‘I think it was fair,’ Yasmin said about the dismissed teacher. ‘They watch us because they love us.’
Sami was willing to agree that love was about being seen, but he felt it was also about acceptance, whatever one’s flaws. Their country would not tolerate any defects or mistakes. He watched the pouring rain, how it formed gutters and ponds on the schoolyard. Yasmin sat between the boys and Sami felt the warmth from her body.
‘Want to borrow my jacket?’ Haydar said, and Sami regretted that he hadn’t asked first.
‘Nah, it’s OK.’
There were informants and members of the secret police everywhere, that much they knew, but Haydar had more detailed insight into how they moved and behaved. Taxi drivers were almost always members of the secret police, he claimed. They might say something along the lines of ‘Isn’t al-Assad just terrible for this country?’ and if you agreed, you were in trouble.
Informers were ordinary people with no conscience. They were rarely recompensed directly, but they gained contacts that might be useful in the future. Your best friend might have been an informer for years without you suspecting. Neighbours, colleagues, relatives – you could never be sure.
Aside from the secret police and informers, there was the Shabiha, a criminal syndicate headed by members of the al-Assad clan. Blackmail and the smuggling of luxury cars, drugs and weapons were their specialities, according to Haydar.
‘Isn’t it weird how he knows all that stuff?’ Sami said, which made Yasmin inexplicably angry. ‘What? I just said it was weird.’
* * *
—
After that rainy day, Yasmin became even more meticulous about following the rules. Even when they were alone, she would hush him and say, ‘The walls have ears.’
It was safer to follow the rules, Sami agreed with her on that. But what if you didn’t know the rules? Sometimes you thought you knew something was true and it turned out to be false. Just take all the things grownups knew and passed on like truths. That watching too much TV would make your eyes square. That you could drown if you swam straight after eating. And then there were the truths passed between students in the schoolyard, often about dangers so dire you couldn’t ask the grownups about them.
Like the man with the goatee and the cane. All the children in the area knew he was a sorcerer. Unsuspecting young boys were invited into the man’s house, hypnotized, then sliced into ribbons. The gate to the low house was usually wide open. The man would sit alone by a table in the courtyard, next to a babbling fountain, cutting thick, fatty pieces of meat.
One day, they were kicking a ball around after school and Haydar took a long-range shot. They watched the ball sail in an arc from the tip of Haydar’s shoe, up over the rooftops and down into the old man’s courtyard. They stood in silence, Yasmin’s the deadliest of them all. Within seconds, they were fighting about who should ring the gate and fetch the ball.
‘I’ll do it,’ someone said.
They all stopped and looked around. Who was going to do it?
‘I will,’ Sami heard himself say again. ‘I’ll ring the bell.’
When he pressed his finger against the doorbell, it didn’t feel too bad at first. The old man stepped aside and showed him the way in. At that point, his legs started trembling and it grew worse with each step. It was like moving through quicksand, as though he might at any moment sink through the stone floor into an underground cave. He pictured a dark cavern with bats, damp walls and long shadows.
When he stepped back out into the sunny street with the ball under his arm and his belly full of hot tea, the others surrounded him and cheered. He looked for Yasmin but she seemed to have left. Haydar was gone too.
‘What happened, what did he do? Why were you in there so long?’
Sami smiled and threw the ball in the air. The old man’s air of mystery seemed to have rubbed off on him and, for the rest of the week, everyone wanted him on their team.
Being in the know could be an advantage, but there were things he wished he had never found out. Like how there had been a catastrophe in Hama five years before he was born.
* * *
—
Hama was a neighbouring city, further north on the Orontes river, known for its beautiful norias used for watering the gardens. However, as it turned out, the flowery front hid a dark secret. The catastrophe, or the event, as it was usually referred to, was not talked about. Not at home and definitely not at school. Sami caught on anyway, because certain topics and words opened up a black hole of silence in which all conversation died.
‘It never happened,’ Nabil said.
Samira, who was pouring a glass of water, spilled half the pitcher over the table.
‘We don’t need to talk loudly and protest,’ she said. ‘But at least don’t lie.’
‘What never happened?’ Sami asked.
‘You’ll understand when you’re older,’ his father said.
He nagged his older brother Ali until he told him, but it was so unfathomable it couldn’t be true. He then asked a classmate from Hama, who punched him on the nose and ran away with wet cheeks. When their teacher wanted to know what was wrong, they both sat in silence, unsure what would happen if they revealed anything.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know,’ Sami mumbled to his classmate.
‘Didn’t know what?’ the teacher said.
Neither he nor the classmate replied. What he knew but would never utter aloud outside the home or conversations with close friends – since the walls had ears – was that a long time ago, the army had gone into Hama in search of enemies.
‘Is it true?’ he asked his mother after school. ‘What happened in Hama?’
She was making one of his favourite meals, vine leaves stuffed with silky rice. Samira dried her hands on her apron and pulled him in tight.
‘I know your father doesn’t want me to tell you, but sometimes it’s safer to know what you shouldn’t know.’
Her braid rested on her shoulder; her big hands were warm.
‘It was in 1982,’ she said, lowering her voice.
Certain Islamist groups who had previously supported the Syrian regime formed a united resistance, and President Hafez al-Assad decided the rebellion had to be put down. The army was sent into Hama to identify dissenters. During two weeks in February, the streets were black with regime soldiers and tanks. It was a bloodbath. At least ten thousand people were killed, probably tens of thousands more. It was not the first or last massacre by the regime, but it was the most violent.
Samira told this to Sami, but chose other words.
‘After the events in Hama, there were school classes where all the children had lost their fathers.’