City of Jasmine Read online

  ‘It’s expired.’

  ‘I know.’

  The officer shakes his head and then asks the driver, ‘And you?’

  ‘I don’t have one. Bashar al-Assad never let me have an ID card,’ the driver says.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’ve been collecting humanitarian aid for our hospital in Deir ez-Zor,’ Hammoudi says. His voice conveys great concern.

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  ‘I can show you the receipt,’ says Hammoudi, and holds it out to the officer.

  ‘Please let us pass, we’re doctors, we have to get back. Our patients are waiting,’ says the smuggler.

  The police officer takes a long look at the papers and then studies their faces before finally handing back the proof and saying with a smile, ‘Alright, off you go.’

  ‘Damn,’ says Hammoudi once the policeman has withdrawn to his patrol car and driven off.

  ‘I hope this whole trip was worth it,’ mutters the driver.

  ‘I’m going to have a look,’ says Hammoudi, pats him on the shoulder and walks round to the back of the ambulance, where he opens the boxes at last. The only thing in them is condoms. Hammoudi digs his hands into both boxes in the hope of finding at least a syringe or some paracetamol, but instead there are only different flavours, strawberry, chocolate, banana, the occasional tutti frutti. For the first time in years, Hammoudi is on the brink of tears.

  ‘What have we got?’ the smuggler asks.

  ‘We have to go back. They can’t do this to us!’

  ‘What’s in there?’ asks the smuggler, not slowing the ambulance.

  ‘You’re not going to believe it,’ says Hammoudi as he climbs back into the passenger seat and holds up a pack of condoms.

  ‘Nothing else?’ the smuggler asks.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ll have to ask Naji to take care of it.’

  It’s quiet in the flat. Amal’s flatmates are out. Youssef is curled up on the bed in their room. The curtains are partly drawn.

  Amal looks at him. His hair is spread over the entire pillow, his face pale and his lips feeble, half-open. His face is relaxed and looks almost happy. Amal kneels next to the bed and notices the thin coating of sweat on Youssef’s upper lip. Suddenly she’s scared. She touches his cheek but the skin is cold. When she turns him on his back, his right hand drops lifeless to the floor and his chest is not moving. She feels for his pulse but she’s too nervous to find it. She screams at Youssef, over and over, but there’s no reaction.

  Amal dials the number of an emergency department at a private clinic, shaking Youssef with all her strength. He gives a low moan.

  ‘Youssef, if you die on me I’ll kill you. Wake up, you idiot!’ she yells, raises his upper body and shakes him again, his head falling to one side. She runs her hands over his face, punches his sternum awkwardly and keeps jolting his unconscious body.

  Ten minutes later, she hears ambulance sirens and there’s a knock at the door. Youssef’s breathing now consists of gasped intakes and his skin has a bluish shimmer to it. Amal opens the door and three paramedics storm into the flat, find the right room and get to work on Youssef. They pull up his eyelids and shine a light at his pupils. Their motions are precise and coordinated.

  ‘What has he taken?’ one of the men asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Amal replies.

  Youssef’s T-shirt is cut open and a stethoscope applied to his chest while the third ambulance man measures his blood pressure, which is very weak.

  ‘See if you can find a packet, any kind of medication,’ the paramedic tells Amal.

  Amal runs into the bathroom and finds the floor scattered with crumpled towels, cosmetic products, bottles and tubes. The drawer where Amal and her flatmates keep their medicines is untouched and there’s nothing in the kitchen either, until Amal looks in the bin – a large empty packet of sleeping tablets. She grabs it and runs back to the ambulance men.

  When she gets to the bedroom, Youssef’s face is half-covered by a transparent oxygen mask, an infusion inserted at his elbow. The bed is surrounded by open medical cases. One of the paramedics hurriedly shaves Youssef’s chest with a disposable razor and then affixes several electrodes to the grazed skin to connect him to the ECG. They all stop moving for an instant. Amal and the men stare at the line of the ECG, now installed at the end of the bed. Amal starts sobbing. But Youssef’s condition seems to stabilize, so two ambulance men take the medical equipment downstairs and return with a stretcher. They load Youssef onto it and carry him carefully down the stairs, one step at a time.

  In the ambulance, Amal strokes his hair and cries. The paramedic says, ‘He’ll make it, we’ll just have to pump his stomach. If you’d got home ten minutes later, though, he’d be dead by now.’

  Youssef is allowed to leave the hospital the next evening.

  Amal and Youssef stay together – they cling to each other like an old married couple and their relationship gains a foundation for the first time. They talk about books they read before the revolution, about films, childhood memories, first crushes – giving each other back a veneer of normality. Their sex too is regular and unexcited, which doesn’t make it worse. They’ve found refuge with one another.

  In the middle of the night, Hammoudi is abducted from the hospital. Five armed men come into the operating room and order him to go with them.

  They at least have the decency to let him finish the operation he’s performing. Outside the hospital, they throw a sack over his head and push him into a car.

  Not a word is said during the drive. When the car finally stops, Hammoudi is dragged out of it. They’re in the desert, near an oil field. Hammoudi can smell it. Now he’s ordered to take a few steps; he feels the rifle barrel against his back. They take the sack off his head and he sees several pick-ups and masked fighters.

  It’s a clear, starry night. Hammoudi could name most of the constellations. Instead, he watches a pale foreigner prepare for a beheading in the headlamps of the pick-ups. A young local man with his hands and feet tied kneels between two men in ski masks. Something about the masked men’s body language makes Hammoudi suspect they’re not Syrians. Later, he’ll find out he was right. But at the moment Hammoudi is still trying to work out what’s gone so terribly wrong in his life.

  Next to them is a line of boys, also masked, looking up at the older men in awe. One of the higher-ranking jihadists reads a prayer and the executioner lowers his eyes to his own fingers. They are clutching an ordinary kitchen knife with a faded pink grip, but it’s extremely sharp and longer than his hand. Hammoudi looks at the boys again but the masks conceal any emotions. The condemned man closes his eyes. Not a word passes his lips. He’s accused of being a fighter for the Free Syrian Army.

  Hammoudi turns his head away but the man guarding him from behind takes him in a stranglehold and forces him to watch the scene. His fingers claw into Hammoudi’s flesh.

  The boy’s head falls to the ground. The executioner bends down and picks it up, slowly. Someone pulls out a mobile phone to document the man’s death. That someone is Abu al-Qaqa Al-Almani, a man who once left Hamburg for Deir ez-Zor and has since become fluent in the language of jihad.

  The boy’s body remains in the same kneeling position. Hammoudi is shoved back into the car and driven back to Deir ez-Zor. He understands the warning but it barely makes a difference, partly because he still feels obliged to his patients and believes he has no right to leave the city.

  The next night, Hammoudi is picked up from the hospital again. This time it’s a short drive. His blindfold is only taken off inside a house, and his hands and feet are kept tied. The room he’s standing in is spacious, furnished with large silk rugs and expensive cushions.

  Hammoudi sees a small, round figure. He has large ears and eyes with bags beneath them, and a downward-pointing nose that looks stuck on. The emir in charge of Deir ez-Zor is enjoying a generous breakfast – cheese, butter, bread, pancakes and a whole ca
rafe of banana milk – greedily wolfing down his food.

  Behind him is Hammoudi’s old schoolmate Zair, once a philosophy student, then a fighter for the Free Syrian Army, then the al-Nusra Front and finally Daesh. He’s neither tall nor short, neither stocky nor thin, and his face too has nothing remarkable about it. His eyes, though, are intelligent and absolutely cold, not revealing a single human impulse. Eyes that harbour infinity. His men obey him blindly, the tiniest motion of his head enough to make them leap to their feet. Hammoudi has operated on him three times in the past two years, but that hasn’t necessarily strengthened their relationship.

  ‘Did you enjoy the viewing yesterday?’ the emir asks, with unmistakable loathing. His chin is shiny with grease.

  Hammoudi says nothing, merely staring at Zair. Zair stands up to his gaze; in fact, his mouth forms a grin that looks inhuman.

  While the two of them keep their eyes on one other, the emir gives a pompous and overblown speech using only the simplest and most easily comprehensible words, probably due to his modest education, three years in a mud hut in the Nile delta. Once he’s finally finished, Zair says, ‘You can go now. We’ll call you when we need you. And say hello to your brother from us.’

  From now on, Hammoudi is called upon by Daesh men on several occasions as their private doctor; they bring him their fighters and demand that Hammoudi gives them preferential treatment. They don’t bring any medications but they do close down the hospital whenever they’re present. While Hammoudi treats the injured, three fighters stand behind him at all times, watching his hand movements and keeping the barrels of their guns pointed at his back.

  Amal wakes at dawn soaked in sweat and tries to get her bearings in the empty new flat. Youssef is next to her, sleeping peacefully. They’re lying on a mattress, without sheets but underneath a duvet. Youssef’s arm is dangling from the edge and he’s snoring. First he takes a breath with a loud grunt, then he emits it again with an insect-like chirp, with a frighteningly long pause between the two. It’s one of the few nights since they arrived in Istanbul that he hasn’t had nightmares.

  Life became increasingly unbearable in Lebanon. All they thought about was money and how to get it. Amal’s wages were far from enough to make ends meet, and after spending a day in hospital for observation Youssef lost his job and his boss refused to pay the wages he owed him.

  They couldn’t even afford the basics needed for survival any more. Food prices were too high, and buses, doctors and above all the rent were too expensive. They were at their wits’ end, so they decided to move on to Turkey and make their way from there to Europe.

  Amal gets up and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water. The flat belongs to friends of friends, who have moved out and left nothing but an old bed, two folding chairs and a sink – for a horrendous price. Next to the sink are two glasses, two drying plates, two forks, one large and one small knife. Amal opens the window shutters. The dawn creeps into the room, soft light playing on the kitchen tiles. The wallpaper is curling in several places, with occasional tears. She sees no one out on the street.

  Amal and Youssef have run out of money. Amal has even sold Ali’s goodbye present. They’ll have to spend several months working in Turkey to finance their trip to Europe. Unfortunately, they have nothing to offer the Turkish labour market – they’re just another two Syrians with no prospects. Still, Amal is glad to have left Beirut.

  Checking in at Beirut Airport, they had excess baggage and the desk agent said they had to pay one hundred and forty dollars. After a dramatic pause, she added that if they’d prefer to pay only one hundred dollars, Youssef should put the money in his passport. The woman accepted the bribe nonchalantly and put it underneath her phone.

  Trembling with cold, Amal goes back to bed. Youssef has got up in the meantime and Amal hears him turning on the bathroom tap. He comes into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around his hips and hands her a cup of coffee. He’s wearing grey slippers that Amal hates, but she’s grateful for the coffee.

  Amal and Youssef walk through Gezi Park, the crows in the famous trees now the only other visitors. Here too, there is nothing left of the revolution. Each of them keeps to themselves their impressions of the new city and their worries over what lies ahead. Only their hands, Youssef’s right and Amal’s left, never let go of each other.

  Istanbul too is full of escaped Syrians. They hear Arabic in bakeries and phone shops, Syrian children try to sell roses to the tourists and are shooed away like flies, entire families camp out in underpasses, waiting for nothing.

  When they get hungry they go to a kebab shop not far from Istiklal Avenue. The place is simple enough, a giant doner kebab rotating sedately on its spit. Now and then, a thin man slices meat off it with an oversized knife, puts it on flatbread, adds lettuce, tomatoes, onions and lots of sauce, rolls it all up neatly and hands it over the counter. Loud music plays.

  Later that day, it pours with rain. People dash along the streets with their heads ducked, the city now looking grey. Passers-by loiter outside shops waiting for the rain to let up and street cats flee to dry spots. Cars slow down, their tyres spraying fountains of water.

  Amal and Youssef spend the rest of the day in an internet café where the air is permeated by cold cigarette smoke and flat-beer fumes. They look at photos of ships and boats on Facebook, comparing prices and reports of others’ experiences.

  ‘It’s like booking a cruise,’ Youssef jokes.

  ‘Our first holiday together,’ Amal replies.

  ‘Or we could take a plane: Greece to Germany, Austria, Norway, Poland or Belgium, 3,500 euro; Greece to Sweden or the Netherlands, 4,000 euro.’

  ‘Too expensive.’

  ‘Even a passport is 600,’ Youssef reads. ‘You just can’t look like an Arab.’

  ‘Do you think we’d get through?’

  ‘You might. My skin’s far too dark for the border checks.’

  Amal looks outside; the streets are still wet. She watches drips of water dissolving into puddles.

  As they leave the internet café, the sky brightens. The grey cloud cover has disappeared and the puddles glint in the evening sun. Now the atmosphere takes on something light and summery, the street cafés gradually fill up again and the cats come out of their hiding places, and then the streets cool down and grow dark. The cold creeps beneath their jackets and Youssef strokes Amal’s wrist, a gentle touch.

  The sun goes down. Hammoudi waits for the battle that always begins at sunset. He’s alone in the hospital, the last patient taken to a safe house a quarter of an hour ago, directly after a seven-hour operation. Hammoudi performed it by the light of a mobile telephone, under the influence of uppers he gets from a fighter whose leg he once saved.

  As he’s looking for his phone, he feels a hand on his back.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ comes a hoarse whisper in his ear. The voice seems vaguely familiar.

  ‘Naji?’ Hammoudi asks.

  ‘Were you expecting someone else?’ his brother replies.

  They hug and then Naji says, ‘Listen, I’ve only got five minutes and then I have to go. Hammoudi, you have get out of here, tonight.’ His voice sounds like someone who’s decided to give up.

  This isn’t good, thinks Hammoudi, and he says, ‘I’ve been hearing that all my life.’

  ‘No, listen, Daesh is coming to the city tomorrow. They killed the emir an hour ago, we have to get out. Zair has issued a fatwa against you. You’re a fair target from now on.’

  ‘I operated on that arsehole just two months ago.’

  ‘Exactly, you do your work without rhyme or reason. Zair has sworn loyalty to Daesh and believe me, you’re right at the top of his list. He won’t show mercy.’

  ‘What’s mercy got to do with it? I’m the last living surgeon in this dump,’ says Hammoudi.

  ‘Listen, I really haven’t got time for this. You have to leave today. Another dead doctor’s no use to the revolution. Here.’ Naji hands Hammoudi a small package.


  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A travel voucher.’

  ‘How are you getting out?’

  ‘We’ve made a deal, they’ll let us withdraw tonight. After that the city’s theirs. I’ll say it again: Zair is ambitious. He’ll come for you. You have to leave town.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m leaving too. Do you want to come with us?’

  Hammoudi shakes his head. Naji embraces him one last time before he disappears into the dark. In Hammoudi’s hand is an envelope containing several thousand dollars and two packs of cigarettes. Hammoudi sits down on a bed and lights a cigarette. He inhales slowly and deeply and thinks about what to do next. He knows he’ll die if he waits until the morning, but he feels guilty towards his patients.

  Suddenly the generator springs back to life. The ceiling lamp comes back on. Hammoudi looks around. The room is in chaos: the beds are messy, the sheets are covered in dirt and blood, the ground is strewn with crumpled, blood-soaked clothing, the medicine cabinets are empty. Hammoudi hates this place.

  Youssef gets a call from someone he used to know, a Syrian TV producer. They’re filming a TV series directly on the Syria–Turkey border – Amal could play a minor part and Youssef could assist the director. They’re in a small fish restaurant on the Bosporus when the call comes, eating unspecified white fish caught and frozen in Norway before being defrosted and served in Istanbul. They watch the freight ships heading ponderously for the Black Sea. There are dolphins there too, or at least that’s what the waiter tells them. A street dog keeps skulking up to their table and waiting with dignity for leftovers.

  Youssef negotiates with the producer on the phone. The shooting will last three weeks and the fee should be enough to cover the crossing to Europe.

  Youssef raises his eyebrows at Amal; she nods.

  Youssef accepts the offer, whereupon Amal tops up their raki glasses, dilutes the alcohol with water and says, ‘It’s not like we have a choice. So we’ll make another series.’