A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(19)
She threw the door open and ran inside to the safety of her home. Catching her breath, Doaa was surprised to realize that despite the bullet’s having just buzzed past her, she was not afraid. She wondered if she was becoming immune to fear. Every day they learned of more people that they knew who had been killed by government forces, but somehow, at this moment, she felt intuitively that the time had not yet come for her life to end. She felt that God had her destiny in his hands, and that the best way to serve him was to do what she believed was right and to follow the direction she received from her prayers. Doaa didn’t want fear to conquer her or her family, and she was resolved to continue living this way.
Through the fall and long winter of violence and food, electricity, and water shortages, the Al Zamels, like all families, did what they could to get by in a city that had turned into a war zone. Shokri brought home just enough money to buy food, and families and neighbors did what they could to help one another.
Then one day in June 2012, when Shokri arrived at his salon, he found that two missiles had hit the roof, turning the back of his shop into rubble. For over thirty years, Salon Al Fananeen had been his source of income and part of his identity, and now it lay in ruins.
He surveyed the damage, sweeping away shattered pieces of mirror and cleaning the debris from the mangled chairs. He dug out his scissors and brushes, meticulously cleaning off the dust, then placed them carefully back on the half-broken shelf. He pushed the pieces of rubble from the roof to the far reaches of the shop, moved the only undamaged chair to the front, and waited all day for a customer. No one came.
When he returned home that night, Doaa noticed a change in him. His shoulders slumped and his face was blank. He somehow looked smaller than usual. “Baba, what’s wrong? What happened?”
“The shop…” was all he could say. The family tried to comfort him, assuring him that they were relieved to have him home all day so that they wouldn’t have to worry about his safety all the time, but he found no comfort in their words. The loss of his shop took his spirit away. He spent the rest of the day sitting in the same spot in the corner of the house, chain-smoking, and only speaking if someone asked him a question. Doaa sensed that his losing his livelihood was like his losing his manhood, and she desperately wanted to find a way to help him, but the only thing she could do was try to keep his spirits up. “It will be over soon, Baba, we must be patient.”
Shokri’s shop wasn’t the only one that had been destroyed. Ayat’s husband’s popular baklava shop down the street was also demolished by a bomb. He had come late to work that day, just minutes after the missile fell. “God saved me,” he told the family. Days later, another bomb demolished his car. “That was everything I had,” he told Ayat, then revealed his plan to flee for Lebanon where his brother lived. His brother could help find him work and he could send money home for her and the kids. Ayat’s husband had no interest in taking part in the armed struggle for either side. He just wanted to continue to make a living for his family, so instead he joined a growing group of Syrians paying bribes at checkpoints to make their way out of the country for neighboring Lebanon to wait out the war. Ayat and the children would follow him not long after by paying a smuggler to get them to the border, and telling the soldiers at checkpoints along the way that they were headed there to visit relatives.
More and more people began to leave Daraa, although the thought of fleeing home had never entered Doaa’s mind. She was convinced that the uprising would soon end and that they could just start over and resume normal lives. She felt that the people who fled were abandoning a cause more important than staying alive, and she couldn’t imagine ever leaving the home she loved so much.
However, as every day in Daraa became a lottery of life and death, the stresses of survival began to take their toll on the entire family. The girls suffered from insomnia and panic attacks, and they were always nervous and on edge, constantly bickering over small things. Hamudi would cry every time he heard a loud noise, and the sounds of the bombs outside made him hysterical. He clung to Hanaa’s side, following her around the house, afraid to lose sight of her.
Doaa, too, was feeling the physical effects of stress. She lost her appetite and grew extremely thin. Hanaa suspected that Doaa was anemic. She also began to get regular sties in her eyes, and one morning she awoke to discover that her entire eyelid was completely swollen.
“We have to go to the doctor now, hayati,” Hanaa said when she saw her. “Your whole eye is infected.”
But a trip to the clinic was risky—they had to cross areas of fighting to get there, and it would take at least an hour. Despite the risk, Hanaa called for an appointment that day and found a taxi that would take them. Security forces were on every corner, and only a few civilians were on the streets. When Hanaa and Doaa arrived at the clinic, they hurried inside.
The doctor, a distant relative, took one look at Doaa’s eye and said he would have to lance the sty immediately. With no money, Hanaa explained that they couldn’t afford the five hundred Syrian pounds for the operation.
“Don’t worry, my dear, I’ll do it for free. We are family, after all,” the doctor said, smiling at Doaa, “and I don’t want you to lose that pretty eye.” Doaa was too nervous about the procedure to smile back and held tight to her mother’s hand.
When Doaa saw the long needle the doctor would use to inject anesthetic in her eye and the razor he would use on the sty, she burst into tears. The doctor comforted her, instructing her to close her eyes and pretend she was sleeping. Doaa obeyed and he quickly set to work. He injected the anesthetic in the sty and covered her eye with a bandage. Afterward he gave her a prescription for antibiotics and sent Doaa and her mother on their way with instructions to return in a week.