A Woman in the Crossfire Read Online Free

emerged just then out of the street, men with huge rings and inflated muscles and gaunt eyes and cracked skin – they created a human wall as they flung themselves upon the demonstrators and beat them, throwing them down on the ground and stamping on them. Other men captured people and hauled them away, made them disappear. I saw them open up a shop, throw a woman inside and shut the iron door behind her before heading after some other woman.
    The group, while trying to stand together, got broken up. The husband beside me vanished, leaving his small four-year-old son behind. Several men grabbed the father along with his ten-year old son. I stood there, like a defiled statue. I pulled the little one in close to my chest, as if I was in a movie scene. Is there really any difference between reality and fiction? Where is the line that separates the two? I was shivering. Suddenly I noticed the little boy gaping at his father and his brother as they were beaten, watching as the two of them were stuffed inside a bus. The face of the tenyear- old was frozen, as if he had just been administered an electric shock, and a powerful fist came flying at his little head: THUMP. His head went limp, and after a second, they kicked him along with his father inside the bus. I recoiled and turned the little boy’s head away so he wouldn’t be able to see what was happening, slung him over my shoulder and ran. Just then a friend of mine appeared nearby in the square, and three men pounced on her. I grabbed for her arm, screaming, “Leave her alone!” They threw me aside, along with the little boy who was by now weeping in my arms, and took her away. I kept running, stopping outside a store where the owner shouted at me, “Get out of here! Can’t you see we’re trying to make a living?” As I ran away, one of the demonstrators ran up alongside me to help carry the boy. We then continued briskly walking. Why had I run? The little boy asked me to stay with him; he was going to wait for his father, saying how scared he was now that his father and brother had left him, and that he was going to hit the policeman who had struck his brother. When he asked me whether they had been taken to prison just like his mother had been, I was silent, unable to respond, until I simply told him, “You’re coming with me now.”
    Actually it wasn’t the police who beat up his father, the police just watched while people got punched and kicked and insulted and arrested; they just stood there, silent. Then a group came out chanting slogans and carrying flags and pictures of the president, including some of the very same people who had carried out the beatings in the first place, as well as others who had appeared suddenly. They, too, started beating people with their flags, and the people who had almost managed to assemble there dispersed, bewilderment all over their faces. That night the news reported that infiltrators among the demonstrators had picked a fight, and that the Minister of the Interior had received complaints from the prisoners’ families. I heard all this on Syrian state television, still haunted by the eyes of that little boy I had carried away, imagining him instead lost beneath the stampeding feet, wandering the city streets alone in search of his father and his brother.
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    Crossing al-Merjeh Square weeks after the incident, I see those phantasms, behind sliding metal prison bars. Then I hop in a taxi and head toward a mosque I hear remains under siege. There is no crowd there. I think there has to have been some mistake or some kind of media distortion. Through the car window I observe the city between al-Merjeh Square and the Kafr Sousseh roundabout. I don’t want to rely on anything but myself and what I can see with my own two eyes. Scanning the internet on my mobile phone, I find reports that the mosque has been surrounded, but the radio broadcast says the entire city is calm.
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