The Morning They Came for Us (16 page)

But what you don't expect is that ordinary things – those things that you take for granted in life – disappear too. The man who collects the rubbish no longer comes because there are no functioning civil services. The nurses who draw blood disappear because the hospitals are bombed. Your daily newspaper, your coffee shop, then – eventually – every bit of normality you know is gone.

What you yearn for more than anything is for the ordinary to return. The simple pleasure of going to a shop to buy apples; to smoke a cigarette languidly in a café; the ease of a university student driving from one side of the city to the other to get to her psychology or macroeconomics class without encountering a round of gunshots.

When I think back on my time in Aleppo, the strongest memory I have is of watching the baby die. I have my own child at home. He is healthy and lives in the first world; he drinks milk and eats cookies before bed, studies by an electric light, goes skiing, plays with Lego. He does not know war. His heroes are the heroes of
Star Wars
 – the good and evil, the Jedi and the Senators, Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. His heroes are not jihadists, fighters, or people who get through the front lines bearing humanitarian aid.

The suffering of children is particularly painful for anyone, but for me, as a mother, when I look into the eyes of the mothers whose children are helplessly dying, I feel like a fraud. I watch this, then I can go home.

It did not take long for this infant in Aleppo to die, maybe ten minutes, possibly even less. The doctor, Khaled – who is so young, only a resident – and the nurses worked on him.
They tried desperately to keep the tiny bundle alive. He had come in with a simple respiratory infection. Nothing drastic, not a gunshot wound, not an artery severed by shrapnel.

I watched them huddled over his body. It was like watching an Olympic race: Khaled's face tense and full of competitive anticipation, the nurses next to him in their hijabs and sneakers. They were competing against time, against death.

But they were losing. They checked the dying baby's fading eyes with a battered flashlight; they took his pulse, and gently thumped the bottoms of his feet to test his reflexes.

But he was gone. Nicole and Paddy and I watched, standing on the side, feeling awkward and in the way, as the life went out of this baby: someone that had been on this earth the moment before was suddenly, irrevocably, dead. Nicole did not touch her cameras; Paddy stood on one side.

Then it was over. His breathing just stopped. The thread was cut.

Now that we were back in the emergency room, I could hear the screams of other people in pain. I was aware of the coldness of my feet against the marble floor and someone else's blood on the wall. Against my will, I began to cry, with a kind of rush of tears dripping off my face onto my down coat. I could not stop them, with tissues or with Nicole's startled glance at me, imploring me to get a grip. I summoned the urge to be in control, but it was impossible. I went into a
small room, practically a cupboard, where they kept supplies. Nicole joined me after a moment.

‘You OK?'

A nod. She handed me a fresh tissue. I was thinking of my boy, how he had been born seven weeks premature and how, if he had been born in Aleppo, and not Paris, he would probably be dead.

At the time of that child's death, there were only thirty-one doctors for one million people in Aleppo. Khaled had been promoted by management somewhere – whatever was left of management – from being a resident to heading the hospital. He asked me not to write the name of it, or its location in Aleppo, ‘because then it will be bombed', like Dar al-Shifa, a hospital that had been deliberately targeted a few weeks before by government bombs because it was heavily used by civilians.

Targeting public spaces during wartime, especially those that are known to be full of civilians – hospitals, schools, etc. – is a violation of the Geneva Convention. But who here cares about the Geneva Convention? Are Assad's bombers who fly the planes low enough in the sky to drop the bombs, even aware of the Geneva Convention? Has any war ever taken into account the Geneva Convention?

Khaled had a terrible look of defeat on his face as he wrapped the small, dead baby in a triangular blanket, covering the lifeless head before turning to the mother.

She was also young, sitting quietly in a chair next to the examining table, wearing a hijab and a thick brown
abaya
. Her skin was faintly yellow. Hepatitis? Jaundice? Or just
malnourishment, lack of sleep, lack of water and fresh air and good food?

The mother shivered slightly in the cold of the darkened emergency room, but she seemed to be in the kind of pain that goes beyond tears. She looked hollow.

She took the wrapped package, her baby. Her husband touched her shoulder. They stood, with a kind of stooped dignity, and left the room.

‘The thing is,' Khaled said, turning to me, his glasses on slightly crooked, ‘that the baby died of a respiratory infection.' A respiratory infection that might have responded to a massive antibiotic drip in another country. Nothing serious, nothing that could not be handled. Outside of wartime.

The parents had waited until the baby had barely any life in him before they brought him in: there had been too much shelling in the city and they feared being killed by a rocket as they made their way from their home to the hospital.

What Khaled needed, he said, are ambulances. They cost $40,000 each and would get the wounded and the critically ill to the hospital faster. ‘It's not really asking for a lot, is it?' he asked. ‘One ambulance?'

We kept going back to the hospital at different hours of the day. The same nurses and Khaled were working. More patients. Another woman was brought into the ER suffering from spasms. Her body was convulsed, her legs and arms shook with tremors as a friend tried to quiet her. Her relatives said she had had cerebral palsy from birth, but her condition was worsening – her lungs were filling with fluid, she could
not breathe. They each took one of her hands and tried to calm her, steady her.

Then she saw us, Westerners, trying to make ourselves small in a corner, and she screamed out, ‘If I die, take my children!' She clutched her stomach as though she was having an appendicitis attack. She gave a high-pitched shrill shriek: ‘Take them with you! Take them with you!'

Another relative dragged her away.

Khaled had been known in his high school days as a champion foosball (table football) player. After calming the woman, he took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and said he was taking a break. He had been working since dawn – he was on a twenty-four-hour shift.

He climbed up the four flights to the small abandoned part of the hospital near the roof – no one wants to be near the roof because of bombing, but the doctors took over this space to sleep and eat in between shifts. He told us to follow. There was a foosball table – old, but still workable – on the top floor. Foosball, beloved by European kids. Khaled stood over it, fiddling with the knobs. Something resembling a smile seemed to cross his face.

One of the nurses had made a pot of soup from beans, and someone else had brought bread. The hospital had two things going for it: they got petrol from the FSA to keep the generators going long enough to do surgery, using headlamps to light up their patients' bodies, and they got bread.

‘Grateful for small miracles,' Khaled said, dipping a spoon into the bowl. It did not taste so bad: it was thick and, most importantly, it was hot.

He didn't want to talk about the baby, or about the city or the war. ‘I'd like to think about something outside of here,' he said. All he would say about the baby was that if it had been peacetime, he would have lived.

There was a tiny girl with us in the room, a local celebrity of sorts. She was a singer. At demonstrations, her brothers and sisters marched her in front of the crowd and she sang protest songs in a stunningly clear voice. She ate a bowl of soup that someone handed her, and then began to sing. Everyone clapped to the rhythm of her song. She closed her eyes and held up her hands and moved in a kind of trance.

Khaled was singing, too, but he looked wasted. ‘I can't cope,' he said after a while, and went to bed in one of the hospital cots downstairs. ‘See you in the morning.'

A year after I met Khaled, he was married, and his young wife had just given birth in Turkey. I called to ask him about a polio epidemic that had apparently broken out in Syria. He said that his newborn baby had given him hope. ‘There is not much hope left in Syria,' he said.

‘Are you going back?'

‘How can I stay away?' he responded.

Salat
is the obligatory Muslim prayers, performed five times each day by the devout. The first, called
Salat al-Fajr,
is at dawn. Prayer takes place again at midday after the sun passes higher. This is called
Salat al-Zuhr. Salat al-Asr
comes in the late part of the afternoon,
Salat al-Maghrib
soon after sunset, and finally the
Salat al-Isha
between sunset and midnight.

The other pillars of Islam are
shahada,
faith;
zakat,
giving savings to the poor;
sawm
, fasting; and
hajj
, the pilgrimage to Mecca. But none affects daily life more than the
salat
in both war and peace.

I have seen soldiers in trenches stop to pray, and farmers in fields, and even my translators have asked to be excused in mid-sentence when they are called to pray.

We had moved apartments, from Umm Hamid's to a secure house in another neighbourhood, where some FSA rebel soldiers and activists were living. The men here prayed reverently. They gathered together in the main room to pray, eat, talk, and, in between, to strategize on their computers.

They were quiet when Nicole and I walked by to use the bathroom – a good one, we said, it was a hole in the ground, but it was ceramic and it was clean – or to make tea on a stovetop, when there was cooking fuel. We had to stay in our room to eat dinner. A neighbour woman left the food on the floor outside our door on a tray, and we picked it up and sat on our beds to eat. I knew we were not prisoners, but I sensed what it might feel like to be a woman in their world.

Today there was a funeral. It was near midday – the sun had not come out at all – when the call of the muezzin broke the cold greyness of the sky. At the graveyard, called Martyrs Field, in the neighbourhood of Salah al-Din, a man named Mohammed stopped to pray. He worked in the graveyard every day. Sometimes, he took his small redheaded son with him to the cemetery. He wore high rubber boots as he scooped up earth with his shovels, laying down the bodies
in their bloody blankets, and then covering them with more earth.

I was worried for the redheaded child, surrounded by the dead, the haunting he will find later in his life when he combs through the memories – if he lives. If he gets through today, this week, this month, this year.

Sheikh Moisin, a religious leader working with Mohammed, says that the bodies sometimes have no heads. Sometimes, he says, they have no faces.

‘And your boy sees this?' I say quietly to Mohammed. He looks confused.

‘It doesn't bother him,' he answers. ‘Death is like life.'

But not in wartime.

Part of the graveyard used to be a park. But the death toll in Aleppo demanded more room for burials. As of January 2015, the United Nations estimated the figure of the total number of deaths in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict at 220,000; but others give higher figures.

Here in Aleppo, the playground-turned-cemetery was essential. Sentiment was put aside and the ground was readied to accept bodies, rather than to have children play. It is so unlike Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, near where I live, which I often walk through, or, in the spring, ride my bicycle through, in order to think. It is not like the cemetery in America where my father, sister and two brothers are buried, where my mother goes at Christmas, Easter, and on their birthdays to lay flowers and wreaths. It is where the dead go during wartime.

‘It is my duty, my work of God, to bury the dead,' Mohammed said simply. He is a man completely devoid of
drama. He says he does not have nightmares from his work, nor is he afraid of the dead.

The redheaded child, who turned out to be only four years old, clung to his father's hand – when there wasn't a shovel in it. Wouldn't the little boy remember mutilated corpses, children's crushed and twisted bodies, or those dead faces caught in the agony of the last moments of their lives?

‘Death is death,' Sheikh Moisin said. ‘The dead cannot hurt you.'

On the day I visited Mohammed, he was burying a man who, an hour before, had been alive. Muslims try to bury their dead before sunset on the same day, so as to honour the dead: the bathing, the enshrouding in white; the funeral prayer; the positioning of the head towards Mecca. But this is war. Two hours ago, this man had been on the front line, fighting. Then a bomb blew him up. His life was extinguished, fast, like a candle.

He had not been bathed, but someone brought a bloody blanket to wrap him in. Friends brought him to the cemetery, but only three people were standing at the edge of the shallow grave dug by Mohammed.

His corpse was wrapped but his head was exposed. He had fair hair, a pleasant look about him, and slightly bucked teeth. His eyes were ringed with purple bruises – a result of the explosion? The gravedigger shrugged, and asked one of the three men to say their prayers.

‘He's smiling,' one of the men finally said, after he had prayed. ‘The martyr is smiling.'

A martyr, killed in
jihad
, holy war. A
shaheed
.

‘He's not smiling,' another man interjected. ‘He looks shocked. The bomb got him when he was not looking.'

‘No, you're wrong. The martyr is smiling.'