“Okay, Ahmed, it’s time to put away your book,” Ms. Hussain said.
It was something she prompted him to do almost every day at Al Salam School. He didn’t mean to disobey but always wanted a few minutes more to read before he was dismissed. Ms. Hussain had brought a small bag of books with her from Canada, and Ahmed had read the simple English picture books dozens of times each. The English alphabet was challenging, but he’d been studying the letters in his free moments and could now recognize some short words and understand simple stories as long as they had pictures. When immersed in a book he could be freeing genies from lamps, fighting pirates, or befriending jungle animals. Once he got home he was more likely to be fetching water, hanging laundry on the clothesline, or sweeping the floor of their tent.
“Just one more minute,” he said, without looking up from the page. “Teacher, can monkeys really be pets? Is there such a thing as a magic cave? If you had three wishes what would they be?”
“Now, Ahmed. Put the book away.” Ahmed could hear in her voice that Ms. Hussain meant business. She stood over him with her hands on her hips. “I want a lunch break before the afternoon students arrive.”
Ahmed closed the pages on Aladdin, which Ms. Hussien told him was the English name for Alaa Al-Deen, wishing he could take it home to read to Yasmine. (It was funny to read the English equivalent of her name in the book: Jasmine.) He also wanted to read to her about the market because how it was pictured in the book reminded him of the souk in Aleppo. “Thank you, teacher. See you tomorrow,” he said, re-shelving the book and standing to go.
Ms. Hussain smiled and laid her hand on his shoulder before giving him a playful shove out of the door.
It was already a hot, dry day, and Ahmed had ignored his thirst for the past half hour, but he was suddenly parched. The sun was beating down from a cloudless sky onto the refugee camp as he walked home. There were no trees among the lines of white tents to provide any shade, and he dragged his sandals through the dust lethargically. Ahmed thought back to the olive tree on his balcony in Aleppo, with its wispy green leaves, scratchy bark, and strong branches. It didn’t offer much shade but it did look alive and he missed it. Nothing much grew here. A family in a neighbouring tent was trying to keep an olive tree alive that they’d transplanted into a large plastic bucket, but the leaves were turning brown and dropping. Talk inside the camp was that it would never work and was a foolish waste of space and water, but Ahmed admired that family’s effort, and he prayed for that forlorn little tree.
When he arrived at his tent he went straight to the water jug to pour himself a glass of water. At air temperature it wasn’t refreshing, but he drank to the bottom anyway.
“I need you to beat the dust out of this carpet, Ahmed.” Amira did not say please, or ask about his morning at school. All she ever seemed to do anymore was order him around.
“Fine. In a minute,” he replied. He tried to walk past his mother but she was twice her normal size now, and he bumped into her belly.
“Careful, Ahmed!” she said.
He lifted the rug off the floor and dragged it outside. He heaved and slung it over their makeshift clothesline, which was no more than a fraying yellow rope tied between the front pole propping up their tent with another pole on an adjacent tent. He grabbed their straw broom and started whacking the rug. Plumes of dust rose off it and fell onto him. He spluttered and coughed. He wished it was magic like Aladdin’s carpet and could fly him out of this refugee camp to someplace spacious, lush, and cool. He swung the broom back to hit the rug even harder. He began counting his strikes in English. “Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten,” he said aloud, picking up speed and strength with each strike. Now he was shouting the words. He didn’t know how to count any higher than ten in English so switched to Arabic and continued counting up to twenty, then thirty. He stopped, panted, and rested, propped up on the broom handle.
“Here. Is this clean enough for you now?” he said to his mother, hauling the rug back inside and pushing it toward her.
“What has gotten into you, Ahmed?” she asked. She and Yasmine sat on one of their two sleeping mattresses, sharing a large piece of pita bread. No one had offered him anything to eat. His father was not home to remind him to respect his mother.
“Nothing. Leave me alone.” He flopped down face first on the opposite mattress. He craved his old bedroom where he could shut the door and be by himself. He was never alone in Reyhanli Camp. There were probably fifty people in shouting distance at this very moment. He heard people scuffling by outside, the rumbling of conversations, the distant motors of tractors clearing even more land for even more tents. It had been half a year now that they’d lived here. Months since he’d seen his grandparents, sat beside his olive tree, or read a book quietly in his bedroom. Abdo had already been here for more than a year. He’d had two birthdays at Reyhanli Camp.
Ahmed looked at the happiness picture he’d drawn months ago, which Yasmine had pinned to the tent wall. He remembered drawing each of his family members as best he could. His mother had a flat stomach then. Yasmine was holding the cat she always dreamed of having. They were returning to their home in Aleppo, and a peace flag was flapping in the air above them. “Mama, when are we going home?” Ahmed asked.
Amira grunted loudly as she got up from Yasmine’s mattress and repositioned herself next to Ahmed. She rubbed his sweaty back. “We can’t go home, Ahmed. There’s a war happening in Syria, you know that.”
“So next month? Next year? It has to end sometime, right?” Ahmed was being naïve and he knew it but wanted to see if his mother would be honest with him.
“Our country is destroyed, Ahmed. Your father thinks we are going to have to make a new home in a different country.” Ahmed heard the pain in his mother’s voice. It was probably just the baby pressing against her ribs again.
“Another new country? Which one?”
Amira paused before answering. “Your father thinks somewhere in Europe or North America. We don’t know yet who will have us.” She smiled at Ahmed but only with her mouth. Her eyes didn’t crinkle the way they did when she was truly happy.
Ahmed thought about never going back to Syria and shared his mother’s sadness. But he decided to trust that wherever his father chose, it would have to be better than here.