“Rest now,” Hanaa reassured Doaa, “the curfew is about to start. We’re safe here.”
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” Iman said. “Just yesterday I saw them take some girls to that park across the street. They’re torturing people there! Every night I can hear screams coming from that place.” Hearing this, Doaa’s imagination went wild. If they had taken her, she would have used her knife to kill herself. She would never stand for the indignity of whatever those men had planned for her.
For now, Doaa was safe, although her ordeal wasn’t over.
At nightfall, Hanaa and Doaa decided to head home. It was risky to be caught out after curfew, and—more urgently—they had to fill the prescription for antibiotics for Doaa’s eye or else it could get reinfected. They decided to take a chance and walk the back roads to their home. Iman packed a small bag of food and gave Hanaa and Doaa five hundred pounds each. Cautiously, Hanaa and Doaa slipped out into the dark.
On their way back, they saw a small pharmacy with its light still on. Doaa stumbled inside after her mother, catching the pharmacist by surprise. She was shocked to see them at this hour: “It’s dangerous to be on the streets now. What are you doing?”
“We need medicine. My daughter just had an operation,” Hanaa told her.
Seeing Doaa’s eye, the pharmacist quickly filled the prescription. Doaa was feeling dizzier by the minute. She wasn’t sure she could keep standing as she fought back tears of anger and frustration.
The pharmacist handed them the medicine, saying urgently, “Go quickly. They just killed a man outside. I heard the shots, then I heard them throw his body in the Dumpster.”
Terrified by this story, Hanaa pulled out some money to pay the pharmacist and prepared to leave immediately, but the pharmacist refused it. “Allah ma’aku [God be with you],” she said instead. “Walk with your heads down and don’t look to your side where the Dumpster is.”
But once outside, they couldn’t help but look. Blood dripped from the bottom slot of the Dumpster onto the street. Doaa was sick with the realization of what had just happened, but they continued on. A little farther up the road, they heard the sound of a car approaching, so she and Hanaa quickly turned to hide in the shadows of the nearest building. There they waited and watched as a group of men got out of the car, opened the trunk, carried another body to the Dumpster, and threw it in. “Shoot him again to make sure he is dead,” they overheard one of them say, then shots rang out through the air. The men piled back into the car and it disappeared up the road.
Doaa and her mother came out of the shadows to continue their journey home. “Mama,” Doaa cried out suddenly, feeling nauseated, “I can’t walk. I’m really going to faint.”
Hanaa held on to her daughter. “Hayati, you must. We’ll go slowly, I’ll support you.”
Summoning all of her strength, Doaa followed her mother. For the next hour, they crept along the walls trying to blend in with the buildings. When they eventually saw the lights of their house, Doaa thought she might faint with relief, while Hanaa said a prayer of thanks. They had never been more afraid than they were that day.
That night, while the children slept, Hanaa and Shokri decided it was time to leave Syria. It was na?ve to believe that their lives would return to normal anytime soon, and they knew how close they had come to losing Doaa that day. Shokri had already lost his livelihood and worried it was only a matter of time before he would lose his girls. Their neighborhood was emptying day by day. All the men of fighting age had disappeared, having either joined the Free Syrian Army, been arrested, or been killed.
In the morning, Shokri picked up the phone and called the only person he knew who had the financial means and connections to help them—his son-in-law Islam, in Abu Dhabi. When he answered, Shokri told him, “We’re leaving. Help us get to Egypt.”
FOUR
Life as a Refugee
Doaa knelt on the backseat of the car. Through tears she stared out the rear window as her country faded away behind her. Saja, Nawara, and Hamudi were crammed in next to her, making it difficult for her to take a full breath. Her parents shared the front seat with Khaled, her father’s friend who was driving them out of the country, staring steadily ahead. Out the window she could hear the muffled sounds of sporadic shooting, and her despair deepened as she realized that this would not be just a short family trip. Her sobs grew heavier as the reality that this departure might last forever began to sink in.
She did not want to leave. She’d promised herself that she would never abandon the revolution and had begged her father to let her stay behind. “Leaving Syria would be like taking my soul away from me,” she told him, her voice trembling.