A Woman in the Crossfire (3 page)

I walk back through the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, nearly empty except for a few street vendors. The shops are all closed. Nothing but security forces scattered all around while at the end of the market even more buses sit packed with armed men. I can now appreciate the meaning of the phrase ‘tense calm'. I have heard this expression before, thinking it more a figure of speech than an actual description. These days in Damascus I can understand ‘tense calm' by people's eyes and movements. I walk out of al-Hamidiyyeh towards al-Merjeh Square despite having resolved not to go there any more after what happened one day a few weeks ago outside the Interior Ministry.

Al-Merjeh Square is empty except for security forces who are lined up in significant numbers, spread throughout the square. Not too far off there is a bus filled with men and weapons. With its wretched hotels Al-Merjeh Square seems more distinctive when all the people have disappeared and its shops are closed.

It looks nothing like it did on 16 March, when dozens of prisoners' families assembled outside the Ministry.
Nearly
assembled, they did not actually succeed. Standing there in silence, they looked odd, almost elegant, holding pictures of their loved ones who had been imprisoned for their political opinions. I stood with them, beside the husband and two sons of a female prisoner. Suddenly the earth split open with security forces and
shabbiha
³
, who started beating people. The small group started to panic, and I, staring right at those men, screamed, “Anyone who kills his own people is a traitor!” The people didn't fight back, they took all the blows and the insults and then started disappearing one after the other. They were taken away by men who had emerged just then out of the street, men with huge rings and inflated muscles and gaunt eyes and cracked skin – they created a human wall as they flung themselves upon the demonstrators and beat them, throwing them down on the ground and stamping on them. Other men captured people and hauled them away, made them disappear. I saw them open up a shop, throw a woman inside and shut the iron door behind her before heading after some other woman.

The group, while trying to stand together, got broken up. The husband beside me vanished, leaving his small four-year-old son behind. Several men grabbed the father along with his ten-year old son. I stood there, like a defiled statue. I pulled the little one in close to my chest, as if I was in a movie scene. Is there really any difference between reality and fiction? Where is the line that separates the two? I was shivering. Suddenly I noticed the little boy gaping at his father and his brother as they were beaten, watching as the two of them were stuffed inside a bus. The face of the tenyear- old was frozen, as if he had just been administered an electric shock, and a powerful fist came flying at his little head: THUMP. His head went limp, and after a second, they kicked him along with his father inside the bus. I recoiled and turned the little boy's head away so he wouldn't be able to see what was happening, slung him over my shoulder and ran. Just then a friend of mine appeared nearby in the square, and three men pounced on her. I grabbed for her arm, screaming, “Leave her alone!” They threw me aside, along with the little boy who was by now weeping in my arms, and took her away. I kept running, stopping outside a store where the owner shouted at me, “Get out of here! Can't you see we're trying to make a living?” As I ran away, one of the demonstrators ran up alongside me to help carry the boy. We then continued briskly walking. Why had I run? The little boy asked me to stay with him; he was going to wait for his father, saying how scared he was now that his father and brother had left him, and that he was going to hit the policeman who had struck his brother. When he asked me whether they had been taken to prison just like his mother had been, I was silent, unable to respond, until I simply told him, “You're coming with me now.”

Actually it wasn't the police who beat up his father, the police just watched while people got punched and kicked and insulted and arrested; they just stood there, silent. Then a group came out chanting slogans and carrying flags and pictures of the president, including some of the very same people who had carried out the beatings in the first place, as well as others who had appeared suddenly. They, too, started beating people with their flags, and the people who had almost managed to assemble there dispersed, bewilderment all over their faces. That night the news reported that infiltrators among the demonstrators had picked a fight, and that the Minister of the Interior had received complaints from the prisoners' families. I heard all this on Syrian state television, still haunted by the eyes of that little boy I had carried away, imagining him instead lost beneath the stampeding feet, wandering the city streets alone in search of his father and his brother.

 

Crossing al-Merjeh Square weeks after the incident, I see those phantasms, behind sliding metal prison bars. Then I hop in a taxi and head toward a mosque I hear remains under siege. There is no crowd there. I think there has to have been some mistake or some kind of media distortion. Through the car window I observe the city between al-Merjeh Square and the Kafr Sousseh roundabout. I don't want to rely on anything but myself and what I can see with my own two eyes. Scanning the internet on my mobile phone, I find reports that the mosque has been surrounded, but the radio broadcast says the entire city is calm.

Security has been deployed at the Kafr Sousseh roundabout, patrols the Syrian people know all too well. Foreigners would never imagine there could be so many cars in the squares. They prevent me from entering: the road is closed. We pass through the square and turn down a side street. Elsewhere the situation seems calm; there are places far removed from what is going on, especially wealthy neighbourhoods. I get out of the taxi and head towards the mosque, but it is hard to get close. Motorcycles. Shouting and chanting. High-ranking security officers. Crowds holding flags and pictures of the president. I ask what's going on. Everyone says there is a deadly silence inside and advises me to get out of there. There are no other women present, and one of them scornfully asks me, “What are you doing here?” I turn my back on him as the chanting rises up alongside the flags and the pictures. Security forces surround the mosque; it truly is under siege. I don't know if I can get inside; the only way would be to infiltrate those who are holding pictures and flags.

It's not easy to find yourself among men in civilian clothes who appear all of a sudden and beat up a young man, throw him to the ground and take away his phone. Some of them climb up onto the buildings overlooking the mosque. I overhear them say they want to make sure nobody is filming, but I can't confirm anything except the fact that the whole place is surrounded by security forces, police and military officers – and by the flag and picture carriers who are really no different than security forces, alternating between beating up demonstrators and holding their pictures of the president. People outside the mosque are talking about negotiations under way inside between an imam and the security forces so that everyone can come out peacefully, without violence or bloodshed. I would later discover that when the young demonstrators finally came out of the mosque they were taken straight to prison.

My heart shudders. I can hear it beating like someone addressing me, warning me of danger. My heart is a better guide than my head. I spot an angry-eyed man with a picture of the president walking towards me. I dash for the car. The man follows me, pointing menacingly. I ask the driver to step on it. The man rejoins the flag-bearers.

“Sister,” the driver asks, “why are you getting involved in all this? They don't treat women any better than men!”

I keep silent. My eyes cloud over. The image of the besieged place terrifies me. What is going to happen? I hear news of killing in Douma, news that my friends have been detained, news of injured people and hospitals overcrowding with demonstrators after the army opened fire on them. Lots of news comes from all directions. I ask the driver to take me to see the situation in Douma, but he nearly jumps out of his seat, shouting, “My God, you can't go there!”

I am armed with nothing but my conscience. It doesn't matter to me whether the coming period brings moderate Islam and all they say comes with it. The faces of the murderers don't matter to me, and neither does all the talk nor all the lies. All that matters now to me is to break my demonic silence, as people speak only the language of blood. What matters to me is that with my own two eyes I have seen unarmed, peaceful people getting beaten up and locked away and killed for no other reason than that they were demonstrating. I have seen the children of my people fall one by one like unripe peaches from a tree.

The driver turns into a guardian and a preacher, saying, “The road to Douma's closed. It's forbidden to enter.”

“Is Douma under siege as well?”

“Don't talk like that, sister. What have I got to do with all of this?”

“So who told you, then?”

“The army's there, there's gunfire,” he says.

“What do you think, uncle? What's going on?”

“What have I got to do with it? I can barely make ends meet.”

“But people are dying,” I reply.

“God have mercy upon them, but we're all going to die someday.”

“What would you do,” I ask him, “if it were one of your children who was killed?”

He is silent for a moment, then shakes his head and says, “The world wouldn't be big enough to contain me!”

“I heard,” I say, “that they put a young man in Dar‘a into a refrigerator. While he was still alive. And when they pulled out his corpse, they found he had written with his own blood:
When they put me in here I was still alive send my love to my mother
.”

He shakes his head in silence.

“I hope it's not true,” I say.

He remains silent, his ears turning red.

Today there is a demonstration at the Damascus University Faculty of Letters; they detain all the students and confiscate their cell phones. The town of Talbiseh is still under siege, and all lines of communication are cut; they receive their children's dead bodies from the security forces. In al-Ma‘damiya, near Damascus, the people tear down a giant picture of President Bashar al-Assad
⁴
, and a young man is killed. In Latakia eight prisoners are burned to death in the central prison.

In a moment we are about to reach my house.

I am trembling. I can see that bloodshed only begets more bloodshed. I can see gaping holes in life, holes bigger than existence. I notice them in the chests of the martyrs, not in the faces of the killers. Back at home I think about how I will infiltrate the sleep of the killers and ask them whether they ever noticed the holes of life as they took aim at the bare chests of their unarmed victims.

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

This is Damascus: a phrase we all used to hear on the radio when we were children. Every Syrian knows the timbre of that phrase. Obviously this is Damascus. But ever since Syrians started to migrate from their small cities and villages and deserts, Damascus has become a transfer station, like the humdrum chore of a woman making dinner for her husband without a trace of love.

But still: This is Damascus!

Today is Friday. A soft drizzle stops long enough for people to go out into the streets and demonstrate in the squares and the mosques.

Who even remembers that every demonstrator is marked for death?

Death is a game whose rules are unclear. These diaries turn death into a canvas for painting, a darkened mysterious canvas that appears before me upon the chests of unarmed young men going out to die. How will the gently rocking mothers ever forgive those murderers? How can all these Don Quixotes tilt at justice amidst those hordes and so much injustice, when working for justice only rarely amounts to anything at all? But heroism isn't the glory of a crown of laurels; that's a Greek illusion. Heroism is to stand on the side of the weak until they are strong, for me to spin the world on my fragile fingers and rewrite it with a few gauzy words. Shall I do as Rimbaud wrote in his
A Season in Hell
: ‘To the devil, I said, with martyr's crowns, the beams of art, the pride of inventors, the ardour of plunderers; I returned to the Orient and to the first and eternal wisdom.'
⁵

The drizzle stops. A miserly sun shines through until the rain returns to roll down my cheek once again. I drink a few droplets before getting into a taxi and heading to Douma. I conceive of these diaries as deliverance or an exclamation, but in the end they are just words. People around me may think them courageous, but they are wrong, because as soon as the car sets off in the direction of the demonstration, my knees become weak, my throat dries up and I can hear my fear pounding.

Fear is a human condition that humanity has never given its due, a mysterious commentary on meaning or love. Fear means you are still human amidst the rubble.

We approach Harasta, the suburb we have to get through in order to reach Douma. My driver is a young man in his midtwenties, taciturn; I would later discover he is also courageous.

“Road's closed,” he tells me.

I snap out of my reverie and notice the long line of cars. Utter silence. It was the first time I have ever seen a place that crowded with people yet so quiet. I get out and walk past a few parked cars in order to see what is going on. Several green public buses with yellow seats are stopped, blocking the flow of traffic. Young men are jammed inside the buses, standing up, sitting down, one on top of the other. When they step off they are deployed on both sides of the street. The hordes pour out in silence. The marching young men are led by others wearing navy and grey uniforms. The young men's faces are severe, exhausted; most have shaved heads and poverty seems to be written all over them. I approach one of the men directing them all and ask, “What's going on?” He frowns and ignores my question. There are almost no women in the street, just one I can make out from afar, draped in a black
niqab
and dragging a child behind her as she runs in panic. The man in the car sticks out his head and says, “Get back in, sister. Those guys are security agents.”