A Woman in the Crossfire Read Online Free Page B

going on?”
    â€œWhat have I got to do with it? I can barely make ends meet.”
    â€œBut people are dying,” I reply.
    â€œGod have mercy upon them, but we’re all going to die someday.”
    â€œWhat would you do,” I ask him, “if it were one of your children who was killed?”
    He is silent for a moment, then shakes his head and says, “The world wouldn’t be big enough to contain me!”
    â€œI heard,” I say, “that they put a young man in Dar‘a into a refrigerator. While he was still alive. And when they pulled out his corpse, they found he had written with his own blood: When they put me in here I was still alive send my love to my mother .”
    He shakes his head in silence.
    â€œI hope it’s not true,” I say.
    He remains silent, his ears turning red.
    Today there is a demonstration at the Damascus University Faculty of Letters; they detain all the students and confiscate their cell phones. The town of Talbiseh is still under siege, and all lines of communication are cut; they receive their children’s dead bodies from the security forces. In al-Ma‘damiya, near Damascus, the people tear down a giant picture of President Bashar al-Assad 4 , and a young man is killed. In Latakia eight prisoners are burned to death in the central prison.
    In a moment we are about to reach my house.
    I am trembling. I can see that bloodshed only begets more bloodshed. I can see gaping holes in life, holes bigger than existence. I notice them in the chests of the martyrs, not in the faces of the killers. Back at home I think about how I will infiltrate the sleep of the killers and ask them whether they ever noticed the holes of life as they took aim at the bare chests of their unarmed victims.

8 April 2011
    ..............................
    This is Damascus: a phrase we all used to hear on the radio when we were children. Every Syrian knows the timbre of that phrase. Obviously this is Damascus. But ever since Syrians started to migrate from their small cities and villages and deserts, Damascus has become a transfer station, like the humdrum chore of a woman making dinner for her husband without a trace of love.
    But still: This is Damascus!
    Today is Friday. A soft drizzle stops long enough for people to go out into the streets and demonstrate in the squares and the mosques.
    Who even remembers that every demonstrator is marked for death?
    Death is a game whose rules are unclear. These diaries turn death into a canvas for painting, a darkened mysterious canvas that appears before me upon the chests of unarmed young men going out to die. How will the gently rocking mothers ever forgive those murderers? How can all these Don Quixotes tilt at justice amidst those hordes and so much injustice, when working for justice only rarely amounts to anything at all? But heroism isn’t the glory of a crown of laurels; that’s a Greek illusion. Heroism is to stand on the side of the weak until they are strong, for me to spin the world on my fragile fingers and rewrite it with a few gauzy words. Shall I do as Rimbaud wrote in his A Season in Hell : ‘To the devil, I said, with martyr’s crowns, the beams of art, the pride of inventors, the ardour of plunderers; I returned to the Orient and to the first and eternal wisdom.’ 5
    The drizzle stops. A miserly sun shines through until the rain returns to roll down my cheek once again. I drink a few droplets before getting into a taxi and heading to Douma. I conceive of these diaries as deliverance or an exclamation, but in the end they are just words. People around me may think them courageous, but they are wrong, because as soon as the car sets off in the direction of the demonstration, my knees become weak, my throat dries up and I can hear my fear pounding.
    Fear is a human condition that humanity has never given its due, a mysterious commentary on meaning or love. Fear means you are still human amidst the