In the morning the muezzin called to empty houses to come and pray. I went out to try to find some flour and eggs before the bread ran out. I dragged my feet in the dust. It was so thick, like walking through snow. There were burnt cars, lines of filthy washing hanging from abandoned terraces, electric wires dangling low over the streets, bombed-out shops, blocks of flats with their roofs blown off, piles of trash on the pavements. It all stank of death and burnt rubber. In the distance smoke rose, curling into the sky. I felt my mouth dry, my hands clench and shake, trapped by these distorted streets. In the land beyond, the villages were burnt, people flooding out like a river to get away, the women in terror because paramilitaries were on the loose and they feared being raped. But there, beside me, was a damask rose bush in full bloom. When I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell, I could pretend for a moment that I hadn’t seen the things I’d seen.
When I looked up from the ground, I saw that I’d reached a checkpoint. Two soldiers stood in my path. They both held machine guns. One of them wore a checked keffiyeh. The other one took a gun from the back of a truck and pushed it against my chest.
‘Take it,’ the man said.
I tried to mimic my wife’s face. I didn’t want to show any emotion. They would eat me for it. The man pushed the gun harder into my chest, and I stumbled, falling back against the gravel.
He threw the gun on the ground and I looked up to see both men standing over me, and now the man with the keffiyeh was pointing his gun at my chest. I could no longer stay calm and I could hear myself begging for my life, grovelling with my knees in the dust.
‘Please,’ I was saying, ‘it’s not that I don’t want to. I’d be proud, I’d be the proudest man in the world to take that gun in your name, but my wife is very ill, gravely ill, and she needs me to look after her.’ Even while I was saying this I didn’t think that they would care. Why would they? Children were dying every minute. Why would they care about my sick wife?
‘I’m strong,’ I said, ‘and intelligent. I’ll work hard for you. I just need a few days. That’s all I’m asking for.’
The other man touched the man with the keffiyeh on the shoulder and he lowered his gun.
‘The next time we see you,’ the other man said, ‘either you take a gun and stand beside us, or you find someone to take your body.’
I decided to go straight home. I sensed a shadow behind me as I walked and I wasn’t sure if I was being followed or if it was my mind playing tricks on me: I kept imagining a cloaked figure, the type in childhood nightmares, hovering over the dust at my back. But when I turned around there was no one there.
I arrived home and Afra was sitting on the camp bed, her back against the wall, facing the window, holding the pomegranate in her hands, turning it around, feeling its flesh. Her ears pricked up when I entered the room, but before she could say anything I ran around the house, searching for a bag, cramming things into it.
‘What’s going on?’ Her eyes searched the blankness.
‘We’re going.’
‘No.’
‘They’ll kill me if we stay.’ I was in the kitchen, filling plastic water bottles from the tap. I packed an extra set of clothes for each of us. Then I searched under the bed for the passports and the stash of money. Afra didn’t know about it – it was the money Mustafa and I had managed to put aside before the business collapsed, and I also had some in a private account, which I hoped I could still access once we got out of here. She was saying something from the other room. Words of protest. I packed Sami’s passport too; I couldn’t leave it here. Then I returned to the living room with our bags.
‘I was stopped by the army. They held a gun to my chest,’ I said.
‘You’re lying. Why has this never happened before?’
‘Maybe before there were still younger men around. They didn’t notice me. Had no reason to. We’re the only stupid people left.’
‘I won’t go.’
‘They’ll kill me.’
‘So be it.’
‘I told them that I needed a few days to take care of you. They agreed to give me just a few days. If they see me again, and I don’t join them, they’ll kill me. They said I should find someone to take my body.’
At these last words, her eyes widened and there was sudden fear on her face, real fear. At the thought of losing me, maybe at the thought of my dead body, she came alive and stood up. She felt her way along the hallway and I followed, breathless, and then she lay on the bed and closed her eyes. I tried to reason with her, but she lay there like a dead cat, with her black abaya and her black hijab and that stone face that I now despised.