‘Just trust me on this,’ Sami said.
They only advertised once, by handing out flyers Sami made on the university’s photocopier. They had barely signed up their first two customers – Ali’s computer shop and a nearby internet café – when word about their network began to spread. It was both cheaper and faster than the state-provided one. They laid cable after cable from their tiny server hall in the city centre. People offered Sami and Rasheed tea and biscuits to show their appreciation. People he didn’t know said hello in shops and cafés. It was like when he was little, walking down the street with Grandpa Faris. He pictured the company growing, providing internet to the entire city, even the entire country. A Syria where everyone was online and connected. Where you could pay bills, look for work and do admin digitally, without a single bribe.
Their first profit was invested in hiring an electrician. Younes was five years older than Sami but his street-style clothes made him seem younger. He had a shaved head and wore baggy jeans and a checked sweater with the sleeves rolled up to show the tattoo on his left upper arm. Esther. His girlfriend in Tel Aviv, whom he talked to and texted several times a day.
‘My mum got mad when she saw it.’ He grinned. ‘ “My son, why ruin your body with ink? When you die and God sees your unclean skin, you will burn in hell.” ’
Younes held out his mobile and showed a picture of Esther wearing dark sunglasses and standing in front of the Eiffel tower.
‘She’s pretty. But that’s not Tel Aviv?’
‘She’s half French, so she travels to Paris sometimes.’
‘Have your family met her?’
‘Let’s put it like this. Mum says: if you had to make a bloody-hell tattoo, why not choose your own dear mother’s name? Why a girl you’ve known shorter than a blink of an eye?’
Sami laughed and Younes shook his head. He was certainly good at talking away the time, but he was efficient when he worked.
The business did so well that they were even able to pay themselves modest salaries. Sami used his to buy his first car or, rather, half a car. Muhammed agreed to pitch in the other half, saved from the small amount he had earned during military service. Especially when he saw the colour.
‘We have to name her the Pink Panther!’
The car was certainly pink – bubble-gum pink – but there was nothing panther-like about it. It didn’t matter. The car was a beauty, with its curved bonnet and classic outline: a 1952 Volkswagen Beetle.
Not a day went by without heads turning in the street. Police officers asked to see their licences just for a chance of a closer look. The Pink Panther sounded like a retired old lady with a racking smoker’s cough and didn’t have enough horsepower to get up steep inclines. But Sarah loved it, and on the weekends they drove to Damascus and hung out in cafés, sipping mint lemonade and sharing meze.
Sarah was drawn to everything that alleviated the feeling of dreary everyday life. Aside from reading and going for drives, she liked horror films and TV soap operas. The highpoint was during Ramadan, when several new TV shows were always introduced, since people generally slowed down during the fasting period and spent more time in front of the TV. Sami said it was a waste of time. She said he was the one wasting time, what with all the late nights he was spending at the office.
University seemed less and less important. Sami was often ahead of his course mates and he found it more stimulating to work on concrete tasks. Two of his teachers knew about his business and offered conflicting advice. One warned Sami about the consequences if the government ever found out what he and Rasheed were doing. The other teacher helped solve the various technical problems that cropped up.
As it was, Sami was concerned about more immediate perils, like laying cable in a nine-storey building in Homs’ business district. Using a safety harness never crossed his mind. He and Younes gave the janitors a small financial incentive to let them into the apartment buildings, and they climbed out on to the roofs and laid the cables down as best they could. Sami was untroubled by vertigo, so long as he didn’t look down. But the sun and the blue sky could make the world start spinning, and brought to mind what had happened once to a sparrow that couldn’t fly.
Their cables stretched like a spiderweb through the streets of Homs. On one occasion, during the annual festival in the desert city of Palmyra, which tempted the crowds with concerts, horse racing, craft fairs and car races, they were even praised by senior politicians. Take a look at these ambitious entrepreneurs, one minister said, providing our country’s third-biggest city with reliable internet!
Poetry or not, apparently, computers can be as radical as words. If he and Rasheed had contented themselves with their original network, with what they had already achieved, then perhaps nothing would have gone wrong.
10
AS TIME WENT on, they were ready to take the next step. Sami had been working at the company alongside his university studies for almost three years, and now he and Rasheed wanted to put their money into wireless internet.
But one February morning in 2009, their network unexpectedly shut down. Sami’s phone started ringing around lunchtime and continued nonstop until evening. Only then did people realize it wasn’t just their network that was down. Friends and relatives in other cities told them they were offline too. In fact, all of Syria seemed to have gone offline.
Since they were unable to work, and since he and Rasheed felt on the verge of burning out – ‘Don’t overdo it,’ Nabil had told him every time they had talked to each other in the past year – they decided to drive the pink Beetle to Latakia and spend a day by the sea. The weather was warmer by the coast and the breeze would clear their heads and do them good. They planned to bring pierogi, parsley salad and arak and have a quiet time playing cards to the sound of the waves.
Sami packed a cooler and arrived at the office before lunch to pick up Rasheed. He parked and opened the car door, which gave a displeased sigh. That was when he saw them: a group of about ten men, dressed in civilian clothes and armed with Kalashnikovs, standing around the entrance. Sami assumed it was the secret police’s monthly visit to Rasheed’s mother’s company next door. She ran an agency placing nannies and maids from other countries, primarily the Philippines. Working with foreign countries always aroused suspicion that you were handling smuggled goods or even spying, but in the case of Rasheed’s mother it was more likely that her venture was so profitable the secret police were asking to have their palms greased. They certainly showed no signs of caring about the nannies who worked under slave conditions or had their passports confiscated.
Sami considered turning around, but the pink car had attracted attention.
‘Hey, you, show me your ID.’
Sami crossed the car park, pulled his wallet out of his pocket and handed over the card. The man studied it over the edge of his sunglasses. Sami could see his own anxious face reflected in the lenses.