City of Jasmine Read online

The vet adds, ‘We could import empty blood bags from Iraq. Then catalogue telephone numbers and blood groups of potential donors – if someone needs a transfusion, we can call the people with the right blood group on the spot.’

  ‘We won’t be able to test the blood,’ Hammoudi points out.

  Mariam switches on the ceiling fan; it hums quietly.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ll just have to trust people. Anyone with doubts about their health would be better off not donating.’

  ‘We could start with ourselves,’ Hammoudi says.

  ‘The most important question of course is how long it will all last. Even if we manage to drum up enough donors we won’t hold out for long. It’s impossible to set up a whole underground hospital. We’ll only be able to treat the mildest injuries,’ says the pharmacist.

  ‘It’s going to get even worse,’ the dentist replies, lighting another cigarette.

  ‘I think so too.’

  ‘I’m afraid the city’s going to end up under siege,’ the nurse sighs.

  Over the next few weeks, they manage to set up a store of medications and medical equipment. Each of them secretly sets aside antibiotics and bandages. They get hold of lighter equipment such as operating lights and surgical instruments, even a small X-ray machine and a generator. Everything is privately funded, which means their supplies are modest. They’ll last a month, two at the most. No one is expecting the siege to go on longer than that anyway. Hammoudi works day and night, finally forgetting how much he misses Claire.

  Hammoudi and Naji take a walk around town and Deir ez-Zor puts on a fine show for them: the temperature is mild, the evening sun a mere orange-tinted memory against a milky blue sky. They leave the main street, crowded with trucks and minibuses, walk along narrow roads to the suspension bridge and cross it. Families stroll across it in the opposite direction.

  On the other side of the river, Hammoudi spots a bird on the dusty asphalt. Its plumage has taken on the colour of sand. It tries to fly away but it seems to have forgotten the right sequence of movements. Hammoudi hesitates to touch it.

  ‘It’s not going to make it,’ he judges.

  ‘Shall I?’ asks Naji, squatting down next to the bird. He puts his hand over the bird’s head, Hammoudi turns away, and when he looks back the bird is no longer moving. Naji wipes his hands on a tissue.

  By the time the brothers reach the Sahara restaurant, darkness has settled. They are led to a small wooden table. The room is rather grubby, the menu uninspiring. The other guests are families with small children and the children gaze with eyes alight towards a side room hidden from view by a curtain. That room is the real reason for the restaurant’s popularity – it’s where the animals are kept: a German shepherd, a monkey, a peacock, a hyena, a donkey and a rather stunted lion that is carted around the neighbouring villages in its cage on high days and holidays. It costs five Syrian lira to look at the lion. As children, Naji and Hammoudi were always nagging their parents to come here. Today they’re visiting for sentimental reasons.

  Naji orders a portion of kebab and Hammoudi does the same, too tired to read the menu. Naji takes a quick look around and then tells his brother about that day’s demonstration in the city centre. The statue of Bassel al-Assad was pulled down at the very moment when the sun set behind it, bathed in gold. It was a statue of Bassel riding a horse, a poignantly bad rendering. Many hands shook it at the same time, many voices calling out vile curses. When the gigantic horse’s rump hit the ground there was no holding back the euphoria. The security forces fled the scene, not having anticipated so many demonstrators. There were tens of thousands of them.

  Hammoudi smiles at Naji.

  Naji gushes, ‘We even burned the Baath Party flag. It felt really good. From now on, that square bears the name of freedom.’

  ‘We should drink to that!’

  ‘They don’t serve alcohol here any more.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘A while ago now.’

  Hammoudi’s phone vibrates. Reading the message, he turns pale.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Naji asks.

  Hammoudi shakes his head and then holds his phone out to Naji. He reads that one of the nurses was caught carrying medicines at an inner-city checkpoint and was shot dead on the spot.

  Naji’s grey eyes darken. ‘We’re not an army, we’re normal people! Are we to let them slaughter us like lambs?’ he exclaims.

  Hammoudi cradles his head in his hands. His brother is right, what else can he say? He remembers the young woman’s face precisely; her laugh and her confidence in him. Hammoudi feels responsible for her death.

  Naji lowers his voice. ‘In other towns, people are forming their own army.’

  ‘That’ll only lead to civil war.’

  ‘Why civil war? We’re fighting against the regime, not against the people.’

  This city’s always been violent, Hammoudi thinks, and studies his brother’s face as though it were living proof of that thought. He sips at his Coke. ‘It’s not right,’ he says.

  Naji laughs out loud; Hammoudi feels like a little boy.

  By the next morning, Naji has gone underground. Along with other volunteers and defected soldiers, he forms the first brigade of the Free Syrian Army in Deir ez-Zor. At this point, the Free Syrian Army resembles a vigilante group, made up of old men well into retirement and a few enthusiastic younger people. They can’t really be referred to as an army at all. They’re unprofessional and disorganized. They have no weapons, no uniforms, no vehicles, no safe haven to retreat to, but they know their neighbourhoods like the backs of their hands – and the younger ones gradually learn the art of war the hard way.

  Hammoudi hears nothing from his brother for weeks. He worries about him, but his work in the field hospital rarely allows him time to dwell on it.

  They come during the night. Amal hears them breaking down the front door of the building but she thinks it’s part of her dream and turns over to go back to sleep. The next instant, she’s wide awake. She shakes Youssef, sleeping peacefully beside her, and makes him climb down into a small crawl space beneath the floor, a former storage space. The entrance is concealed beneath a rug. Youssef is now on the regime’s death list for smuggling medicines, at least according to Luna, who says she heard it from her father.

  During the minute it takes the men to get up the building’s narrow staircase, Amal pictures everything she might lose: her flat, money, jewellery, her teeth, her dignity, her freedom, her life. She decides not to think or feel at all any more. She’s not sad. She’s not afraid. She’s not angry. There are no feelings inside her now. The stairs creak. They’re wearing masks, there are six of them and they have torches with them. The beams cast their light across the floor, then over her bed and finally her body. Only now does Amal notice the power has been cut off.

  One of them presses a hand to Amal’s mouth and she smells the stench of his nicotine fingers. In the meantime, the others are searching her flat: two of them trash her living room, another the upstairs bedroom and two others, men like butchers, tackle the kitchen. They are deliberately noisy, stuffing her computer, her phone, scripts and anything handwritten into blue plastic sacks. They throw books on the floor, smash porcelain, rummage through the cupboards, slit upholstery and paintings. They do at least allow her to get up and get dressed while they work.

  ‘Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?’ Amal asks the intruder who appears to be in charge. She looks into his red-rimmed eyes with their spaced-out expression and smells that the man is totally drunk. He leaves a trail of alcohol in his wake like a child pulling along a toy car on a string.

  He raises his right hand in approval and Amal makes him a Persian omelette with fresh herbs that grow in her kitchen and plenty of laxatives, which she keeps in the top drawer. She fries it in butter and turns it with her bare hands.

  The secret servicemen stay for four hours, during which they eat and drink everything they find in Amal’s kitchen. Half an hour in, t
hey stop looking for revolutionaries and start gathering up all electrical appliances, any porcelain they haven’t yet broken, valuables, and then divide the spoils between them. The minute one of them finds an item he likes, he calls out the name of the relative it will now belong to: ‘For Muhammed’, ‘For little Ali’, ‘For Marwan’, ‘For my darling Fatima’, or ‘For Hibba, so she’ll sleep with me again at last’. Their faces are alight. One of them slips Amal’s pearl necklace into his pocket, and Amal feels naked and vulnerable. They’ve made themselves so much at home by now that they’ve taken off their masks.

  As they’re preparing to leave, a particularly ugly secret-service man stops in his tracks and walks over to Amal. He grabs her by her right elbow, drags her to the middle of the kitchen and then shoves her away. She lands on the floor, falling on her wrist, which now throbs with pain and starts to swell.

  ‘Have we ever arrested you?’ he asks loudly enough for his colleagues to hear.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Louder, I can’t hear you!’

  ‘No,’ Amal repeats more loudly.

  ‘Have we arrested your father, your mother, your brother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So why are you asking for freedom? Do you even know what it is?’

  ‘No,’ says Amal, adding a quiet ‘not yet’. Bile gathers in her mouth.

  Then he orders: ‘You have an appointment tomorrow morning. Be there at nine.’ There’s no need to tell her where.

  Before they leave, they scrawl a huge piece of graffiti on the wall of her living room in wobbly, uncertain letters: Bashar is our god.

  Amal waits for the white Opel to disappear from sight and then goes upstairs, where she finds Youssef rolled up, crying. She strokes his head, though she feels nothing for him at that moment.

  ‘Come on, I’ll make you some tea,’ she says, removing her hand from his head.

  Youssef follows her downstairs to the kitchen. They don’t tidy up but they do sit together for hours, telling each other intimate details, whispering and laughing side by side. Both of them sit with their knees drawn up and their heads resting on their hands. Next to them is a bottle of cognac that went undiscovered by the secret service. Sometimes a passer-by’s voice reaches them. They take turns to drink; the bottle is a large one.

  At some point Youssef puts his hands on Amal’s cheeks. She reacts, touching her lips to his, and they start kissing. Amal unbuttons Youssef’s shirt, lies down on him. Youssef undoes Amal’s jeans and kisses her neck, her collarbones, her ears.

  An hour later, Amal leaves the house. It’s early morning and the sky is fading from dark blue to white. Rose-tinted light falls on Amal’s bare legs. She forgot to put on tights in the rush. The air stands still, as if even it is waiting. Bashar al-Assad smiles benevolently from a giant poster. This week’s slogan under his picture is ‘Kullna ma‘ak’ – ‘We are with you’, in which the ‘we’ refers to the Syrian people and ‘you’ to the all-powerful ruler. Amal has clear memories of the day when Hafez al-Assad died. The radio and even the minibuses broadcast hours of Quran readings, all shops and bars were hurriedly closed and everyone made a show of shedding crocodile tears. People cried and made quite sure everyone saw them crying; and everyone automatically registered those whose eyes remained dry.

  Amal called her father earlier to ask for help. Now he’s parked his car outside her house, and he takes her things and puts them carefully in the boot. He doesn’t tell her off. Even when they get to his summerhouse in Saydnaya, a town high in the mountains with a largely Christian population, he says nothing about either the revolution or Amal’s involvement in the demonstrations, for which she is grateful. He stays the night, helps her to light the fire and settle in, then drives back to Damascus the next day. He’s going to try and bribe someone at the secret service to cross Amal’s name off the wanted list.

  Amal spends several weeks in Saydnaya. She likes her father’s house, the extravagant architecture, the spacious rooms with rugs, crystal and fireplaces, bright white Egyptian-cotton bed linen, stone bathrooms, the jacuzzi by the panoramic window spanning an entire wall, the underfloor heating. It’s no coincidence that Bassel built his house here, of course. The place is known not only for its fresh air, but also for the excellent network of smugglers selling archaeological artefacts from here to the whole world. Even in Bashar al-Assad’s palace there’s an entire bathroom decorated with artefacts from Palmyra.

  Amal is alone most of the time. She walks the austere, narrow streets, always accompanied by a cool breeze, a Greek Orthodox convent rising above the town like a vast despot. Sometimes she climbs the many steep stairs to the convent and looks out at the mountains towering above it. She sleeps badly, tossing and turning for hours before she nods off exhausted as dawn approaches.

  She ignores Youssef’s messages. He doesn’t prove particularly stubborn, though. Their last night together triggered something bad in both of them. Amal feels abandoned by him, and he’s ashamed of not having protected Amal from the secret service, of cowering in his hiding place instead of standing by her.

  As Ramadan comes ever closer and Bassel assures her the wanted list has been dealt with, Amal returns to Damascus.

  Hammoudi’s shift starts at five in the morning. He’s afraid of being followed so he takes several detours on his way to an unassuming building in a busy area. This is the temporary hospital where they’re treating the injured at the moment. It’s set up so that it can be moved to another apartment in the space of an hour, if necessary. If they do get found out, though, it’s questionable whether they’d ever get away in time.

  The stress and the lack of sleep affect Hammoudi more than he’d expected. He can’t shake the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong in his life, especially when he follows the lives of his Paris friends on social media.

  Hammoudi enters the two-room apartment and says good morning to its owner, a young human-rights lawyer who’s already awake and smoking a cigarette. ‘I’ll let you work in peace,’ the lawyer says, although he’s still in his pyjamas.

  The blinds are closed and the spacious living room is divided by three large sheets. Minor injuries are treated in the front section, while behind the sheets is the improvised intensive-care unit, where patients rarely survive. Having changed into a suit, the apartment’s owner brings a pot of strong coffee and says goodbye for the day. He looks just as tired as Hammoudi.

  The first patient isn’t admitted until noon. He has so many injuries that Hammoudi doesn’t know where to start. The nurse too stares in horror at the wounded body, tears running down her cheeks. For two hours Hammoudi tries to save the young man, but it’s pointless.

  Ten minutes after the boy’s death, his mother turns up at the makeshift hospital. She’s petite and fragile, her slim face framed by a dark scarf. When she sees her son’s wretched body she says nothing. She freezes, even her breathing seeming to stop. Gently, she takes her son’s hand. Only now does Hammoudi recognize her; she’s his neighbour, Mohammed’s mother.

  She says, ‘I’m glad you were with him. He always admired you.’

  Over the past few months, Hammoudi has built an insurmountable wall around himself, but now it collapses with one blow. He has to lean against the wall, his forehead and his palms are sweating, his heart racing. Hammoudi is still staring at the dead boy, whom he can’t reconcile with his neighbour. He feels the blood flooding his temples and then feels nothing more as the room around him descends into darkness.

  Late that afternoon, Mohammed Mullah Issa is carried through the streets of Deir ez-Zor in an open coffin. Mohammed was top of his class with an extraordinary talent for science, outstanding even for the Bashar al-Assad High School for Gifted Pupils. Hammoudi remembers Mohammed telling him his dreams only a few months ago. He wanted to study and travel the world, building unusual, elegant and strong bridges. He only lived to the age of fifteen.

  His mother, his aunt, his sister and Hammoudi’s mother wail and whimper. No one can under
stand their words. No one wants to understand them. Their faces are contorted. Mohammed’s father walks alongside the coffin, sobbing, around him a sea of outraged neighbours, fellow students, locals and friends.

  Once Hammoudi came round in the clinic, he was told what had happened that morning. The regime ordered the students at all Deir ez-Zor schools to take part in a demonstration in support of Bashar al-Assad. The students reacted with griping and grumbling. They were handed government flags and Assad portraits. The portraits depicted a middle-aged man with cold eyes and a moustache slightly wider than Hitler’s. Their procession gradually began to move, the girls dressed demurely in pale grey and pink uniforms, the boys in pale grey and blue, most of them wearing autumn jackets.

  Apparently, Mohammed started chanting revolutionary slogans at some point. Hammoudi doesn’t know how such an otherwise shy boy suddenly decided to set out his demands, first in a low voice and then, noticing that a few were following his lead, more loudly and confidently. He called for freedom, probably feeling free for the first time himself; and that freedom was the most enticing rebellion he’d ever experienced. The mood in the procession shifted, becoming more relaxed and happier. The boys competed to look as brave as possible in front of the girls, but the girls took no notice of their performance; they were loud enough themselves. Their demonstration had nothing to do with Islam, only with the right of young people not to give in.

  At the next crossroads, secret-service men blocked Mohammed’s path. They instantly began beating him, first in the stomach, then in the face. The boy was kicked in the chest, the head and the back. As he lay on the ground, barely breathing, the secret-service agent Ayhma Alhamad – the son of the infamous Syrian army general Jameh Jameh – approached him. Ayhma Alhamad was less than two metres away from Mohammed when he drew his weapon and fired the first shot.

  It’s the first day of Ramadan and it’s so hot on the streets that even the asphalt is melting. Everyone is hiding inside, watching TV series made especially for the holidays and taking naps to help cope with their fasting. Many restaurants are closed. The temperature had settled at forty-seven degrees. On the balconies and at the windows, strings of lights are waiting to illuminate the city in the evening.