NINETEEN

MOSUL’S AIR HAD SATISFIED A need within me too deep to name, but as soon as Raqqa’s dust-colored blocks loomed, I was sucked back into its gloomy nimbus. I was unsettled. I was overwhelmed by conflicting thoughts and emotions that intruded deeply into my life. Was it self-deception to stay, my eyes closed to the city’s inevitable trajectory? Was it sinful to exploit the situation, if only for survival? Was I obligated to leave?

As for my uncle, he was let down early by the revolution that he once believed in, and it seemed to me that he’d found an easy exit. Telling no one besides his wife, he had disappeared with winter’s wind. He’d always loathed bidding farewell, and for this journey—more than most—he could not endure the burden of explanations. All it took was a space in a smuggler’s raft to start the voyage toward the alluring shores of freedom. He rode the reckless Aegean wave that led him to the fabled Lesbos, which promised salvation for Syrians at the time. That year, 2013, Europe’s gates were still approachable. On Facebook, he checked in in Athens, then the Netherlands. There, he found himself confined to a refugee camp. Months later, when his wife’s papers were processed so she could follow him, he asked her to bring only one thing: a handful of dirt from the banks of the Euphrates.

He updated his Facebook status regularly, flirting with his passions: poetry and painting. His art brought him to mysterious worlds, intentionally detached from this one, mazes of colorful blankness. He must have missed his brush and its profound miasma, and even as a suffering refugee far from home, he’d at least reunited with this love. It’d been ten years since he’d painted, ten years wasted.

About one subject only, I had no moral conflict. I would not fight. I would not join an armed group. I spurned the pressure of a rifle butt against my cheek. Still, I could find no clear shore on which to rest. Stay? Leave? I vacillated. Each made sense and brought pain in equal measure, and I jumped back and forth between the two. Perhaps there was no space left for certainty in this chaos. What was Syria, Mr. Sykes, in the span of history? And what was special about that dirt, oh Uncle?

Indulging in the World Cup craze—or perhaps the siren song of assimilation—my uncle turned to realism again, painting a fair-haired girl in an orange football jersey, and won membership in a Dutch fine art union, and with it a space to exhibit his paintings. But home called after him in ways more persuasive than I could have guessed. And I, in Raqqa, spent the remainder of 2015 hunting for the reason he came back.