He didn’t know when he would see Leyla again but they said goodbye that day as if it wouldn’t be long. She was either going to stay in Lebanon or try to get to Turkey. In the meantime, the women and children gave her the strength to carry on. They gave her meaning amid the meaninglessness.
‘If you go to Turkey, I’m sure Younes will have a place for you,’ Sami said.
‘So he managed to escape too?’
‘Yeah, shortly after me. I heard that he crossed the northern border on foot and is reunited with his girlfriend.’
‘I’m happy for them,’ Leyla said. ‘Maybe we’ll all be reunited one day. Wouldn’t that be something?’
She smiled but looked sad, and Sami gave her a long hug.
* * *
—
Sami continued to visit the camps, to listen and take pictures, without knowing what to do with what he heard and saw. These were not his experiences and yet they belonged to him: all these individual experiences formed part of their people’s memory.
Winter was coming. A year ago, the storm had howled outside his hiding place in Homs as he lay on the sofa, worrying about how long the firewood would last. In Lebanon, the winds from the sea were milder and heavy with moisture. But it wasn’t his home, it never could be. Waiting and watching were wearing on him. His friends asked him to stop jiggling his leg and pulling dry skin off his lips.
He wrote to the news agency he had worked for in Homs. Sorry, they replied, they couldn’t do anything, but they sent him the name of a contact of theirs at the organization Reporters without Borders.
The shortest day of the year came and went, and afterwards he could feel the change inside. He had a reply from Reporters without Borders, asking Sami to submit papers and evidence of his journalistic work. France was his best option, they said. They couldn’t fill out the paperwork for him or seek asylum on his behalf, but they could guide him through the process and attest to his being in danger on account of his work as a photographer. And so, one month after all the paperwork had been submitted, he was called to the French embassy in Beirut.
The waiting room was airy and there were only a few other people in it. There were people who had waited longer than him, months, years; there were people who applied again and again. But most of the refugees were not in the waiting room. They lived on the run in their own country, shut out of their streets and homes. A small number of Syrians, but still more numerous than the people who tried their luck at the embassy, set off on their own, primarily to neighbouring countries: Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Then there were some who dreamt of Europe. In France the people had risen up against a bloody regime once and declared liberty, equality and fraternity – they should understand.
* * *
—
Was it luck or fate, or just chance? Maybe his paperwork was enough, maybe the woman interviewing him was having a particularly good day. Sami knew several other journalists whose applications had been denied. But not his.
He didn’t have to live in a tent, hide in a lorry or climb into a leaky plastic boat to cross the Mediterranean; he was one of the lucky few who were welcomed before they even arrived. His passport was stamped and a date set for his journey. He had just enough money left to buy the ticket.
And so Sami found himself in an aeroplane for the first time. The whirling sound of the propellers, the vibrations in the body, everything was both new and familiar. Only before, the aircraft had been passing over him during the siege, leaving him in white horror.
When the plane took off, Sami felt his body press against the seat, felt it become heavier. And then came that same feeling he had had in the sea. Weightlessness.
Sami thought about the bird he and his sister had thrown from the roof, a lifetime ago. He was hurling himself out into the unknown now, and hoping his wings would carry him.
Epilogue
MARCH THE THIRTEENTH, 2015. The rain pattered against the windows as Sami looked out at a line of aeroplanes waiting to take off.
‘Bienvenue à Paris. Welcome to Paris.’ The air hostess held out a bowl of chocolate hearts wrapped in red tinfoil.
In the airport, people hurried to the baggage reclaim and Sami let the stream of muffled footsteps carry him. The speaker announced departures and delayed passengers and it struck him he wasn’t one of them. He was neither late nor early, nor on his way. He had arrived, in what was to be his new home country: France.
Sami figured someone would be there to meet him. That was how it worked at airports in the movies. People came home and embraced each other with flowers and kisses. But no one knew he was coming. He picked his bag up from the belt, tried to decipher the foreign-language signs and didn’t know where to go.
Reporters without Borders had reserved a hotel room for him in northern Paris for one night. They had also arranged a meeting with a refugee hostel.
He didn’t know anyone, didn’t speak the language and it was his first time out of Syria, not counting Lebanon. But it was going to be all right. It had to be. What are you waiting for, his Grandpa Faris would have said. The Damascus of Europe is waiting for you.
* * *
—
That first morning Sami woke to the rising noise of morning traffic. From the narrow hotel window he saw the trains pass by on elevated tracks; under the bridge, cars and mopeds jostled for space in a busy intersection. There were two canals, lined with cafés and trees in bud. Pigeons took off in cascades and spread out across the watercolour-grey sky.
Sami walked along the streets and zigzagged between the rain puddles. He thought of Muhammed, of their walks and races to school, and he thought of other friends from his childhood and the army and all through the siege. How deep and at the same time fleeting friendships could be. You never knew who would cross your path and change your life. They just showed up one day and decided to stay by your side, until one day they were gone. Was it the nature of war or were friendships always unpredictable like that? Sami wasn’t sure. He only knew that the war had separated him from his closest friends and he no longer knew where many of them were. And yet it felt like he was carrying them with him.
* * *
—
He moved into a refugee hostel housed in a former factory, with bare concrete rooms and windows that overlooked a cemetery. Sami unpacked his bag and studied each object in turn: the camera, the memory cards, the clothes and the miniature Quran his mother had given him when he started his military service. The first new item he purchased was a kettle so he could make himself a cup of maté when his insomnia became unbearable.
Sami was creating a context, even though everything was new and fragile. His biggest worry was that time seemed to be disintegrating. He had a hard time telling the months and days of the week apart. When people asked how long he had been in Paris, or which day he wanted to meet up, he was unable to bring himself to place the dates in his mind. Other people seemed to think of time as a straight line with fixed points for significant events, but for him everything blended together into a jumble.