Selamlik by Khaled Alesmael

Author:Khaled Alesmael [Alesmael, Khaled]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2024-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

Confession

Nidal, his family, and I returned by plane to Damascus. My brother’s wife’s health worsened to the point where she was too weak to speak. There was no other way—we spent all our money on her treatment, knowing all the while the medicine was doing her no good. We had to make a decision: either we left his wife and child in Damascus and made the journey to Europe ourselves, or we stayed in Syria.

We chose to go without them. My brother would reunite with his wife and child as soon as he gained his residency permit. This time we cooperated with Syrian-Palestinian smugglers. Rumour had it they were working for the Mukhabarat and facilitating the evacuation of the camps full of Palestinians.

In Damascus Airport we were just a group of Palestinian men heading to Qamishli in northeast Syria. When we went through security, and the official tried to find out the real reason we were heading for Qamishli, we said we had been invited to a Kurdish wedding. After we got on the plane the shabiha came on board. They were carrying assault rifles. They forced everyone to hand over 10,000 Syrian liras without bothering to come up with any justification.

Before the shabiha left, a clean-shaven bald man turned and spat on us. “You bastards, you sons of whores. We know you’re all going to Germany. The president knows every hair on your wives’ pussies.”

I gripped my brother’s hand and couldn’t work out which one was soaked, his hand or mine. We spent two nights in northern Syria until we were smuggled across the border with the same group of men we had travelled with on the plane. The whole group clung to each other. We spent over a month in Izmir.

We couldn’t do anything but wait until the smugglers gave us an indication that the next stage of our journey had been arranged. This gave me time to think and helped me grasp what I and my brother and the others were going through. I started to see new things in my brother. He spoke all the time about his daughter, about his big dreams for providing a safe life for her. He told me he could face every danger to ensure his daughter would grow up in a country where she would have an easier life. His daughter was at the heart of everything he said.

Once, when we were out buying life jackets, my brother asked the shopkeeper if he had one for a two-year-old child. I prayed to God: “Lord, if the boat capsizes and one of us has to die … let it be me. Please, choose me, Lord, if you want to take one of us.” But neither God nor Nidal heard my prayer. Nidal drowned, and it was me who was left alive.

What was he saying? Who was Nidal and who was the brother? Who was this man sitting in front me? Was I drunk or sober? I couldn’t understand. I wanted to refill my wineglass but the bottle was empty.

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