Roundabout of Death Read online

  Jumaa the Teacher had known Lamya, also a teacher, in a quieter time. He had searched for a new love in her after a previous romance had fallen apart. Early in her time at the school, he had surprised her by walking into the teacher’s lounge while she was brushing her hair. He apologized profusely and was about to shut the door on his way out, but she told him to come in, that she was nearly finished. He told a few crass jokes about the situation and she laughed politely. When she finished brushing her hair, she placed her brush and the leather-backed mirror into her purse, then told him she had been dispatched there, to the school that is, as a geography teacher. She had delivered the papers that the superintendent had given her to the headmaster, and then he was visited by two Party cadres while she was asked to wait in the teachers’ lounge, and so here she was waiting for the two of them to leave, to finish their necessary activities.

  The coffee arrived. We didn’t put any sugar into the pot, though the waiter left sugar for us on the table. We ignored it and continued our conversation. I asked her how she and her children were doing. She told me that her eldest daughter had gotten married. When I asked about her husband, she said, with a smile on her face and without clarifying anything for me, that she had packed up all her stuff. Putting out her cigarette she said that it was getting late, and so she stood up to go. I said goodbye to her and she left.

  WHY IS IT CALLED SAADALLAH AL-JABIRI SQUARE?

  (From Dr. Muslim al-Zaybaq, Parties and Political Organizations in the Twentieth Century)

  Saadallah al-Jabiri was one of the leaders of the national independence movement. He was born in Aleppo in 1894, where he completed his primary and secondary education, then went on to study at the Imperial Law School in Constantinople, where he was involved in founding the al-Fatat Arab nationalist organization, which called for the independence of the Arab lands and their liberation from the Ottomans. He also participated in the First Arab Congress in 1913.

  Saadallah al-Jabiri traveled to Germany for two years, then returned to Constantinople, was conscripted into the Ottoman Army (as a petty officer), and was appointed a commanding officer in Erzurum, where he spent the duration of the First World War.

  Afterward he returned to Aleppo and was elected as a member of the First Syrian Congress in 1919. When the northern revolts broke out in 1919, Saadallah al-Jabiri was in contact with the leader of the revolt, Ibrahim Hanano, and al-Jabiri was elected as a member of the constitutional congress from June 9, 1928, until August 11, 1928. He was imprisoned at Arwad Prison for a period of time along with Hashim al-Atassi and a number of other nationalist figures.

  At the first Nationalist Congress of the National Bloc in 1932, al-Jabiri was made a minister in the cabinet of President of the National Bloc Hashim al-Atassi, and when the bloc rejected the terms of the 1933 French treaty, demonstrations broke out all over Syria, leading to the arrest of many nationalists, including Saadallah al-Jabiri, who was sentenced to eight years in prison.

  Al-Jabiri was elected yet again to the legislative council from July 8, 1939, until December 21, 1939, and he held the position of foreign minister in the first and second administrations of Jamil Mardam Bek. He served as president of the republic three times.

  In addition, Saadallah al-Jabiri was head of the Syrian delegation to the signing of the Alexandria Protocols and head of the coordinating committee delegation for the General Arab Conference. Al-Jabiri returned to Aleppo at the end of 1946, and suffering from a chronic illness he went to convalesce in the village of Turaydim, where he died on July 20, 1947. He was buried in Aleppo near the grave of Ibrahim Hanano. There is a statue of him there, in front of the post office, on the right-hand side when one is exiting the building, on the left if one is coming from the Officers’ Club.

  BOMBING...BOMBING...DESTRUCTION...DEVASTATION

  We endure this horror every day, this raving madness poured into our brains every night, all the people subjected to murder and shelling. The day before as I was leaving Joha’s Club I saw a young man being detained by a middle-aged gentleman whom the young man was trying to mollify.

  “What have I done? He took my ID card and just started beating me.”

  “What has he done?” I demanded, and then the man started beating me before I was able to sprint away, then he barked, “Take your ID and get the hell out of here.”

  Signs of the beating were all over the young man’s face and neck. The older man told him to deal with it. He had been coming out of the Officers’ Club, where some of the rooms had been transformed into a prison for torturing detainees. We could hear the sound of their screaming voices from the toilet in the cafe, they were hollering and pleading, “Oh God, hajji, I’m my mother’s only son.” The use of that phrase stunned me, proof that the one who was being beaten had never completed his compulsory military service, had never been in the army.

  “Shut the fuck up, you sonofabitch,” a second voice boomed, and the first voice fell silent for a few seconds.

  They had stopped a car outside the business hotel and forced out the driver, demanding his ID card, which he pulled out for them, at which point they piled on top of him and proceeded to beat him senseless, some kicking while others were punching, and those who arrived late just started kicking and punching without knowing why they were doing so. Finally they opened the trunk and shoved him inside, then along came some other unsuspecting person and they did the exact same thing to him that they had done to the first man, shoving him into the trunk as well. We could see all of them through the window.

  “They’re going to suffocate,” one of us exclaimed.

  The men outside continued to discuss the matter, then along came a third guy, and after he had been beaten and punched and kicked to their satisfaction, they threw him into the trunk, too.

  The important thing, I told myself, is that I go and see my mother. It had been a long time since I last saw her. I made my way out into the square, walked eastward, and before I made it to my mother’s house, I turned, in shock, to discover that it looked as though an army had swarmed through there, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.

  The square was nothing like the way I remembered it. The shop doors had been removed or torn off. Here was a building without any windows at all, here’s another without balconies, and yet another that was torched, there’s one that exploded when a barrel of TNT was dropped on it. I scanned through my mind, wondering whether this was in fact the same square I once knew.

  As soon as I knocked on the door, an old lady appeared, someone I barely recognized. My mother had been waiting for me.

  “Thank God the entire house wasn’t destroyed,” I said.

  “You say that now, but take a closer look,” she said, showing me around.

  It appeared to be totally ruined from the outside—no windows and no shutters, absolutely nothing left. Inside, the house was full of dust and rubble and rocks both big and small.

  “Your tragedy isn’t so bad compared to others,” I offered.

  “You always minimize the scale of tragedy,” she rebutted.

  Both of us were silent. I sat there with her for about an hour. A fighter jet was circling high overhead until it zoomed toward us and dropped its payload. I grabbed my mother’s hand and pushed her deeper inside the house, into a room where she wouldn’t be exposed to any shelling. I glanced over at the neighbor’s balcony that had been hit. Everyone was pointing toward it as I left. The next day the sun was shining brightly in the street. I walked out of the house and saw the driver of a yellow car picking out glass from the rear window.

  “Everything okay, I hope?” I asked him.

  He told me they had been in Saadallah al-Jabiri Square when the explosion took place.

  “Which explosion are you talking about?”

  “Like I said, there was an explosion in the square, and I was able to get away because I was on the outskirts.”

  I headed over to the square, or just a bit outside the square, into the Jumayliyah neighborhood. They
prevented me from getting any closer. Even from afar I could see trucks carting away the debris. When I finally made it home, I was horrified by what I found. Saadallah al-Jabiri Square had been obliterated. The business hotel now looked like an old man staring at his own grave. There no longer remained anything called Joha’s Club, not even the building that once housed it. The cellular company MTN and the mobile accessories store and the Officers’ Club: all of them were gone, nothing remained. Those of us who had been dispersed from there, would we ever meet again?

  THE ISLAND CAFE

  The Island Cafe where we reconstituted ourselves is nicer than Joha’s Club, which had been wiped off the map of Aleppo. Here is where we’ll sit from this day forward, and we’ll appreciate its location, which is right next to the Al-Siddiq mosque, you could say it’s not much more than two hundred meters from there. There were no more encampments in Saadallah al-Jabiri Square, the business hotel had to move everything out of the building, and their cafe had been wiped out of existence. The Officers’ Club, meanwhile, was no longer a functioning club, the section underneath the cafe was gone altogether and could no longer accommodate anybody. They had brought some soldiers over to work security for the building, and soon it was totally forbidden to walk through the square. I could no longer see the pine trees and their boughs that craned up toward the sky in order to tell their stories and inhale some clean air. I could no longer see the tops of the trees as they embraced one another when the breeze caused them to sway to and fro. All of that was gone, gone for good.

  The city was divided in half and those two halves never intersected. One half, the east, was demarcated by the square as well as the Shaykh Abu Bakr and Maysaloun neighborhoods. The other half was marked by the death roundabout, to the west. All forms of communication had been severed between east and west. Aleppo was besieged. Food supplies, including fresh fruits and vegetables, could no longer get into the city. Urban dwellers were forced to begin trading with the other half of the city. A public market sprang up, where the entire portion of the city that was with the regime went to buy goods, where they would find little carts transporting home furnishings, sacks of produce, other foodstuffs, and dead bodies. You set off from there, from Al-Fayd to Al-Kuttab, and from there through the regime checkpoint over to the no-man’s land, then onward to a zone controlled by the Free Syrian Army or Jabhat al-Nusra. People would depart with empty hands, much like their carts that carried nothing but the dead wrapped in white shrouds, sheets over the top, and all around there were shouts for everyone to give way to the dead, declaring that there is only one true God and no other. The dead would cross over to the next world without anyone reciting the Fatiha over their souls because of the rush to shove the crowds aside. You would have to hustle if you were walking on foot, and as you crossed the river you might be met with sniper fire. There could be one stationed up on the roof of the Ameer Hotel, to the east, and another on top of the television station, to the west. Both of them would shoot at people—taaaaakhkh, a civilian drops to the ground and a group of mujahideen or a bunch of people with Jabhat al-Nusra would rush over and carry the wounded away to an ambulance by their hands and feet. They equipped the spot near the checkpoint crossing with a rudimentary ambulance, one doctor and one nurse on hand, to treat anyone injured by sniper fire, although most of the time these cases resulted in death.

  One time when I was going to Damascus there was shelling going on, more like an exchange of gunfire. The shelling continued as we boarded a bus. We sped off to the checkpoints that would prevent us from going any further right away. Whenever we stopped at a roadblock, a militiaman would come on board to check IDs, scrutinizing our faces and then looking back down at our identity cards, before disembarking from the bus with a fresh bottle of water or however much money could be filched. Then we reached the Al-Qateefa checkpoint, where the bus attendant gathered up all of our IDs and left the vehicle. Running all of our names through the computer took nearly half an hour, then the bus took off once again, until we arrived in Homs, which we found was a shattered city, full of squawking birds, including crows and owls in the sky, with rats, mice, and all kinds of scavengers down on the ground. We passed through various checkpoints before reaching the part of Homs that was still inhabited by human beings. People were having coffee on their balconies, women were out buying vegetables, and men were walking around looking pleased as punch, as my beloved students might put it in composition class. Life was carrying on as usual. Meanwhile, in the destroyed part of Homs you’d find checkpoints and soldiers, and declarations of: “Halt! No Photography Allowed,” and “Halt! This Is a Checkpoint,” as soldiers collected all the things that people had left behind when they fled the eye of the storm.

  We left Homs toward the east, on a national highway, because on all the international roads there were attacks that were, to put it mildly, crushing. We crept eastward toward Salamiyah, where there was an armed checkpoint waiting for us. When the bus attendant handed them hundreds of liras, we were able to zip right through as delight spread across our faces, that is, until we reached the international road at Maarat al-Numan, on which we drove for six hours, maybe more.

  As soon as we had passed Maarat al-Numan, the driver stepped on the gas, and the bus took us to Al-Zirbah, where we arrived at precisely 5:00. My house is close to there, not more than fifteen minutes by car, only now we’ll see how long it takes us. By the time the van had picked up all its passengers, it was already 5:30, and the driver took off without much regard for anything, and if he did pay attention to anything it was just to stare back at us and smile. He turned left to pass through Khan al-Asal and whatever villages and neighborhoods were nearby, continuing onto the Castello Road, descending to Bab al-Nayrab, then Al-Kalasa, and Al-Maabar. The trip took nearly three hours and fifteen minutes; one that used to take me fifteen minutes now required three more hours of our time. I picked up my bag and started walking, turning my face toward what remained of the house when the first bombs landed near me. These weren’t RPG rockets as far as I could tell, these might have been tank armaments. Heavy shelling exploded throughout the streets and the neighborhoods and the alleyways.

  Fighters with long beards said: “They’ve shut down the crossing point and started to set up barricades in building entryways.” All the street vendors had closed up shop. People who were hunkered down inside behind the walls started to say: “There is no God but God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Bombs rained down on buildings, the streets thundered with sounds I had never heard before. The roads were empty, even cats had retreated into locations where they wouldn’t be hit. There was a pile of rubble between me and the khan, a large courtyard inn which was more like a hangar, but who would be able to pass and get across? There were blown-out buildings, a broad street, and Bab al-Khan, where long-bearded militiamen had taken cover behind the walls, preventing people from passing. Those guys had decided to use the bombs to kill people, heavy shells fell all over the place like raindrops, preventing anyone from getting anywhere even as those men shouted that the checkpoint was closed. An image flickered in my memory for a moment: my journey to Damascus. I had left there the day before at eight in the morning, and now it was 8:45 the next day. I remembered the bombardment of the garages, the place at the end of Al-Qaboon where the buses were parked, and the man who had been wounded in the hand and had to have it amputated. There had been very few passengers on our bus, they might have been from Hassakeh. I remembered the blood that spurted from his amputated hand. They wrapped his wrist with a handkerchief like a tourniquet, took the hand with them and ran over to the car that would rush them to the hospital, and the driver shot off to get us to the checkpoint, the ID check, and the bus inspection, the taking of money and water from the bus attendant, and after we had set off from the rest stop near Hama we reached the zone controlled by the Free Syrian Army, finally arriving at Maaret al-Numan, Al-Zirbah, and then the shared taxi, which finally brought me here.

  I was with people who were
saying that death is real. I prayed for my soul as the bombs fell upon us. I didn’t know anyone in the FSA-controlled area, otherwise I would have stayed the night with them. There are some relatives of mine around there, but as soon as I stepped out of the building where I had taken shelter someone from the FSA or maybe someone else shouted at me to get back inside, which I did. I tried to think if there was anyone in this neighborhood with whom I could find refuge but couldn’t come up with a single name. Night started to fall on all the people and the streets and the buildings. Although this neighborhood had no electricity, I was still able to see. Eventually I needed to do something: either leave the place where I was and go backward or else . . .

  An idea flashed in my mind. The sniping had lightened up a bit, so I sneaked into the khan and crossed the street over to the other side.

  It took a great deal of courage for me to pull this off, especially as the shelling got worse, and I encouraged myself, “Let those who trust in God trust in God.” I eased myself through the entrance without anyone seeing me because the militiamen were still taking cover behind the walls. Step by step I made it back out to the boulevard, then the khan, which I hurried through, until I reached the second gate, muttering to myself, “Scram, all of you, I’m king of the world, just like Al-Zeir Salem.” Then I started running. Was there a single combatant who could defeat me? Were there any fighters? Ten against one, a hundred on one, a thousand to one. I ran as fast as I could while shouting out loud, Is there anyone here who can best me? Only the place itself responded to me, there was nobody around, only desolate shadows accompanied me as I moved along the edge of the government employees’ hospital, where human blood had been splattered all over the walls from sniper fire. I screamed again and the place responded with silence and gloom, so I pumped my legs even harder and shouted, I’m Abu Zayd al-Hilali, is there anyone who can defeat me? Now I had reached the river, which informed me, You are blessed, my son, there is nobody here, continue on your way.