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Kings of Syria

Kings of Syria
We don’t know the trains are suspended when we wake and rise to pray. We turn eastward and raise our hands until they are even with our ears-palms out: “God is Great,” we say. Light spills over the train station facing us onto the still empty square between us and trickles down into the submerged passageway where we slept, bringing us life and consciousness. We progress through the forms of prayer, and, for a moment, I am back in Damascus, with my parents and my sister, before the bombings began.

We finish and wander through sleeping bodies strewn about the concrete floor of the subterranean passage to a nearby shop to buy bread, and I want Laban Arabi, which is yogurt made from goat’s milk.
“You won’t find it in here,” My older brother Tariq says, because he always tells me what he thinks and because he thinks he knows everything. Tariq is the king of those who think they know everything.
“I know,” I say, but I don’t know and neither does he. “It doesn’t matter, It’s not that important. But still...”
“But still, we are in Europe, you won’t find it.”
“... I’ll just have a look.”
“Be quick, we don’t have much time.”
“Of course,” I say, “I know that,” because I must let him know that I know what he knows.

Inside, I wander towards the dairy section and hear the gentle hum of the refrigeration motors keeping cool the rows and rows of Laban Baqari, which is yogurt made from cow’s milk, but there is no Laban Arabi, and worse than another morning without the wistful taste of my childhood breakfast of choice, I have to admit that I am wrong. Tariq finds bread and pays the cashier, then calls for me and I meet him at the front of the store just as two men enter speaking our native Arabic. We stop and listen.
“It’s not true,” exclaims one unto the other, through heaving breaths. His hair is black and oily, it shimmers under the cold lights like the feathers of a raven and stands in an unruly mound upon his head, all of the color has drained from his cheeks and his forehead is dotted with sweat. He produces an envelope from his back pocket and slaps it against the palm of his opposite hand. “I have a ticket, why would they sell me a ticket?”
He turns and hurries out the door. I start to follow him, but my brother puts his arm across my chest and asks the man who remains what is happening.
“The trains are suspended,” he says. “No more trains to Vienna.”
“But we have tickets,” Tariq says.
“That’s what he said,” and he points towards the door.
“But they can’t do that,” my brother says, incredulously, his voice is deliberate and confident. “Can they do that?” he asks out loud, but the question is intended only for himself.
“It’s done, see for yourself.” 

I open the door and step outside; sirens wail in the distance and when I look toward the imposing facade of Budapest’s Keleti train station, I see a growing crowd, from which the resounding cries of injustice are increasingly audible. “Come,” my brother says, grabbing my shirt sleeve. We run towards the decaying edifice and the increasing mass of protesters.

At the edge of the pulsating crowd, Tariq thrusts our loaf of bread into my chest and forces his way into the madness. I stay back and observe terror etching its way across the weathered faces of those arriving to protest. I catch a glimpse of my brother and he is not afraid; he is never afraid; he is the king of fearlessness. Blood courses through blue veins protruding from the surface of his sun-soaked neck and he clenches his jaws firmly as he works his way closer to the police barricade blocking the entrance. I can’t pick out his voice among the shouting, but I know his argument: We are seeking asylum from war, you cannot make us stay, we have rights... all of which are true.

The sun rises higher and the growing crowd swells such that I am no longer on the edge; I look at my watch and realize that the first train should have left already and there should be a train departing for Vienna every hour hereafter but the great station looming in front of us is empty. I turn and walk downstairs into the underground crossing where Tariq and I slept the night before. I slump against the wall next to our possessions and listen to hungry babies crying, patient mothers shushing, determined commuters marching; above ground I hear public transport vehicles coughing, helicopter blades pounding, and above it all, migrants pleading. 

***

Tariq wakes me, “Alem, Alem. How can you sleep?”
I force my eyes open and see him breaking our bread. “We have been traveling by train and foot and hitchhiking for eight weeks; I am tired. I can sleep.” I lean my head forward into my hands and breathe in the stuffy air of the busy passageway.
“You can sleep anytime, anywhere,” he says.  “You are the king of sleep.”
“What did you learn about the trains?” I ask.
“Nothing. The police won’t say anything. They don’t speak English or German; they don’t even look into our eyes.”
“Did you try speaking to them in Arabic?”
“I cursed them in Arabic.” 
“Do you know why the trains are terminated?”
He shrugs and hands me a piece of bread. “Why do you think? We are migrants, we are many... no one wants us.”
I bite into the bread; the interior is soft and porous, but the crust is thick and crunches between my teeth. “The bread is good.”
“It is good bread,” Tariq agrees. “But not so good that I want to stay.”
“You think it is serious?” I ask.
“Brother, it is serious,” he says while sitting down and folding his legs. “We cannot stay in Hungary. We don’t know anyone. Look around, we don’t want to stay here.”
“We’ve come so far.”
“Maybe we should have stayed in Syria. Maybe it was a mistake to leave.”
“The bombings were getting worse.”
“Were bombs worse than the camps we will move to if we don’t get out of here?”
“The bombs were worse,” I say. “I’m sure the bombs were worse.”

When a bomb fell in Damascus, a sharp crack would interrupt the busy white noise on a swarming street, followed by a blast that would shake the very air you breathed and then a plume of smoke would jettison from the targeted structure; the cloud, initially sharp and defined, would quickly unfold into a viscous wave that washed over you, tangibly opaque. Whenever I witnessed a bombing, my initial thoughts were shaped by what I had considered important just before the blast. “I’ll be late to school,” I would think, until the subsequent screams of panic and terror and scrambling feet replaced those thoughts with the gravity of the situation, and I would later contemplate how I was king of the self-absorbed, because, in the presence of death and destruction, I was annoyed before I panicked, or even before I grieved.

“What then, should we do?” I ask my brother.
“We should find more to eat; the bread only made me hungrier.”
“And we should find a postcard.”
“You don’t need a postcard, Alem.”
“It is for mother. I promised.”
Tariq stands and I rise too and brush the dust from my trousers. He turns and we begin to walk; the differences between us are apparent even in our steps. My steps are light, indecisive and appear clumsy next to his; he moves with the confidence of one who walks through walls.
“Where will you send the postcard?” Tariq asks.
“To our parents, like I said.”
“But where?”
“To the address they provide when they are settled.”
He nods and says nothing more, which is more concerning than if he had just said what he believed to be true. Tariq never concedes the final word. In doing so, he acknowledges my irrational belief that our parents are fine and settling into a comfortable village sheltered from the war that ravages the rest of our country. They have not written to our family chat for over a week though, almost certain confirmation that they are not fine.

We exit the submerged passageway onto the main square; the morning chill has been replaced by the friendly warmth of the September sun; the station and the protesters are behind us now, cars flow around the great train station in both directions on both sides of the structure. Pedestrians crisscross before me and hurry to work or lunch or to catch their bus. The routines and the habits of society are familiar enough that I reconstruct Damascus as we walk; I see shops with packaged goods and next to them, I imagine busy markets with open crates of olives spilling out onto the street below, and trays of baklava stacked in perfectly symmetrical rows, each one decorated with such care that they are as pleasing to look at as they are to eat. Outside of cafés I envision old men with deep brown, leathery skin, wearing felt hats and loose hanging trousers, drinking acrid coffee from ceramic mugs with sparkling cubes of sugar on saucers; they regale one another with animated stories from the past and I try to listen because I know that the secrets to life and happiness reside within these men. Then I remember that I have only imagined the old men and I wonder if such secrets actually reside in each of us. I see a young girl take an even younger boy’s hand and walk across the street and I think of my sister, Amira, and I think that if she were standing next to me, I would tell her what I was thinking and she would laugh, but not because she would think it is foolish but because she would think it is profound. She would repeat what I said slowly and then she would object to her statement with an opposing idea and then she would contradict her opposing idea with a defense of the original idea and with each new proposal her words would pour out of her mouth faster and faster until I would interject, reminding her that we were just speculating and then she would laugh again, because she knew the limits of humor and she delighted in all things silly and knew that nothing and no one was as silly as herself. Then she would say, “Little brother, I don’t know what I would do without you.” I want to see her soothing smile again and I want to look into her amber eyes that radiated comfort and I want to say, “Sister, what am I supposed to do without you?”

If my father were here, I would ask him instead. He would not answer me directly though; he would invite me to sit down while he boiled water in an electric kettle and as he pulled out two cups, he would ask me to explain my question. I would describe the pain and purposelessness that was swallowing me whole, and he would continue to prepare the tea, nodding occasionally to affirm that he was listening. He would delicately stack the pot, cups, sugar, spoons and milk onto a tray, and he would carry all of it to the table and sit across from me and when I felt that I had explained myself sufficiently, he would pour us each a cup of tea and ask me to tell him more. As I spoke, he would nod and say little, but the pain would ease and while he would never answer my question, while he would never tell me how to fill the emptiness left by the loss of Amira, I would feel a little less empty.

My mother would not indulge us in such a conversation; since Amira’s death, she moved silently from room to room sweeping or mopping or rearranging. Periodically her movement slowed, her eyes fixed on a distant point and then she froze completely and stared into the past. In those moments, my father would put his arm around her and hold her, for she was fragile and if she spoke about her sorrow she would only be crushed. Eventually, she would thaw and go back to work moving the mop or broom back and forth with a rhythmic sense of numb precision, like the second hand of a clock.

She cleaned as though she were exacting revenge on those who took my sister’s life by restoring order to the household they threatened to destroy. The rest of us knew that a home was greater than the structure she wanted to redeem but we remained silent as she methodically cleaned up the dust we brought in, dust that collected upon us as we traversed the city of rubble, and we all hoped that we would be gone when the time came for our building to fall as well.

We were my mother’s greatest joy in life, and she understood each of us. She saw my ability to gather information from the world around me when others only saw my inability to pay attention to the world as it spoke to me. She knew that Amira was destined to make people laugh and she saw that Tariq was born to lead. She used to explain to us that her love for each of us defied logic, which is to say, her love was not divided into three equal parts. She loved each of us equally with all of her love. Her response to Amira’s death also defied logic. When Amira died, my mother did not just lose a third of herself, she lost everything. She withdrew and only resembled herself when the call to prayer drifted into the darkness of our flat and stirred our attention away from ourselves and the temporary chaos surrounding us onto that which is everlasting and immoveable. 

Before my sister’s death, the melodic announcement stimulated my intellect; I contemplated God’s greatness and his presence throughout history as I progressed through the different positions of prayer, reciting the comforting words that I’d memorized as a child. Since she died though, those same notes have ignited my emotions and now I feel God’s greatness and his presence throughout history. When we pray, I am reminded that what happened to my sister and what is happening in Syria is not just bad; it is wrong, it is objectively wrong, and it is wrong because it is inconsistent with the character and standard for all that is good, which is God. Prayer reminds me that it is God who will serve justice to those who are waging this war, and when I believe that I no longer feel the suffocating burden of revenge. For this reason, it is the music inviting us to pray, the mysterious arrangement of notes over time rushing through space that I miss more than the crowded markets, the cafes, the olives and the baklava. Without the regular pauses throughout the day, nostalgia blurs the lines between my imaginary Damascus and the European cityscape surrounding me. I am only aware of my hunger for all that is familiar and all that is familial and the ground that is spinning below me. I feel my chest tighten and I struggle to maintain my balance. I stop and place my hands on my knees for support, but even the ground is spinning such, that I cannot stand. I want to hear the call to prayer desperately but all I hear is the white noise of pedestrians walking around me; I fall to one knee and close my eyes.

“Alem, are you ok? What happened? You are dreaming again. Stand up,” I feel my brother’s hand around my arm. You are always dreaming; tell me you are ok.” 
My head begins to clear, and I take a deep breath, I nod. 
“You are the king of dreaming. It is ok, though. Look, we can eat there,” he points across the square. I nod again and follow him.

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