Hiba distractedly twirled the knife on the cardboard. Sami grew more sleepy. He couldn’t put it into words, not then. It was a dizzying feeling, amplified by the bright light, like the feeling of being thrown off the bike. The thought solidified later in life: perhaps there was no fate to control him, perhaps he was completely and utterly free. When you took a step in any direction, you immediately faced a choice and then another one. Time forced you to move. Every second was a new start in which you had to act.
But that was a dangerous thought that went against everything he had been taught. You were supposed to trust in fate and the higher powers. God, first and foremost, then the leader of their country. Or was it the other way around? Hafez al-Assad first and God second.
Sami and his sister were sitting on the roof terrace with the knife and the bird, almost dry now, between them. The sparrow’s heart was beating rapidly in its chest. Afterwards, you might regret it and ask what might have happened if you had done this or that, if you hadn’t cycled on the main road, if you had put up a fight the very first time you met the girl next door, if you had listened a little bit less to what other people thought and said, like your older sister, for instance. But by then, it was too late.
‘You have to throw it,’ Hiba said, interrupting Sami’s contemplation.
‘What do you mean, throw?’
She showed him how he should lift his cupped hands up and out, to give the bird momentum and make it understand it had to unfurl its wings.
‘That’s how they learn to fly, their mums push them out of the nest,’ his sister said.
‘But our bird already knows how to fly.’
‘Exactly, it just needs to be reminded.’
They each kissed the bird’s beak and stroked its back. In that moment, he regretted not giving it a name. If it had had a name, it would stay with them, a name would anchor his love for it. Instead he whispered, teer ya tair: fly, bird.
He raised his hands and hurled the sparrow into the air and, for a moment, it looked like it was flying in a wide arc out across the rooftops and courtyards of Homs, through the shimmering blue sky, before it plummeted towards the asphalt three floors down, broke its neck and died.
2
HE IMAGINED A quilt and that it was his country. Sami’s mother used to collect patches of fabric, from ragged jeans to old curtains and torn tablecloths, and sew them together on her shiny black Singer. Their country looked like one of her quilts, made out of fourteen pieces. Some edges were as straight as if cut out with a pair of scissors. Homs’ governorate was the largest part, occupying the middle – most of it was camel-wool, the colour of sand, and showed Palmyra, whose Roman ruins attracted pilgrims and tourists. At the other end of the cloth, a blue thread seemed to wander, surrounded by orchards and cotton farms. The stitches became more sprawling in that part, more broken and colourful. A silk blue patch of water, a cross-stitch of roads and hills.
In that corner was Sami’s hometown, Homs, which gave its name to the province. Looking more closely at the blue thread – the Orontes river – it divided the city in two. To the east was the centre and the most important neighbourhoods, and to the west, the new and modern al-Waer suburb.
Yes, both the country and the city resembled the quilt Samira held in her hands: an incongruous collection of pieces, which she patiently sewed together with equal parts frustration and love.
* * *
—
Homs was the country’s third biggest city and home to about a million inhabitants, situated on the river banks near the Crusader castle Krak de Chevaliers. There was the old clocktower, the Saint Mary Church of the Holy Girdle and the Khalid ibn al-Walid Mosque, but the city didn’t attract as many tourists as the capital Damascus or the commercial centre Aleppo. Homs was primarily a city for the people who already lived in it, an unassuming place. No one was particularly rich and no one was particularly poor; everyone ate the same kind of food, as the saying went.
Sami’s home was in al-Hamidiyah, in the Old Town, the most condensed part of the city. Several of the houses had shops and cafés at street level while the owners lived upstairs. Sami could recognize his home streets from the smell: fresh coffee, roasted almonds and diesel steam. Their house, like the neighbouring houses, was striped, built with dark and bright stone. When Sami was born his father had had a small shop to make ends meet but it had been closed down long ago and made into a garage. They reached the apartment from an outside staircase. It had two levels, three if you counted the roof terrace.
The house had originally been built with a square courtyard, which an orange tree brightened during the day and a starry sky illuminated at night. But as the family grew, floors had been added and the courtyard built over. Now the pride of the house was the children it contained, not to mention all the animals. Sami and his mother would place bowls of leftovers on the stone steps for the neighbourhood cats. From time to time, a cat or two would move in, and they were usually allowed to stay so long as they didn’t get pregnant or pee on the Persian rug. Two hens lived in a mesh-encircled coop on the roof terrace, alongside a turtle on a water-filled silver tray.
The white duck, however, that had been Sami’s special pet, had vanished without a trace. His parents had told him it was sick and they had taken it to the vet. That night, they had meat for dinner. When his mum leaned across the table and asked if he liked it – pulling a face as though trying to stifle a giggle, and then she coughed and Nabil handed her a glass of water – his sister said they were eating his duck. Sami didn’t want to believe it. Besides, only half of what his sister said normally turned out to be true. But they wouldn’t tell him where the white duck had gone. The meat on his plate was light and tender and had tasted juicy up until that point, but afterwards he wasn’t really hungry any more.
After dinner, Sami went to the biscuit jar and comfort-ate some of the sweet pistachio rolls in it. He was not allowed to do so and to emphasize the point his mother had placed a note at the top of the jar that read God sees you. Samira was the only one in the family who turned to Mecca five times a day and fasted during Ramadan. Sometimes the others joined her so as not to make her sad. She was the heart of the family, tall, imposing, with a thick braid that swung far down her back when they were at home. Like many women of her generation, she didn’t work, aside from the work required to bring up three children, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Sometimes, however, Samira made tablecloths that she sold in the market. She had started sewing at the same time she started wearing a hijab. It was a few years before, not because she had to, but because people around her were. Samira wore it on special occasions and with her fringe visible, more in the style of early Hollywood starlets. She made her first headscarf out of one of her mother’s polka-dotted 1950s dresses. When she had the sewing machine out anyway, she also took the time to make things for Sami and his siblings. A skirt for Hiba, a pair of sweatpants for their big brother Ali, a jumper for him.