad.
He tried to smile but he knew it was true. He took her hands in his and felt their warmth.
‘But aside from the physical I’m the same, right?’
‘I don’t know. It’s like you’re not really here.’
He looked straight ahead, beyond her and the orange tree. She was the same but moved more quickly than he remembered, and now she pulled her hair back and bit her nails. Maybe he had slowed down while her pace had increased, like two instruments playing to different beats. Maybe that was one of the more subtle effects of the war, that people lost their natural rhythm. Instead you vibrated according to external circumstances, attentive to the smallest shifts in atmosphere that might indicate danger, an approaching threat.
‘How is your family? Did your dad get out?’
Sarah’s dad had been arrested in one of the mass round-ups the regime performed before every round of negotiations with the opposition. They would arrest up to a thousand people in just a few days, on trifling or trumped-up charges, only to release them again as part of a deal. But Sarah’s father had not been released. He was from an affluent family, which made him a perfect subject for blackmail.
‘We sold everything we had,’ Sarah told him.
‘And they let him go?’
She nodded and took out a photo from her pocket. A picture of her father lying in a hospital bed, his ribs showing through his skin, which was transparent and as thin as rice paper.
Sami put his arms around Sarah and she leaned her head against his shoulder. He remembered the first electric feeling of her legs touching his in the university cafeteria. He remembered when they went to the festival in Palmyra and stayed up late, sharing candied nuts they had bought from the food stalls. The night sky in Palmyra had seemed bigger, starrier and a darker shade of blue than the one in Homs. It had been a different time. Everything had felt possible.