A story that I wrote and is very close to my heart. It is not meant to carry a political opinion but to just convey the story of individuals affected by war, something you wouldn’t see by looking at the “bigger picture”.
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It was a Friday at dawn when Ahmed and I woke up to the sound of shelling. It wasn’t like any we had heard before, this time it was a lot louder and it felt as if it lasted for hours. Each set of rockets falling disturbed the rhythm of my heart and made me cringe even more. I was holding Ahmed so tight, reciting all the prayers my mother had taught me and I could remember. The electricity went off at the same time so the silence that followed the shelling felt like an expanding void. The first thing that came to my mind was my family living three blocks away.
My father had a 4-storey house. He and my mum lived on the ground floor, while my 2 brothers and their families lived on the second and third floors. When I married Ahmed, my father was hoping he would be able to convince my husband and I to live on the fourth floor. He had always tried to keep us under the same roof. I wouldn’t say he hadn’t succeeded since I ended up living in a house not far away from him and the rest of my family. My mother found it hard to come to terms with his passing despite her irrevocable faith in God, and her belief that the death of a dear one is not a valid reason to turn against God. I was relieved that I lived nearby as I could visit her every morning and chat over a cup of shai. Every once in a while when I couldn’t find her at home, I would find her sitting on a short, four legged wooden stool next to his grave in the neighborhood cemetery, sipping her shai and listening to Sabah Fakhri(1) sing one of his classics, just the way she and my father used to for 40 years.
That Friday, we remained in bed until we no longer heard any aircraft noise. We quickly got dressed and ran towards my family’s house to make sure they were safe. The air smelled toxic and the neighborhood looked different, as we got closer to where my mother and brothers lived. For a few seconds I was confused, I thought in our panic, we might’ve run in the wrong direction. Concrete rubble was everywhere, and the buildings, I just could not recognise. I could only see skeletons of broken building, loose wreckage held together by steel bars; the scene was horrific. Ahmed looked around trying to locate the house, or whatever was left of it. The neighbors were screaming, swearing and praying, all at the same time and I just stood there frozen. I vividly remember that a woman was holding me and helping me to where the front of the house was, climbing what looked like a mountain of concrete rubble. The left portion of the house wasn’t there anymore, as if it had never existed. Instead there was a giant, three-metre deep hole.
I lost twelve members of my family on that day, and it makes me even sadder that I’m now referring to them all now in terms of a number. They were a bundle of happiness and hope, and without any introduction, they became a number. How could anyone sufficiently grieve over the loss of the individual if twelve of them were massacred at once, including my mom?
When my father passed away it was a sharp sting, which dug very deep into my heart and soul. It was like witnessing the collapse of a skyscraper, the one he was lifting up with his bare hands. When he left, I had my mother to feed me when I refused to eat for days. I had my elder brother to carry me every time I collapsed after a bout of heart wrenching sobs. I had my second brother to remind me that I was strong enough to make it through. But when my mother died, they too were gone. They were all gone!
Ahmed was helping the men retrieve bodies from under the wreckage while I was mourning over the crushed corpses covered with blood and dust. There were people counting bodies and others moving them closer to each other and further away from where the house was, to make room for the rest.
Men started digging graves for the bodies on the same day. By the time the graves were ready, it was already dark so we couldn’t bury them then. In the morning, the twelve bodies were, wrapped in cloth, resting right next to my father’s grave. A few neighbors were helping other families bury the rest of people who had died on that day. The cemetery was fast running out of graves and people were being buried in groups.
Ahmed and I had spoken before about the possibility of temporarily moving out of Syria until the country becomes more stable but he had recently opened a musical instruments shop and the business was going well. Besides, if we had decided to leave the country for a little bit, we were hoping to take my mother with us but she would have definitely refused the idea. When I dropped some hints about this to her before she died, she said:
“How could I leave Halab? How could I let go of the smell of olive trees and the aroma of bread at dawn? The Alleys crowded with kids playing football? Who would leave breadcrumbs to the hungry birds waiting by the atrium fountain every morning? Also, would we leave in the middle of the night? Because I wouldn’t dare to drag my suitcase in front of all the neighbors, that’s embarrassing. If I’m going to die, I want to die here, in this house.”
We decided to stay; we thought the clashes were a hiccup that eventually was going to pass. It’s been a while now and the ugly images are starting to override the beautiful ones, I just wish I had paid more attention to the details of my village when I was there, to be able to just close my eyes, shut the world out, and roam around its alleys for a few minutes in my head. A boy playing on the street. A little girl helping her mom hang up the laundry in the sun. A happy old man riding a bicycle bringing home some bread.
In the days following the attack, only a few people used to leave their homes, mostly just to buy some milk and a few loaves of bread. Everyone changed to buying only the essential items for survival, especially after rumors started about some armed groups hiding in bombed houses and storing large quantities of weapons in the neighborhood. Ahmed’s shop was deserted, customers stopped coming. For a while, he used to go to the shop in the morning and come back way before it was noon. He would come home, silently eat a little bit for lunch then spend the rest of the day tuning the strings of his oud. Once, I asked him to play me a piece, and after a few moments of just staring at the sugar cube dissolving in his shai, he plucked a few strings with the risha before it slipped out of his fingers at the sound of bombarding. Since then, he ended up just tuning.
We stayed at home for most of the time, spending hours watching the news on television. When I look back now I think that was a mistake. The TV news just fed hate. There is little that we got out of it about where the country was heading towards, the news were directed to viewers to make them hate a group or another. No wonder, tension was rising all over the country, the level of hatred fed was intense.
One day, I was flipping through the channels when the ruins of my family’s house appeared on the screen. I put the volume up and nudged Ahmed so he would pay full attention to the news. They were showing images of piles of destroyed machine guns that the reporter claimed were found under the wreckage of the house. He was saying that the house was targeted because it sheltered members of the Free Syrian Army and that the old woman who lived there provided them with food and information about the village. Pictures of my mother and brothers were also shown. How would you react to such news? My family who we buried a few days earlier was being accused of allying with an armed force. My mother probably wouldn’t even have known what the FSA were. I was furious that they would accuse my family of such lies and blame them for their own death. I wanted to knock on the door of every house that watched that report on the news, I wanted to go on TV myself and explain the truth. I was angry because millions of people thought my family had betrayed their trust and I couldn’t fix it. I wished I too had been killed on that day and didn’t listen to these lies. That was the time when Ahmed temporarily broke his silence and tried to comfort and convince me that we both knew they were innocent and that was enough. He told me that at least if our neighbors were watching, they wouldn’t have believed it because they knew us very well.
The next day, when Ahmed went to buy bread, one of our close neighbors, whom I’m going to refer to as Seen(2), asked Ahmed if what they saw on the news was true, and told him that people have had been talking.
In the afternoon, someone knocked violently on the door yelling and urging us to open quickly. Ahmed placed his ears against the shaking wooden door and asked who it was. It was Seen, the neighbor Ahmed had met in the morning. When Ahmed opened the door for him to come in, Seen was breathless. He had run all the way to our home to tell us that a large group of the neighbors believe that we no longer were welcome in the village, that we might be a threat to the safety of other villagers. Some were even saying that we should be executed. I just stood there unable to speak. What kind of mentality allows taking someone’s life away on the assumption that there is a slight chance of danger coming from him or her? I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t the opposite, giving someone a chance to live on the assumption that they could be innocent. It was too much for me to grasp how already cracked our community was.
Seen proposed we leave the house immediately and go hide in his, for as long as some people had the intention of hurting us. We left home immediately, I didn’t have time to clear the coffee table or rinse the teapot. When I was younger, my mother used to get mad whenever I would leave the teapot without rinsing especially overnight as it stains badly and would be hard to clean. I wish we’d had a little bit of time to pack some items with us; the small jewelry box my mother gave me the day I got married, the framed pictures of both my parents and Ahmed’s that were sitting on the dresser, Ahmed’s oud. I wish we had found time to collect the few valuables we had; anything we owned would’ve made a little difference if we were able to bring it here with us, not to keep, but to give away for those who are in worse conditions.
We were hiding in our neighbor’s house when our own home was broken into and then burnt down with everything we had owned. We lost all physical evidence of who we are. I still can’t believe that people we knew actually did that. What if we had been hiding in our house? Would they have burned us alive? I try to convince myself that they did it when they were absolutely certain that we weren’t there, just to get us out of the village. It’s a less uncomfortable idea than the first guess. It can’t be the second; we shared too many good memories for them to go that extreme but again, I don’t know exactly what they had been watching on television.
Ahmed thought that we had to figure out a way to leave the village, to save our lives and not compromise the safety of Seen and his family. Ahmed, Seen, his wife and I spent hours coming up with a plan to smuggle us out of the village without anyone noticing. I insisted on passing by the cemetery to say goodbye to my family and also give Ahmed a chance to say goodbye to his parents, they both passed away when he was little, this request made the plan even harder to follow safely but after some long negotiations, everyone was convinced it was emotionally necessary, especially after all what we’ve had been through over a such a short period of time.
We spent the majority of the next day at Seen’s house, preparing for the road map of our exit from Syria. There was no point in moving to another part of Syria if the country wasn’t going towards a resolution. We thought that Lebanon would be suitable; at least we spoke the same language and shared the same cultural values. Seen paid a man a large sum of money to accept the job. We felt ashamed we couldn’t pay for it ourselves but Ahmed promised him to try and return the money somehow in the future. We also received a basket full of food Seen’s wife prepared for the journey. I never thought that one day I would be crying over a basket of food but the act of generosity really touched my heart. When everything and everyone was against us, God sent us this family to take care of us.
We left their house when it was too dark outside for anyone to be casually walking around the village. It was so quiet, I could hear Ahmed breathing and the sound of distant bombardment of a village close enough for us to hear the punishment its residents collectively received. The cemetery was locked when we got there so Ahmed cautiously climbed the wall to see if he could figure out a way to open the gate from the inside. Twenty minutes later, he was able to pick the lock and let me in. It was a difficult job especially when he had to do it with the minimum noise possible, maybe I too should’ve just climbed the wall, it just didn’t occur to us in our panic- stricken state.
While Ahmed was saying goodbye to his parents, I sat on my mother’s stool, which was still positioned right next to my father’s grave. I wanted to move it a little bit for it to be right in the middle between his and my mother’s newly dug grave. I was frustrated that its soil hadn’t entirely settled in its place and I was forced to abandon it. I used to feel sorry for those dead people with neglected graves and wondered why nobody visited and planted some flowers. Someone might wonder one day and judge the children and relatives who walked away from those graves and never came back to even maintain them.
It was very scary to sit there and think about the fact that everyone in my family was gone. I sat there trying to remember my last conversation with each one of them. It was harder than I thought. I still remember my last conversation with my father but I can’t exactly remember what it was with anyone else, I had probably said goodbye to each one of them while leaving the house but it hurts not being able to recall what we last discussed. I wish I could go back in time and mentally record those conversations then re-visit them whenever I felt homesick, instead of just hoping to meet them in my dreams. But maybe it was less of a tragedy that my mother didn’t live to go through the humiliation Ahmed and I have been through, it would’ve tortured her losing her kids, her home, her neighbors and her Jasmine flowers. At least she had passed away with the anticipation that everything was going to get better. I hope the noise of shelling is not disturbing her in her sleep, though.
I touched the stone of each of their graves and recited Al-Fatiha(3) before moving to do the same at the stones of Ahmed’s parents. When Ahmed made a sniffling noise, I knew that he was crying. I think the fact that it was pitch dark and no one else was around to hear him, gave him the freedom to let it out a little. He had been a rock for the people around him since the day I met him that he barely got to grieve himself.
When we arrived where the driver had agreed to meet us, an old pick-up truck was waiting for us. In different circumstances, I would’ve complained about the ride but I just climbed into the back seat and waited for the driver to start the engine. I slept throughout the rest of the night while Ahmed was chatting with the driver. He told Ahmed that since we didn’t have passports or any identification cards on us, we would have to enter Lebanon as refugees then register with a refugee camp. The word refugee was a huge burden on both of us, how could we end up being refugees? The other problem which only hit us on the way to the border was the possibility of our names being on the system as part of a family which supported armed groups, it didn’t matter then if that was true or not, we just had to make decisions as if our family really was what the news report described it as. The driver said he could smuggle us inside Lebanon if we were to pay him extra $300 dollars, which we didn’t have or gave him the watch Ahmed was wearing. The watch was very special to Ahmed; it was his father’s before he died and Ahmed told me before that he had worn it even when his wrist was too small for it. I didn’t want him to give it away just like that so I passed my hands under my headscarf to reach for the gold necklace he gave me at our wedding. He gave me a look and I knew that I had to take my hands off the necklace and just silently watch him take his watch off and hand it to the driver.
I can’t tell you what happened next or how we entered Lebanon for the safety of the people who helped us but we managed to avoid being officially branded as refugees. The moment we arrived in Tripoli, we started looking for a place to stay at. The driver told us that a lot of Syrians came here when they fled Syria and we assumed that it was the case because it was easier for them to live here.
We were shocked at how much landlords expected us to pay for a small room. Most of them were trying to take advantage of the fact that we didn’t have another choice and some were trying to collect the money refugees get on their United Nations aid cards, which we didn’t have because we hadn’t registered with the United Nations. We were drained on the day so we gave the landlord whatever little money we had and my necklace, just to cover the rent for the first month. It didn’t affect me much losing the necklace because all that mattered to me then was finding a roof for the two of us to safely live under but Ahmed took it very hard. He barely spoke to me on that night. Actually, he hardly spoke to me since then.
We have managed to survive until now by doing some random labour jobs around the neighborhood. Since we got here, Ahmed has been making much less money than I have. I usually do the laundry and clean houses close by but for Ahmed, days would go by before he made a few dollars. It is harder for him to get work.
When he’s not mentally distant, he would be fighting with me, mostly about silly subjects but I think it’s because he always has money on his mind now. It must be very hard for him to not know if we’re keeping our room the next month and harder because he only marginally contributes to the rent.
I woke up this morning to a very familiar smell, the inside of my mother’s spices cupboard and that made me feel very nostalgic. I looked out of the window and found an old man sitting on the pavement selling spices. I started remembering the days I had spent in the kitchen with my mum, memories that evoked me in a strange mix of comfort and heartache. I jerked out of these thoughts when Ahmed stormed into the room shouting at me. He asked me where exactly I had got the hundred dollars I made yesterday. I repeated to him what I had already told him last night, the woman whose house I have been cleaning for the past few weeks gave me the money as a gift. He didn’t believe me and started yelling and accusing me of being a prostitute; he said that he heard men talking in the local market about how one could easily find a Syrian woman to sleep with for a hundred dollars. I was furious with him, I immediately walked out of our room in the shared apartment and headed towards the door.
At the door I found a boy of around six or seven years of age. He begged me to give him some bread, as he hadn’t eaten a morsel since the day before. His voice was shaking and tears filled his eyes; I simply couldn’t walk away just because I was furious with Ahmed. I took a deep breath, held his hand and asked him to come inside. I avoided making eye contact with Ahmed while leading the boy to the room and showed him where to sit and wait for me as I went to prepare something for him to eat. We didn’t have much food at home, a few slices of bread, olive oil and some Za’atar(4) . I mixed the Za’atar with olive oil in a small bowl for him to have with the bread and poured some milk in a small cup. I could hear his conversation with Ahmed from outside the room and I still remember exactly what they said:
“ So how long have you been here in Tripoli?” Ahmed asked
“ Four months, I think.”
“ Did you come with your parents?”
“ Yes but I’m staying with my mother now; my dad went back to Syria. He said he went to back to Idlib to kick out the bad guys.”
“Your house is in Idlib?”
“Was. Some mean people destroyed it just before we came here. I wish we could go back home. I miss my room, my books and my piano.”
“You play the piano?”
“Yes, I do. My mum and dad taught me how to.”
“I play music too; I used to own a musical instruments shop in Halab.”
“Did you sell pianos?”
“Yes, I did”
“My dad promised to buy me at least a music keyboard when he gets back. To be honest with you, I don’t want a keyboard. I once played one and didn’t like it, notes sound awful on it.”
“ I hope one day you get your piano back, I really do”
I walked into the room and placed the food in front of Shadi. He immediately started eating. Ahmed and I sat facing each other in silence, which Ahmed broke when he asked Shadi if his mother had something to eat. He said he didn’t know; He hadn’t seen her in two weeks. She said she was going to find a new job and he should play with the other kids in the neighborhood until she gets back. It didn’t cross his mind that most probably his mother wasn’t coming back, probably because she’s too scared of the responsibility. I don’t think any kid would reach the conclusion that his parents have abandoned him, not even Syrian kids, who are forced to grow so quickly, living here or in the refugee camps.
I reached for the hundred dollars in my pocket that Ahmed and I had fought over, which was meant to go for rent and showed it to Shadi. I told him once he finishes eating; we were going shopping to get him some new clothes and a mattress to sleep on with us in the same room until his parents came back.
We just bought them; they’re on the floor. Ahmed had just taken him now to buy him some sugarcoated chickpeas from a store on the other side of the market. I predict that Ahmed connecting with Shadi is going to bring a lot of positivity to our family.
I thought that a lot of what has happened to us was unfair and it certainly has been the biggest test for my relationship with Ahmed. I have a great faith in God and believe that He’s going to protect us and help us come out stronger through this. I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I’m happy Shadi is now with us.
This is my story. If you could interview every Syrian who moved to this neighborhood, each would tell you a story, an individual and unique, a story with people, homes and feelings. There is one message that we all agree on here and you should include it in your documentary, we are more than just numbers reported on the news as part of a collateral damage.
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(1) A Traditional Arabic singer who is considered to be a legend in the Arab world.
(2) An Arabic letter, which is used to represent an unknown, i.e. X.
(3) The name of a chapter in the Quran that is usually recited when visiting the dead.
(4) A mix of dried herbs in the Middle East, usually referred to as Lebanese Oregano
