The way my mother tells the story, she had only just started out on her own as a midwife when the famine began. In those dark days, weeks went by with more miscarriages than births. Those who had been ill when disaster struck succumbed to their illnesses. Friends and relatives began to disappear, either leaving for Beirut or Tripoli or vanishing into their hunger. At first the women mourned their dead, wailing as the funeral processions went by. But as time went on, all became too weak with hunger and too crushed by loss to wail.
The war had taken more from my mother’s village than it could bear. And so when news arrived of an Arab uprising against the Ottomans, the village rejoiced. Some of the young men spoke of joining the revolt. If you ask my mother, she will tell you that my father, then a scrawny young man prone to philosophizing, declared one day that he was going to join the fighting. They barely knew each other then, though my father had a reputation for lofty political ideas and larger-than-life stories. He was laughed at by the other boys his age, and my mother, too, scoffed at his outlandish promises. But when he vanished one morning, the mothers murmured that he had finally made good on his promise.
He didn’t make it out of the province before the sound of warplanes sent him running down a hill to hide in the brush of the nearest orchard. The planes passed overhead without incident, but my young father tripped on a root and went sprawling head over knees down the hill, breaking his leg. He was promptly returned to the village by a passerby, where word spread that he had survived an air raid, though this was only partially true. Soon, the story became more and more embellished by the village youth, who quickly claimed—despite my father’s halfhearted protestations—that he had been attacked by a dozen or more men and fought them off himself, that he had popped out one of their eyes with a branch, that he kept the dried eyeball like a desiccated persimmon under his bed. By the time the Arabs took Dera’a and then Damascus, my father had become a local hero without ever lifting a weapon, and because my mother had taken a liking to teasing him about the absurd tales of his misadventure, when he asked her to marry him, she said yes.
But despite the promises of the Allied powers and Emir Faysal’s declaration, France and Britain divided up our land according to their whims, and my father grew sullen and jaded. The failure of independence had broken something in him, my mother used to say, and he was never the same hopeful, rambling intellectual after that, with his big plans and uncompromising ideals. He settled into my grandfather’s textile business and became resentful of the revolution that had failed his hopes, resentful of the world that had disappointed him.
Five years later, the smallpox came. The epidemic arrived in the spring and was followed by an ill-timed drought. My mother buried many infants and children who succumbed to the disease, and she quarantined me to the house for most of the spring and summer, healthy and forlorn. Our neighbors began to flee disease and lack of water, until it was clear there would not be enough people to harvest even a meager crop.
I had just turned five. The scent of lightning was thick in the air when we received word from the Bedu elders that Sultan Pasha al-Atrash had declared revolution against France in Jebel ad-Druze. The Druze revolt grew in strength, until many cities were in open rebellion, and sympathy for the rebel cause began to grow in Homs and Hama and, finally, in our village.
Do you have any memory of those years, little wing? Perhaps you were too young to remember them. We were lucky; our village was of little importance to the French, so we were spared the violence France rained on Hama from the air. The aerial bombardment reached us when my father’s business suffered, though, and when the French cut back Abu Rayan’s orchards to prevent ambushes.
On the first of October of that year, my father set down a bite of bread and lentils at supper and announced that he intended to join his kin in Hama in the fight against the French. My mother told him he was a lunatic, that he had two small children to support, that we would starve if he were lost. My father accused my mother of her disbelief in his ideals, and she accused him of being naive. To this day, this was the bitterest fight my parents have ever had.
My father left that night, dissolving into the dark with only a goat-hair jacket and a bag of bread and dates. We would not hear from him for eight days. The fighting lasted only four, but it was dire. The French, who had few troops in Syria, brought in additional forces from Morocco and Senegal to quell the uprising, and surprised the rebels. The revolt in Hama was over. Preparations were made to bury the dead.
When we did not hear from my father after six days, my mother began to fear the worst. She became frantic, searching the orchards at night for survivors who had been missed. Still, there was nothing. After a week, Imm Rayan, who lived next door, tried to console my mother with herbal teas and the revolutionary songs my father loved to sing, but my mother was in too tight a knot. My mother opened her mouth to scream in frustration when, to everyone’s shock, the door opened and my father fell into the foyer.
After we had cleaned the scratches on his legs and arms and given him a little ara’ against the pain, my mother spread old linens on the good couch and set him down in the sitting room, demanding he tell her what had happened.
My father had cheated death a second time. Senegalese mercenaries under French command had surprised them in the orchards, and the Hamawi forces had run this way and that, afraid to fire on their countrymen amid the trees and the dark. Two bullets grazed my father in the confusion, impossible to say whose. One bullet had torn a line of flesh from his back, and another had taken a chunk of his ear. Bleeding and stunned, he had stumbled in the dark and struck his head on a stone. He’d lain in the brush like a dead man for the remainder of the battle, too weak and confused to rise. When he finally came to, the fighting was over, and he’d crawled his way to the closest house, where a sympathetic widow had cleaned and dressed the wound on his ear. The damage to his spine was harder to remedy. He had lost the use of one of his legs, to which most of the nerves had been severed, and would walk with the aid of a cane for the rest of his life.
The season of my father’s political idealism was over, and with it, Hama’s revolt. Merchants stopped coming to our village for a time, and trade nearly ceased. A pervasive sadness filled the streets and the homes of my neighbors, a hopelessness that made people whisper again about leaving. They spoke of relatives who had gone to Amrika and come back to build houses, sons who sent good money home, a cousin here or there who had decided to stay and make a life where there was a good living to be made. Why were we here when our sons were reaping their harvests elsewhere? Though Amrika had begun to close her doors to immigrants from outside Europe the year before, children were occasionally able to bring their parents or their siblings to join them, and hopes were high that the measure would be reversed. Perhaps there was a way, they said, and even my father spoke of such things when he thought my brother and I weren’t listening. When he began to talk of abandoning not only his business and his village but also his country, I knew my father had lost all hope.
Years went by like this, my father withdrawing into himself, business dwindling, the young and the strong being drained from the villages to find work elsewhere. On one particular evening, I lay awake as my mother mended clothing by the window. We’d gone to bed hungry again; my father hadn’t sold anything in weeks, and my mother had served us the same watery lentil soup from the night before. An owl had come to roost in the tree in our garden, and it called out into the falling evening. Beyond the window, the orchards outside of Hama were visible against the sky. My father shut the window; he could not take the owl’s cries. He used to say they were the spirits of those who had died unjustly, haunting the living.