The Syrian Sunset, page 5
For what Fuad needed, he would drive himself to Hama without accompaniment or escort. Fatima had been unable to conceive, a tragedy for them both. She longed for a child and in his abject loneliness Fuad did too. Tough, deceitful without hesitation about his work, his concern for her happiness ran as deep as any underground river; she was a companion and not anyone he could whisper to. Five years his senior, the marriage had been bartered for advancement. Her father was a sheik from the Baggara tribe, who commanded loyalty between Deir-ez-Dour, the largest city in eastern Syria, and the provincial capital of Raqaa in the north. Regardless of his motive, he would be blessed with a son, and if he was lucky, a friend.
Several hours later, Fuad drove through the outskirts of Hama and accelerated north towards the village of Ma’an. On a narrow road, water flowed to his right like a tributary. Soon he passed the cross in a field of the toppled stone church behind it. With the mopping up, the entire operation occupied three weeks, not very long unless you were inside Hama. Fuad was not often emotional but unexpectedly he felt feelings he could not name, tight in his chest. To his surprise, two near-extinct hefty bald ibises with dull unfeathered red heads and long red beaks, flapped loudly overhead breaking the silence. Emotional, he almost wished he was more spiritual and could see them as a sign of continuation of a civilization. He returned his attention to the road and noticed most of the dead had been cleared from the streets. He sped past an arch somehow standing despite jagged holes clear through in both sides. Dust spun from his tires on the otherwise empty asphalt. A map on the passenger seat rippled in the cross breeze from the open windows.
Soon Fuad was back in the countryside with familiar fresh scents, and he felt the emotion dissipate. In every direction pistachio orchards, small leafy trees in rows, filled the dry earth blanketed by burnished yellow grass. These hearty trees lived to three hundred years in this desert climate; pistachios were one of a cornucopia of cherished Syrian exports alongside apricots and tobacco. At a crossroads, narrow dirt lanes in both directions, Fuad pulled off the road and consulted him map. As he lifted it off the seat, past the trees to his right, he saw a red-tile roof through the green canopy. He dropped the map and excitedly swung the military sedan towards it. Upon his orders, a French relief agency had turned this large home into an orphanage, owners missing and nobody looking for them. He slammed to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Fuad quickly walked through the open front door into an unspoiled courtyard with a mosaic fountain, to his surprise, quietly gurgling water despite all the nearby destruction. Hospital beds filled with babies, some in bloodied bandages, ran in rows on both sides of the atrium. Children’s crying rose everywhere in the house, one on top of the other, none singly distinguishable and Fuad felt the walls of equanimity inside him crumbling and his heart beat hard at the agony of these children without parents. Then like slamming a bank vault closed, he sealed off that feeling. He would rescue one, and maybe manage many more years from now. Maybe. He counted on nothing emerging as planned. A tall redhead in a long blue aba neared, a heavy cross on beads dropping between small high breasts. Her eyes were luminescent, green with copper accompaniment. At an earlier age, all would have stirred him to inquire if she strayed from God to man.
“Muqaddam Fuad,” she said quietly, as was her nature, without fear or deference. “I am Margaret Eido. From the Alliance Francaise de Developpement. We spoke.” Knowing she could be struck by any one of various calibers of military shells, she accepted that if Her Maker chose to call her that meant it was her time. At twenty-seven and doing good works, she believed in this brutal country she would be aiding orphans interminably.
He allowed a small smile at her ease with him and with this chaos. Her Arabic lilted from her native French, he knew, her father from Lyon where she was raised and her mother born in Beirut.
“This child must have a good home,” she continued evenly. “I will not ask for your word to God.” She gazed as if looking outside this place. “I have no time to ask anything of Him now. Maybe later? Maybe never.”
“You know who the children’s parents are?” he said harshly. Then he softened, not sure why he spoke that way as he was drawn to her. “Or were.”
“Some. I will only show you those that we do. As you demanded.”
“I require a boy. The age is not important. Tell me about the parents, not their politics but what you know of who they were.”
She gave a small shrug. “I begin by telling you that you killed them all.”
“Would it help if I said it was not my wish?”
“Pas meme un peu,” she said in French.
A small scream echoed from far back in the stone walls, high and prolonged. She watched the lines of his military eyes tighten at the sound as if he was squinting through a scope at a target only all the targets were gone and she could not place what he was thinking. “We manage some small surgeries,” she said.
“Can you send me a list of what equipment will help?”
“Of course. We’ve made requests. It’s as if the phone rings and rings in an empty room.”
“Write it for me in detail before I leave.”
“As you wish.” The tiny scream stopped. She slowly realized it was pain in his eyes. “Thank you. I see that you will fulfill it.”
“Of course. I made the offer.”
For a moment, she thought she would cry. Margaret walked ahead of him so he wouldn’t see, and down the hall into a bedroom. She strode in, her long dress flowing above her sandals, completely composed.
He saw no doctors or nurses along the way, heard no footfalls. Children’s sobs reverberated. Inside the bedroom walls were newly whitewashed. A wood cross hung on naked plaster. The sounds of the fountain in the atrium suddenly became audible in a pause in the crying, then disappeared again as the misery reemerged.
“I have brought one girl,” Margaret said. “She is the strongest.” Margaret glided to a woven straw basket with a child. Fuad followed. The girl looked at him with wide brown eyes.
Margaret watched with surprise at the gentleness with which he lifted her. His lips moved silently, in what almost seemed like prayer, then he brought them to the infant’s forehead. As he set the child back down on the blanket in the basket, the girl’s eyes followed him.
“Her father was a structural engineer...”
“The boys?” he interrupted softly.
She walked with pique towards the only crib in the room. The boy was sleeping.
“Don’t disturb him,” Fuad said. “Tell me.”
“He too is strong. Uninjured. His father drove a truck, brought vegetables and fruit to the marketplace. The mother made dresses in a small factory.”
Fuad turned to another basket on the floor, the patterned blanket bloodied, a white bandage covering all of one arm. Tiny fingers protruded from a cast on his hand.
Margaret bent to the floor and lifted this boy who began to cough and whimper. He was long for his age, perilously thin but with thick, curly hair. “His father was an ophthalmologist, Doctor Hasan Masalmeh. He was murdered for using his medical training to help those wounded from the shelling. You think men should be killed for bandaging wounds, Muqaddam Fuad? Or maybe if you kill enough, will you become a general in Hafez’s army of Satan?”
He looked at her for a long time, admiring her courage; another would shoot her for such daring. “It would not disrupt my career path.”
Her restraint abandoned her and large tears formed lines down her cheeks. She quickly brushed them away and with the boy in her arms strangely not crying said, “The boy is very weak. I don’t know his name.”
“Margaret, do you think courage can be passed in the genes?”
She was surprised at the depth of the question. “We know evil can—drinking too much. The inclination to hurt. So if that is true, then the opposite must be also.”
Fuad reached carefully to take the young Masalmeh from her, lifted his face to his own shoulder and gently rubbed his back to quiet the boy’s coughing. Fuad shifted his position, must have pushed the child’s injured arm as the boy shrieked and shrieked. He gazed at the third basket, to a robust well-fed boy who was sleeping.
“His father too was strong, worked in the stone quarry. His house fell on him, and he still lived a week. One day the world will know what happened here.”
“Probably,” Fuad agreed. “But not soon enough to matter.” He continued to rub the tiny boy’s back until his crying soothed into whimpering. “His father was an ophthalmologist,” Fuad more repeated than asked, as that training mattered more to Fuad than even the father’s audacity and courage.
“We both know you have not forgotten. Are you hoping he will become a physician instead of a murderer?”
Fuad found himself laughing to cover his surprise at his sudden urge to have all of this woman, tears still silently descending reddened cheeks. If he repulsed her, he believed, she would not have shown the vulnerability of tears.
“No,” he said truthfully and stopped there. Words even in private had a way of emerging later to wound or kill. “Prepare him as best you can for travel. I am alone. Something the seatbelt can secure. Bring me two bottles for the journey. And the list. I will wait for you outside.” He reached into a front pocket and removed a thick of cash in a gold clasp. He freed the money and held it towards her. “Not for the boy. For the others.”
“You are kinder than they say.”
“Not true. You are right. Whenever I order a trigger pulled, I’m the murderer.”
“Men most are far less than they appear. You may be considerably more. I can accompany you and hold the child. Whatever more you like, if you want, once there. I want to forget the suffering for a long breath. I will wait for what we need and return with it.”
“You do not need to safeguard the medical supplies. I will send them regardless.”
“I know. That is why I am coming.”
She wiped her tears away with both hands in one fast swipe. “God has abandoned this place. So I can abandon Him for someone completely Godless. It’s what God deserves. One week. I want the supplies ready then.”
“You will be a big help on the drive back.” He sensed an athletic build beneath her loose garment. “Do you like to swim?”
“I enjoy few things more. You have a file on me?”
“No. Not yet.”
With young Masalmeh on his shoulder, Fuad walked quickly outside to escape feeling more in the house of tears. He must be losing his mind, he thought, because he already loved this small warm body whose tiny fingers on his good hand strongly gripped his epaulette. As for the woman, he was a little afraid of what he could feel for her.
Soon she emerged carrying a small valise. “I want you to call him Kassem,” she said. “After a boy who died here yesterday.”
✽✽✽
When Kassem Fuad was seven years old, at 4:30 a.m., two familiar words pulled Yussuf from sleep.
“Dad, come.”
Small and round, Fatima knew her husband preferred to go and had trained herself not to wake at these outcries.
“What’s the matter, son?” Fuad was standing barefoot now on the cold stone floor in the dark hall, hoping not to wake his wife.
“Come.”
“Okay. I’m going to the bathroom first.” Yussaf had forced himself to no longer run down the hallway, felt it was better for his son not to. Encouraged, he could not remember the last time Kassem had summoned him in the dark.
Half awake, Yussuf collapsed down beside his boy; the springs sang.
“I had a really bad dream.”
“You want to tell me?”
“I don’t know.” He hugged his father with all his small might. “Maybe in a minute.”
Yussuf ran a hand through the boy’s thick black curls.
Kassem said, “Remember the dream catcher we used to have?”
It was round, Fuad remembered, blue with Arabic calligraphy. Four hawk feathers dropped from it. “Yes, it’s in the closet in my bedroom.”
“We took it away because it made me have bad dreams.”
“I don’t think that’s true, but it didn’t help. Remember when we put the bad dream in your hand, and you blew it up to Allah and he stuck it in his robe pocket. That worked.”
“That was when I was little.”
“That’s true. You’re big now.”
“You want to hear the dream?”
“I’ve been waiting.”
Kassem punched his father’s arm with a powerful clenched fist. “Listen Dad, two wild men wanted to kill us and they put us in chains in a cell and acted like we were pets, gave us food. Somehow you escaped and they said, ‘now we have to kill you.’”
Yussuf was startled by the ferocity, but Damascus children often heard of people in cells. “What happened then?”
“Nothing. It was over.”
“I would never leave you. I have guards that would be near. Nothing can happen to you. Go back to sleep now. I’ll stay.”
Kassem gripped his father’s forearm with both small hands. Yussuf wondered if the baby might have breathed in the thunderous artillery shell, the wall toppling over his mother, his father’s disappearance, the round-the-clock crying at the tossed together orphanage. He had felt confident their love would erase that past. Fuad realized he had been naive. Kassem was more frightened than his classmates, covered his eyes during the scary films the boys watched. Still, though quiet and shy, he had a dogged determination and humor. Fuad was not certain which of his fathers delivered that, maybe both. He was not jealous of the physician but had not told the boy about him. He would do so strategically, and he pretty much knew when. Soon Kassem’s breathing deepened rhythmically.
In the morning, Yussuf entered his son’s room holding a bag. Kassem remained intent at his Japanese Game Boy machine. Kassem was tall for his age, reed thin and round spectacles fitted over his ears. Kassem preferred to play alone and loved Aretha the Famicon. A ten-year-old girl had to forge through the forest of Nineveh, just across the border in Iraq, and improve her magic for the ultimate battle against evil. He found the game surprisingly prescient.
Kassem flicked buttons and didn’t look up as he spoke. “Father, I do not want to play polo anymore. Those boys are not my friends. I’m afraid of being hurt. I’m afraid of a lot of things. Is it important to your position that I play polo with them?”
Fuad felt excitement on his skin, like a lover’s touch. He imagined having a son would be great, but it turned out even better. Fuad did not care that Kassem frightened easily. He still felt certain their love had formed a foundation for his life and eventually he would leap from it to his own solid ground.
“You can stop polo. My position is gratefully such, that you may do as you like. I will explain to your mother. The only thing that truly matters in your life is who you help. I may have something here you may enjoy more than hitting a ball from a horse.”
A dry, spring breeze wafted through the open window rippling the half-drawn curtains. It was cooler here midway up Mount Qasioun. Fuad approached the window and looked out. He loved this country and this people, who never refused a request from a friend and readily traveled distances to return a favor. It was not uncommon at a barber or a restaurant to discover that the previous occupant of his chair or the family at the next table they had chatted with, had paid his bill on their way out. He pulled the curtains wide open. Iris damascena covered the eastern slopes of the mountain above him, rose from the dry ground only here in Damascus at 1,100 meters. Two white or sometimes gray flowers, both purple-edged, budded from each small stalk. He often had to remind himself of the breathtaking beauty in the world as he spent his time trying to control the opposite. More restaurants were opening lower on the mountain with views for the blossoming middle class of the stone city of two million below.
Fuad turned and pulled a large box from the bag. “This is for boys a little older, say eleven. But you can do this. It came from England.”
Kassem jumped up, grabbed the box and looked at the pictures of beakers, test tubes, gloves, goggles, balloons, the writing in English.
“What does it say?”
“Complete Introduction to Chemistry Kit.”
“Tzababa,” Kassem said. Arabic for great, excellent. “What can we make?”
“It has twenty-seven experiments. We will learn about the safety equipment first. Arabs invented chemistry.”
“Really. You sure? Who, when?”
Yussuf pointed to the English word on the box. “In English, “chemistry.” From our Arabic khemia. In the ancient Egyptian writings we see they attempted to turn black powder into gold. It did not work but like many wrong paths, it led to great discoveries. There is another word you will learn in this set. In English, alkaline. It comes from al-qali. There is a plant that grows by the Mediterranean called the glasswort. They are highly salty. Thousands of years ago the Arabs made glass from them. The material from that plant is called al-qali.”
Kassem wasn’t listening, didn’t like his father’s teachings, well most of the time. Some were okay. “Can we blow up things?”
Fuad laughed. “Not in your mother’s house. I do not know about chemistry but we will learn together. We can begin by placing al-qali metals in water. I read from the instructions yesterday. Each will burn a different color.”
“That is so great! Dad, I love you so much. Even more than Mom, but don’t tell her.”
They hugged. He knew it was petty, but Fuad liked that he loved him more. “Of course not.”
Fuad thought about how much many secrets he carried, often felt like a mule with increasing furniture lashed to its back. He drifted back to the window. Wondering what might have penetrated and solidified in Kassem’s bones at the orphanage had brought memories of Margaret Eido. He had ensconced her in the Cham Palace, one of the city’s oldest with its inlaid mosaic furniture, incandescent chandeliers and ivy dripping from the many floors of walkways surrounding the high lobby. While he labored a few early hours at the office, she swam in the indoor pool.
