After dialling the number for my parents’ house, I listened to the ring. A woman’s voice answered.
‘Hello?’
I said nothing. I had not spoken to my family for two years. I wasn’t sure I recognised the voice.
‘Hello?’ the voice asked again. It was my mother.
I didn’t know where to begin.
‘Is that you, Sora?’ she asked. ‘Sora?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I could hear my mother breathing heavily. She started crying. It was a minute before she spoke again.
‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘Are you OK? Are you wounded?’
‘I was wounded a few times but not badly,’ I said. ‘I am alive. I am not bad.’
‘I knew you were wounded!’ she shouted. ‘I had a dream.’
‘Tell me about your dream,’ I said.
‘I was holding you as a baby in this room,’ she said. ‘There was a noise. I went out into the corridor and there were two demons there. They were walking past. I thought to myself: “I don’t want my baby to see these distorted, wicked faces. And I don’t want them to find my baby.” So I stood there, blocking the doorway.
‘The first demon looked at me right in the eyes and passed on. As the second one was passing, he looked over my shoulder into the room and saw my baby. I tried to stop him but he pushed past me. He went for you. I went for you. We were both holding you, the devil trying to take you away and me trying to save you. Then the other demon came and stabbed me in the back with a knife. I screamed and woke up, shaking and panicked. I knew something had happened to you.’
It was unnerving to hear my mother’s dream, so fantastical and strange. But she was also a mother talking to her son about the nightmares he was giving her, and in a way the dream made some sense. Something about two devils in a corridor, the way the second one turned and attacked, reminded me of the two jihadis outside the cultural centre, the boy and the man, running down the street. ‘Don’t worry, mother,’ I told her, ‘I’m all right. I met your devils. One of them wounded me. I killed one and wounded the other. I got away. I’m doing fine. I am walking.’
To prove it, I took a picture of myself and sent it to her.
Herdem had a new truck that he had taken from a group of jihadis he had killed. He dropped me the next morning at the yellow-and-grey Syrian government building we had commandeered for our defence ministry.
The minister was Xhalo, an old man from Kobani, who was kind, respectful, meticulously organised and neatly dressed. My clothes were filthy from months of fighting and my trousers still had holes in their legs where I had been caught by small shards of shrapnel. But Xhalo pretended not to notice and even allowed me to take a mattress and a blanket up to the roof at night so that I could stay there, out in the open.
Aside from the few times when I had collapsed from exhaustion, I hadn’t slept for more than a few minutes at a time for months. Now, when I tried to sleep indoors, I found it impossible. My mind had been in the war for too long. Walls blocked my view of the battlefield. Floors were unsafe. But roofs were good for seeing what might be coming. And so for months, like a bird, I returned each night to my nest on top of the ministry.
I had lost so much weight, my teeth were destroyed by lack of brushing and too much coffee, I had developed a near-permanent sniper’s squint, and I couldn’t eat more than a morsel. But that didn’t account for the ache in my stomach. My belly seemed to be able to hear the suffering and pain of the war. When people spoke, I heard them with my ears but with my guts, too. The biggest injury was to my heart. It was howling, day and night. I tried to be kind to it. I told my mind to respect my heart, to listen to it, because I had locked it away for so long and now that I had released it, it needed to scream and shout.
In a strange way, I found myself missing the front. My comrades. The narrow focus. The lack of choice. Now that I was no longer there, I felt the absence of war, the lack of a force pushing me through its narrow channels of exigency. I had the freedom to do what I wanted – the freedom, after all, for which I had fought. But I was unused to it. I was like a pilot sitting on the runway with the chance to fly anywhere but finding he had lost all feel for the controls. I had been at peace in war, I realised. Now I was at war in peace.
As I hesitated, I felt the weight of my experience begin to crush me. This war was not something we had planned. It had been imposed on us. It was a reality far bigger than our own. And now that I was able to look back at it, I was starting to sense the size of it and how its immensity might overwhelm everything that I was. Nor had I left the fighting entirely behind. Part of me, I knew, wanted to hold on to it. I wanted to feel that kinship with my comrades. I wanted my injuries to last to keep me sharp. And in Kobani, of course, I was still in the middle of a battlefield of which I knew every brick and every hole. All my instincts told me that the dark and quiet were merely a lull in the fighting. At any moment, a word or a gesture or a sound could transport me back to the front and I would be stuck there for hours at a time. I tried to convince myself that it was over. Then I tried not to try. But my body knew better. I was still at war. It raged inside me.
When I could, I took walks around Kobani. Looking around the streets, viewing all the destruction, I felt the old fury. Why would anyone choose to destroy my land as their way to heaven? How could anyone imagine vandalism as a path to paradise? They had wrecked our city. They had killed over a thousand of us, wounded another two thousand and sent hundreds of thousands more fleeing as refugees. I was angry that even one of these imbeciles might have died with the illusion that my bullets were sending them to a glorious afterlife. I didn’t want them to think I was giving them anything but the pain they inflicted on us.
If I wasn’t sleeping, which was often, I would walk at night. I had discovered so many new things in this war, things which I would not have absorbed in two hundred years of living, and like a curious child I found myself returning to the places of my learning. The war had been a cruel explosion of understanding: what friendship means, what comrades are, what an enemy is, what it means to say ‘our land’ and ‘our people’ and ‘life and death’. I went back to the cultural centre. I went to the girls’ school. I went to the Black School. I went to Forty-Eighth Street and Mistenur Hill. I walked the rooftops and lay down in my old bases. I spoke to bricks, to houses, to streets, to broken doors and empty chairs. Sometimes I would see a person in the far distance and my finger would reach for a trigger and I would stay there for a while, remembering how I had lain in that place for three or four days, just watching and waiting for my shot.
But the city was mostly empty. My comrades were no longer there, nor ISIS, and I could walk freely in the streets. I developed the habit of lying down in the open and looking up at the night sky, trying to accustom myself to the calm and peace. And over the weeks and months of my wanderings, as I watched families start to return to their homes, I began to see that death had lost interest in Kobani and that maybe there was the possibility of something new. This was how it was when a place came back to life. This was how it felt to have the opportunity to live again. This is what it was to be reborn. One thing of which I was certain was that, from now on, I would live with deeper meaning. My understanding of life, people and family had changed. Fear, death, freedom and love would remain my closest confidants. And that knowledge, I was beginning to realise, could light my new path forward.
Many times I found myself returning to the city graveyard. The long lines of bodies buried next to each other seemed to insist on regular visits. I would read the names: who they were, how they had died, places and dates. There were so many I hadn’t met. Young ones, old ones, men, women, children, all filling the earth. I would stay for hours, lying down between the graves, conversing with my comrades.
I had heard about survivor’s guilt. I wasn’t sure I had it, not exactly. Why I’d lived and why others had died – and what that said about me, that I could walk out of a war, that I was good at war – remained a mystery to me. My idea was that war was not really living. It was surviving by instinct, a sharpness that was more animal than human. Now that I was becoming human again, I could talk to my comrades as people too. I would tell them that I was still willing to die a hundred times for honour and respect, liberation and history, to live a life free from backwardness and blind ideology. But I was also preparing myself for a different existence. It wasn’t easy. I could feel that the souls of my comrades were at peace. I knew I was not.
I was out among the graves one day when I received a call telling me that Herdem had been shot. He had been leading an advance on a village where ISIS were still holding out. At one point, a breach opened up in their defences and Herdem jumped into it. He survived, as ever. But hours later, after that battle was won, Herdem walked into a house that he imagined to be empty and was confronted by two terrified ISIS fighters. They had hidden away during the fighting. I imagine it wouldn’t have occurred to Herdem that anyone could be so cowardly. He took a single bullet in his upper right arm which passed through his lungs and heart before exiting through his other side.
Herdem’s body was taken to a makeshift hospital in the city. I radioed Nasrin, who was on the southern front, and she came back immediately so that we could go together to see him. When we arrived, we found our fellow sniper Haroon already there. He had been close to Herdem. As they moved his body into the back of the truck, Haroon taped Herdem’s black Dragunov to the bonnet.
By now a number of comrades had arrived and we set off in a procession from the hospital to the graveyard. Some of us fired guns in the air. After twenty minutes we arrived and I helped carry Herdem’s body to a spare patch of ground at the end of a line of graves. We dug a trench for him in the yellow soil, then lowered him in. Once he was inside the grave, I helped the grave-diggers stack breezeblocks over his body to make a stone coffin.
It was my job to cover Herdem’s head. As I was placing some bricks over the last few gaps, watching his face disappear, our last conversation came back to me. ‘How can I send you to the front and rest back at headquarters?’ Herdem had asked. Herdem had always done what he said, right up until his death. He met that commitment with his life. And it was Herdem who taught us that a bullet doesn’t know addresses or colours or ages, or care whether you are a poor man or a president. He had accepted the fate that he knew awaited him. But as I heard his voice one more time, I broke down, splitting open right inside his grave. I cried and cried. They had to pull me out.
I sat there with Nasrin next to the hole as they filled it with earth and then, one by one, started to drift away. Eventually, the two of us stood up and walked back together into the city which, more than anyone, Herdem had helped to liberate.