No Turning Back by Rania Abouzeid

Author:Rania Abouzeid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

MARCH 28, 2013. Just after breakfast, the guards were shouting out names. Suleiman’s heartbeat quickened when he heard the names of several of his former cellmates from Aleppo. He lifted himself off the floor a little, as though it would somehow help him hear better. He closed his eyes and listened: Diaa al-Absi. Ahmad Moaamar al-Zein. Suleiman Tlass Farzat. He jumped to his feet.

“Get your things!” a guard shouted. Suleiman didn’t have any things. He was barefoot in his boxers. The line shawish tossed him a pair of fleecy black pants that had been lying near the wall. They were damp and many sizes too big. An inmate from Hama gave Suleiman the shirt off his back—it was white with blue stripes. Suleiman left behind his underwear. There were men who could use it, he figured. Some were naked. Names were shouted, inmates scuttled toward the hangar gate. Suleiman turned to the man who sat behind him in line number one. His name was Abdel-Kareem Mohammad Mansour, and he was from Qalaat al-Madiq in Hama. Suleiman pressed his prayer beads into his neighbor’s hand, as well as the half-piece of bread he’d saved that morning to stave off hunger pains later in the day. He kept the scrap of denim. The pair embraced. “I’ll pray for you!” Mansour said. “Please find my family!” He repeated his last known address, shouting it out in the mayhem, regardless of the consequences, as Suleiman, holding up his damp pants, rushed toward the hangar gate. It slid open.

“Get out, you animals, and get on the bus!”

Sunlight on his skin. The guards hadn’t bothered to blindfold them. The detainees were driven a few hundred meters back to where Suleiman had been processed on his first night. He walked down a flight of stairs into an office. One of the two mobile phones he had when he was arrested sat on a table, near a clear plastic bag containing his belongings. He signed and fingerprinted a receipt for them. The guard didn’t return his mobile phone. To hell with it, Suleiman thought. He considered asking about his car but decided against that, too. “It wasn’t worth it. I’m being released! They’ve returned my things, don’t upset them now.”

He was ordered to wait near a minivan, to squat like the other detainees while he was handcuffed and blindfolded. He heard vehicles arriving and people alighting, and, after a while, names were called to board buses. Suleiman froze when he heard one: Samer Tlass, his lawyer cousin who had been part of Rastan’s tansiqiya. Suleiman knew Samer had disappeared before he had—Samer vanished on Valentine’s Day 2012 while trying to smuggle flour into Rastan. Starving towns into submission was an overused tactic in Assad’s war, one some of his opponents also employed on a lesser scale. Rastan had been besieged for almost a month, its bakeries low on supplies, when Samer ventured out to try to secure food. Nobody knew what had happened to him. The cousins were both in Air Force Intelligence’s Mezzeh detention center at the same time.

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