Roundabout of Death Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  ROUNDABOUT OF DEATH

  “Some books stand as monuments to wars from which they arise. This is one of those books.”

  —ELLIOT ACKERMAN,

  author of Green on Blue and Waiting for Eden

  “A masterful distillation of one of the great tragedies of the twenty-first century, as stripped of artifice and sentimentality as it is undergirded with insight and empathy. Roundabout of Death is essential reading.”

  —DAN MAYLAND,

  author of The Doctor of Aleppo

  “A brilliant, kaleidoscopic and claustrophobic portrayal of the Syrian civil war. Khartash’s spare prose eloquently conveys horrors that require no rhetorical elevation. This is a fine book that deserves a wide readership, both on its own merits and because the Syrian disaster is by no means over.”

  —JONATHAN SPYER,

  author of Days of the Fall: A Reporter’s

  Journey in the Syria and Iraq Wars

  “Tells the incredible story of how the city of Aleppo has been reduced to piles of rubble and blood-soaked dirt in the wake of a celebrated history, its once proud identity now lost in the shadows.”

  —AL-BAYAN (Dubai)

  “[Faysal Khartash] has always written imaginatively about the character of Aleppo, especially those relegated to the margins, the deep trenches, revealing the city’s subterranean worlds. He intimately chronicles Aleppo’s alleyways and secret corners, which is why most of his novels have faced state censorship.”

  —AL-AKHBAR (Beirut)

  www.newvesselpress.com

  First published in Arabic as Dawwār al-mawt mā bayna alab wa-l -Raqqa

  Copyright © 2017 Faysal Khartash

  Translation copyright © 2021 Max Weiss

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Khartash, Faysal

  [Dawwār al-mawt mā bayna alab wa-l-Raqqa, English]

  Roundabout of Death/Faysal Khartash; translation by Max Weiss

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-939931-92-4

  Library of Congress Control Number 2020946573

  I. Syria—Fiction

  CONTENTS

  Translator’s Introduction Death and Boredom In Aleppo

  Saadallah Al-Jabiri Square, Aleppo

  Bab Antakya

  Apocalypse Now

  Cock Fight

  The School Opens Its Doors

  Two Little Bumps On Top Of My Head

  Why Is It Called Saadallah Al-Jabiri Square?

  Bombing...Bombing...Destruction...Devastation

  The Island Cafe

  From The Totally Decimated Joha’s Club To The Island Cafe

  We Grill And Grill And Don’t Even Make Back The Cost Of The Coals

  Take Me With You To Europe

  The Checkpoint: What Do You Know About A Checkpoint?

  My Son, Without Any Protection

  Raqqa...Capital Of The Islamic State

  A French Filmmaker In Egypt

  Abu Muhammad And Bahaa Al-Din Al-Faransi

  Roundabout Of Death

  Translator’s Introduction

  DEATH AND BOREDOM IN ALEPPO

  The protagonist of Roundabout of Death, Faysal Khartash’s searing 2017 novel set in wartime Aleppo, is a schoolteacher named Jumaa. Unemployed except for serving as the reader’s guide through a hellish warscape, he has a harrowing tale to tell. Jumaa bears witness to the brutal series of sieges and counterattacks known as the Battle of Aleppo (2012–2016) that pulverized the northern Syrian metropolis after forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad assaulted eastern sections of the city from both the air and the ground.

  A few strange moments occur in the heat of the conflict. When Jumaa hallucinates about the appearance of tiny bumps—vaguely resembling horns—on his forehead, he perceives them as literal manifestations of his own sexual arousal and frustration. Jumaa’s confusion here is precipitated not only by his own sense of impotence, but also by an accompanying and widely shared sentiment of shame.

  This minor plot point gestures toward something profound at work in this short, trenchant novel, namely the rampant and, one might say, subcutaneous feeling of anomie and uncertainty that characterizes war-torn Aleppo. Let us call Jumaa’s uncanny experience war phrenology: the somatic experience of wartime pathology that results in an impaired ability to comprehend the present as well as a persistent dread of an unpredictable future.

  Syrians began to protest the Assad regime’s corruption and unaccountability in 2010 and 2011 across small- to medium-sized cities all over the country, with sporadic demonstrations also erupting in the capital, Damascus. It wasn’t clear during those initial phases whether these actions would congeal into a national movement capable of spreading through larger cities such as Homs and Hama. Most unforeseeable of all was Aleppo, whose large Armenian, Kurdish, Turkmen, and Turkish-speaking communities lend it the greatest religious and ethnic diversity of any Syrian municipality. Academics, policymakers, and the general public struggled to divine if and when this commercial capital of the country, a legendary city with striking cultural vibrancy and an outsize significance in the national mythology, might also be drawn into “the events” subsuming Syria as a whole. As the Syrian revolution gradually devolved into a chaotic, gruesome, and internationally fueled conflict, the war arrived in Aleppo with fury in the summer of 2012.

  In the years that followed, the once-proud city accorded—albeit in vain—the protected status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its wealth of ancient monuments would be subjected to some of the fiercest, bloodiest, and most costly battles of the Syrian civil war. Iconic “barrel bombs” were dropped on Aleppo by regime aircraft, chemical weapons were unleashed on many districts, Russian military and material support conspicuously arrived to shore up regime forces, Lebanese Hezbollah fighters were marshaled into action, and militia outfits from the Kurdish and Armenian communities were drawn into urban guerilla warfare. This macabre symphony was performed in relation to and alongside the ongoing kinetic struggle between the Syrian regime’s armed forces and opposition elements such as the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham, and others.

  The summer of 2016 was ruinous for Aleppo, leaving it reeling from the physical, economic, and human toll of nearly five years of calamitous combat. Now the regime launched a major new offensive against rebel-held areas, effectively strangling Aleppo by cutting it in half, opening the possibility of food shortages and total social collapse. There were estimates of just over 200,000 civilians and some 8,000 fighters left, compared with a population of more than two million before fighting broke out in 2012. Tens of thousands fled their city when, during the second half of that year, over 3,500 civilians were killed in shelling and airstrikes as the regime unleashed all weapons at its disposal—including illegal chemical weapons and improvised barrel bombs—ostensibly to root out “terrorists,” but also destroying private homes, public spaces, and medical facilities in the process. This is the savage world from which Faysal Khartash’s Roundabout of Death arose.

  Khartash was born in Aleppo in 1952, part of a generation of disillusioned Syrian writers who were relatively isolated from the rest of their country and little-known outside of Syria. These Aleppan intellectuals nevertheless continued to live, write, and work, languishing away for many of their days in dingy, smoke-filled cafes, bars, and restaurants, under the alternatively lazy and watch
ful eye of state censorship. Most of Khartash’s novels—including Mūjaz Tārīkh al-Bāshā al-Ṣaghīr (A Short History of the Little Pasha) (1991), Khān al-Zaytūn (The Olive Caravanserai) (1995), Maqhā al-Majānīn (The Lunatics’ Cafe) (1995), Ḥammām al-Niswān (The Women’s Bath) (1999), and Maqhā al-Qasr (Palace Cafe) (2004)—are set in the distinctive urban spaces of twentieth-century Aleppo: coffeehouses, public baths, and covered markets. His 1992 novel Turāb al-Ghurabā (Land of Strangers), a fictionalized account of the life and times of the Ottoman-Aleppan intellectual and politician Abd al-Ramān al-Kawākibī, received the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Arabic Literature and was adapted into a film by Syrian director Samir Zikra that was released in 1998. Khartash’s 2018 novel Ahl al-Hawā (Lovers) was honored with the Tayeb Salih Prize for Novelistic Creativity.

  Roundabout of Death is his first—but hopefully not last—novel to be published in English. As described above, life in general has already been violently disrupted across the divided city of Aleppo when the novel begins. Jumaa’s attempts to maintain a modicum of regularity in his daily habits while also attending to the needs of his aging mother who lives across town provide the context within which the reader encounters a city and a country in seemingly unending conflict and crisis. The narrative voice erratically swerves from first-person limited perspective to third-person omniscient and back again. Perhaps more important than the polyphony of narrative perspective, though, is the complicated relationship Jumaa has to space, in personal and emotional terms, as well as to concrete, physical places in particular.

  Along with a cohort of crusty intellectuals and unemployed middle-class men, Jumaa frequents smoke-filled cafes around the iconic Saadallah al-Jabiri Square in downtown Aleppo, not far from the university, a neighborhood that is now overtaken by displaced people, working prostitutes, and hordes of conscript soldiers and their commanding officers. From his coffee-shop perch overlooking the square, Jumaa is simultaneously witness to and (if only by the reader) witnessed in the never-ending calamity and deepening malaise. Like other literary narratives of wartime, therefore, Roundabout of Death is far from a romantic action story. On the contrary, ennui has set in for Jumaa and his companions. “Typically, there aren’t too many of us,” Jumaa notes, “ten people or so, give or take, including a doctor, a lawyer, and an unemployed teacher. Some are retired, some own their own businesses, some of us have lost our children and some are just waiting for no reason at all.”

  It would seem that the entire city of Aleppo—except for the hundreds of irregular fighters and thousands of soldiers in the midst of a punishing military conflict—is waiting for some semblance of normalcy to return.

  Jumaa feels the absence of normal life most poignantly perhaps in his inability to regularly and easily check in on his mother, who lives on the other side of town, and much of the novel recounts the monotonous but impossibly circuitous route he must take—on foot, by bus, in private cars—to make the otherwise simple journey from the western part of the city to the east. The titular “death roundabout” is most likely a reference to the fearsome Karaj al-Hajez crossing point between the eastern and western sides of the city or another checkpoint much like it. Heading east, one can continue on to the city of Raqqa, one-time capital of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The original Arabic title of the novel translates literally to The Roundabout of Death Between Aleppo and Raqqa, and the physical obstacle and symbolic danger of that location are key to the physical and emotional geography of the text. But there are other locations in Jumaa’s personal map of the city—Saadallah al-Jabiri Square first and foremost—in which he and his companions encounter an altogether different, though no less punishing, crossing: the intersection of boredom and uncertainty. Without understating the scale of physical destruction and human devastation in these times, it bears remembering that the individual and communal experiences of life in wartime are just as often felt in banal moments and quotidian routines.

  By the middle of December 2016, Aleppo had been decisively flattened, at least hundreds of thousands of people had been internally displaced, many more had become refugees, and the regime claimed to have won a major military victory, one that may prove to have been Pyrrhic, although the local and national consequences of the Battle of Aleppo remain uncertain. Whatever the case, it is a cruel irony of history that the jaw-dropping and awe-inspiring city of Aleppo now seems to be inscribed in global consciousness at the moment of its annihilation. A comparable phenomenon—albeit less dramatic in terms of human costs—is also at work in the literary and cultural spheres, as writers such as Nihad Sirees, Khaled Khalifa, and now Faysal Khartash achieve a level of international attention unprecedented for Syrian writers, affirming the intellectual vitality of Aleppo even as the city confronts chilling and lethal realities.

  Roundabout of Death can be read as a monumental testament to the power of literature as a means of documenting wartime atrocities, but one should not neglect to appreciate how such a literary text can also more modestly capture moments of psychological vulnerability, physical danger, and geographical remapping. Such moments have been experienced in diverse and contradictory ways by the people of Aleppo, both those who stayed and those who left. In light of such a literary achievement, moreover, there is good reason to retain some measure of hope. The dynamism and mordant wit of Aleppo’s poets, intellectuals, and writers may well prove capable of transcending the tragedy of the present moment. Their celebration of the lives and history of Aleppo heralds, however hesitantly and unsurely, the city’s unwritten and, one can only hope, happier future.

  —Max Weiss

  SAADALLAH AL-JABIRI SQUARE, ALEPPO

  August 25, 2012

  5:20 a.m.

  I woke up at that time on the dot. The electricity had been cut. When I looked at the school wall directly across from me, I could see that the lights had gone out, replaced by a gloomy darkness. Every night the school became a beacon, and this window in particular shone until morning. It was as if the multitude had forgotten about the switch that could turn those neon lights that burned my eyes on as well as off.

  My name is Jumaa Abd al-Jaleel. How I got my name is one of the simplest things in the world. That’s just what my parents called me because of the day I was born, Friday, Jumaa. Though my mother and father had toyed with a few different names, this one won out in the end, and would remain attached to me throughout my life, perhaps even for a few years beyond that.

  Abd al-Jaleel is my family name; I have no idea where it comes from. Never had much interest in looking into the matter, to be quite honest.

  Jumaa Abd al-Jaleel snored abruptly and then woke up. The electricity hadn’t been restored yet. There were so many things he had to do but he didn’t get up . . . he waited for the electricity to come back on first.

  You might ask, why did I use the word “multitude” in quoting what Jumaa had written?—“It was as if the multitude had forgotten . . . etc.” Yes, my good people, there had been a multitude in the classroom for juniors at the high school until they’d moved all the chairs out and washed the floor, removed the remaining pieces of furniture and then spread mattresses all over the place. Throughout the day they would lie down whenever they got tired of talking with one another or walking around in circles, whether alone or in groups. At night they would lie down to take their rest but sleep with one eye open, afraid of death or even worse things to come.

  The fighter jet starts to circle through the sky, soaring up and then swooping down, as if the pilot suddenly has something to take care of. What could cause him to zoom around like that up there, clearing away the pigeons, the sparrows, the doves, everything that flies? Was it all to free up the airspace for himself so that he could then just disappear? And where did he go anyhow? I have no idea. As he swoops down toward the ground, the pilot might declare, “The word ‘bombs’ is the most adequate to describe these objects that weigh precisely five hundred kilograms, something that explodes and destroys, that can relocate an
entire building or a market, that can blow a hole in the middle of the street, causing the sewers and the water mains to flood, and lots of other things, too, of course.” The pilot might also decide to jettison something off to the side that razes houses or shops or mosques, and whoever is left alive will simply have to wait for the next round of shelling, a role created for them . . . until the pilot completes his mission and returns safely back to base, washes his hands, runs off to scarf down his meal and head to sleep because it’s well past his bedtime.

  My head had always been round, but now it appeared to have become egg-shaped. At least that’s the way it seemed as I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror; all of a sudden it was elongated, and it seemed as if there were two tiny bumps bulging out in arousal, making me look like some kind of sexual deviant, so I quickly smoothed down my hair to cover them. There might have been something wrong with the mirror, or maybe something wrong with me. I tried to call my friends at the cafe, but nobody picked up—why wouldn’t anyone answer the phone? Probably because the electricity was cut, as you all know well, and the gas had run out a long time ago, it could have been a month, possibly more, I’m not sure. Well, why don’t I just walk over to the cafe, I thought to myself. Even though the way there was littered with danger, I got ready to walk over anyway.

  My cafe is located in Saadallah al-Jabiri Square, smack in the middle of the city, a secure area because it’s under regime control. On the way there you pass by security headquarters, the university, and the mayor’s mansion, all of which make the trip pretty complicated. I could add to that list the drones that target residents with wave after wave of bombs, although to be honest those drones and their weapons have never really gotten near me, and the sounds of the explosions don’t really bother me too much because I know where they’re coming from; they now seem to possess their own temporality as the explosions ring in our ears, turning sleep into a perpetual wish. The important thing in all of this is that I managed to put on my clothes and smooth down my hair, concealing the two small lumps I still believed I could see jutting from my forehead, before leaving the house.