Roundabout of Death Read online

  And so I walked on worry-free, crossed over the other street, slipped beneath the buildings, and when I reached the military security checkpoint, my soul had drifted off somewhere far away from me, I caught a glimpse of it high up in the sky before pulling it back down and stuffing it inside of me. Then I crossed the next street, walking with my head held high. I saw people behind me, men and women who seemed to be weighed down as they ran. I walked right through the checkpoint without anyone noticing. I passed right through. There were some men in camouflage gathered together with women in military uniforms, deep in conversation about something or other.

  My suitcase was tucked under my arm as I continued making my way, and I started to sing, “He’s brave in his power, he’s so very, very brave,” moving down the empty street until I reached the Al-Fayd neighborhood, where there was a bus hauling people to New Aleppo in the south, so I hopped on and waited until the driver was ready to go. He was smoking, flicking cigarette ashes out the window, and then he started to drive us away as he bellowed, “Southbound! Southbound!” My soul had been weighing heavily upon me and it now felt as though I were relaxing with my feet in cool water as he crossed Al-Fayd to the Le Meridien hotel and continued on to the university, stopping there and shouting out once again, “Southbound . . . Southbound,” picking up additional passengers and then taking us toward Al-Kura Al-Ardiyah, then to the Al-Furqan neighborhood, and finally arriving at the death roundabout, where I got off to walk on foot. I counted five buildings, then veered off toward the right and entered a building, climbed up to the second floor, took out the keys, and opened the door. I had arrived in one piece.

  FROM THE TOTALLY DECIMATED JOHA’S CLUB TO THE ISLAND CAFE

  Most of the group who used to hang out at Joha’s Club shifted over to the Island Cafe, which was located behind the Al-Siddiq mosque, well, actually it was inside the Islamic religious endowment office building behind the mosque, that gargantuan complex situated between the post office and the mosque, composed of multiple buildings that included offices and residential apartments, all of which were empty, nobody had set foot inside for a while, built on the red earth that is the stomping ground of the Assads, the earth we used to boast about during the June 1967 war, chanting, “They called us! They called us! To Palestine they sent us.” In those days the military police pounded us, beat us with truncheons and belts as we pelted them with stones. All that came to an end when an official representative from the People’s Army came out to meet us, and as far as we high school students were concerned, we were beholden to him, and he spoke and announced to those listening that they should come back the next day, when there’d be weapons and training and a journey to Palestine. Nobody showed up.

  Construction on this red-earthed land had been supervised by the Directorate of Pious Endowments, but they wouldn’t let anybody live there, except in special cases for those who had a lot of money and wanted to set up a shop on the ground floor of the building, including this Island Cafe.

  Truth be told the Island Cafe was a pleasure to frequent. We’d sit there in the summertime when the trees spread shade all over, especially in the morning. It was located on the road that led to the education ministry, and from there on to the electric company, then the public garden where we could no longer look at tall trees or flowers to brighten our mood or even fountains because there wasn’t any water. In that new cafe of ours I would sit and watch doves flitting between the tall trees, but now there were no more doves, no more public garden, no more Saadallah al-Jabiri Square, no more business hotel. All of those things were now in the past. The hotel had been leveled and its remains had been spat out in one blow. The park had shut its gates, except for the east and west entrances, and anyone who entered or exited was searched by the militia of the ruling party, with more than ten of its men stationed at each point, dressed in camouflage uniforms and tattered athletic shoes—they’d apathetically rummage around for nothing in particular—feeling under people’s armpits and around their waists and across their chests, down their legs to the feet and then back up again in between. If you were carrying a bag of food, they’d search that, too, which is why walking alongside the garden outside became more enjoyable than going inside. Here in the cafe adjacent to the park they handed out food to people who had none, regardless of whether they were with the Party or the revolution, each with a bowl in their hand, and they’d ladle out mujadara stew and slop it into the bowl. There were droves of people lined up and waiting to fill their bowls.

  The Island Cafe is divided into three parts: a summer section, a winter section, and a rooftop. There is WiFi for customers with smartphones, who pull them out and make calls while they’re there.

  Typically, there aren’t too many of us, 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.

  We moved from the summer room into the winter room because of shelling from a 14-millimeter machine gun that had incinerated the roof, causing it to come crashing down between Jamal and Anwar, who quipped that the summer room was no longer suitable for us, and therefore shuffled into the winter room in summer and winter alike. The second table from the door was for us, the word Reserved was posted on it until we arrived. One or two of us might be absent, maybe more, this was never an issue, or there could be more than that many missing, no problem there either.

  Whenever the water is interrupted throughout the city, or even if it’s only in the Jumayliyah neighborhood, you’ll find people coming with their barrels and carts and plastic tanks, queuing up in long lines in order to fill up. The cafe has an artesian well where people can take as much water as they need and then be on their way. All of this is well-organized, and even though the water isn’t treated, they’ll tell you at the cafe that they have asked doctors who say it’s safe to drink. Now I—and I beg God’s forgiveness for repeating the term I here—am no longer waiting for the woman who may or may not ever come walking through the door. I have been waiting for her for seven long years, and I had to give up my habit of waiting back there at Joha’s Club. There is no use in waiting here because this isn’t an elevated place from which one can look out on the square, and there isn’t a clear path toward West Aleppo the way there is at Joha’s: no tents, no shabbiha sleeping inside. Saadallah al-Jabiri Square is totally deserted. All of the tents have been taken down, each and every party has pulled up its tent stakes and moved on, the singer with the mellifluous voice is gone, we never see her anymore, and those who used to pass through the square now pass along the edges, coming from the direction of the public park, for example, but hurrying along on their way.

  At our cafe, by which I now mean the Island Cafe, you’ll find an upper level, which is a cafe for families. The tables will be mostly filled with young ladies and young men smoking water pipes and having something to drink, you’ll find the place dense with smoke from all of the argileh and because the women inhale so deeply and blow out such huge quantities of smoke until their eyes get all bloodshot and their cheeks turn flush, as they expel the smoke from their mouths that begin to resemble metallic censers.

  The shabbiha who frequent the cafe never sit down, they simply stand there smoking and clutching their rifles, then leave with their coffee, and even though some might hover over us for a while, we don’t pay them any mind.

  I consider myself part of the opposition, which means I’m opposed to anyone who sits with me: if they say that laban is white, I say it’s black, if they say the sky is black then I tell them it’s white as milk. It all started at a restaurant one evening when the uprising first began, back when I was still supportive of the revolution. Whenever I went to visit my mother in the Midan neighborhood, I’d see them outside the Al-Burj restaurant getting ready for Friday prayer, fifteen or twenty cars, some pickup trucks, some taxis. In every car and in every pickup truck there was a group of shabbiha inside and an offic
er behind the wheel, some had dogs with them, the least one could say of those animals is that they were wild. Now they were getting ready for deployment, awaiting orders. It’s possible they were nervous, feeling anxiety and trepidation, popping pills to give themselves energy and confidence: here’s one taking two tablets, downing them quickly, here’s another shoving one down his throat surreptitiously so that his supervising officer won’t notice, even as the commander retreats into his room where he also takes a pill, until everyone is flying through his own universe.

  Another officer was dragging a bare-naked and bleeding young man by his bloody shirt, which had been yanked up and wrapped around his neck, as he punched and slapped his exposed back. He threw him between two men in a taxi and they drove off when the orders came to depart, which is when the caravan of death set off, as Mahmoud called it, sitting at the Al-Burj restaurant. Somebody shouted at them and the officer drove off. You could easily tell his rank because he was driving a white Kia taxi. The rest of them were in pickup trucks. Anyone with a car had filled it with fearsome fighters, and as the caravan inched away, they honked their horns and fired their guns all over the place. They left with their handguns and rifles, their wild dogs, their metal chains and their batons, their heads shaved, and they set off toward one of the mosques, surrounded it, and savagely beat anyone who came out, those who had just finished Friday prayer and were now chanting at the top of their lungs, “Freedom! Freedom! The People Want Freedom!”

  I no longer go to my mother’s house on Fridays. We agreed that I would go see her another day instead because we have trouble on Friday: demonstrations and car bombings are always taking place on Friday, also there are ID checks for every citizen, detainments and cell phone confiscations; no matter what, they say, take him to the car, by which they mean a paddy wagon with bars on the windows, like a prison cell, which quickly fills up with people, at which point the commanding officer calls for them to bring another vehicle. So I decided to leave Fridays to others and sit home instead, making all different kinds of ful bean stew: ful with tahina, ful with hummus, with a few falafel balls: I’d spread all the dishes out on the table with chopped tomato, parsley, mint, lettuce, laban, and olive oil, and then we’d all start eating. My son loves to drink tea with breakfast on Fridays, he’ll boil and brew the tea himself, and he doesn’t like to have ful without a cup of tea, one during breakfast and another one afterward. If the electricity happens to come on, we’ll all pile in front of the television to watch Al-Arabiya or Al-Jazeera, which air demonstrations taking place all over the country. Then my son will perform his ablutions and, in the politest way possible, tell me, “I’m off to pray.” “Pray for us,” I’d tell him, “so that God may forgive us all.” He’d head out without responding and breakfast would be cleared from the table.

  When I went to visit my mother, she told me my sister Shukriya had fled to stay here, by which she meant on regime-controlled territory.

  “Her house is near Sulayman Al-Halabi, across from what’s its name, I can’t remember exactly, fourth floor.”

  Shukriya is my sister by a different mother. I told my mother I’d go see her.

  “Why don’t we go together?” I asked her. She liked the idea and got ready to leave.

  We passed through the Sulayman Al-Halabi neighborhood on the way to Al-Musawwar, the building whose name my mother had forgotten, and we walked up to the fourth floor. Her house was on the front line, starting here is the regime, and from there, just behind her building, is the Free Syrian Army. I rang the bell but didn’t hear a sound. My mother said the power was out.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I completely forgot.”

  I knocked on the door instead, and my sister’s daughter appeared, shouting, “Who is it?”

  After recognizing her grandmother, she spun around to tell her mother that her grandmother and I had come to visit. My kindly sister welcomed us as we stepped inside. She was my sister by my father, who had married two different women, my mother and my mother’s sister. My mother is the new wife, while my aunt is the old one. My father would sleep one night at the old wife’s, one night at the new wife’s. My oldest sister is this one called Shukriya, or Umm Abduh, and she had given birth to thirteen children, eleven boys and two girls. They were a badge of distinction for her, meaning, for example, she wouldn’t pay the bus fare when the driver asked for it, just turn up her nose and say, “Badge of honor,” and the driver would move along to the next person.

  My sister kissed us both on the cheeks and asked us to have a seat in her one-room apartment. In a whisper she informed us how her children and all of their children had stayed behind, by which she meant back there in the Al-Kalasa neighborhood. She could no longer stand the fighter jets dropping barrel bombs on them every day, even the ones that never exploded. She followed the news about the barrels closely: the day before, Abu Muhammad’s shops had been hit, and the day before that, some other person’s building had been shelled. Then she began to tell us all about the barrels that exploded as well as those that didn’t, until her older son finally advised her to leave for regime-controlled territory, and so he packed up a moving truck with foam bedding and blankets, and told her, “Go with God.”

  My sister explained how she had to travel for seven hours, on the Minbaj Road to Khansir, then to Al-Safira before looping back to Aleppo. That route should have taken no longer than the time it takes to cross over al-Fayd Street, but now amounts to seven hours of travel. There were checkpoints waiting for us as well, she told us, somebody would demand to know, who are you? When they told him they were from Al-Kalasa, they were instructed to get out of the van so it could be searched thoroughly, and when the soldiers didn’t find anything of interest inside, they ordered them to proceed, until they reached the checkpoint at the Four Minarets Mosque, where they told them to get out once again so the van could be searched, turned upside down really, but still they didn’t find anything. They denied them entry nevertheless, and my sister said how they would keep you waiting, telling you it would be this long and then that long, and they ended up waiting there for nearly two hours before there was a shift change and they were cleared to leave.

  When they finally made it over here, my sister, her daughter, her son’s wife as well as another son along with his sixteen-year-old son, they rented an apartment, this single room and its facilities. Every day they could hear shooting and bombardment, until they became accustomed to all of that, until it no longer seemed to faze them at all, as my sister said.

  She quietly told us about how her grandson had volunteered for the popular fighting brigades, how he was transformed into a fighter after they provided him with a rifle, three grenades, ammunition, a uniform, and payment in advance, and how he had then been deployed east of Al-Safira to Al-Ta’aneh, where he was sent to fight terrorists. My sister meekly smiled in shame when she described to me how two of her children had joined up with the mujahideen in Jabhat al-Nusra, while another one had volunteered with the FSA, and all of them were now fighting in the area east of Al-Safira.

  We fell back into our own thoughts as we sipped the tea the little girl brought us. Once my mother was safely back home, I took a shared taxi to my place. But before I had made it as far as the Basil al-Assad statue, I noticed people starting to congregate, sitting on chairs along both sides of the street, some of them munching on seeds, some chomping on lettuce, while women were busy making tabbouleh. I thought to myself: people are like this, people are like that, people could no longer expect grilled meat, they made do with green beans, tabbouleh, and lettuce. They say that it’s better for the body and your health. And so they walk for exercise as well, there are three girls walking over here and four more over there, two young men wearing camouflage, a trailer truck parked over here, a Suzuki over there, street vendors hawking coffee with creamer, tea, Milo chocolate malt, and another selling spirits lined up all along the length of the monument.

  “Brother, they’ve divided the country among themselves. Every
rooster crows on his own garbage heap now. They won’t let you crow anymore, and if anyone does, then everyone has to line up behind one another while they check IDs. If there’s a fruit or vegetable cart they’ll just dump whatever they can into the guard station. If a Suzuki happens to be carrying home furniture, have pity for them as the men bark at them to pull over and leave their car off to the side, demanding, “Where are your documents?” The driver has to step out with the car’s registration. “Where are you coming from?” And then there are more questions that ultimately lead to the driver donating a thousand liras to the checkpoint, and then it’s all “Drive on, move along.”

  My sister didn’t realize any of this until she got stopped at the checkpoint and had to wait for two hours, pulled aside with those she was traveling with. Their journey would have been much simpler if she had simply handed over the money at the outset. My sister was inexperienced, she had come from FSA territory, and all of their names were entered into a computer when they reached the Al-Ramouseh neighborhood, as she told me and my mother, where she was detained at that motherfucking checkpoint, as she called it. My sister Shukriya dropped out of school because there were adult men and young boys there. School was forbidden for girls because they would have to sit in the same class with boys. My sister got married when she was young. My aunt came—well, not my mother’s sister, but the sister of my aunt who had married my father, the old wife—along with her husband, son, and daughter, and they all sat down in the great room in our house to get her engaged. She hadn’t even turned fifteen years old, and within three months her fiancé and his brother were able to cobble together the dowry that we used to buy a gown, some bedding, and to pay for the wedding party. The bride didn’t cry before the rest of us did on this blessed occasion, and she left our care so quickly. They took the bride to the bathhouse, to the Al-Effendi Hammam, and I was in the lead among those who escorted her over there.