TWENTY-ONE
I’M SEVENTEEN, AND IT’S MY first day at the university of Aleppo. I am here to study English literature, and today, I hope, is the first day of my real, free life away from the repression of religious school, family, and past. Death to last year’s gallabiyah. To celebrate the occasion, I wear tight jeans, a T-shirt of the German national soccer team. I carry a four-hundred-page English-language book on research methodology. The weight is a pleasure beneath my arm.
I hold the book tight for confidence against the buzzing of my nerves. The presence of too many people does this to me. A tic from religious school. Family, they called us there. Family, sure, if family meant the bastinado stick on your feet, the screams, in public, about your failures, the space of your privacy shrunk as slim as a porn CD. It was family, if family twisted you inside, forced you to present a blank face for protection against the free-floating horror of your surroundings. If family took away your ability to speak. Fuck that. It’s dead to me. Leaving my trepidation behind, I walk into Ma’arri Hall.
Noise. Chaos. Laughter. Three hundred new students crowded into every space. They fill each of the tightly packed elementary school desks, then spill over onto the stairs, behind the desks, boys and girls—girls whose eyes I can’t meet because of the crippling shyness the religious school imposed by isolating us from the other sex—all together gossiping and whispering, and I tentatively, stealthily, wedge myself into the back of the lecture hall, breathe, then survey my new universe.
In religious school, everything was forbidden. In this crowded lecture hall, I feel as if I’ve teleported from Saudi Arabia to New York. What I see is total freedom. Beauty, challenge, excitement, all played out in Aleppo, this city out of history. In my Aleppo, I can wear, read, and be whatever I want. The student teacher sidles up to her desk. I hold on to my giant English book. In Aleppo, I tell myself, I will shed the old humiliations, then shape myself anew, into the person I want to be. I may be kicked down, but I’ll get up again. I will work until I bleed. What victories I win will be mine alone.
From my first day at university in 2006, Aleppo was the world for me: the glorious past and the present, the bitter and the sweet—and my first month was the month of honey. I didn’t work and I lived with roommates in Aleppo’s Sha’ar, paying my way with money I’d earned back home. After class, I wandered the Old City’s ornate streets, beneath the shade of the overhanging balconies of Al-Jdayde, past the spindly, sphere-punctuated minarets of al-Tawhid mosque, to the small “lovers’ park” where the old Armenian couples sat together, their bodies bowed into each other like a promise kept. In Aziziyah, the old buildings blurred into the new. The balconies dripped roses, above the cafés whose tables spread across streets uncrowded by the presence of shouting children. Old men wore suits in Aziziyah and old women formal dresses—clean as those streets and the fine cars that cruised through them, clean as the lines of the facade of Aleppo’s main train station or the precise, palm tree–adorned geography of the public park. Life here, with its endless accretions of ancient, past, and modern beauties, cultures, and conveniences, seemed no less fine than how I pictured it in the European capitals. A world away, in other words, from the other Aleppo in the east.
After some battles with my roommates and the all-too-quick depletion of my savings, I moved into my own private room in the eastern slum of Karm al-Myassar and, through friends, found a job sewing clothes at a workshop to pay my expenses. Like Sha’ar, Karm al-Myassar was filthy, crowded, conservative, manic—a living negation of the manicured elegance of West Aleppo. Like much of the city’s East, Karm al-Myassar had been officially designated as an agricultural plain by the government. It was not. It was an urban neighborhood of necessity, built illegally and overnight by the rural poor, who had fled their villages to seek better prospects in Aleppo’s outskirts. It grew up without planning, building codes, or logic—excepting that of the clans who handed out cigarettes and candy for votes and dealt drugs from their wheelbarrows. Each morning, I woke up in my windowless cell. Even the balcony was blocked off, in case I might peek out and see the hair of the woman on the balcony across from me. I dressed as neatly as I could, then attempted to maintain this neatness as I fought my way through the dust and grit to the bus stop. Karm al-Myassar’s narrow lanes were obstacle courses, choked with cars, wheelbarrows, hawkers, children playing soccer. Drivers screamed at me. Fights broke out because someone’s cart banged against someone’s cab. Holes pitted the pavement; in winter, streets turned to mud. Merchants strewed their wares over the sidewalks. My ears screamed from the din of basement workshops. Blacksmiths. Carpenters. Dirty businesses that should have been isolated in an industrial area, not a residential neighborhood, but who cared if the residents of Karm al-Myassar choked? Half the women wore niqab, some not even showing their eyes. They might not have been religious, but they dressed the part. TVs blared through the thin apartment walls, and the voices of the fictional characters mirrored the voices of the street mixed up with the honking of the cars and the clanging of the tailors’ sewing machines. We were so close. On top of one another, crushed against one another, our sweat ground into one another’s skin. Despite my best efforts, by the time I boarded the bus, I was covered in dirt.
On the bus, I was one of the only students among a throng of workers headed to their jobs in the city center. Jammed against each other, we rocked and swayed, as the bus crawled through four East Aleppo neighborhoods until it reached Bab al-Hadid, one of the seven gates in the walls that had once protected Aleppo. The Silk Road had once curved along our path. Old Aleppo’s walls had vanished over the years, but its gates survived as if to remind residents of their history: The city may have been destroyed before, by Byzantines, or by Tamerlane, but each time it clawed itself from the ashes again. The bus passed through Bab al-Hadid to the pale stone streets of the Old City, these arched, cat-filled, obscenely beautiful streets, and then kept going. As the bus moved west, the veiled women got off, replaced, slowly, by bare-headed, well-dressed ones.
At the public park, I got off, walked a few minutes, boarded another bus. Now, in rich Aleppo, the streets were modern, the trees plentiful, the garbage gone. Finally, I strode through the arch of the university. Already tired, I was ready for class.
For an hour, each day, I bisected the city, east to west. From the periphery to the core, from the squalid warrens of the exploited to the shiny palaces of those for whom this country was made. I could study alongside them, but I was not one of them. Every evening, I returned to my place. The neighborhood in which I crashed exhausted each night did not even officially exist in the city’s record books.
Perhaps two-thirds of the students at the University of Aleppo were like me. People from the countryside who had come there to transcend their families’ circumstances but still had to till the fields or teach in the villages, then commute at least an hour each way to class, because it often took wasta to get a bed in the University City dorm rooms to which out-of-town students like us were supposedly entitled. We were adrift in the city. In our hometowns, our families—our controlling, demanding, freedom-denying people—had our backs. Here, we slaved, and Aleppo shrugged. What did she care for us? We were just the latest round of invaders. No one would catch us if we fell.
The other third were different.
These were city people—Damascene, Halabi—sleekly cosmopolitan to their cores. The most elite of them had supportive families who didn’t just pay their way through university; they had the financial surplus to encourage their dreams. I watched the guys of this group as they lazed their days away in the cafés of Aziziyah, then tooled around in their BMWs after class, girls perched in the passenger seats. Their clothes were expensive, yes, but they also dripped with cool. Exhausted from my job sewing clothes, I skipped more and more lectures. With no need to work, the well-off students attended every class. No matter how I tortured myself at English, theirs was better—fluent with the ease that comes from private classes with tutors who had studied abroad. They bantered with the lecturers as if they were members of a private society, while, like most students, I struggled to follow along. Afterward, they moved together as a clique, confident and graceful, from lecture hall to cafeteria. They lived in the finest neighborhoods—neighborhoods where it felt like blasphemy for me to walk their streets.
I used to imagine myself as I would have been if I had been born into that lucky third. I would have the best education available in Syria. Who cared if I was stupid? I’d still pass the tests. Instead of living in fear of post-graduation unemployment, I’d have a swell job waiting for me. It would be no problem. My well-connected daddy just needed to make some calls. In this other life, as this other me, I wouldn’t be working at a sweatshop. I wouldn’t avoid mingling because I was too broke. My friends would be the sons and daughters of businessmen. They would be educated people, assured and worldly. As we aged, we would help each other rise ever further, in an eternal loop of kickbacks, entrenching our places far from the potholed streets of East Aleppo, where the proles who labored for us lived.
You might wonder why a single barrel bomb levels an East Aleppo building. The answer is this: They were built cheap, fast, and lawless—by and for the lawless and expendable people. Until the government finally took back the East in the winter of 2016, Karm al-Myassar was uncontested rebel territory. For this transgression, the government bombed it into nothing.
I SPENT MY SIX YEARS in Aleppo breaching the city’s divisions. At first, the two sides seemed crossable, but as the years passed, they yawned apart and finally parted, leaving us all clinging to the cliffs to which our class of birth had assigned us. I tried to attend the lectures each day, grew bored, studied anyway. I hung out with the guy from my neighborhood who bragged about all the housewives with whom he had allegedly dallied in the back of his shop. I read history. I tried my hand at novel-writing—a devastating failure. I wandered the city. Through the National Library gates—those heaven doors, adorned with five arched windows—lay every book I could have dreamed of. Chronicles of empire, from the days when Muslims spread across the earth and built cities grander than fantasies, rather than merely living in the shells left to us by colonizers or by generations who had died hundreds of years before.
Aleppo was a hard city, and it hardened newcomers like me. It challenged me at every moment—demanding cleverness and tenacity. It valued only cash (all Syrians mocked Halabis for their avarice) and was filled with scammers—each wanting to squeeze the last Syrian pound from his mark. I could never just relax into life; I needed to be sharp always. Aleppo had been besieged since before history existed and had emerged each time, arrogant and lovely again. Aleppo had survived the Crusaders. It had no patience for me. Religious school had been a prison, but this was something more frightening. It was a gorgeous world—expensive, cruel, corrupt, sure, but so seductive and so near, close enough to brush it with my fingertips. Aleppo promised freedom to aspirants who came there, but only at the price of its complete indifference to their fate.
English remained the thread that guided me through Karm al-Myassar’s concrete labyrinth—to a sunlight that sometimes looked like Aziziyah and sometimes like London, but always far from here. For class I read Great Expectations, Sons and Lovers, Pride and Prejudice, the endless Paradise Lost of Milton, the Greek myths and absurdist playwrights and Jane Austen’s sedate dramas about which society girl would marry whom. I barely understood the plots but fought through the pages anyway. I copied new words into notebooks, each marked by me with phonetic symbols; neat soldiers waiting for the day of their deployment—when I would unleash them, and they would conquer the whole of this tongue, and English would no longer pause frozen at my lips but spill out slick and accent-free. It was all a fantasy.
Our first tests came. I failed.
How did I fail? How had all this desire borne so little fruit?
You might imagine that the tests for the country’s top literature program would be essays, in which we carefully critiqued the ideas presented by the books we read, explored their use of metaphor, perhaps put them into historical context or traced the veins that connected, say, The Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses. I wish. At the University of Aleppo, tests took random paragraphs from one of the seven fat books we’d been assigned, blanked out a word, then had us choose the right word from five different synonyms to complete the sentences.
This was, of course, impossible. It didn’t matter how deeply one had read. No one could memorize five thousand pages and then, word for word, regurgitate them back. Like so many “tests” in Syria, it was one designed for us to fail.
I tried again. Not out of ethics, but out of love. English was my kingdom to conquer, not some bridge to which I’d buy a fake deed. I wanted the genuine article, not the knockoff. I studied harder. I reread and watched movies and drilled. I took another test, but the same sort of paragraphs, with those same blanks, stared back at me, and I knew, even before I handed back my exam paper, that I had failed. Worse than failing, I hadn’t gotten it. The gulf yawned between me and the sharp, savvy other students who knew how things were done.
FURKAN BOOKSTORE SAT JUST around the corner from the Faculty of Art and Humanities. It was a lovely place, filled with fine volumes that sat untouched. Books didn’t pay Furkan’s bills. Instead, they made rent off their “Golden Papers.” These guides were sold shamelessly, and they contained perhaps a hundred sentences, half of which were the exact ones that would later show up on our tests. No need to read those boring books. Just buy and memorize, then vomit it all up at the end of the semester. Learn nothing, but advance to the next level anyway. Very clever indeed. In Self-Criticism After the Defeat, Sadiq al-Azm blamed the humiliations of 1967 on this culture of cleverness, which encouraged incompetents to pretend that they knew something and even congratulated them for getting one over on…someone. Whole countries were constructed on pyramids of mendacity, until, one day, we looked up and the Egyptian Air Force had been leveled and the Israelis had taken Golan, and we had only our cleverness for consolation.
This small corruption was but one preparation for the corruption of our lives. Everything required influence, or bribes. If you wanted to build a home—bribes. If you had money, best bribe some people in the security services in case a son or cousin ended up in jail. If you wanted even the most insignificant document, you waited for hours in an office to be humiliated by a government employee and then you tried to take him out afterward, give him some money, just to get on with your life. I was once late obtaining my military service booklet—it looked like a passport and showed that, since I was in university, I could postpone my mandatory two years in the army. When I finally went to the office to settle the matter, the employee at the desk demanded fifty dollars for a bribe. At the time, this meant two weeks’ wages. After I paid him, I neglected to come back to him with a tray of sweets to thank him for doing me that great favor. Angry, he didn’t add my name to the good boys’ list, so that, forever afterward, whenever I went through a checkpoint, the policeman screamed at me for dodging my patriotic duty to the nation.
The next year, I bought the “Golden Papers.” I had to be clever. I wanted to graduate, after all. My grades skyrocketed to the 80s and 90s.
IN AL-HAMDANIYAH STADIUM, there was no class, and no cleverness either. We were hooligans. For al-Etihad maniacs, East and West vanished in our devotion to the city’s team. We packed shoulder to shoulder in the filthy old bleachers—an unbroken sea dressed in the team’s blood red. During a match against the Emirati team, al-Ayn, we threw garbage, rocks, fireworks. “Your sister’s cunt ya Hakam!” the crowd screamed at the referee as if with one mouth; we parroted each other’s abusive chants about Gulfi players. I hurled a bottle. I was too far away, it barely reached the field.
We were thousands of guys, all teenagers, cursing the same way against the same enemies and cheering the same heroes.
The first match I attended, I went alone, but after that, I was everyone’s friend. In the bleachers, I killed the last traces of fear inside me. I didn’t give a damn about anything. There was no religious school. No rich kids. No sewing workshops or “Golden Papers.” There was no oppression and no lack. There was no authority, no father, no teacher, no rule I could not break except to go against the people who were, for those moments at least, my friends. I jumped, I shouted, I cursed the striker’s mother, and all this in complete comfort. I was just like anyone else. The games felt crazy as a battle.
“Break the wall of silence,” I chanted, in a different crowd, in 2012, my last year in that beloved city. But it was not so different after all. Didn’t I recognize those faces from al-Hamdaniyah Stadium? We looked like the same young people, liberated from our plans, our jobs, our futures. Shining with sweat. Anointed with tear gas.
“Ya Bashar, God curse your soul!” we shouted. The city, for once, would hear.