Roundabout of Death Read online

  The Al-Effendi Hammam is located at the end of the Al-Zahr souq, the market that specializes in selling beauty supplies, textiles, and other essentials for a traditional wedding. The Al-Effendi Hammam is to the east, and directly in front of it is the rear entrance of the Al-Zahr Hammam, which looks out on the Bab Al-Hadid plaza, but the rear of the building had been transformed into a flea market.

  WE GRILL AND GRILL AND DON’T EVEN MAKE BACK THE COST OF THE COALS

  I went down to the vegetable sellers in the Bab Al-Hadid souq. They were selling grilled meat from carts, one with kebab on skewers and another where they were grilling on hot coals, the first on a cart where they cubed the minced meat and speared it onto a stick, the cook’s voice booming throughout the space, “We grill and grill and don’t even make back the cost of the meat!” Out front there was a platter decorated with parsley and onion and tomato. There were parsley sprigs on top of the cart, and off to the right there was finely chopped tomato. He’d slide a skewer or two in between a piece of pita bread and then cover it with biwaz salad, tomato, and a little bit of salt and crushed pepper for anyone who wanted some. One customer took the sandwich to his Bedouin wife, who was sitting far away from the crowd, and then returned to get himself one. He had promised her that if they ever had the chance to visit Aleppo, he would make sure she tasted the kebab. He returned to her with the second wrap and the two of them ate together in silence.

  Little birds of hunger started chirping in my belly. I had one-quarter of a lira so I stopped and bought a sandwich for ten qurush, sprinkling a bit of crushed pepper over the top. I nibbled on some radishes as I ate my sandwich. The whole operation amazed me. I asked the griller whether he needed any help.

  “Ask the boss,” he grunted, so I did.

  After scrutinizing me closely, he said, “Come back tomorrow. You’ll take home three liras per week. Don’t snack on the meat or anything else. Bring some tap water with you and wash the skewers before you leave. Your shift will be from 8:00 a.m. until the meat runs out.”

  I told him I could start working that day and he told me to go ahead.

  I filled the water jug from the tap at the mosque and filled a second jug for drinking, then immediately started shouting out, “Grilled meat, grilled meat!” I took the fan from Abu Muhammad, who was blowing it on the skewered meat. I stashed a cigarette behind my ear and started shifting the coals around, putting some fresh pieces on top of the lit ones, which increased the strength of the embers. I split open the smoldering coals and laid the skewers on the grill while he smoked a cigarette and sipped a cup of tea. As he poured the boss a glass I pulled the cigarette out from behind my ear and lit it up, grilling the tomato and the onion and the hot pepper. “Grilled meat! Grilled meat!” I shouted. “We don’t even make back the cost of the coals . . . step right up, step right up, dear friends!”

  Soon the cart was jammed with customers eating as I grilled the huge amount of meat that Abu Muhammad had provided me, and by 3:00 p.m. the meat had run out along with the salad and all the tomatoes, so I put away the supplies and washed everything down with the water I had brought with me. Then I placed the kettle on the fire, and when it started to boil I hurried over with cups, blew on the fire until it was extinguished, washed all the silverware and the plates, well, not washed exactly the way my skillful sister would, you might say I scraped off the parsley and most of the grease from the silverware, then placed it all inside the cart and shut the doors tight.

  “Be here early tomorrow,” the boss ordered me.

  “What about my pay?” I asked.

  He laughed jovially, the first time I had seen him laugh all day, then he reached his hand into his pocket, pulled out half a lira and handed it to me. I thanked him. I had stashed a piece of bread and some salad over by the mosque, so I hurried over there, but the bread was gone. When I noticed a street kid was eating it, I rushed at him, kicked him, grabbed the bread from out of his hand, but then handed him back a quarter of it. He took it from me and continued eating, so I ate there with him before heading back toward the souq.

  I made my way to the Al-Mashatiyah market, passing by an omelet stand, where I stopped for a moment and asked the cook to make me some eggs. He cracked one on the side of a bowl and dropped the egg inside, sprinkled parsley and chopped onion on top, then some salt and other spices, mixed it all together and poured in a little water so that it would set, and put the whole mixture into the pan. He tossed a piece of wood underneath, poked it around with a fire iron, then stood back up all chalky and swollen, looking hilarious. He tore up a piece of bread and scattered the morsels into the eggs, adding some pickled vegetables for me, which made everyone’s mouths start to water. Then he mixed in cucumber and spicy peppers. I took my food and walked up the end of the street, where I sat down and started to devour it with uncharacteristic appetite.

  I finished the entire sandwich and a couple loaves of pita bread, which left me with one more round and a couple large chunks. I decided to hold onto them for my skillful sister, since she was bound to be hungry from her long day of work, but then I thought better of it when I remembered that my sister was getting married, surely they would bring home some good food, so I bundled up the food and started singing to myself, “O silver heart, why are you so angry, I’d give anything for your forgiveness, brother, from the spring of my . . . from the spring of my. . . ” I struggled to complete the song, “Olive Green” by Lena Chamamyan, but I couldn’t remember the words, and as hard as I tried to stoke my memory, it was no use, so I gave up and improvised the words, “the spring of my balls. . . ”

  After my sister Shukriya got married, her husband would bring her around every month, then every two months, then every major holiday. Her husband worked in construction, building the horizontal beams of each floor so that young men could come along and pour concrete on top, then he would level out the bathrooms and the ceilings, stabilizing the beams and building the staircases.

  “Give me the construction joint, quick, boy!” And the boy handed over the joint. “And bring some wood, boy!” And the boy brought the wood. He was an expert in his craft, and had no equal. He recruited his brother to the work so that he, too, could learn the craft that would keep them out of poverty. His brother was the apprentice, and Shukriya’s husband was the master. He would place the beams, the extra wood, and the stoppers beside the house, and he nailed them all together, all of that for Friday, the day when the two of them would pour the foundation for houses without permits. It was only a few years before the two of them managed to buy a piece of land, where her husband poured concrete and built a house, bringing in electricity and water, and every year they’d build a little more, until it became a building on the side of the street, a sight to all who passed by. But her husband was shot in the neck by sniper fire and fell down without saying another word. He had been standing with his wife Shukriya as the two of them were preparing red peppers when the hit came, BANG, and his entire body collapsed to the ground, and from that point the eastern section of the city became a shooting range for barrel bombs, and ever since then the family had been divided into one group fighting with the FSA, and others fighting alongside regime forces, which deeply saddened Shukriya, causing her to retreat inside of herself, the family no longer held itself together, their father got killed or was martyred, and all the children wound up opposing one another.

  “Trust in God,” I told my sister, “He won’t forget about you.”

  When my skillful sister reached the age of consent, she then got engaged to one of her cousins. He didn’t come by himself to do the deed, but sent his mother and father to see us instead.

  “But your son is already married,” my father protested.

  His mother said he would only be happy if he had a proper heir, he wants a son, may God provide for your children in due time, it’s because his wife has only been able to give birth to daughters, three girls in five years.

  My father replied that we would discuss the matter and s
end them our decision, and he did discuss the matter with my sister’s mother. This cousin is a big deal in his region, he’s very well off, the girl would never go hungry, my father told her, but she would always be the second wife. My mother said that they all marry their own women, the idea being that those you already know are preferable to those you haven’t met yet. At this point my skillful sister got involved, declaring her intention to marry him.

  “But he already has a wife,” my father said, “and you’ll always be the second wife.”

  “I know,” she said flatly, before walking out of the room.

  And so they sent word to the house of the future groom, “Come and fetch your bride.”

  My skillful sister married her new groom, and for seven days his other wife remained elsewhere with her daughters at her side. On the eighth day he brought her and her daughters back to the house so that they could move on with their lives. As soon as her husband left for the cafe, my skillful sister pulled out her vanity kit and began putting on makeup. This was in the courtyard of the large house, across from the building where she lived. She pulled out her tweezers and started plucking her eyebrows, then she filed her nails, and before her husband got back home, her co-wife took a tank of gasoline, stood in the middle of the courtyard, poured the liquid all over herself, and began hurling insults at my sister. Her daughters all started sobbing as they watched this happen. My sister carried on with what she was doing with remarkable aplomb even as the other woman wailed and shouted at my sister for having stolen her husband. My sister hardly noticed what she was saying, just kept filing her nails, and when their husband opened the door, she cried out to him, “Look at this mess you’ve made, Abu Samira!” then grabbed a box of matches and lit herself on fire. Abu Samira rushed toward her but she was already a ball of roaring fire, he couldn’t even get close to her, he was shouting and howling, then grabbed a bucket of water and dumped it on the mother of his daughters, but the flames just grew higher because of her synthetic clothing.

  The girls were terrified, all of them were bawling, clinging to one another, but my sister didn’t move a muscle, just sat there with the nail polish applicator in her hand, holding onto her toes as if nothing had happened, while the other woman, the mother of those daughters, was moaning, and then fell to the ground in silence. Her husband wrapped her up in a sheet and rushed her to the hospital, where he filled out a report attesting that this woman had died by incineration. She was later buried in the Sheikh Yousef cemetery, with a funeral attended by her relatives as well as her husband’s relatives, those who were still alive anyway, good people of the community, those with kind hearts. They recited the Verse of Yas, then the Fatiha prayer, and then everyone mourned. Their husband’s brother paid for everything, whether that meant compensating the ones who buried the corpse or those who had helped out in other ways, to say nothing of the money they handed out to beggars they encountered along the way. Meanwhile, my sister switched on the hot water heater, sent the three daughters to their grandmother’s and finished filing her nails, then she went into the bathroom and got ready to welcome her husband back, and when he opened the door and realized his wife was inside, he announced that he was home.

  After getting married my sister enjoyed a happy and comfortable life while her husband’s mother raised his daughters. My sister only gave birth to one son, who was stocky and broad-shouldered, his hands big enough to work like a bulldozer, and her husband truly was a big deal, in the morning she’d watch him getting dressed in expensive traditional Arab garb: a heavy robe with a vest and a jacket, a Persian shawl around his shoulders, and some metalware around his neck. He asked his wife to make sure he looked all right, and after she gave him a once-over and offered her comments on his outfit, he’d make his way to the cafe. He gave some cash to a sheepish-looking guy who would go and buy meat, vegetables, and whatever else they needed at the house. The man didn’t do anything at all at home, my sister took care of everything: she prepared the hashish and filled small sacks with it, the weight of each one was precisely half a kilogram, then she’d pack them into boxes, and finally seal them all up. Her husband was in charge of distributing the product, mostly it was once a month, when young men would come knocking on the door of the guest house, asking him, Hey Uncle, and after all the late-night visitors had been exhausted a small shipping van would show up to carry away the boxes that had been stamped with my sister’s professional seal, Shamsa, and they’d wait until morning to drive that van over to the depot. Shamsa’s husband had bought off the police and security services so that when the van set out in the morning, the streets would be empty, there would be no police or security forces, and nobody to be concerned about what was happening.

  When Shamsa’s son got older, he showed absolutely no interest in the family business, he was much more into trading antiquities and rare manuscripts. He would spend his days hunting them down, purchasing whatever he could. He didn’t sell those items inside the country, though, he would send them to Lebanon, where they would be catalogued and sent for international auction in London.

  He looked out for himself, started spending a lot of time with high-level officers and the heads of security stations, government ministers, people like that. His property on the Damascus Road became a meeting spot where they would stay up late into the night partying, bringing in whiskey and women, and anyone who wished to take a girl to a bedroom could experience whatever they wanted. The most desirable women would show up there along with men who held all kinds of positions of authority, people well known for smuggling hashish, pills, and liquor, judges and high-ranking police officials, security services bigwigs and tribal leaders, all sorts of people from the city. You certainly might say that they were creating a house of cards for themselves, abetting one another by not asking about any crimes being committed, just going ahead and committing them, and for that reason you might also say that they were able to monopolize the black market. They didn’t lack for anything. They simply did as they pleased.

  TAKE ME WITH YOU TO EUROPE

  Everyone was silent at the Island Cafe, ours was the only table where people were talking. Nader the unemployed lawyer had gotten there first, his cell phone glued to his hand as he talked to the whole world over Facebook; then Nizar, a doctor who was unemployed, too, but only because he had retired, sold his practice, and was waiting for his pension checks to start arriving—he was also on Facebook at that moment—and Muhammad D, a novelist, or at least the author of one novel, although the circumstances weren’t helping him finish his second, was sitting there staring off toward the east. We’d always find him sitting there with two briefcases, and we never knew what was in either one. The barista called him Doctor because he knew more about medicine than many physicians, he’d show up for doctor’s visits carrying medical journals to discuss with them, and often when he popped over to the pharmacy for a few minutes to pick up a prescription, he’d tell the person next to him to keep an eye on his cell phone that was charging, and that person would tell him not to worry. He’d spend a few minutes in the pharmacy then return to his phone, look at it for a moment only to discover that it hadn’t recharged yet. He slept in the Al-Musharaqah neighborhood, on the front line between the old and the new city, and every night he spent there he would hear people cursing at one another, or degrading other men’s wives, hurling insults every which way. Mahmoud also came around from time to time, bringing us books to read, but usually nothing more than that. Newspapers no longer found their way to us. We used to solve crossword puzzles in the papers at Joha’s Club. But they don’t make it to the cafe anymore so we can no longer do the crosswords.

  The young men who are left come around on Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, and they don’t make any trouble, they just show up, drink their coffee, talk some politics, and then leave.

  There’s an aid distribution center next to the cafe where you’ll find hordes and hordes of people who come to pick up five yellow bottles of vegetable oil; a blanket and a f
oam mattress for every member of the household; a razor blade, toothbrush, toothpaste, rice, tea, and a few other things I may have forgotten. I’ll go see about it tomorrow, then I’ll be sure to write it down.

  I—and I cautiously speak in the name of I—come by the cafe every day, sit down, and observe. I’m inspired by an artist who paints here and sends some of his paintings to Saudi Arabia, leaving some here, hopeful that somebody might buy them someday. This artist has a narrow mind, replying to any question without giving the answer much thought. You go east, he goes west, or he’ll just leave a response dangling in the air, saying that he knows so-and-so, and what that person knows, but what he himself truly knows, God only knows.

  Jamal doesn’t know where he’s going to go. First he went to Lebanon, to stay with his in-laws, but they grew tired of having him around. He’s extremely fat, he just sits at the table eating and smoking like a glutton, talking about his journey to Lebanon and then on to Turkey. You might call him a refugee, though. And then there was Abd al-Qadir, the Bedouin philosophy teacher who fled his house in the Al-Rashideen neighborhood. He moved his wife and two daughters to Reyhanli, then traveled to Mersin, Greece, and Albania, where he was detained for a month before being deported to Greece, where he is still awaiting sentence.

  Nader also fled to Mersin, then to Greece, where he tried going to the airport eleven times, but each and every time they seized him in the terminal or on the plane before take-off. And Zakaraya, the other philosophy teacher, joined up with Mahmoud, and the two of them set out for Europe, now they are in Brussels learning the language and wasting their days as they await release from a detention facility.