A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(18)
After most of the tanks and the soldiers left the city, a new threat emerged as bombings began. On summer evenings, the family sat outside their house in a strange new ritual and watched other neighborhoods in the city light up as missiles fell. They counted how long it took for the bombs to land and guessed what kind of destruction had occurred from the clouds that mushroomed above. The sounds of heavy artillery shelling and explosions replaced birdsong.
“Alhamdullilah [thank God], it didn’t land here,” they said to each other, feeling guilty at the way war had hardened them. Sometimes they would witness the Free Syrian Army firing a rocket-propelled grenade, and they would all cheer, hoping that it hit its target.
Nowadays, the only thing Doaa and her sisters were allowed to do was cross the street to buy food from the supermarket or bread from the bakery. But prices had almost doubled and any better-quality food was even more expensive.
One day, the family had run out of bread, so Doaa, Saja, and Nawara went out to try to buy some. As they walked toward the bakery, soldiers called out to them, “Where are you going? Go back!”
Doaa answered, “We are only going to get bread.” But the soldiers kept insisting that they should return home. The girls stopped in the middle of the street and bent their heads together, whispering, “Should we turn back around?” They were so hungry their stomachs ached. While they were scared to disobey the soldiers, they also couldn’t bear the idea of going another day without any food. After a hurried discussion, they agreed to make it look as if they were going back home. They had heard that a Palestinian refugee camp in a neighborhood a thirty-minute walk away had food. They decided that they would go there instead. So they turned down the street in that direction. They were about two hundred meters from the camp when the soldiers spotted them again. Furious that the girls had defied them, the soldiers began shouting, “Go back, you dogs!”
This set Doaa off. They weren’t protesting or threatening the soldiers; she and her sisters were just trying to keep their family from starving, and the soldiers were getting in the way of that and being nothing but bullies. Without turning around, she shouted over her shoulder, “We need to eat! You’re starving us!”
“We just want to get food,” Saja added.
Before the soldiers could respond, the girls heard shooting in their direction and the sound of a tank moving toward them. They weren’t sure whether they had become the targets of army snipers for defying the soldiers’ orders or if they were suddenly caught in a cross fire. They immediately threw themselves to the ground, landing hard on the asphalt. Doaa felt the air forced from her lungs as she pressed her face to the ground and heard bullets flying above them like angry bees. Nawara felt the stinging brush of a bullet grazing over her back. If it had been a quarter of an inch lower, it could have killed her.
As soon as the gunfire ceased, Doaa and Saja helped Nawara up and ran through the side streets into the camp, hiding in alleyways until they felt it was safe enough to return home. They gave up on getting food, as the fear of being shot overcame their hunger. As they approached their home, all three of them were pale and shaking, aware of how close they had come to being killed. Nawara had a burn mark on her shirt where the bullet had skimmed her. Ali was on patrol outside their house, and he and his fellow soldiers noticed immediately that the girls were upset. His handsome, kind face creased with concern, Ali asked what had happened. As Saja and Nawara rushed into the house to Hanaa’s embrace, Doaa stopped to tell Ali that they weren’t able to buy any food for the family because they had been shot at. She walked back to her house feeling like a failure for coming home without food. An hour later, Ali knocked at the door and handed Hanaa a loaf of bread and a plastic bag full of ripe tomatoes. Grateful, Hanaa accepted his gift and quickly returned inside to make a meal for her family and to comfort her shaken daughters.
Now that the siege had been lifted and the protests continued, Doaa began to spend a lot of time up on the roof to hear what was happening on the ground. If she couldn’t attend the protests in person, this would have to do.
Doaa and her sisters would join in the chants of “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) and then “How can you kill your own sons?” and “Freedom!” Shouting along from their rooftop was a way of participating. Doaa knew that they had to be careful to not be noticed, as being on the roof made them a target for any snipers surveying the crowds from above. Anytime a soldier looked in her direction, her heart pounded. But despite her fear, being on the roof where she could see and join in the chants made her feel connected to the opposition.
One day, as she was in her usual position leaning over the edge of the roof and chanting the slogans along with the protesters, a soldier spotted her from a nearby building where he was stationed to observe the crowd, occasionally firing shots into the streets.
“Get down, irhabiya [terrorist],” he shouted at her. When Doaa didn’t move, he threatened, “Get inside or I’ll shoot you.”
That day Doaa felt emboldened by her fear, and she shouted back, “You’re the terrorist, you’re the one killing people! I saw you!”
At this, the man raised his gun and pointed it directly at Doaa. She quickly realized, in horror, that this soldier really intended to shoot her, so she bolted for the door. As she did, she felt a gust of air as a bullet brushed past her ear and hit the iron door in front of her, leaving a dent before it ricocheted backward and dropped to the ground. Just an inch closer and she would have been dead.