EPILOGUE
“WHY DID YOU COME BACK to Raqqa, uncle?” I finally asked.
He was surprised by my audaciously direct question. I suspected he actually liked it, despite the pain it would incite. You might think it was silly of me to consider this some kind of deal, but anyone who had endured a period of self-questioning similar to what I had undergone would not deny me the question. I believe that I provided him an occasion to answer such openness coming from me when I told him that I was leaving the country for good the next day.
Two days earlier, while I was trimming his trees, he had approached me and inquired why I would not settle in Raqqa. Why I kept crossing back and forth. For a proper answer, I looked at what was behind him. There sat the car of Abu Fatima. Abu Fatima had been the neighborhood annoyance ever since he had transformed the old recovery center into a mosque, and now he was my uncle’s neighbor. Abu Fatima kept an eye on his neighbors, investigating their absence at his mosque during prayer times. “Uncle, do you think this is a life?” I had shot back, putting down the tree clippers. He gave me a faraway look, then said, “If we leave the land to them and possibly to those who might come after them, then can we claim to have a right to it later? As long as they are here, and as long as we consider this our country, we have no option but to abide by their rule.” And there was where we left off.
He was now toying with his wine-red rosary—a habit and reflex in his case, rather than an act of devotion. As someone who had known him for years, I should say that digging deep into his mind was an offense against his nature. He had always been eager to fortify his thoughts from intruders, and I doubted, even this time, that he would let me in. But a last visit was vital because an argument I could parry was necessary equipment for my journey, since, at least in my view, he had left the country when there was hope and returned when that hope vanished.
Since Turkey had long ago closed its border, under the assumption that its prior porousness had allowed European jihadists to join ISIS and then return to their worried countries, crossing became harder than ever. So I had to make a final decision. What finally pushed me to leave was not just the daily threat, nor war’s cruelty; it was the instinctive evil that had started to prevail in people’s eyes. People in Raqqa had begun to prey on each other, and their anger at the world frightened even me too much. Not that I blamed them. Rather, I was afraid of becoming one of them. Raqqa’s time zone had reared hundreds of years backward, and I was striving not to lose all sight of the future.
He told me that they, the guarantors of his protection in the European country that gave him refuge, who gave him shelter and opportunity far away from the tapestry-and-rug-decorated walls of his terrace house where we sat sipping tea, weren’t his people after all, and it, the solid ground that had been paved so thoughtfully for walkers, wasn’t as solid for him as the dusty lanes of his own country. He said that the construction workers who arranged the cobblestones he walked on didn’t sweat, strive, and hunger for the sake of his feet. He felt that it was only because the cobblestones were mute that they didn’t protest his foreign presence and tell him frankly what he had to hear. He tried his best to not say the dread keyword in this whole conversation: racism. A word, I see clearly now, that is often too painful for its victims to utter.
He told me that we bore a historical responsibility to commit ourselves to this land of Raqqa, and my head bowed.
“We are smart people and no less than other people in advanced countries,” he said. “But we are destined to live in a time when our countries are in decline and even a burden on the world.”
“And we can’t do anything about it?”
“We can’t. Maybe the next generations.”
The struggle over whether to stay or leave touched every Syrian I knew, regardless of their circumstances. What was worth fighting for, after all? Were we fighting just by remaining there, in our homes, in our country? What was our duty, and what was merely voluntary commitment? Are homeland and roots nothing more than rusty words? Or perhaps there is some sort of gravitational attachment to the soil we covered ourselves with when we were toddlers, to the grass that grew from it and that we ate? Are we responsible to the future generations, or only to our own consciences?
Raqqa was his home, and it—even in such conditions—will always be. “Half a homeland is better than none,” he said upon his arrival back in Syria, and it should have been enough for me the moment I heard it.
By the time he concluded, I knew I had opened, somewhere delicate inside him, an old wound. I bade him farewell and glanced at the closed café when I was interrupted by a freezing gust of wind, unthinkably more tender than Abu Fatima’s indoctrination speech, which also blasted me, from the mosque speakers. “If a woman’s feet are uncovered during praying, her prayer is invalid,” he taught. It was settled. Abu Fatima’s words mercilessly smacked down the doubts that my uncle had raised.
An air of detachment set me free.
IT WOULD TAKE ME a few weeks outside that cycle of conflicts to realize that I am destined to be centerless, one lone flaming planet outside of a livable orbit. Opportunistically, I should like to present my definition of destiny: It is what I could have avoided but I dared not. It is what I wanted to embrace even when I saw in it my death. It is the seductive angels of fire and the celebrating djinns. It is what I must break ties with and commit apostasy.
Nael was dead and achingly unforgotten. Tareq had been drawing his straight path with the help of his pair of compasses, until, six years after our Ramadan protest and four after his recruitment, he curved back toward the initial chants, only when it was far too late.
In Kadirli, a town in the southern Anatolian plains, Tareq lay on his deathbed, his face swollen, breathing through respiratory devices. The same friendly bullets of 2014 now penetrated his chest, sent him and Ahrar al-Sham into oblivion. After an ideological circumnavigation, Tareq had been shot in defense of the three-starred flag by Jabhat al-Nusra fighters, his old Islamist allies. My uncle was probably planning what to do should his old blackmailer Abu Issa return to Raqqa amid the town’s next cycle of liberators. And I, in Istanbul, was counting the wine bottles crackling in Ayhan Işık alley at 4 A.M.