The Syrian Sunset, page 12
“Dark room in English,” Afra said.
He sat a little clumsily, his long legs hitting the tabletop from underneath. “You know about cameras?”
“A guess. Literally what he called ‘dark house,’ I presume would mean dark room.”
“He wanted to prove that light travels in time and with velocity.”
“How’d he do it?” She wanted to understand, found his awkwardness cute—as long as he overcame it quickly.
“He posited that if a hole was covered with a window curtain and the curtain was pulled away, the light traveling from the hole to the wall would take time to arrive. He introduced the camera obscura by studying the sun’s half-moon shape during eclipses.” Kassem grew excited. “He made a small hole in window shutters. The light when it hit the opposite wall projected a moon-sickle.”
She found the explanation illuminating and clear. She wasn’t sure if he was nervous or this is how he talked upon meeting a woman. She suspected the latter. She smiled softly and to calm him, as with most men, she only had to talk about what they already knew. “I think some of the great masters used looking through the pinhole obscura. Vermeer some believe used it to create the sparkling highlights in Girl with the Pearl Earring. A box with a hole in it captures the image so it can be drawn precisely.”
His mouth dropped. She figured he was a goner now. She admired the risk he was taking, as the Eurovision song contestants annoyingly always mouthed, “for world peace.” By chance she had taken a class in the Old Masters at Tel-Aviv University. Her father had hated her staring at paintings, hounded her heels with his rapid retorts that she was smart, could be so much more than a teacher, that she was a disappointment. On the two occasions she told him his words hurt, he replied, “Why? It’s plain truth.” She had wandered into the military for his applause and was aware she was angry at about every male who crossed into her sights for acceding to him. Not knowing where she would have marched on her own rhythm had left her underground and not only on Mount Hermon. Then with the snap of a magician’s fingers she reappeared in the Damascus sunlight.
“Al Haytham was under house arrest in Cairo when he rewrote what the world had understood about the properties of light,” Kassem said leaning forward eagerly on both elbows. “In an instant he created the scientific method, hypothesis then experiment. Accept or reject.” Suddenly he felt like an unpopular schoolboy trying to impress the new girl in class. He spoke quietly, “What do I call you?”
She found him charming, had been assaulted by every smooth and suggestive line males could conceive, so had often favored quieter men. She felt only a little guilty that she had known nothing of camera obscura until Shai walked through it chapter and verse, to facilitate his comfort. It had not risen in her art history courses.
“Lilia, Lilia Wassaf,” Afra said. “What’s next? Lunch or saving the world?”
“Lunch,” he said, and then with an uneasy smile. “But only first.”
Heavy whispers of the intent to explode gas on opposition suburbs in the outer flanks of Damascus, both Ghouta in the east and Dariyya past the presidential palace in the west, had dropped though Institute 3000 like a black cloud of sarin itself. Even before his awakening, he had shrunk in horror at the prospect.
Kassem reached for the basket and removed manakish, round bread topped with cheese, zaatar and tomato sauce. Next came yabrak, stuffed vine leaves, and Syrian shawarma, lamb encased in pastry dough. He tried to grab hope about his mother that she could still cook.
“You make this?” she asked.
He reddened. “No, my mother. She insisted.”
“I appreciate that kind of mother.”
“Yours was?”
“She died when I was a girl. Overprotective. Worried. One picnic basket wouldn’t have been near enough.”
He laughed, the sound rich and deep. “I know that kind of mother.”
She liked his sound, and as with Shai, she suddenly felt the urge to unburden. “I always felt chained. Didn’t appreciate her then. I apologize for that tired cliché. In other areas I’m more creative.”
Which blew right past him. “When one dies should be completely random, like your mother,” he said passionately. “Sometimes we can do something about it. I believe that’s why you and I were placed here.”
He was a bit too spiritual and “world peace” for her. Though she abruptly wondered if he might pare some of the thorns from her rose.
After lunch Afra asked, “Can we walk? Do you have time?” She was uncertain whether she did not want to return alone to her small apartment, or found herself drawn to this tall, curly-haired, awkward scientist? She sensed no guile in him and despaired for his safety.
“I am happy to make time,” he said.
Beyond the park, they walked in silence. She pointed with her head towards a newspaper stand, grabbed his hand and skipped towards it. He assumed it was all cover, yet still her small hand clutching three of his fingers was such a surprise, he feared she could hear his loud heartbeat. This boldness, he would never have walked so near her.
Afra studied the horizontal strings that ran above the rotating postcard rack, the untouched offerings yellowed by the relentless sun. Clothespins clipped magazines and newspapers face out for passersby. The top row featured two Arabic soccer magazines and the weekly sports rag Al-Mokif Riyadi. The next row advertised the Syrian national daily, Al-Watan, the Baath party al-Thawra, the local Qasioun, and Al-Jamahir. Next marched a row of the full-size identical lottery magazines which made her think of that novel Love in the Time of Cholera; escape in a time of dying. The largest selection, women’s fashion magazines, wafted from a bottom string. There were more than twenty of them, all with smiling western dressed Syrian models, waves of blonde and dark uncovered hair cascading below shoulders, several above bare arms and plunging necklines. Bashar might point to them, she thought, as signs of his reforms. She had talked to a girl in the Damascus University café with platinum hair, who with tears in her eyes confessed that she changed her hair color with every meltdown. The month before fifteen students had died when a rebel mortar screamed into an outdoor cafe in the College of Architecture in Baramkeh, near government buildings and the Defense Ministry in Umayyad Square. The woman had shouted that the pro-government al-Ikhbariya television showed a woman walking to the hospital blood dripping through her hair, so she dyed her own red in sympathy.
Afra saw that nothing in a foreign language was offered not even the English Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. Well one, The Syria Times, consoling any Anglos concerned about Spain’s standing: KING CARLOS STRESSES RELATIONSHIP WITH SYRIA STRONG.
She still held his hand which felt strong and dry. She thought Shai might be unhappy with what she was about to suggest, but if their relationship was cover, she thought, let’s make it airtight. She was more emotional and needy in Damascus than she’d expected.
“I think we should go back to your apartment.” Then she looked up unwaveringly into his eyes and advised. “I’m more experienced than you. If that’s a problem?”
He had no inclination to feel shame because he was certain it was true. “My father taught me to think highly of another’s talent.”
She smiled and as they walked, she took his entire hand. “I’m generally with men, who I liked just enough. On occasion with one...” Her voice had softened. “But I really want to. I’ve been thinking about it longer than I’d like you to know.”
He was charmed since they’d known each other two hours. “Keeping secrets already?”
She leaned her head into his shoulder. “I’ll try not to. Other than the really big stuff,” she joked, to hide that it was true.
“I don’t care what you tell me or don’t,” he said. Overwhelmingly now, he cared about stopping mass death of his own people. There was no way to know if what they would shout to the world about Institute 3000 would be heard or drowned out by the drone of traffic heading to work. And even if it ascended to Mount Olympus, would the Gods care enough to throw thunderbolts? Any pleasure while he remained alive he felt were stolen moments. He stopped and said, “Only one question, and I want the truth.”
“I’ll try.”
“Were you asked to do anything more than sleep on the couch?”
Her head against his chest, he felt it move in a no.
Twenty minutes later, after he finally found a spot on his narrow car-lined street, they approached the dense cluster of two to five story stone apartments rising on a hill below Qasioun. Gray satellite dishes crowded every roof.
“What do they watch?” she asked.
He was surprised she didn’t know. Maybe it was because she was from a small city in the far south, he told himself.
“Three satellite channels. Two conventional ones. The pro government Sama TV has the highest viewership. Percentages out of loyalty or fear untalliable. Because we get real reporting from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the government began to install controlled cable systems in every building in the capital. The excuse, a call for public decency.”
She laughed. “I suppose there is a lot indecent about dead civilians.”
The people would not easily relinquish their satellite feeds, Kassem thought. Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya reached their dishes from Qatar and Dubai respectively. Syria TV reached them from Istanbul and the Kurds’ Zagros TV from Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, both cheered the rebels and rushed reporters into opposition-controlled territory. He thought with unease how his father had so easily stolen the Hama images from the world.
Inside, they climbed stone steps along white walls to the fourth floor. “They better not try and stop the Turkish soap operas getting here,” Afra said.
“They know better. The government would be toppled in a week.”
As Kassem opened the front door, he said. “I apologize. It’s not much.”
She loved Syria’s simultaneous embrace of the ancient and accelerating worlds. Shai had found her tiny apartment through Erasmus online student bookings, the way a spy might set up shop in New York or Paris.
Kassem led her past a small round table with cheap metal legs mostly hidden by a drooping white tablecloth. Through an entranceway with leather straps hanging from the top of the wood frame, they arrived in the kitchen. Cupboards above and below the stone counter shone, were a pristine plastic wood substitute.
“Something to drink? I don’t have much. Coffee?”
She took his hand. “We just ate. No.”
Below a wood-framed window, a small bed precisely covered by a green bedspread was pushed against one corner. A pine dresser, tall like the original tree, with a full-length mirror rose beside a lamp on the end table. The round wood table in the center of the room was empty and gleamed. She looked at white, naked walls.
“You do live here?” she laughed.
“I work a lot. I like to eat with my parents when it’s possible.”
She stood on her tiptoes, put both hands around his neck and before kissing him asked, “Out of obligation, or you like them? Or you’re lazy?”
He lifted her from behind by her buttocks. “Do you care?”
“I do. Though I usually don’t, I want to know everything I can.” She hinged her legs around him. “It can wait.”
Above him, she was like a butterfly, continually moving, almost silent, her face near his neck as she kissed him only there, maybe afraid of feeling too much, he thought, worried for her. Lest he miss, he let her lift herself and descend. Embarrassed as he quickly convulsed, her wings flapped faster. She brought her mouth to his neck again and with that, as his sounds reverberated off the walls, she tightened quietly and then melded into him.
Amazed, this entirely unlike the two self-conscious women he had been with before, he said, “How’d you do that?”
“Practice.”
He felt no jealousy and was excited at how much he would learn from her.
She rolled off him and sat on the edge of the narrow bed.
“I don’t sleep naked. I need a clock in the bedroom. If I wake and can’t tell what time it is, I get nervous.”
“Digital or analog?”
She punched his arm. “Luminescent.”
Her vulnerability, he thought, was like an open wound bandaged with bravado.
When the sun began to set, they sat on the tile roof outcrop. Long ago Kassem had removed the screws that held the window glass in place in order to slide one side behind the other. Though the falling sun was unseen behind them, yellows and oranges silhouetted Qasioun. A few stars winked in the darkening sky. She sat a little away from him and then bent her head to his shoulder.
He believed that he could provide a steadiness to help her let go.
CHAPTER 8
INSTITUTE 3000
EARLY AUGUST 2012
Kassem drove into Institute 3000 and what he saw shook him. Camouflaged transport trucks and jeeps, not usually seen inside the chain-link fence, waited everywhere. Soldiers were loading steel vats of the DF, methylphosphonyl difluoride, the mother’s milk of the sarin, into the back of the trucks. Other soldiers carried wood barrels of isopropyl alcohol. No mixing vehicles sat inside the perimeter. Worried, Kassem jumped out and ran. Underground storage caverns hewn deep into the earth dotted the country. Nobody had foreseen that the array of bunkers in the hills to the east of city, above the rebel enclave of Ghouta, could conceivably fall to the Syrian Free Army or to al-Nusra. The latter, along with ISIS massing in the north, attached octopus tentacles to everything and yanked down. Since their storage bunkers were heavily supplied, this had to be preparation for widespread chemical launches from multiple locations.
Below ground, through the thick oval glass in a metal door, Kassem saw men in white disposable protective suits, heavy plastic reaching from their shoes up over their heads like a sweatshirt hood. They breathed through masks with twin purple respirators. Kassem quickened his pace. He passed through the room with broad metal tanks shining in the fluorescent lights, each holding two-thousand liters in precise rows like soldiers awaiting orders to report to the field.
He found his friend, Sami, on the phone in his office, panic in his eyes and the way he gripped the edge of his desk with one hand, muscles straining. A photo of him with Bashar at the horse races sat on his cluttered papers. A huge map with string and red pins to mark sarin storage facilities, as far north as Aleppo and south as Tadmur, covered an entire wall. A logistician, the civilian head of the underground facilities, Sami reported directly to the mukhabarat Air Force general, Muhammad Mitqal, perched atop Institute 3000 and Mount Qasioun like Zeus.
Sami hung up, looked at Kassem. They were both loners, their lives not so much subsumed by work as moderated by insecurities that paired naturally with a solitary life. The tall, reed-thin Sami with a slim moustache was bookish, read ancient history and longed to have lived in the time of the Romans with the beauty of their building and colonnades. All above ground in the warm sun.
Sami motioned with his head for Kassem to close the door behind him not realizing that Kassem had already shut it.
“Practice? A drill?” Kassem asked.
“No,” Sami said softly. “They’re ordering the mixing trucks to a variety of locations. Our people will follow.”
“Where?”
“Different bases around the country. Ten.”
Sami wiped the sweat from his hairline. He was an academic, a research scientist. His predecessor had foamed at the mouth and ceased breathing after a spill accident, and Sami was pushed into his organizational place.
“The targets?”
“Nothing’s been said to me,” he said too loudly, both frightened and feeling bypassed.
Several times deep, deep in the night, they had confirmed no listening devices had burrowed into Sami’s office like unseen rodents.
“What can we do?” Sami beseeched his friend, turning to Kassem for guidance as he often did. “They’re sending it everywhere.”
Kassem was silent for a long moment. “Nothing,” he said finally and firmly. It was the first lie he had ever told his best friend and he knew it would not nearly be the last.
He had to meet Lilia immediately as the world’s beaming light on this might possibly stop Bashar from asphyxiating his own people.
✽✽✽
Afra approached the Pop One Cafe in the Alassad suburb north of the Old City, worried that Kassem had called to meet during work hours. He struck her neither as histrionic nor a puppy dog needing a female hand on his brow. A cheap imitation leather bag befitting her station, dropped from her shoulder on plastic straps. Her encrypted laptop boasted a host of fictitious email and volumes from the Noor Library, the digital skyscraper of Arabic eBooks. It was sheltered on both sides by course books of actual paper from the Damascus University bookstore.
Illuminated in yellow neon even in the startling 3 p.m. sun, the outside lights read CAFE RESTAURANT and below that POP-ONE both only in English. Everyone in the world emulated America after first vilifying her in envy. The exterior was all glass, the frames painted dark blue, the traditional color to close the Evil Eye. Heavily, she mounted the white marble steps. The inside was what she imagined a hipster cafe to have looked like in the American 60s. A cubist painting in browns and purples of skyscrapers in Manhattan covered one wall with C-I-N-E-M-A in vertical letters. To the left, FUZZ shouted. Heads of men in sunglasses filled several pop-art squares. In one, a baseball player swung a bat. Below FUZZ in smaller letters: ASSASSINATION.
A large sign on a brown wood pillar offered: HOT CHOCOLATE and BROWNIES in English and Arabic, a steaming red mug between the two languages. Long tables with cushioned wood chairs filled one side of the room. Several young men smoked shisha molasses tobacco from hookahs. She smiled. Two had laptops open, so Kassem had chosen astutely for a young hip couple. The shisha scent was heavy and sweet. A wall featured photos of fare described only in Arabic. The food was a collision of the West and the Middle East: sandwiches in long Syrian rolls, pizzas, potatoes swimming in melted cheese, deep fried chicken rolls, french fries with sides of spicy red dipping sauce. A small chalkboard on the counter displayed the Wi-Fi password.
He sat a little clumsily, his long legs hitting the tabletop from underneath. “You know about cameras?”
“A guess. Literally what he called ‘dark house,’ I presume would mean dark room.”
“He wanted to prove that light travels in time and with velocity.”
“How’d he do it?” She wanted to understand, found his awkwardness cute—as long as he overcame it quickly.
“He posited that if a hole was covered with a window curtain and the curtain was pulled away, the light traveling from the hole to the wall would take time to arrive. He introduced the camera obscura by studying the sun’s half-moon shape during eclipses.” Kassem grew excited. “He made a small hole in window shutters. The light when it hit the opposite wall projected a moon-sickle.”
She found the explanation illuminating and clear. She wasn’t sure if he was nervous or this is how he talked upon meeting a woman. She suspected the latter. She smiled softly and to calm him, as with most men, she only had to talk about what they already knew. “I think some of the great masters used looking through the pinhole obscura. Vermeer some believe used it to create the sparkling highlights in Girl with the Pearl Earring. A box with a hole in it captures the image so it can be drawn precisely.”
His mouth dropped. She figured he was a goner now. She admired the risk he was taking, as the Eurovision song contestants annoyingly always mouthed, “for world peace.” By chance she had taken a class in the Old Masters at Tel-Aviv University. Her father had hated her staring at paintings, hounded her heels with his rapid retorts that she was smart, could be so much more than a teacher, that she was a disappointment. On the two occasions she told him his words hurt, he replied, “Why? It’s plain truth.” She had wandered into the military for his applause and was aware she was angry at about every male who crossed into her sights for acceding to him. Not knowing where she would have marched on her own rhythm had left her underground and not only on Mount Hermon. Then with the snap of a magician’s fingers she reappeared in the Damascus sunlight.
“Al Haytham was under house arrest in Cairo when he rewrote what the world had understood about the properties of light,” Kassem said leaning forward eagerly on both elbows. “In an instant he created the scientific method, hypothesis then experiment. Accept or reject.” Suddenly he felt like an unpopular schoolboy trying to impress the new girl in class. He spoke quietly, “What do I call you?”
She found him charming, had been assaulted by every smooth and suggestive line males could conceive, so had often favored quieter men. She felt only a little guilty that she had known nothing of camera obscura until Shai walked through it chapter and verse, to facilitate his comfort. It had not risen in her art history courses.
“Lilia, Lilia Wassaf,” Afra said. “What’s next? Lunch or saving the world?”
“Lunch,” he said, and then with an uneasy smile. “But only first.”
Heavy whispers of the intent to explode gas on opposition suburbs in the outer flanks of Damascus, both Ghouta in the east and Dariyya past the presidential palace in the west, had dropped though Institute 3000 like a black cloud of sarin itself. Even before his awakening, he had shrunk in horror at the prospect.
Kassem reached for the basket and removed manakish, round bread topped with cheese, zaatar and tomato sauce. Next came yabrak, stuffed vine leaves, and Syrian shawarma, lamb encased in pastry dough. He tried to grab hope about his mother that she could still cook.
“You make this?” she asked.
He reddened. “No, my mother. She insisted.”
“I appreciate that kind of mother.”
“Yours was?”
“She died when I was a girl. Overprotective. Worried. One picnic basket wouldn’t have been near enough.”
He laughed, the sound rich and deep. “I know that kind of mother.”
She liked his sound, and as with Shai, she suddenly felt the urge to unburden. “I always felt chained. Didn’t appreciate her then. I apologize for that tired cliché. In other areas I’m more creative.”
Which blew right past him. “When one dies should be completely random, like your mother,” he said passionately. “Sometimes we can do something about it. I believe that’s why you and I were placed here.”
He was a bit too spiritual and “world peace” for her. Though she abruptly wondered if he might pare some of the thorns from her rose.
After lunch Afra asked, “Can we walk? Do you have time?” She was uncertain whether she did not want to return alone to her small apartment, or found herself drawn to this tall, curly-haired, awkward scientist? She sensed no guile in him and despaired for his safety.
“I am happy to make time,” he said.
Beyond the park, they walked in silence. She pointed with her head towards a newspaper stand, grabbed his hand and skipped towards it. He assumed it was all cover, yet still her small hand clutching three of his fingers was such a surprise, he feared she could hear his loud heartbeat. This boldness, he would never have walked so near her.
Afra studied the horizontal strings that ran above the rotating postcard rack, the untouched offerings yellowed by the relentless sun. Clothespins clipped magazines and newspapers face out for passersby. The top row featured two Arabic soccer magazines and the weekly sports rag Al-Mokif Riyadi. The next row advertised the Syrian national daily, Al-Watan, the Baath party al-Thawra, the local Qasioun, and Al-Jamahir. Next marched a row of the full-size identical lottery magazines which made her think of that novel Love in the Time of Cholera; escape in a time of dying. The largest selection, women’s fashion magazines, wafted from a bottom string. There were more than twenty of them, all with smiling western dressed Syrian models, waves of blonde and dark uncovered hair cascading below shoulders, several above bare arms and plunging necklines. Bashar might point to them, she thought, as signs of his reforms. She had talked to a girl in the Damascus University café with platinum hair, who with tears in her eyes confessed that she changed her hair color with every meltdown. The month before fifteen students had died when a rebel mortar screamed into an outdoor cafe in the College of Architecture in Baramkeh, near government buildings and the Defense Ministry in Umayyad Square. The woman had shouted that the pro-government al-Ikhbariya television showed a woman walking to the hospital blood dripping through her hair, so she dyed her own red in sympathy.
Afra saw that nothing in a foreign language was offered not even the English Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. Well one, The Syria Times, consoling any Anglos concerned about Spain’s standing: KING CARLOS STRESSES RELATIONSHIP WITH SYRIA STRONG.
She still held his hand which felt strong and dry. She thought Shai might be unhappy with what she was about to suggest, but if their relationship was cover, she thought, let’s make it airtight. She was more emotional and needy in Damascus than she’d expected.
“I think we should go back to your apartment.” Then she looked up unwaveringly into his eyes and advised. “I’m more experienced than you. If that’s a problem?”
He had no inclination to feel shame because he was certain it was true. “My father taught me to think highly of another’s talent.”
She smiled and as they walked, she took his entire hand. “I’m generally with men, who I liked just enough. On occasion with one...” Her voice had softened. “But I really want to. I’ve been thinking about it longer than I’d like you to know.”
He was charmed since they’d known each other two hours. “Keeping secrets already?”
She leaned her head into his shoulder. “I’ll try not to. Other than the really big stuff,” she joked, to hide that it was true.
“I don’t care what you tell me or don’t,” he said. Overwhelmingly now, he cared about stopping mass death of his own people. There was no way to know if what they would shout to the world about Institute 3000 would be heard or drowned out by the drone of traffic heading to work. And even if it ascended to Mount Olympus, would the Gods care enough to throw thunderbolts? Any pleasure while he remained alive he felt were stolen moments. He stopped and said, “Only one question, and I want the truth.”
“I’ll try.”
“Were you asked to do anything more than sleep on the couch?”
Her head against his chest, he felt it move in a no.
Twenty minutes later, after he finally found a spot on his narrow car-lined street, they approached the dense cluster of two to five story stone apartments rising on a hill below Qasioun. Gray satellite dishes crowded every roof.
“What do they watch?” she asked.
He was surprised she didn’t know. Maybe it was because she was from a small city in the far south, he told himself.
“Three satellite channels. Two conventional ones. The pro government Sama TV has the highest viewership. Percentages out of loyalty or fear untalliable. Because we get real reporting from Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the government began to install controlled cable systems in every building in the capital. The excuse, a call for public decency.”
She laughed. “I suppose there is a lot indecent about dead civilians.”
The people would not easily relinquish their satellite feeds, Kassem thought. Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya reached their dishes from Qatar and Dubai respectively. Syria TV reached them from Istanbul and the Kurds’ Zagros TV from Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, both cheered the rebels and rushed reporters into opposition-controlled territory. He thought with unease how his father had so easily stolen the Hama images from the world.
Inside, they climbed stone steps along white walls to the fourth floor. “They better not try and stop the Turkish soap operas getting here,” Afra said.
“They know better. The government would be toppled in a week.”
As Kassem opened the front door, he said. “I apologize. It’s not much.”
She loved Syria’s simultaneous embrace of the ancient and accelerating worlds. Shai had found her tiny apartment through Erasmus online student bookings, the way a spy might set up shop in New York or Paris.
Kassem led her past a small round table with cheap metal legs mostly hidden by a drooping white tablecloth. Through an entranceway with leather straps hanging from the top of the wood frame, they arrived in the kitchen. Cupboards above and below the stone counter shone, were a pristine plastic wood substitute.
“Something to drink? I don’t have much. Coffee?”
She took his hand. “We just ate. No.”
Below a wood-framed window, a small bed precisely covered by a green bedspread was pushed against one corner. A pine dresser, tall like the original tree, with a full-length mirror rose beside a lamp on the end table. The round wood table in the center of the room was empty and gleamed. She looked at white, naked walls.
“You do live here?” she laughed.
“I work a lot. I like to eat with my parents when it’s possible.”
She stood on her tiptoes, put both hands around his neck and before kissing him asked, “Out of obligation, or you like them? Or you’re lazy?”
He lifted her from behind by her buttocks. “Do you care?”
“I do. Though I usually don’t, I want to know everything I can.” She hinged her legs around him. “It can wait.”
Above him, she was like a butterfly, continually moving, almost silent, her face near his neck as she kissed him only there, maybe afraid of feeling too much, he thought, worried for her. Lest he miss, he let her lift herself and descend. Embarrassed as he quickly convulsed, her wings flapped faster. She brought her mouth to his neck again and with that, as his sounds reverberated off the walls, she tightened quietly and then melded into him.
Amazed, this entirely unlike the two self-conscious women he had been with before, he said, “How’d you do that?”
“Practice.”
He felt no jealousy and was excited at how much he would learn from her.
She rolled off him and sat on the edge of the narrow bed.
“I don’t sleep naked. I need a clock in the bedroom. If I wake and can’t tell what time it is, I get nervous.”
“Digital or analog?”
She punched his arm. “Luminescent.”
Her vulnerability, he thought, was like an open wound bandaged with bravado.
When the sun began to set, they sat on the tile roof outcrop. Long ago Kassem had removed the screws that held the window glass in place in order to slide one side behind the other. Though the falling sun was unseen behind them, yellows and oranges silhouetted Qasioun. A few stars winked in the darkening sky. She sat a little away from him and then bent her head to his shoulder.
He believed that he could provide a steadiness to help her let go.
CHAPTER 8
INSTITUTE 3000
EARLY AUGUST 2012
Kassem drove into Institute 3000 and what he saw shook him. Camouflaged transport trucks and jeeps, not usually seen inside the chain-link fence, waited everywhere. Soldiers were loading steel vats of the DF, methylphosphonyl difluoride, the mother’s milk of the sarin, into the back of the trucks. Other soldiers carried wood barrels of isopropyl alcohol. No mixing vehicles sat inside the perimeter. Worried, Kassem jumped out and ran. Underground storage caverns hewn deep into the earth dotted the country. Nobody had foreseen that the array of bunkers in the hills to the east of city, above the rebel enclave of Ghouta, could conceivably fall to the Syrian Free Army or to al-Nusra. The latter, along with ISIS massing in the north, attached octopus tentacles to everything and yanked down. Since their storage bunkers were heavily supplied, this had to be preparation for widespread chemical launches from multiple locations.
Below ground, through the thick oval glass in a metal door, Kassem saw men in white disposable protective suits, heavy plastic reaching from their shoes up over their heads like a sweatshirt hood. They breathed through masks with twin purple respirators. Kassem quickened his pace. He passed through the room with broad metal tanks shining in the fluorescent lights, each holding two-thousand liters in precise rows like soldiers awaiting orders to report to the field.
He found his friend, Sami, on the phone in his office, panic in his eyes and the way he gripped the edge of his desk with one hand, muscles straining. A photo of him with Bashar at the horse races sat on his cluttered papers. A huge map with string and red pins to mark sarin storage facilities, as far north as Aleppo and south as Tadmur, covered an entire wall. A logistician, the civilian head of the underground facilities, Sami reported directly to the mukhabarat Air Force general, Muhammad Mitqal, perched atop Institute 3000 and Mount Qasioun like Zeus.
Sami hung up, looked at Kassem. They were both loners, their lives not so much subsumed by work as moderated by insecurities that paired naturally with a solitary life. The tall, reed-thin Sami with a slim moustache was bookish, read ancient history and longed to have lived in the time of the Romans with the beauty of their building and colonnades. All above ground in the warm sun.
Sami motioned with his head for Kassem to close the door behind him not realizing that Kassem had already shut it.
“Practice? A drill?” Kassem asked.
“No,” Sami said softly. “They’re ordering the mixing trucks to a variety of locations. Our people will follow.”
“Where?”
“Different bases around the country. Ten.”
Sami wiped the sweat from his hairline. He was an academic, a research scientist. His predecessor had foamed at the mouth and ceased breathing after a spill accident, and Sami was pushed into his organizational place.
“The targets?”
“Nothing’s been said to me,” he said too loudly, both frightened and feeling bypassed.
Several times deep, deep in the night, they had confirmed no listening devices had burrowed into Sami’s office like unseen rodents.
“What can we do?” Sami beseeched his friend, turning to Kassem for guidance as he often did. “They’re sending it everywhere.”
Kassem was silent for a long moment. “Nothing,” he said finally and firmly. It was the first lie he had ever told his best friend and he knew it would not nearly be the last.
He had to meet Lilia immediately as the world’s beaming light on this might possibly stop Bashar from asphyxiating his own people.
✽✽✽
Afra approached the Pop One Cafe in the Alassad suburb north of the Old City, worried that Kassem had called to meet during work hours. He struck her neither as histrionic nor a puppy dog needing a female hand on his brow. A cheap imitation leather bag befitting her station, dropped from her shoulder on plastic straps. Her encrypted laptop boasted a host of fictitious email and volumes from the Noor Library, the digital skyscraper of Arabic eBooks. It was sheltered on both sides by course books of actual paper from the Damascus University bookstore.
Illuminated in yellow neon even in the startling 3 p.m. sun, the outside lights read CAFE RESTAURANT and below that POP-ONE both only in English. Everyone in the world emulated America after first vilifying her in envy. The exterior was all glass, the frames painted dark blue, the traditional color to close the Evil Eye. Heavily, she mounted the white marble steps. The inside was what she imagined a hipster cafe to have looked like in the American 60s. A cubist painting in browns and purples of skyscrapers in Manhattan covered one wall with C-I-N-E-M-A in vertical letters. To the left, FUZZ shouted. Heads of men in sunglasses filled several pop-art squares. In one, a baseball player swung a bat. Below FUZZ in smaller letters: ASSASSINATION.
A large sign on a brown wood pillar offered: HOT CHOCOLATE and BROWNIES in English and Arabic, a steaming red mug between the two languages. Long tables with cushioned wood chairs filled one side of the room. Several young men smoked shisha molasses tobacco from hookahs. She smiled. Two had laptops open, so Kassem had chosen astutely for a young hip couple. The shisha scent was heavy and sweet. A wall featured photos of fare described only in Arabic. The food was a collision of the West and the Middle East: sandwiches in long Syrian rolls, pizzas, potatoes swimming in melted cheese, deep fried chicken rolls, french fries with sides of spicy red dipping sauce. A small chalkboard on the counter displayed the Wi-Fi password.
