A Woman in the Crossfire (16 page)

The man spoke openly in front of my daughter and I believed him. I knew he was concerned about me but I was surprised by what he said and I sensed the enormity of the mistake I had made in letting my daughter hear this. She turned yellow, went to her room and slammed the door. The man left and I was there, alone with her silence and fear. My friend who also overheard the conversation tried to convince me it was essential for me to leave immediately, even though I insisted to her that this was crazy talk, especially now that the regime was starting its manoeuvres, pulling the army out of the cities and announcing a round of national dialogue. On the one hand, it wouldn't do them any good to carry out acts of violence now; on the other hand, I couldn't leave without my daughter, and she would staunchly refuse to leave the country anyway. It was impossible for me to leave without her. I wouldn't have the strength and I resolved not to go unless my daughter agreed, even if that cost me my life. She refused to speak to me at first. She wouldn't say a word but then she said bitterly that the only way I could make her feel better was to appear on state television and proclaim my loyalty to the president, so that our life could go back to normal. I stood there, stunned by what she said. I tried explaining to her, I tried to convince her that this meant suicide as far as I was concerned and that I wasn't worth more than the blood of the people who had already been killed, but she refused to listen. She knew the power she exercised over my heart.

“I won't do it,” I snapped at her.

“And I won't leave with you,” she retorted.

The new house we had rented was strange: two bedrooms opening onto a living room, separated by sliding doors. I could hear her footsteps when she was in her room, pacing anxiously, breaking things, screaming. I began thinking that the time had come to force her to leave, especially after having met with my friend who was close to Hizballah, whom I trust, whom I trust is not corrupt, who leans towards secularism in his life and who is with the regime although he is not on their payroll. Still, when they posted what they did about me on the
mukhabarat
website, he got very upset and called me to say he wanted to see me. He came to Damascus, and I met up with him and his girlfriend last Saturday afternoon. I was upset. Things were quiet but he seemed agitated and asked me to calm down, telling me he had just seen the very people who were making up stories about me, fabricating rumours; simply put, he had been in touch with the deciders, with those engaged in the media and psychological war against the uprising and its supporters. He seemed very concerned as he asked me to calm myself. When he learned what had been happening to me over the past few days, he became even more uncomfortable and asked me if I needed anything. I screamed in front of his girlfriend, apologizing to her from time to time for being so loud, wishing they would just let me be. That's all I wanted, for them to leave me alone, to quit monitoring me night and day.

“It's not so simple,” he said.

“How's it not so simple?”

“Just write something that says you're against what's going on in the street.”

At that point I stood up. I felt like my body was about to shoot through the cement ceiling. I know I can get as enraged as a psychopath, but in that moment, on the brink of death, for them to make up stories about me, for me to have had to flee my house and be terrorized night and day, for them to publish lies about me and to incite every Alawite in Syria to kill me, after all of that, how dare they ask me to write an article in support of the regime and its president? I screamed in his face.

“They're never going to leave you alone,” he said. “There were two opinions in your case. Your story was discussed at the highest levels. There's a faction who say they won't ever leave you alone because you're one of them and another faction say you have to be punished more severely than anyone else, that prison is too good for you and they have resolved to make you regret what you've done. They're all displeased with you, the most powerful people in this country are very angry at you.”

I sighed and repeated that the most powerful people in this country are very angry with me, they're calling me a traitor, intimidating me and forcing me into hiding like a hunted dog.

“You have to get out of here,” he said.

“I wrote what I saw. I didn't make anything up and they know it.” He didn't respond to what I said, just pleaded with me to leave Syria as quickly as possible, saying that the group trying to come after me might back off. After a moment of silence, he added, “You're in real danger, in their minds you're a traitor and an agitator.”

“Tell them I'll be quiet. Won't that be enough?”

“Just write something to get them off your back.”

“I won't do it,” I said. “After all this injustice they expect me to betray my conscience. I won't do it.”

Our conversation ended there, he said goodbye to me with extreme sadness; he called me later several times to ask if I needed any help, repeating his well-mannered plea for me to leave Syria at once. After he had gone, I went straight up to my balcony and looked down at the two men who were following me. I had discovered them 24 hours before. An article about me by a female journalist had appeared in the Lebanese
al-Safir
newspaper on Friday, and after it was published I got a phone call from abroad, threatening me with my last warning. I had promised to remain silent but I had broken my promise. I thought the one threatening me might have been from outside the security apparatus. Perhaps it was ordinary Alawites who were calling all the time and threatening my daughter and I. But I became seriously afraid when I discovered the existence of the two men in front of my new home. How had they found my new place so quickly? Why were they so focused on my movements amidst such difficult circumstances? Apparently I was infuriating them, stoking their rage. What would prevent me from provoking their anger? Silence. But it was just a newspaper piece about me. And what if the editor hadn't deleted my last line?
The real question is, who is it that is killing both sides? What I mean to say is, who is killing both army officers and civilian demonstrators?
The editor at
al-Safir
cut it, I think, in order to protect me and the journalist who wrote reasonable things about me. Nevertheless, the article stirred up their anger and the man on the phone with the angry voice said, “If you don't disappear, Samar Yazbek, I'll make you disappear from the face of the earth.”

That was Friday night. I was getting ready to write in my journal. Then the man came and talked in front of my daughter about the liquidation of some Alawite figures. I could not write. I sat out on the balcony, which was actually the roof. The streets of Damascus were empty. Friday had been turned into a day of horror for Syrians, in which life itself nearly disappears as the security forces spread out, everywhere, until finally, after some demonstrations, security forces are posted in even greater numbers. I was smoking a cigarette as coldness whipped me and my body felt like shifting sand. What was I going to do? I was unable to write and my daughter was in her room with the door closed. All contact with my family had been eerily cut off: after I was labelled a traitor they stopped calling me, and I no longer called them. Days would pass without my hearing from friends or their hearing from me. I had no internet, my movements were becoming more infrequent by the day and the witnesses who I was trying to meet with in order to archive their memories of the uprising had started to go missing as well.

I poured myself a glass of white wine and sat beneath the cold sky. I tried to think seriously about what I had to do. I wasn't prepared for all this violence coming for me, against me first, and against the people second. I wasn't prepared for all this intimidation, but I had to remain calm and think in a rational tone. The warmth of the wine began spreading through my limbs. The one feeling that made me cry bitterly that evening was loneliness, not fear. I had been experiencing fear in every moment, but that night, and before I went into my daughter's room, I truly understood how a person can be utterly alone, how the four corners of the earth can be too narrow, unarmed save for a heart and a weakly moving body. In that moment I also understood how important it is for a human being to be capable of regenerating herself and bringing her dead cells back to life; this may seem like a line out of a book but it's a real feeling and not a metaphor I write down in words here.

Truly, I was a dead woman, bones encased in dry skin, cells that need to be regenerated – something straight out of a science fiction movie. I stood up and stuck my head out over the balcony. I breathed in the cold air, feeling the blessing of being liberated from the sensation of living, of being transformed into an inanimate object. At first I felt like I was dead, but then I pushed the thought away and had the exact opposite thought. It was only a moment, maybe more, a moment in which I pushed my body towards the edge of the balcony. As half of my body hung there in the air, it was a moment of freedom, awesome and clear, like boundless flying. Just then I craved a moment of even greater freedom, to fly through the air towards the abyss. The only true freedom is in death. I closed my eyes but I didn't find the strength to flap my arms in the air. I closed my eyes and imagined those flying drawings that would come to me in my dreams from time to time, the flying drawings that I dreamed about for the first time after I watched
The English Patient
, when Katherine comes into the cave with her lover and they find the drawings on the wall, those drawings that fly and swim in the eternal darkness. That deadly pastime of swimming in the void. I incarnated them for a moment, and then they disappeared. I opened my eyes and the passing moment of magic that would transport me to the unknown, to a quick flight up in the air and then into eternal slumber, was gone. Out of complete cowardice I was unable to jump and fly towards the repose of death. My daughter was on my mind. As long as she was, she would save me from dying.

I went back inside and closed the balcony door. As if tranquilized, I didn't go to my own bed but to my daughter's. She was still awake, her eyes all red from crying. I snuggled up next to her, wrapped her in my arms and cradled her in my lap, just like I used to do when she was eight years old. We cried a lot that night. Everything that had been missing in my life until then, I cried it out and she cried with me. We slept on our tears and when I awoke after about half an hour, she was fast asleep in the same position. I started getting anxious. I thought about writing… and I started to write.

That was
al-Nakba
²⁴
Day, but because of the revolutions and the uprisings across the Arab world it was no ordinary anniversary. Young bare-chested men confronted the Israelis. In this place young people are fated to welcome death in a very particular way, either from the bullets of their despotic regimes or the bullets of the Israelis.

I haven't written anything yet about the Friday of Free Women or the six people who were killed by security forces in various Syrian cities. I could no longer keep up with the news as I had become accustomed to doing, so I did not bear witness to the women who were martyred in the Palestinian Intifada on that special day of solidarity, nor did I see the slogans highlighting the presence of women in the Syrian protests either. The Syrian regime claims to be preparing for national dialogue even as it continues its killing and its arrests. The tanks withdraw from Baniyas and Dar‘a, but are then redeployed in the suburb of Daraya, near Damascus.

I think about what I will have to do tomorrow, going to ask if I have been banned from travelling, going to Emigration and Passports in order to get a passport for my daughter, and then, and then…

Now I can understand that cry: My God, why hast thou forsaken me?

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

On this black morning I have sharp pains in my chest as waves of loud ringing swirl in my ears. I start to feel that I am truly in danger. A number of signs have pushed me to respond finally to my friends' pleas for my total silence, self-interest and dropping out of the public eye once and for all. Doctor A. told me that what I was doing was suicide, that I must keep a low profile. Everyone was telling me to stop meeting with people and demonstrators, to stop mobilizing on the ground at all.

I used to believe there was a simple sideline from which I could watch what was happening before my very eyes, or follow the people as they mobilized for the demonstrations but what had happened to me recently has made me stop. Then there was my feeling that I was living under house arrest – tapped phones, surveillance; everything, even my whispers, were being monitored. Yet it had remained possible for me to move around calmly, until that moment when signs started to appear that convinced me I needed to take a break.

The first sign came in the middle of the night about a week ago. My friend was sleeping over and I was with my daughter in her room. In all honesty I was fast asleep, having taking half a Xanax, when suddenly heard a scream, woke up in a panic and stood right up. My head almost hit the ceiling when I jumped up on the bed and for a moment I thought that my daughter had been kidnapped. I screamed, loud, and I was still screaming as I started to run around the room like a madwoman. It wasn't even midnight. When I lifted the blanket from my daughter's bed, it was empty. I screamed even more.

I wasn't myself, something savage was emerging from my chest. I was convinced that my daughter had been kidnapped, that their threat to hurt her had finally come true, when suddenly the balcony door opened and my daughter appeared in a panic. She had been out on the balcony. I was out of breath. My girlfriend was standing next to her, alarmed by my screaming. They both stared at me hesitantly. “Where were you?!” I demanded. “On the veranda,” she said. I left the two of them and went back to bed. My heart was racing, I was shaking, my entire being shook. Both of them remained silent. I didn't cry. My eyes stayed wide open until morning. I couldn't remember the last time I had been able to fall asleep in less than an hour.