A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea(9)
Finally, they reached the house in the Abassiya neighborhood and frantically banged on the door. Doaa’s uncle opened it and pulled them into the house, his face pale with worry at the sight of his family in the midst of the gunfire. “Are you crazy?” he shouted at Hanaa when they were all safely inside. “Didn’t you know what it’s like outside?”
Saja, Nawara, and Hamudi were in shock. They quickly retreated to the back of the house, away from the sounds of shelling and death, trembling in fear. Doaa, however, felt that she had to know what was happening. Minutes after she greeted her relatives, she dropped a bag of cookies on the table and ran up the stairs to the roof, knowing that from there she would have a view of the square where they’d seen the clashes. Hanaa shouted after her not to go, but Doaa ignored her.
She pounded the rest of the way up the steps, shoved open the door, and ran to the chest-high wall surrounding the roof’s edge. Breathing hard, she peered over the wall to the square in front of her grandfather’s house. Throughout her childhood, Doaa had spent hours on that roof, watching the quiet plaza surrounded by shops and homes. She scanned the neighborhood now, transfixed by the protesters who had amassed on the square and were chanting, “We want freedom,” as they marched with signs and olive branches toward a line of black-clad security men. Unlike the protests a few blocks away, this demonstration in the square across from her grandfather’s home was peaceful.
The protesters were a mere five hundred meters from Doaa’s position. She had the perfect vantage point to watch the demonstration unfold. Protesters stood in lines and were walking slowly forward across the square when security forces began firing tear gas at them. The metal canisters flew through the air, striking some protesters before falling to the ground and spewing gas. Some people fled, while others continued marching and chanting, “No to the emergency law” and “The Syrian people won’t be humiliated.” Many dropped to their knees, rubbing their stinging eyes as the tear gas choked their breathing. Then, to Doaa’s horror, she saw officers raising their rifles and shooting live ammunition directly into the crowd. She heard herself shout, “Dear God,” before a wave of tear gas reached her mouth and seared her throat. The chemicals burned her eyes, and she started coughing uncontrollably. She began to feel faint as she gripped the edge of the roof’s wall and watched people fall to the ground, some wounded, some not moving at all. Even from a distance, Doaa was certain that they were dead, and she began sobbing at the brutality of their deaths. The government she had grown up wanting to serve as a policewoman was now shooting its own people, the people from her grandfather’s neighborhood. She realized that everything she’d grown up believing about her country was wrong.
“Get down here!” Doaa could hear her mother’s panicked shouts from the top of the stairs. Half-blinded by smoke and tears, Doaa ran back to the stairway. The moment she reached the bottom of the stairs, she collapsed into her mother’s arms, gasping from the tear gas and trembling in shock. It was the first time Doaa had seen someone die in front of her, and she hated that she could do nothing about it. She was a powerless bystander.
Eyes watering, Doaa and her mother felt their way down the stairs and into the house. They retreated into a bedroom to recover and to try to make sense of what Doaa had seen. After some minutes, her grandfather coaxed her out. He wanted to maintain the rituals of their Mother’s Day meal, and the family began eating in a hushed and heavy silence. But when Doaa drew the fork to her mouth, queasiness overtook her and she left her plate, filled with her favorite foods, untouched. Shokri burst through the door just as they were about to eat dessert. He joined them for coffee and sweets, but announced that they would be leaving before dark. Although the shooting was over and the protesters had retreated, the atmosphere outside was tense. “We can visit grandmother’s grave another day.” This time, Doaa didn’t argue.
When they left the house, huddled close together, they saw bloodstains on the pavement where the shooting took place. The streets were deserted, save for a few men who were carrying the wounded into cars to take them away. Everyone’s eyes started to burn and water from the tear gas that lingered invisibly in the air. Shokri led the family to a busy adjacent street that seemed unaffected by the uprising and violence that had taken place only a block away, and hailed a cab to take his family home.
Later they found out that demonstrators had also set fire to the Ba’ath Party headquarters and to a courthouse. Two branches of Syriatel, the phone company owned by the billionaire cousin of President Assad, Rami Makhlouf, had been targeted as well. Fifteen demonstrators were killed that day, according to eyewitness accounts, and scores injured. The government in Damascus, hoping to contain further unrest, announced that it would investigate the deaths but immediately began placing blame on local officials in Daraa. After that, the protests only grew in size, and more clashes occurred between demonstrators and the police. Meanwhile, the death toll mounted. In reaction to the government’s brutality, a wing of armed opposition began to emerge from the peaceful protest movement.
Soon after the Mother’s Day incident, Hanaa joined her sister on a visit to a friend of theirs, the mother of fourteen-year-old Ahmad, one of the boys who had been arrested. When Hanaa returned home, she was shaken and tearful. Ahmad was thin and gaunt, a ghost of his former self. “We almost didn’t recognize him when he came home,” his mother had told Hanaa. When she’d met with the boy, he had sat motionless, staring into space, unable to answer when they spoke to him. His swollen face was covered with red, shiny wounds, and his arms were blotched with bruises. Not only that, his knuckles were cut open and his fingernails were missing. His mother explained that his hands had been beaten with cables as punishment for the graffiti.