A Woman in the Crossfire (2 page)

The long arm of the regime hit out harder and harder. Samar Yazbek was interrogated, beaten and detained. The regime did not shy away from using dirty tricks to discredit her. Leaflets accused her of treason, spread defamatory rumours, openly invited a lynch mob to take action against her. But that made Samar Yazbek even more determined to continue.

This is the miracle of the revolution: the individual becomes the whole, and the whole is embodied by each revolutionary, in the same way Samar Yazbek turned from media personality to passive opponent, and finally to active underground resistance fighter, branded a criminal by the regime and the president, the Syrian people became ever more radical and determined, the more the regime tried to suppress them.

When Samar Yazbek eventually felt the noose tightening, she fled. She saved herself, her daughter and the diaries of the revolution. Through this record a wider public will find out first-hand what happened in Damascus and other cities. They will find out that wonderful people risked their lives and took to the streets, despite the heavy secret service and military presence that made the city of Damascus such a dangerous place for resistance fighters. Samar Yazbek describes in minute detail how the secret service roamed the streets looking for troublemakers. Orwell's
1984
and Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
have left the realm of fiction.

On 15 March 2011, the Syrians invented a new kind of revolution, a courageous, but peaceful uprising. And Samar Yazbek is the chronicler of that revolution.

Rafik Schami

Spring 2012

These diaries are not a literal documentation of the first four months of the Syrian uprising. They are simply pages I relied upon during those days in order to confront fear and panic as well as to generate some hope. But they are true, real, and have no connection whatsoever to the imagination.

Unfortunately, significant events in the popular mobilization that took place in cities such as Dayr al-Zur and al-Qamishli are absent either because I was unable to travel to them, or because I did not have the good fortune of recording the testimonies of activists in Damascus about the contributions people there made to the uprising.

I refer to activists who are still alive by the first letters of their names, and for the most part I intentionally use pseudonyms.

I have chosen to keep the names of the doctors entirely secret, even though some of them have been martyred, some are still missing and uncertainty shrouds the fate of others.

Samar Yazbek

Spring 2012

..............................

It's not true that death, when it comes, will have your eyes!

It's not true at all that the desire for love is anything like the desire for death, not in that moment itself. Perhaps they are comparable in their nothingness, though, as they both drown in oblivion. In love: communion with another person. In death: communion with being itself and metamorphosis from tangible matter into an idea. Human beings have always thought death nobler than existence: why else would they venerate the dead? Even those who were still with us just a few moments ago, as soon as they disappear they are turned into radiance!

I would not say I am calm right now, but I am silent. I can hear my heart thumping like the sound of a distant explosion, clearer than the sounds of gunfire, than the screaming children and wailing mothers. Clearer than the trembling of my mother's voice as she implores me not to go out into the street.

There are killers everywhere.

Death is everywhere.

In the village.

In the city.

On the coast.

Killers take over, terrorizing the people, fanning out around our neighbours' houses, telling them how we are going to kill them, only to then come back at us, shouting the same thing in reverse:
They're going to kill all of you!

I am an incidental visitor here. I am incidental to life. I don't belong in the environment where I live. Like a wild animal I've been drifting through the void. I flail around, empty except for the liberty of my very existence. I have been here ever since the protest movement began, looking out of my window and watching. My voice doesn't come out. I just want this to be over soon. Buried under this deluge of detail, I never knew that apathy could turn me into such a grim and fragile woman. Or that I could cling to life with this much fear: Fear of what, though? What are people so afraid of here? Without realizing it, people subsist on fear, which has become as automatic as breathing. Ever since my daughter and I moved to the capital fifteen years ago, I have a knife I never take out of my bag; I carry it wherever I go. A small, sharp switchblade to be used in self-defence. For years now I have said I'll plunge it into the body of anyone who tries to insult me for being a single woman living alone. I didn't use it very often, flashing it a few times in the face of stunned men, but lately I have begun saying that I'll plunge this knife into my own heart before I let them insult my dignity.

What's the point of everything I am saying now amidst this carnival of death? Simply going out into the street means the possibility of dying; this thought hit me, that walking down the street you feel someone might kill you at any moment. A crazy idea, but it's strange, you go out with your friends to demonstrate, knowing that there are snipers from general security who could shoot you at any time. The same security forces who have stamped on people's necks for decades, calling them whores and traitors, locking them up, killing them, and then continuing to saunter down the street in cold blood.

How does the human body get turned into a lethal killing machine? Hands, eyes, hair, brain – all these organs that resemble your own, how are they transformed into giant probes and long fangs? In the blink of an eye, reality becomes fantasy. But reality is more brutal. They say writing a novel requires imagination, but I would say it takes reality: nothing more, nothing less. What we write in novels is less brutal than what occurs in real life.

Bouthaina Shaaban
¹
appears on television. My mother tells us all to listen up, “She's talking about traitors and sectarian strife! Oh, the horror! Shut the windows!” Images of the tortured children and dead little boys return. The face of the little boy I held in al-Merjeh Square, as he watched his family getting beaten and arrested. I hear a man on television talking about the blood of the martyrs in Dar‘a, calling for revenge, “We won't respond to this woman [he means Bouthaina Shaaban], we don't respond to women. They expect us to listen to a woman?!” Nothing that is happening seems anything like me: my family cheering for this lady, my friends cheering for the blood of the martyrs.

I am ashamed of the blood of the martyrs. Oh Lord in Heaven, if there is human sin, and it turns out You are sitting up there, unwilling to come down and witness what is happening, then I will reach up and drag You down from your seven heavens, so that You may hear and see.

As I step out onto the balcony, the lemon trees revive me. This place is calm for a few moments, then gunfire breaks out. Everybody knows that the city's calm before was not a natural calm, since nobody could challenge the power of the security apparatus. Agents are always in the street. Suddenly the streets are transformed into a carnival of horror. Chaos is everywhere. Security forces watch the people: some flee, others get arbitrarily eliminated. The gangs sprouted out of the ground just like everything here, out of thin air, without any rhyme or reason. How could armed men suddenly appear and start killing people? How did all this happen? I have been exiled from the city, from the village and even from the sea air itself. Everyone glares harshly at me, from all directions. I understand both sides. I know the other aspects of life in Damascus, where the city was transformed into another kind of village.

What am I doing here?

Waiting around to die?

As the debates start up once again – the saboteurs, the infiltrators – I cower inside myself. Now I am an infiltrator among my own family, an infiltrator in my own bed. Now I infiltrate everything and I am nothing. I am a lump of flesh curled up under the blankets, infiltrating below the asphalt on the street. I infiltrate the sorrow of every Syrian who passes before my eyes. I hear the sounds of gunfire and prayer. I am a mass of flesh, trudging each morning from house to house, trying to find one last document for salvation, claiming to be doing something adequate to my belief in the value of working for justice: but what does that even mean anymore? Nothing. All the slogans, all the pain, all the murderinciting hatred and all the death have become meaningless in the face of this reality: empty streets, a ghost town. Military convoys are dispatched every which way, but there's no army presence. Where has the army gone? Who can believe such a farce now? The army lets these gangs kill people and intimidate them; it won't intervene. In the face of these gangs, the security forces that once terrorized the people are suddenly transformed into the downtrodden.

What is this madness?

Death is a mobile creature that now walks on two legs. I hear its voice, I can stare right at it. I am the one who knows what it tastes like, who knows the taste of a knife against your throat, the taste of boots on your neck. I have known it for a long time, ever since I first escaped that narrow world, then a second time, then a third. I am the crime of treason against my society and my sect, but I am no longer afraid, not because I am brave – indeed, I am quite fragile – but you get used to it.

Today, on the Friday of Dignity, the Syrian cities come out to demonstrate. More than two hundred thousand demonstrators mourn their dead in Dar‘a. Entire villages outside Dar‘a march toward the southern cemetery. Fifteen people are killed. In Homs three are killed. People are killed and wounded in Latakia. In the heart of the capital, Damascus, in the al-Maydan district, demonstrators come out; some are wounded and then moved to al-Mujtahid hospital. Army forces surround Dar‘a and open fire on any creature that moves. In al-Sanamayn the military security commits a massacre, killing twenty people.

I am no longer afraid of death. We breathe it in. I wait for it, calm with my cigarette and coffee. I imagine I could stare into the eye of a sniper on a rooftop, stare at him without blinking. As I head out into the street, I walk confidently, peering up at the rooftops. Crossing the sidewalks and passing through a square, I wonder where the snipers might be now. I think of writing a novel about a sniper who watches a woman as she walks confidently down the street. I imagine them as two solitary heroes in a ghost town: like the street scenes in Saramago's
Blindness
.

I return to the capital, and I know this place will never be the same again. Fear no longer seems as automatic as breathing. Once and for all, and all at once, life here has changed.

I return to the capital, knowing I will not despair from tirelessly fighting for justice, even if death rips open my chest. Like I said: You get used to it. Nothing more, nothing less. I am waiting for death to arrive, though I will not carry flowers to my own grave.

..............................

I will infiltrate the sleep of those murderers and ask them, “Did you look into the eyes of the dead as the bullets hit their chests? Did you even notice the bullet holes?” Perhaps they glance for a moment at the red holes left behind in foreheads and stomachs, the same place where our eyes always come to rest.

Here in Damascus the murderers will soon fall asleep, and we'll remain the guardians of anxiety. Death is no longer a question. Death is a window we open up to our questions.

Damascus is just like any other city. It becomes more beautiful at night, like a woman after making love.

Who kills from the rooftops? Is it a cowardly killer? It most certainly is – how could he be deemed courageous when he has already been stripped of his morality?

From my house I head out in the direction of the squares and the mosques. In the middle of the afternoon, I need to see the city streets, street by street, square by square. I don't believe anything but my own eyes. The squares are empty, possibly because today's a holiday. Everyone is holed up inside their fear.

Security patrols roam dense in the streets; everywhere I go cars are coming and going, fast and slow; giant buses are jam-packed with security forces; men wearing helmets and military uniforms fan out in the markets and the squares, in the broad intersections and anywhere else demonstrations might break out.

Men in plain clothes congregate here and there, but the size of their presence gives them away. How did I learn to distinguish between a security agent and an ordinary man on the street in Damascus? The truth of the matter is that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when this game I play actually started, when my acumen became more reliable than any question or conversation. I know them by their eyes, by the drape of their clothes, by their shoes. Today more security forces than ordinary people are on the streets, in the alleyways, beside the kiosks, in the squares, outside the schools: security forces everywhere I go.

Patrols are deployed near the entrance to the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh
²
, and near Bab Touma they stop some men for questioning, grabbing their IDs. I can't wait around long enough to find out whether they kept their IDs in the end; I must keep moving. I glance at them out of the corner of my eye as I pass them, and then turn into a crowded alley. Here, almost, is human life. The security presence is heavy all around the Umayyad Mosque, and hordes of people are holding up flags and portraits of the president.

The mosque is closed, they won't let me in, they claim there are people inside praying, but before leaving I sit down outside to smoke a cigarette and calmly watch the situation.

Suddenly I start to notice strange figures I haven't ever seen before materializing in the street. Oversized men with broad and puffed-out chests, their heads shaved, wearing black short-sleeved shirts that reveal giant muscles covered in tattoos, seething at everything that moves. Glaring as they walk, their hands swinging at their sides, figures that sow terror wherever they go, thickening the air all around them: Why have I never noticed them in the city before? Where do they live? And why have they appeared today?