‘Was that all?’
That was all.
The bank manager slowly turned to his colleague and opened his mouth and from his throat came a rumbling, almost inhuman sound. He was laughing. The bank manager was laughing and his colleague was laughing with him, and it was so absurd Sami joined in, too. They sat in the bank manager’s office, laughing. Their laughter grew and echoed and bounced between the walls, filling the room until they almost ran out of air. It was a good feeling. How stupid of him to have even worried about drawing attention to the corruption! Sami leaned back in his chair and considered asking for a cup of coffee.
The laughter died down and the bank manager straightened a stack of papers. He said not to worry about the bribe. Sami was welcome to pay it to him directly.
Sami paid and left. He decided to file the event away with others of the same kind. Gather them in a pile, in case one day he needed to draw energy from past injustices. If you could even call it an injustice. The bribe was a pawn that fitted very nicely into the rules of their society’s game. It would, in fact, have been an injustice if the bank manager hadn’t asked for money, since that would have constituted an exception, giving Sami an advantage relative to the rest of the population.
* * *
—
For Nabil, the bank incident was an argument for why Sami should join the army. The bank manager was an Alawite, a member of a religious minority with their own interpretation of Shiite Islam. Under the French mandate, they were given more power in Syria, and now the ruling élite in the country was primarily Alawite. The military was no exception.
That his father wanted at least one of his sons to join the army was natural. You never knew when you might need connections, a wasta, a person who could help out with bureaucratic tangles.
But Sami had no appetite for such a career. The mandatory military service awaiting him after graduation was bad enough. Sami couldn’t understand those of his friends who were looking forward to shooting rifles and sleeping in muddy trenches. More than anything, he didn’t want to lose time. Not now, when he had just had a first taste of the freedom of adulthood.
Military service seemed to unite people, but it also seemed a thoroughly unpleasant part of life. His friend Muhammed preferred to do it before going to university rather than after. He would be gone for almost two years, aside from the occasional home leave.
Already on his first leave, he had changed, Sami noticed. His curly hair cropped, his back straight, hardened somehow. Muhammed had a new look in his eyes but shrugged when Sami asked him what it had been like.
‘There’s nothing to be done about it. Best to get it over with.’
It wasn’t until that evening, over a bottle of arak, that Muhammed could be drawn on the details. Three conscripts in his division had died during training, he told Sami. Another had lost a couple of cartridges for his Kalashnikov and was sent to prison in Palmyra; the boy was nineteen years old and was never heard from again.
‘Military service is the closest most of us will ever get to the regime,’ Muhammed said, ‘so you have to be on your guard at all times. Stay on the good side of the right people and watch what you say. It does make you a bit paranoid in the end.’
His older brother Ali had told similar stories, but he had done his service long ago, and Sami had almost forgotten that the same thing awaited him.
‘Want some more?’ Muhammed asked and held up the bottle.
‘No, you take it.’
‘To friendship,’ he said and raised the glass.
* * *
—
At night, Sami helped out with repairs and orders in his brother’s computer shop. That meant he had to quit his job at Abu Karim’s. Even though Sami liked it in the restaurant – in his office that reeked of cooking, right in the middle of the well-oiled machinery of chopping, peeling, slicing and more or less creative curses and insults – he felt more at home with technical stuff. A broken computer was a rational riddle. The only cure was patience, calmly and systematically searching for, then fixing, the problem. There were no shortcuts to the solution and no way of talking your way to it or out of it.
‘And here I was, hoping one of my sons would become a doctor,’ Nabil said.
‘But, Dad, I can’t stand the sight of blood.’
‘An army officer then.’
‘I don’t think that’s for me.’
‘Engineering is a respectable career.’
‘But that’s what I’m going to study – computer engineering.’
‘I mean a real engineer, who builds houses, something I could be proud to tell my friends about. And what’s wrong with being a doctor?’
There was nothing wrong with being a doctor but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. Against his father’s wishes, Sami applied to the IT programme at the university in Homs.
Attending university was going to change everything, but not in the way he thought it would.
8
YOU MIGHT THINK it is the major choices that are the turning points, the crucial moments that change your life for ever, but it can be as simple as what you choose for dessert.
It was the beginning of the university term and the late summer heat remained. The sand-coloured buildings looked as though they were inspired by Roman times, with pillars and gold writing over the entrance, and a huge statue of the former president overlooking the sea of new students as they caught up with old friends or made new ones.
Sami had finished his first class and was standing in the university cafeteria with the plastic tray in his hand, feeling the soft coolness from the open fridge. There were two kinds of mousse left, vanilla and chocolate, and he hesitated for a second. He liked both, but there was only one chocolate left, which made it feel like the more exclusive choice. He picked the brown cup and put it on the tray.
‘Oh, I hate vanilla,’ someone said behind him. ‘Could you please take the other one?’
He turned to see a girl about his height, wearing distressed jeans and a short denim jacket – finally, no school uniforms – with red hair tumbling down her back.
Sami smiled. ‘Hate seems a bit strong,’ he said, ‘but sure, you can have the chocolate.’
If he had chosen vanilla from the start, she would never have talked to him. Everything that happened from then on would have been different.
‘Is it OK if I sit here? I’m Sarah, by the way.’
He didn’t notice that she hadn’t found a place until she stood right next to him. Sarah sat down and took out the earplugs from her phone before he had time to nod. He felt warm even though he was only wearing T-shirt and jeans.