*******episode 1**********
Our stories of escape can be told in many ways
with both their speed and randomness. Despite
the fact that many people live the same
stories, their beginnings and ends ultimately
vary from one person to the other.
I found out recently that each one of us — me,
my mother, my middle sister Sana and my little
sister Ghena — did the exact same thing for
two and a half years.
Every night, we slept in different beds we
never got used to. We each got to know the
strange roof over our heads as a space to
rearrange the pieces of our story together.
We have to be familiar with our stories so we
can tell them without fear and with the most
neutrality possible — which is what I am
trying to do here.
If you’re looking for the shared beginning of
all our stories, it was one morning in July
2013. My mother left our house in Masyaf, our
little mountain town, to travel to the capital,
Damascus, where I lived with my father.
A few days earlier, he had sent me to a doctor
in Masyaf to be examined; I wanted to know if
I had anxiety and depression. I had been
feeling down for about three months after
rockets from the Syrian regime killed one of
my closest friends.
We switched places. I stayed in Masyaf with my
younger sister, Ghena, while my mother
traveled to Damascus. She had with her only a
few clothes and a lot of my father’s favorite
food. The security forces chasing my father
made his visits to the family house rare and
almost secretive.
I woke up to the phone ringing. I can still hear
it in my ears. It’s my mother! Her voice was
shaking, checking with me about my father and
asking me to call him. I couldn’t understand
everything. I could hear the noise from our
street in Damascus in the background and
thought, “If my mother is there, where is my
father? And why she is asking me to call him?”
She felt my confusion so she started to
explain, “I called him a while ago and said I’d
be 15 minutes late. He said he’d wait for me in
the house. I arrived and tried to call him so he
could help with the bags, but he didn’t answer.
I tried to call him again on his cell phone. It
rang a few times and then his phone was out
of service.”
My mother knows better than to say all this on
the phone. It’s really dangerous to mention
things like that, but there was no time to wait
for safe communication.
My mother found out through our inquisitive
neighbor on the first floor that men in military
uniforms had come to the house. They had a lot
of weapons and they were with someone who
didn’t look like them. There were sounds of
someone being hit, items being smashed and
screams heard in the building. Then they came
down with my father and someone else, his
close friend Hossam. Hossam’s family was later
told that he died in the regime prisons.
We didn’t have enough time to think about the
situation, its danger or its consequences. We
didn’t even have time to be sad and think
about being a mother and two daughters who
just lost a brave father and a husband in one
moment. Ghena and I had to leave our house in
Masyaf immediately and go to Hama. We had to
get far away to stop the regime from finding
and using us as tools to put pressure on my
father in his prison.
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.to be continued
