I learnt quickly. Nasrine went to the local school to beg textbooks for me and I would finish them in a couple of weeks. Once I could read, my world was books, TV and sitting on the balcony. From there, among the plants, I could look across to other roofs with their flapping laundry, satellite dishes and water tanks. Beyond them were pencil-thin minarets from where came the prayer call five times a day and which in the evenings were bathed in magical green light. Mostly I kept an eye on our street. Both sides were lined with apartment blocks like ours – the only shops were a grocery and a store selling football jerseys. The road wasn’t too busy, every so often a honking car or a motorbike, and every morning a man would come pushing his cart selling gas cylinders for heating and cooking. I guess he was a Christian as his music box always played Christmas carols.
On his cart like everywhere there were pictures of our dictator Bashar al-Assad. Our leaders in this part of the world like their personality cults. Everything was named Assad. Assad, Assad, Assad – Assad Lake, the Assad Academy, even the Assad Writing Club. Billboards appeared on the street with different pictures of him almost every week, some as the serious statesman meeting other heads of state, others meant to show him as a fatherly figure, smiling and waving or cycling with one of his children seated on the back and with feel-good slogans like ‘Kullna ma’ak’ – ‘We are all with you’. People said the eyes had been tinted to look bluer. I feel I was deceived by all these things.
There were also pictures of his late father Hafez, who started the whole family ruling enterprise back in 1970. Hafez had been born poor, one of eleven children, but had risen to be head of the air force about the time my dad did national service, and then ran the country for decades after seizing power in a coup. Like us, the Assads were minorities – they came from the Alawite clan – but they were Shias, while most Syrians are Sunni like us. Maybe that made them insecure, for they ran our country as a police state with fifteen different intelligence agencies, and if people protested they were locked up or killed. Hafez survived several assassination attempts, but in the end he died naturally of a heart attack in 2000, the year after I was born.
The plan had been for him to be succeeded by his daredevil eldest son Basil, who was an army officer and horse-riding champion. But Basil loved flashy fast cars and died in 1994 when he crashed his Mercedes at high speed on the road to Damascus airport. So the shy, thin second son Bashar took over, the one people called Mama’s boy. To start with people were happy about that. Unlike his father, who was trained as a pilot in the Soviet Union, Bashar had studied in England as an eye doctor – he was doing postgraduate ophthalmology at the Western Eye Hospital in London – and his wife Asma was British born (her father works as a cardiologist in London). We were proud of having a young handsome President with a beautiful wife who travelled the world, even meeting the Queen, and thought they’d be more open-minded and change things. And at the beginning they did – he released hundreds of political prisoners, allowed intellectuals to have political meetings and authorized the launch of the first independent newspaper for decades. He reduced the retirement age in the army to get rid of his father’s old guard. People called it the Damascus Spring.
Unfortunately, within two years, everything went back to how it had been. Maybe because of that old guard who didn’t like changes. Once again people lived in fear of the Mukhabarat, our secret police, and never quite said what they thought as they didn’t know who was listening or watching.
My favourite saying is ‘Laugh as long as you breathe, love as long as you live,’ and I don’t see why anyone would want to wallow in misery when there is such a beautiful world out there. It’s one of my Nujeen principles. Another one is I don’t believe anyone is born evil, even Assad. The problem is he grew up as this spoilt boy who would inherit his father’s kingdom. It was like the Assad family owned us and believed they should never give it up. We never talked about Assad, even at home between ourselves. We knew they have agents everywhere. The walls have ears, we used to say, so don’t talk.
I watched things too and would know when men had come home from work in the late afternoon as the sweet smell of tobacco would rise up from them lighting up their hookah pipes and start to tickle my treacherous lungs. Sometimes as I watched the shadows move across the street and caught sight of figures disappearing down winding alleys I wished I could wander. What would it be like to lose yourself in a warren of narrow streets?
Aleppo was a place where many tourists came and which everyone says is beautiful with its medieval citadel, Great Mosque and the world’s oldest covered souk selling goods from along the Silk Road like Indian spices, Chinese silks and Persian carpets. Our apartment was high so if one of my family helped me stand I could see the citadel lit up at night on a hill in the middle. How I wished I could go and see it. I begged my mum to take me but she couldn’t because of all the steps.
All I saw was our room and the parts of my home I could drag myself to with my rabbit-jumping. My family did try to take me out but it was so much effort as we had no lift, so I had to be carried all the way down five flights, and then the streets were so full of potholes that it was difficult even for an able-bodied person to walk. The only place I could go was my uncle’s house because it was near by and his building had a lift, so I became less interested in going out. When I did, after five minutes I would want to be back, so I guess you could say I was the one who locked herself up.
Sometimes I saw Yaba looking at me sadly. He never told me off even when I flooded the bathroom by playing water-polo and he would fetch me anything I liked – or send my brothers – whether it was fried chicken from a restaurant in the middle of the night or the chocolate and coconut cake I loved. I tried to look happy for him. He never let me do anything for myself. Nasrine used to get cross. If I was thirsty and demanded a drink, my father would insist she fetched it even if the bottle was just across the table from me. Once I saw her crying. ‘Yaba,’ she said, ‘now we’re all here, but what will Nuj do when we all die?’
The worst thing about being disabled is you can’t go away and cry somewhere on your own. You have no privacy. Sometimes you just have a bad mood and you want to cry and push out all that negative energy, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t go anywhere. I always had to rely on people. I tried to avoid people looking at the way I walked. When I met someone for the first time my mum would recount the whole story of my birth then go on about how smart I am, as if to say ‘Look, she can’t walk but she is not mentally disabled.’ I would just stay silent and stare at the TV.
The TV became my school and my friend, and I spent all my time with adults, like my uncles who lived near by. I never played with toys. When relatives came to visit, they sometimes brought dolls or soft toys, but these just stayed on a shelf. Mustafa says I was born with the mind of an adult. When I tried to make friends my own age it didn’t work. My eldest brother Shiar has a daughter Rawan who is a year and a half younger than me and she and her mum came to stay with us several times. I really wanted to be her friend so I would do anything with her, play even the most boring game or let her use me as her model for experiments in hairdressing. But as soon as anyone came who could walk I would be brushed off. One day when she was five and I was seven, I asked her why she didn’t play with me. ‘Because you can’t walk,’ she replied. Sometimes I felt I was just an extra member of the world’s population.
3
Aleppo, 2008–2010
Apart from facts I like dates. For example, 19 April 1770 was the day Captain James Cook found Australia and 4 September 1998 was the date Google was established. My least favourite date is 16 March. That is a black day in the history of Kurds when in 1988, in the final