A Woman in the Crossfire (24 page)

I can't write.

I can't work on the ground with the young people from the coordination committees.

I can't do anything.

All I can do is hurt now.

I know that my breaths are numbered, each inhalation is numbered. My movements. My steps. Everything is numbered and watched. There's a prison inside me. They won't have to arrest me. That much is certain. But they will drive me to madness, they would have known that I won't be able to go on like this, they would have wanted to tell me they were even monitoring the air I breathe. I thought about going underground once and for all but the existence of my daughter held me back. It would be hard for her to go into hiding with me.

Today Angelina Jolie appears on television, visiting the Syrian refugees. My heart skips a beat. Syrians are now displaced persons; celebrities adorn themselves with them. Turkish politicians kiss Syrian babies in photo-ops as the filthy game of politics extends further and further.

I hear there is a national council being formed to confront the regime, presenting itself as a representative of political forces inside the country as well as abroad. As the army reinforces its presence along the Turkish border, the village of Khirbet al-Jouz is surrounded and its people are hunted down and detained for helping the refugees from Jisr al-Shughur. Still, army defections continue, only this time it is in the naval forces where the officer Mahmoud Habib appears to announce his defection; Sergeant Ismail al-Shaykh Salih from the air force
mukhabarat
proclaims his defection as well. My day ends with a young man appearing on al-Jazeera as a representative of the local coordination committees. I feel a small satisfaction. At least something good is happening today.

..............................

A lifeless mind.

A lifeless heart.

It's time for all of you to get out of here so I can start dancing to music once again, my only life amidst this oblivion.

I want to reclaim my passion for words, for the rhythm of Arabic letters, how I thrill at the letter “Jeem” as it plunges into a deep resting place, the letter “Alif” as it soars through an endless space, the breaking “Ya” as it rises toward forming the whispered whys and y's, the letter “Noon” in its tender womb.

I want to regain the warmth in my fingertips as they flutter like reeds in the wind, sniping words and painting images upon images in a world made of air. The world I belong to. I want to return to my passion for abstaining from the realistic details of human life, to get back to disdaining appointments and interviews and meetings and the ringing of telephones, back to my own private conversation that unites me with a cup of coffee.

I want to reclaim my ability to obliterate real circumstances. I want one night of deep sleep without a fiery needle piercing my heart and ricocheting out of my eyes like an echo. I want the luxury of choosing the faces I will lavishly bestow upon my intimate life. Just like that, to put it simply, I want to go back to my solitude that is crowded with novel characters. They're all waiting for me there, somewhere in my mind that is sick with them, that is sure with them. They're waiting for you to get out of here, you idiots. I want a few simple things, like for my eyes not to tear up every hour, or not to jump whenever I hear a loud noise, not to bolt up like a crazy woman whenever my elderly neighbour who lives alone with her old husband screams. I expect that one of them is going to pass away at any moment now. I have been a bundle of raw nerves, how could I not be, falling asleep to news of killing and waking up to the stench of bloodshed and stories of imprisonment and torture.

This morning the doorbell starts ringing early, at 5:30 a.m. In the building where I live now there is only the old people's apartment and a dentist on the ground floor. We are practically the only residents, that old woman who lives with her half-crippled husband and I. The two of them are tragically alone and I would tip-toe past their door coming from and going to the top floor where I live, because she is sure to open up and make me stand there for a long time as she talks about her loneliness and her sadness over the death of her only daughter. At first I stood there and listened, I would visit, but that meant spending half the day there and furthermore, it would mean spending my entire day in a foul mood. There is something agonizing about the life of those two elderly people, something that makes the way I think about oblivion more concrete. Two lonely old people in Damascus, with no children and hardly any relatives who ever show up. They live in a fusty apartment, which hints that they once had money; their problem was never poverty but rather that life has passed them both by, or that death has passed over them as well. This is painful for me to see. Today her husband falls down on the ground and throws up. As usual I fall asleep to news that made me wake up in pain from grinding my teeth together. The news of the refugees is saddening.

I don't know what I am supposed to do. The old man has nearly lost consciousness, the old woman raves and curses her life, their house smells fusty and the whole place is a mess. I stayed to help her for a while. I was shaking by the time I finally left. I think for a few seconds how my nerves were so badly frayed that I would start crying at the least painful sight. The old woman looked into my eyes, and my face felt redder than usual as I told her that all she had to do was call and I would be there at any hour, that I was like her own daughter. Tears streamed from her eyes as she threw herself into my arms. She was frail. I was trembling. She said, “Ahhh, my girl, if you only knew how much her death stings my heart.” I said, “Auntie, God rest her soul, this is God's plan.” I got up, put back her headscarf that had fallen and walked away so she wouldn't be able to see my own tears. I didn't even look back, quickly climbing the steps. There's nothing left. That's right, there's nothing in this life worth celebrating.

The images rush past my eyes, horrifying images from when Syrians started getting killed and imprisoned and mutilated and dumped in mass graves. Now there are pictures of the refugees on the screen, showing how they live. Simple folk say that they ran away from tanks that did not distinguish between young and old, between women and men. Every day they appear on television, talking about being chased as they ran away, how they left everything behind, escaping with their lives even as the Syrian army continued sending reinforcements.

The strange thing is that they forced them out of their homes and then chased after them as they fled. It wasn't enough to kill them and displace them in order to teach them a lesson. They had to follow after anyone who was still alive – this is madness.

Today the president gives his speech, which is shocking and frightening and even worse than the last two. His appearance conveys wilful ignorance. The Syrians are angry and go out to demonstrate against the speech. The president keeps saying there is a conspiracy, that there were gangs. He doesn't recognize the suffocating crisis the country is living through. From time to time he laughs and pedantically explains some bit of common knowledge. He is a cartoonish Frankenstein, reciting a stilted book report about the mechanics of organized, premeditated crime. The Syrian people answer back: Urban demonstrations in Homs and Hama, Idlib and Aleppo and a number of Syrian cities. His speech makes a mockery of Syrian blood and it spells, in brief, the continuation of the military-security solution.

Following the president's speech, state television announces the discovery of a mass grave in Jisr al-Shughur – they say it contained security forces and army soldiers. It is the third grave they show. The bodies have been dismembered and disfigured, and they are shown on screen. The people of Jisr al-Shughur and the defecting army officers say it was security agents and members of the army who carried out the killing, and who dug mass graves in order to slap the charge on armed men and confirm the official narrative:
The annihilation of the city was intended to cleanse it of these armed men.

The madness continues and the killing continues. The regime says day after day,
Either us or this scorched earth policy and whatever remains of your remains, O Syrians
.

I am waiting for something to happen, despite my lack of confidence. I am really hoping for a miracle to save this country from perdition.

..............................

Today there is a massive demonstration in support of the president. All public employees have been coerced to go out or they will be fired and shamed publicly. They turn everyone who works in government agencies into security forces and anyone who doesn't do as they're told is kicked out. Walking through the streets I notice the faces of the supporters, and as usual my tears precede me. 40 years have passed, my entire life, and in spite of all the torments I had been through, I never cried like this before. In just a few months a woman like me finds out what a flood of tears looks like, a few months in a life gone by, a sad life. I don't regret what happened, the uprising has renewed my faith in ideas about life and justice and strength. I am out in the streets searching for something I had lost, something I imagine. I notice it in the face of the young men and women as they ride around Damascus on top of sports cars, carrying flags and pictures of the president. The young ladies wear lots of makeup and are beautiful, as though they have been invited to a party; the shiny black cars become a parade clogging up the streets of Damascus. I step to the side and watch. I cannot stay at home but I should go back there in order to add to the story of what happened in Jableh. Jableh, my city, where I was born, which is now off-limits to me. A lot of things are off-limits, but somehow I still feel satisfaction tugging at my heart like a thin string of happiness, like a thread made of dust.

 

The story of Jableh

My awesome girlfriend who volunteers to go to Jableh and bring back stories of what happened was also from the city. Her family lives there. Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to send her to the Alawite villages as well because, by accident of birth, she belongs to the Sunni community but we agreed to put out these diaries concerning what actually happened, to report the truth of the events. Our idea was to report what had taken place in the city where we grew up, which was shrouded in murky news that is hard to confirm given the dense deployment of security forces and
shabbiha
and minions of the Assad clan there. After her ten-day tour during which she conducted a number of interviews, she told me I was as good as dead to most Alawites. They consider me a traitor, whereas the people of Jableh sympathize with me and think I am on their side. What a nightmarish tragedy. What is the logic of justice and what is the logic of truth?

Here is a testimony of a young man from Jableh:

“After Bouthaina Shaaban came out with her speech full of jobrelated and political promises,” he says, “Jableh witnessed daily demonstrations in support of the regime and we heralded the beginnings of change in Syria. The daily pro-regime marches in the streets of Jableh became inflammatory and exhausting for our spirits and our nerves. How could we
not
get annoyed when there was no human sympathy? Our first attempt began as a humane and human desire to articulate our refusal of injustice and our rejection of state media lies. We would have successfully protested on the Friday after the massacre in Dar‘a by coming out of the Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Mosque if we had not been surprised to find it surrounded by fire trucks. They brutally dealt with a young man who loudly opposed the presence of security agents inside the mosque. The first Friday only got as far as an indoor sit-in even though the support and encouragement among those who were praying inside the mosque was huge.

“The next Friday we succeeded in getting out of the mosque and into the square we dubbed Freedom Square because it was the first square to witness our attempts at going out and organizing our ranks, and because it was the safest area for us to assemble. That was a big Friday with huge hordes and tons of supporters. Our slogans called for freedom and support for the people of Dar‘a and Douma, focusing on slogans that would reassure our brothers and sisters in the Alawite sect and encourage them to join us in rejecting the language of blood and conflict. We kept on going out after evening prayer, there were more people every day, from all different classes – doctors and engineers, unemployed people and university students. Even women joined us, as did some of our brothers from the countryside and from neighbouring villages. Our slogans at this point didn't exceed demands for reform, the combating of corruption and calls for freedom.”

I stop here to think over these details. I know what that young man means by corruption in Jableh and how the security forces and the regime
shabbiha
control the city, how some corrupt Alawite officers and businessmen were reported to have bought up the city, illegally and shockingly turning its people into tools in their hands. These are the places and streets I knew and grew up in as I changed from a little girl into a young woman, where I had so many memories. My school was in a mostly Sunni neighbourhood, but back then there weren't any problems between us. Most of my childhood friends were Sunnis and I didn't even know what the words Sunni or Alawite meant. I found out when I was a little bit older and went to high school.

The young man continues: “We kept on going out every day for two weeks without any security or army or
shabbiha
coming near us. If there was any movement on the part of the representatives at all, it seemed to be in making arrangements to deal with our employment and cost-of-living problems. They were cosmetic changes without any meaningful treatment of the issues, so we responded by calling for justice. They didn't understand that our demands weren't only concerned with jobs and the cost of living, that they were bigger than that. They were existential and had to do with freedom we hadn't felt the sensation of for 41 years, with democracy and party pluralism, with changing the constitution that deified the single Party and enthroned the dictator. We also called for equality of opportunity, for the corrupt and the thieves who plundered us and plundered our future and our aspirations to be punished, for a dignified and just life that would achieve equality of opportunity regardless of the connections or favouritism that Jableh perhaps suffers from more than any other city or province. Jableh swarms with corrupt people and is full of villas and palaces owned by those with influence, even as entire neighbourhoods and villages go without electricity or water or any chance of a decent life for them or their children, all because they don't have any influence. The corruption in Jableh reached the point where the city is the property of one or two figures who bought up most of the properties and land under other people's names in order to obfuscate and cover it up, but everybody knows all the details. Everybody knows these facts by heart.