The water brought back a feeling he had forgotten: the feeling of weightlessness. He soared free in the deep blue. He was part of the sea and the sea was part of him.
* * *
—
It was after his short outing to the beach that Sami realized he had to leave Beirut. He couldn’t stay cooped up in the flat for ever. His money wouldn’t last long and in Beirut he couldn’t work, study or lead a normal life. Even if he wasn’t stopped at a checkpoint, a lot of Lebanese people looked askance at the Syrian refugees streaming across the border. Every third person in Lebanon was a refugee, primarily Palestinian and Syrian. They needed medical care, food and work and the poorest of them lived in enormous refugee camps on the outskirts of the cities. In many cases, they were people from the Syrian countryside, farmers and uneducated people, families with many children and elderly relatives, who couldn’t raise the money to go any further. He had heard about Syrians being attacked for no other reason than that they were refugees.
With the help of a friend, Sami managed to get from Beirut to Tripoli in northern Lebanon. Again he travelled through the checkpoints with a military escort who called him his cousin, his nephew, his future brother-in-law – he didn’t know any more. Except nameless and paperless, that was who he was.
Tripoli was a port city at the foot of Mount Lebanon. Calling it a safe place was an exaggeration but it was still easier to live there, farther from the Hezbollah. At least while he looked into the possibility of seeking asylum in another country.
Something about Tripoli reminded him of Homs. The two cities were roughly the same size, majority Sunni and had similar senses of humour. He missed his hometown, but he realized he had left in the nick of time. A couple of weeks after he crossed the six-lane motorway in the moonlight, the regime forces had reclaimed the city centre. He still hadn’t heard from many of his friends that were left behind.
* * *
—
‘You need to get out more,’ said Muhammed’s cousin. ‘Working will take your mind off things.’
‘But what work could I do?’
‘Any work. You’ll go crazy otherwise.’
He was right, of course. So during his autumn in Lebanon, Sami volunteered for an aid organization working in the refugee camps. The organization arranged activities and offered psychological support to women and children. Once a week he took photographs to document life in the camps.
The first time he went he had to stop for a minute to take in what he saw: the blue and white windswept tents, spreading out in their thousands. The camp was like a city, with streets and trade going on in some of the tents, and families doing what they could to gain a sense of privacy and regular everyday life.
That was where he met Leyla again. He knew she was working in one of the camps and asked if he could accompany her one day. He recognized her just from the way she walked, and when they embraced each other, neither of them wanted to let go.
‘Hey, little brother,’ she said and ruffled his hair. ‘I’ve never seen it this long before.’
‘The fresh saltwater winds do it good.’
‘Looks like it.’
She had cut her hair short and her features seemed softer, her cheekbones less accentuated. Oddly enough, it was easier to reunite with Leyla than with his parents or with Sarah. Leyla and he had been through so much together. They understood each other without having to explain.
‘How did you get out?’ Sami asked.
‘The same way you did, I assume.’
Like him, she preferred not to talk about herself. It was a way of avoiding having to feel. Instead, she told him about the activities in the camp.
The children painted to keep themselves busy and have fun, but also as a way of dealing with traumatic experiences. The drawings were of stickmen with weapons and aeroplanes dropping pinhead-sized bombs. The children weren’t sad while they were drawing, which made Sami even more sad. Many of them had no memories of life before the war.
There was painting for adults, too. Most didn’t want their picture taken or to talk about their experiences when Sami was around. But Leyla looked them in the eyes and made them relax, and some seemed to almost forget his presence.
‘You can’t take my picture,’ said one woman. ‘But I’ll tell you my story.’
Then the woman turned to Leyla and began to speak. Her name was Nadine and she was from Daraa. She had joined the protests during the first few days, together with her neighbour Rasha. When people were shot, she went to the hospitals and helped wherever she could. She had no medical training but in time learnt to extract bullets and put on bandages. Soldiers visited her family home and asked: where is Nadine? And her family answered: she’s not here. They came again and asked: where is Nadine? And her family cried and answered: she’s not here.
Until one day, she was there.
‘These are the terrorists,’ said the regime soldiers when they delivered Nadine and Rasha to the detention centre.
The women were separated and Nadine was brought to an interrogation room where an officer was eating pistachio nuts and casually flicking the shells at her. After a few hours, the interrogator asked if she wanted to see her friend. Nadine heard the screaming even before the door was opened; Rasha was lying on the stone floor inside. Two men were holding her arms and legs, while a third man moved on top of her with his trousers down. Oh god, oh god, Rasha screamed fitfully.
‘What do you want from me? Do you want me to confess?’ Nadine asked the soldier. The door was closed and she was brought back to the interrogation room. That evening, they led her down into a basement. Finally, I’ll get to sleep, Nadine thought. But then the door opened and four men entered.
‘I thought about Rasha and stepped out of myself. It was as though I left my body, as though I turned into a spirit who soared up to the ceiling and watched the pain from above. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital. A nurse whispered and told me, shh, the doctor was going to do me a big favour and tell the soldiers I was dead. It was a big surprise: apparently, I wasn’t dead. For a long time, I lay on the gurney, trying to feel without feeling anything.’
Nadine showed them her painting: a white wedding dress on a bed of black blood.
‘I got married the week before I was arrested. My husband left me when he found out about the rape. Rasha killed herself after a few weeks in the prison, or at least that’s what I heard.’
Sami listened to the woman but was unable to fully take in her story, even less to say something that would calm her.
Later, Leyla put a hand on his shoulder. She told him some of the children had been conceived when their mothers were raped. Their trauma was double, in part caused by the war, in part by their mothers’ torn feelings about them. The women’s pain was double, too, caused first by the violence perpetrated by the regime soldiers and subsequently by being shunned by their families.