‘Give me your hijab,’ I said.
Afra unwrapped the hijab from her head and handed it to me. I covered my head with it and answered the phone.
‘Abbas!’
‘No.’
‘Where are you now, Abbas?’
‘No, I’m sorry, I’m not Abbas.’
‘Where is he? Can I talk to him? Did he get picked up? Did they pick him up?’
‘Abbas isn’t here.’
‘But I was talking to him. We got cut off.’
‘When?’
‘Not long. About an hour. Please let me speak to him.’
Just then the pickup stopped, the engine was turned off, footsteps approached. The driver pulled the hijab off me, threw it in the back, and I felt metallic cold between my eyebrows.
‘Are you stupid?’ Ali said. ‘Do you have a death wish?’ He pushed the gun into my forehead, his eyes gleaming. From the phone the wife of Abbas was saying, ‘Abbas, Abbas …’ again and again and again.
‘Give me that!’ the smuggler said, and so I handed him the phone and we set off again.
We were heading to Urum al-Kubra, about twenty kilometres west of Aleppo. We meandered through the ruins of the old city; the western neighbourhoods were held by government forces, the rebels had the east. The river could see it all, running now through the no-man’s-land between the opposing front lines. If something was tossed in the Queiq on the government side, eventually it made its way to the rebels. As we reached the edge of the city we passed an enormous billboard of Bashar al-Assad, his blue eyes bright, like jewels, even in the darkness. The poster was intact, completely untouched.
We reached the dual carriageway and the world suddenly opened up, black fields all around us, mulberry trees and olive trees blue under the moon. I knew that battles had been fought between rebels and Syrian troops amid the Dead Cities, the hundreds of long-abandoned Greco-Roman towns that littered the countryside outside Aleppo. In this blue emptiness, I tried to forget the things I knew, the things I’d heard. I would try to imagine that it was all untouched. Just like Bashar al-Assad’s blue eyes. What was lost would be lost forever. The Crusader castles, mosques and churches, Roman mosaics, ancient markets, houses, homes, hearts, husbands, wives, daughters, sons. Sons. I remembered Sami’s eyes, the moment the light fell away and they turned to glass.
Afra was silent. Her hair loose now, the colour of the sky. I watched her as she sat there, picking at her skin, her white face paler than usual. My eyes began to close, and when I opened them I saw that we had arrived in Urum al-Kubra and in front of us was the skeleton of a bombed-out lorry. Our driver was pacing around. He said we were waiting for a mother and child.
The place was empty. Unrecognisable. Ali was agitated. ‘We have to make it before sunrise,’ he said. ‘If we don’t make it before the sun, we will never make it.’
From the darkness, between the buildings, a man appeared on a bicycle.
‘Let me do all the talking,’ Ali said. ‘He could be anyone. He might be a spy.’
When the man came close I could see that he was as grey as concrete, it didn’t seem possible that this man could be a spy, but Ali wasn’t taking any chances.
‘I was wondering if you had any water,’ the man said.
‘It’s OK, my friend,’ Ali said. ‘We have some.’ He took a bottle from the passenger seat and gave it to this man, who drank it as if he’d been thirsty for a hundred years.
‘We have some food too.’ From a bag Ali took a tomato.
The man held out his hand, palm open, as if he was receiving gold. Then he stood there like that, unmoving, with the tomato on his palm, inspecting each of us, one by one. ‘Where are you off to?’ he said.
‘We’re going to visit our aunt,’ Ali said. ‘She is very sick.’
He pointed at the road ahead to indicate which way we were heading. Then, without saying another word, the man put the tomato into a basket on his bike, climbed on and headed off, but instead of riding away, he made a big circle in the road and came back to us.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, ‘I forgot, I need to tell you something.’ He dragged his hand over his face, wiping away some of the dust so there were now finger tracks across his cheeks, revealing white skin.
‘I would not feel like a good man if I took your water and tomato and left without telling you. I would go to sleep tonight and wonder if you were dead or alive. If you take the road you said, you will find a sniper on top of a water tank about five kilometres away. He will see you. I would advise you strongly to take this road instead.’ He pointed to a dust road that led to a country lane, and he explained which way to go from there so that we would eventually get back on the right route.