Mother of All Pigs Page 11

  “That’s what the aunties have always told me,” Muna admits. “I just didn’t expect it to be confirmed so soon after my arrival.”

  Over her bifocals, Samira takes a closer look at her cousin as though seeing her for the first time. She might have been too hasty in her assessment. In an effort to make amends she confides, “It’s something I’ve always been aware of but never discussed until I started working with a group of Syrian women activists.”

  Muna is genuinely surprised. “What kind of work?”

  “Pickup and delivery; I help out.”

  Samira doesn’t add anything more than that, and Muna, she notices, has the good manners not to pry. Instead her cousin returns to the clothing and says distractedly, “Honestly, Samira, I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  By the time the unsuitable items are sorted, Samira actually likes her American relation. She does not have to be in competition with her, and they could even become friends.

  “This afternoon we’ll be entertaining old people, but if no one shows up we’ll escape. With the wedding feast tonight at least we’re going out,” Samira says. She buttons the back of a dress Muna has borrowed from her. With its high neck and three-quarter-length sleeves, her cousin finally looks respectable, although Samira prefers the culottes and the beautiful blouse from New York.

  Alone afterward in the kitchen, Samira steps through the heavy curtains onto the back terrace. The view, which once induced such emotional turmoil in her, seems ugly and ordinary in daylight. There is no romance in the rough concrete walls and spare struggling trees. Fifty yards away stands the flat-topped house that belongs to the family of Walid, the boy who broke Samira’s heart. Their meetings were brief stolen moments, intensified by the fear of discovery. It was a clandestine courtship, filled with intrigue and concealment, but for Samira it had been true love. Because she believed Walid felt the same way, she agreed to meet him on the back terrace late one night regardless of the risk.

  When Mother Fadhma discovered them among the cushions, Walid jumped over the ledge into the darkness and fled out of Samira’s life forever. She waited for him but he never contacted her again. Then she heard he had taken a job in Dubai, and the long, painful process of accepting her loss began. As the aching, raw sore of rejection healed, another worry festered. A disastrous scandal could erupt if any of Walid’s family or friends found out. Her guilt expanded until she imagined that people were talking about her indiscretions even when they were not. Without a word of explanation to her family, she quit teacher training college, avoided contact with anyone who might know about her relationship, and stayed at home. However, it was stifling to remain in the new house with her mother. So despite their arguments about what she was doing with her life, she began to take trips to Amman by minibus. There, wandering the wide boulevards, utterly dejected and alone, she at least felt free from scrutiny.

  Samira smiles to herself when she considers how mistaken identity and a glass of sweet tea began a new important chapter in her life. On one of her excursions to the capital, she had been in one of the alleyways and saw a small teahouse that went against all she knew. Instead of being filled with only men or hipsters, it had been taken over entirely by women. Curious, she stepped inside, found an empty seat, and ordered a refreshment. As she was about to leave, a slim girl with a moon face and big dark eyes, wearing a hijab, rose from a nearby table, sat down without being invited, and immediately inquired why Samira looked sad. Samira didn’t mean to tell the story of her broken romance, the abandonment of her studies, and, worst of all, the loss of her mother’s respect, but like a torrent everything poured out of her.

  The young woman was Zeinab. “You feel as if you don’t belong,” she told Samira. “Fate brought you here.”

  She placed a warm, soft hand on Samira’s arm and motioned to the women at the other tables, who rearranged their chairs loosely around the two of them. Samira was at first intimidated by the commotion but also intrigued. Some of the women reminded Samira of herself and the twins—with or without headscarves. Others were obviously working mothers Laila’s age and elderly grandmothers who, upon reflection, should have been watching the door more closely and stopped Samira from entering in the first place. Once the women realized she didn’t pose a threat, they continued where they left off. It was a meeting of Syrian refugee women, including Palestinians and Kurds, now living in Amman and the surrounding towns and villages. Before Samira’s arrival they had been listening to a report on the conditions in al-Zaatari refugee camp, which was growing at an unprecedented rate.

  “Sometimes two thousand or more men, women, and children arrive daily and after being admitted to the camp they are not allowed out.”

  Afterwards another woman stood and read from her notes. “‘Life in the camps,’” she said, “‘is brutal. In the heat or extreme cold, the UNRWA tents are unbearable. Large extended families survive on a minimum of necessities and the children, the majority less than eleven years old, are not going to school. Instead some are working to support their families. The camp is rife with criminal gangs.

  “‘Nearly everyone there,’” the woman continued reading, “‘has lost someone near to them. The threat of rape by both the regime and opposition fighters made many women flee; and just when they feel a degree of safety for themselves and their daughters, the girls are being married off by their fathers or uncles to wealthy Arabs who come to the camp, looking for a beautiful and young third or fourth wife.’” She sat down.

  A heated discussion followed. The women wanted to do as much as they could for the people inside the camp, but as refugees themselves, their lives were also constricted. Another woman raised her hand and started complaining how difficult it was for her to get away because her relatives were always questioning her. “One of my brothers has even started following me,” she admitted. “He hasn’t confronted me because he’s only seen me in the company of women, never men.”

  From the other murmurs of assent, apparently it was increasingly hard for young and old women to get away. Preparing for all eventualities, the leader of the women’s committee had already formulated a plan.

  Raising her voice to reestablish order, Zeinab explained, “Suspicious parents, husbands, and brothers should be visited by Umm Ghaliyah. She’s our cover.”

  The moonfaced Zeinab in her hijab held one hand over her mouth like a niqab and with the other pointed to a heavyset, sturdy woman in her late sixties standing by the door. Umm Ghaliyah’s floor-length dress and shawl were obviously homemade. With a twinkle in her eye and big, rough hands accustomed to manual labor, she was larger than life—beguiling and indomitable at the same time.

  “Any trouble, yani, let me talk to your menfolk.” Her voice was shrill and forthright. “Times like these require extraordinary measures. I’ll explain about our meetings and study sessions. It is a chance for Syrian women to remember who they are and where they come from.” Umm Ghaliyah moved her large shoulders with pride and added, “My sisters and I convince even the most suspicious. Few say no to witches like us.”

  Laughter rippled through the crowd. Her generous hands opened to include two elderly women seated beside her. Protected by their guardian angels, the activists forgot the dangers lurking beyond the teahouse door.

  “Consider my situation,” offered Zeinab. “As a Palestinian and a Syrian, I lost my home twice. Because of the Israelis, my family fled the catastrophe of 1967, and now only a few of us have escaped the violence by the regime and its supporters. Our first home is under occupation; our second one has not been given much of a choice, join Assad or burn. In Syria, there have been 400,000 people murdered, half the population of a country of 22 million displaced, and 117,000 detained and tortured in jail—and still there are those among us who believe women are not responsible adults able to decide or fend for ourselves!”

  Sensing the restive mood of her listeners, she became conciliatory. “Of course I understand. You are not fanatics. You are God-fearing women
who pray, work hard, and raise families, but where are the people who will wrench the Syrian and the Palestinian nations from their collective tragedies? I’ll tell you where! Locked inside the refugee camps of our minds. We are not fighting for the future of one or two countries. We are fighting for the survival of us all.”

  Throughout Samira’s lifetime, regional war and politics were a natural phenomenon, like a rock or a tree. In the past they were seemingly as unconnected to her life as a desert to a department store. Yet even then she wasn’t entirely immune. Like many others of her generation, she was observant and critical, although without an outlet it was an anger that often turned against oneself or, if private finances allowed, found expression in unbridled consumerism. Under the spell of her new activist friends, Samira was beginning to see that everyone met on a common ground of unhappiness, bitterness, and betrayal. All of them had been forgotten: the refugees by an apathetic world, Arabs by their own corrupt governments, Muslims by jihadists, and, at the end of a very long funnel of diminishing proportions, Samira by Walid. Each and every one of them had been spurned, and the result was a world filled with anguish and pain.

  Samira never worried that some members of the women’s committee professed a different religion from her own. She felt that, at last, she was among people who understood and did not judge her. Her father would have been pleased that his daughter displayed such tolerance. Whereas Al Jid hoped that integration would promote understanding, for Samira it provided an opportunity for rebellion and conflict.

  As her preoccupation with the group grew, she began to borrow reading material, much of which she didn’t understand. Later when she admitted her shortcomings in understanding the assigned postcolonial readings, Zeinab said, “All you need to know is that there are many refugees in the world, people used as cheap labor, living in unimaginable conditions of poverty and oppression. Their lives will never change except through revolution, and sometimes that requires violence.”

  During meetings the women voiced their resentment about how their uprising had been hijacked by Daesh. Through their relations, some still inside ar-Raqqa, they heard about foreign fighters who had come from as far as Chechnya and Malaysia to join the jihadi free-for-all. And in the brutal caliphate that had been established, they took out their insecurities against the modern world on women, who were expected to marry between the ages of nine and seventeen, tend homes for their fighter-husbands, and be ready to marry a second, third, or fourth time once those men took their own lives as suicide bombers. People of the Book, like the Christians, endured sexual and menial enslavement, meaning they served as concubines to the man of the house and maids to his many wives. Women not of the Book, followers of so-called pagan religions like the Yazidis, were condemned to sexual servitude by men who believed intercourse with virgins an ecstatic religious experience and raped girls as young as twelve.

  Still, existence continued in rebel-controlled areas. With the men away fighting or killed, it fell to the women to hunt for food, firewood, and water, as they cared for the young. Despite the conditions, that wasn’t all that they did. Those women caught inside communicated with the refugee activists in Jordan, who followed their reports on Internet radio and raised funds to support local initiatives, like a new generator for a newspaper.

  Among the activists, inside and outside, there were disagreements. Some desperately argued for surrender to the regime and a return to the life that had been destroyed. Others, like Zeinab, felt that the growing savagery on the part of both the jihadists and the government must be met with brute force as a form of self-defense. She made little distinction between the two, calling them “a snake with two heads.”

  She reminded the women of the first year of the Syrian uprising: “You remember when everything changed. Everyone wanted a nonviolent revolution and people were starting to wake up after forty years of fear. New civil society groups were forming and there were workshops on nonviolence and citizen journalism. This stopped once the government erected checkpoints and we could no longer move freely inside Syria. By December 2011, soldiers entering towns and villages raped women as a matter of government policy, in front of fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. If there is a sniper on your street, or the house where you live is constantly shelled, or pro-regime shabeeha militias slaughter your children, can you really stand idly by? No one is such a saint! Anger is natural; revenge is not. The real question is: How do we stop ourselves from becoming as bloodthirsty as they are?”

  These talks had a tendency to become heated. During one meeting Zeinab made an impassioned plea: “Women are a bridge to the future. Women are the donkeys of tradition. Women are caregivers and self-obsessed. They suffocate and love. They abuse and they suffer. The killer or the victim, which one are you?”

  Samira wrote her words down in a notebook she started keeping.

  Zeinab’s cry for action caused such consternation that even proud Umm Ghaliyah shouted out: “It’s not this or that; it’s this and more.” In the excitement, someone ululated as the women’s protector and guardian angel sounded her own call to arms: “Drip by drip, like water, we melt stone!”

  Phrases like this also appeared in Samira’s notebook, which she scrupulously hid under her mattress at home. Other reading material, like the book of Iraqi antiwar poems, was left out in the open. She expected her mother to ask where it came from, but Fadhma made no comment. Samira knew that her mother was in some ways relieved that she was no longer moping around the house.

  Zeinab’s tutorials, combined with a late-night regimen of secret reading and studying, had the desired effect. Samira slowly became conversant with the theorists of the Syrian nonviolent uprising, like Gene Sharp, as well as Palestinian and Kurdish history. But her favorite times were when she and Zeinab stole a moment together and her friend took out her phone and scrolled through her personal photographs, telling Samira about her family and friends in the Yarmouk refugee camp and their lives during better days. Over time Samira learned what happened to every one of them: Zeinab’s boyfriend had been imprisoned and died under torture; her uncle was shot leaving a bread shop. And then there was her first cousin. A mother of three darling little girls, she fled Syria on one of the boats bound for Egypt and her daughters, all under eight, drowned when the boat capsized. Zeinab had the good fortune to be smuggled out of the camp. Those of her extended family who remained during the ongoing siege were being picked off one by one—by hunger, barrel bombs, or snipers. Samira came to the conclusion that the Arab regimes and Daesh both considered all life cheap.

  It was the photo of the three little girls with their big brown eyes that followed Samira as she did her political work. Identically dressed in their mother’s hand-knitted sweaters and leggings, they stood shyly together, proud of getting their picture taken. They could have been any of the children from the town or her brother Boutros’s daughters when they were small. The demise of Zeinab’s little cousins was terribly cruel. But realpolitik was indifferent to death, injury, or injustice. Samira felt an urgency to pick sides. She thought she had a better chance of helping the activists and other children than arguing for herself or her neighbors. She was disappointed that the Arab Awakening faltered in the other countries before it had a chance to take root in her own.

  Although she yearned to take a more active role, she was unsure how to do it. Then after one meeting, Zeinab asked her to remain behind. She had a request to make of Samira. A comrade’s mother needed to go to the medical clinic, and Zeinab wondered if the newcomer to the women’s committee would accompany her. A Jordanian national might come in handy. The committee was becoming more active among the wider Syrian refugee population, and Samira was in a position to help them. Eager to please, she agreed to go.

  After that Samira was regularly called upon. Traveling alone by bus or shared taxi, she ferried money, messages, or reading material among the various Syrian political groups. The opposition movement was fractured, and it seemed groups were unnecessarily isol
ated or in disagreement. Sometimes, because she was an outsider, she moved easier between them as she picked up and delivered envelopes and packages unaware of their contents. All she did know was that her actions were a tiny link in a long chain that extended both ways: across Jordan’s border toward Damascus, Homs, Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo, through to Lebanon and the Syrian activists working there, and back again. It was a trail that was becoming increasingly fraught—and not only because of the enemy but also because of so-called friends. The Arab governments wanted to corral the refugees in the camps, which were tinderboxes waiting to be ignited.

  On one trip, the thin brown paper over the parcel split ever so slightly and Samira saw she was carrying opposition newspapers. If she was caught, it could mean trouble or, worse, a jail sentence. While the Jordanian government didn’t prevent hotheaded Sunnis from crossing the frontier and fighting for Syria, upon their return they were arrested and charged. Periodically a father made a public appeal, in the hopes that his son fighting a few hundred miles away was watching the news and would come home. However, the Jordanians weren’t going to tolerate cross-border traffic of any kind, including incendiary political material. On one bus she had a close call: two policemen came on board and began searching refugees. She slipped off before her stop. When she voiced her fears to the man she handed the parcel to, he informed her, “Don’t worry. Tell the policeman your brother is a retired army lieutenant; he won’t bother you.”

  She was surprised that an absolute stranger knew about Hussein, and her first thought was to sever her associations with Revolutionary Change in Syria, the umbrella group that included the women’s committee and other small initiatives. However, the political officer, who identified himself as Mr. Ammar, patently ignored the alarm on Samira’s face and ushered her into an office filled with old computers, typewriters, books, and papers. Paint was peeling off the walls, and in the middle a cluster of twenty or more wooden chairs encircled a battered table. Samira took a far seat, but it didn’t matter where she sat. Mr. Ammar towered over her. It seemed unlikely that this balding, mustached man was one of the handsome Free Syrian fighters whom Zeinab talked about. She promised Samira that there were many and suggested that the two of them take a trip to northern Syria—only four or five hours away by car from Amman—for a visit. Needless to say the overweight Mr. Ammar in his checkered shirt and frayed sweater vest wasn’t one of them.