It is 6:45 in the morning, and the temperature has plummeted to minus 21 degrees. I find myself waiting for bus number 121 at Grimard Station, only my eyes peeking out from the bundle of clothes. At this moment, I half-expect any tears I shed to freeze on the way down. The uncontrollable urge to cry has been a part of me ever since the days when I hurried as a frightened child from my home, next to the Political Branch (a prison I watched being built during my childhood), to my primary school, Amal al-Orouba (“The Hope of Arabism”). This habit of sudden tears has always embarrassed me, something I’ve tried to conceal. Yet, somehow, in this cold, new country, the weight of it seems a little lighter.
The bus is four minutes late. We stand in silence, our eyes the only part of us visible in the cold. My elderly neighbor crosses the street toward me. Just yesterday I dreamt of him coming to my aid while I floundered in the snow on the road to my family’s house in Qatana. In the dream, the road seemed longer than I remembered, likely due to the piled-up snow. I sank several times, my feet freezing as frost crept through every pore of my shoes and pushed me to the brink of tears. Then, just as I was about to give in to despair, his hand reached out to me – dressed, exactly as he is now, for the miserable cold of minus 21 degrees. We exchanged no words; he merely guided me to my parents’ house and vanished. At my childhood home, no one awaited me. The familiar family photos adorned the living room wall as always, but with one jarring difference: I was missing from them. These were the same photos that I had known all of my life, yet now I was conspicuously absent.
As time went on without finding a single picture of myself, I grew more and more frightened. I started to feel like I was losing control over my body, on the verge of breaking down into hysterical tears, just as I used to when I was a child. It was then that a familiar terror reared its head – the realization that I had no place. Desperate to find even a single photo of me – proof of my existence – to stave off a breakdown, I frantically searched everywhere. Rifling through drawers, dashing from room to room, throwing belongings left and right like a burglar, I still came out empty-handed. Exhausted and defeated, I leaned against the kitchen refrigerator, only to notice a photo of my brothers and parents. Once again, I wasn’t in it. In fact, the photo was taken before I was even born.
The search was futile and I felt like I could collapse. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Mama, mama?!” only to hear the same call from my daughter: “Mama, mama.” Her voice pulled me from my dream, and I rushed to her side. As she hovered between sleep and wakefulness, she whispered in French, “Mama, I’m afraid.” I was unable to speak and could not assure her there was nothing to fear. Instead, I gently ran my hand through her hair several times, soothing her back to sleep. Both of us were sodden and exhausted.
It is very cold here, but there is always hot water. We shower in the morning and go about our lives clean and without shame.
In my daughter’s dreams, ghosts cross the wall. My daughter knows that ghosts don’t really exist, but she sees them crossing the wall. The wall can’t protect her, and neither can I. I don’t know if the ghosts are spirits who were unlucky enough to arrive here, where there is hot water every morning for bathing.
*****
Long ago, somewhere other than this place where I’m waiting for bus 121 at minus 21 degrees, my mother had a beautiful garden. The Kalanchoe flowers saved my childhood. Pruning the dried flowers from these colorful plants was the most beautiful time we spent together. My mother made sure to have all their colors – yellow, orange, pink, red and white – all gathered in a large pot. I tended to the flowers with a seriousness and elegance that I did not at the time understand. I was allowed to remove dried flowers so that new, fresh flowers could emerge. We spent time silently tending to the flowers. My mother had a messy house, but a strictly arranged flower garden.
Since arriving in this new country, I’ve found myself dreaming of the place I never loved – my country, my home, and the city where I grew up. The smell of jasmine reminds me of the school route, and school is a place for rubbing ears and spreading fear. Two hot red ears, rubbed raw by Hana, my fourth-grade teacher, whose image and smell flash upon my memory. Hot ears and freezing feet: this is the only memory I have left of school. I loved my city once, in 2011, when I thought I finally had a place, friends, and a strong voice. It was the first time I heard my own voice. We, who had once had no country, street, or school, thought now that we finally did.
I am still trying to belong to the new country in which I live with my two children, who were of course faster than me to adapt. Within months, French became their language of communication and they shut me out of their conversations, and with time, from their lives.
During my eight-hour shifts at the cashier, I find myself reflecting on my life and my achievements. I analyze them, evaluate them, and try to come to terms with this job, which was meant to be temporary but has now been my daily routine for two years. I often reach into my pocket and touch my small notebook, where I jot down sentences and dreams – perhaps I draw some resilience just from feeling its pages.
My reverie is interrupted by an octogenarian woman who lays her purchases before me for pricing. She says I have a beautiful smile, and I thank her with a broad grin. Perhaps she means to draw me out of my silence and the apparent depression betrayed by the dark circles under my eyes and my hands, always trembling from what feels like an unending, imaginary chill. This type of compliment tends to be exchanged at this time of day, when the queues are short, and everyone else is at work, leaving only the retirees who pick small amounts of vegetables and fruits. As I scan their items, I feel as though I’m preparing a lunch box for my children: a green apple from the United States; three clementines from Spain; one cucumber, which seems gigantic to me, from Quebec. The people here are kind, and their loads are light.
Standing at the cashier reminds me of the long periods during my childhood when I was punished by having to stand next to the trash can in class, facing the wall for forty-five minutes – the length of the class. Eventually, that position became very familiar to me. I didn’t like school or the teachers, and the feeling was mutual.
*****
In my new country, after completing four levels of French through “Francisation” – a program in Quebec designed to teach newcomers the language – I was accepted into a college that teaches cinema, or rather, the principles of cinema, in a two-year program. “I will study what I love”, I whispered to myself. During the first month of classes, I cried more than I had in the past thirty years, comforted by the shoulders of professors whose only fault was asking, “Tu vas bien?” That one question was enough to unlock all the pent-up emotions of the victim I still found myself to be. My face would assume the look of a guilty child, one who insists she’s done nothing wrong yet knows she won’t be believed, and so she cries out of sheer helplessness at the pain. I told them I was here by some mistake and that they needed to check it out. But they were too kind to expel me, so I decided to leave after the first semester ended.
My nightmares intensified during this period of studying what I loved. It was during this time that I realized these nightmares were not just my own but shared, collective experiences. This realization came after a friend living in Germany confided that she too dreamt about Hana, Madame Khoury, and the director, and of hand slaps, ruler slaps, and ear-pulling, and that these dreams had come up while she was learning German. A friend in London experienced similar dreams. We were girls haunted by the same nightmares. We named our WhatsApp group “Nightmares of Amal al-Orouba School.” We use the group to share our nightmares, and sometimes we even hold a contest for the most vivid nightmare. More often than not, I win.
In my dream yesterday, I attended a film workshop. Our teacher asked us to bring a physical object that held significant meaning for us, so one friend brought a bag of chips, another a watermelon, and another a set of plastic Pokémon toys. The choices were simple and humorous, and since I lack this sense of humor, I brought the key to our house in Damascus. The professor then instructed us to “plant” the items we’d brought. At the end of the day, as we were preparing to go home, the girl who planted the watermelon, driven by hunger from our long day, decided to unearth and eat the watermelon she had “grown”. Despite my attempts to persuade her otherwise, she persisted, and as she dug it out, I watched the small roots of the watermelon being severed. When I shared this dream during a therapy session, my analyst interpreted the watermelon as representing me and my roots formed during the five years I spent in Lebanon. Analysis can sometimes strip away the magic of things; it can be blunt. But she then recalled another dream I had shared a year prior, where I dreamed that my mother-in-law pointed out my children’s hair had no roots. She had demonstrated this by holding my daughter’s head, urging me to see for myself – and indeed, I saw my daughter’s hair as rootless.
*****
The women of my village sit on wicker chairs in a long line that stretches out of sight, beginning beside the Political Branch building that our house overlooks. As a child, I watched as they dug for days and months to construct that building, a hole that deepened each morning as I passed by on my way to school. The underground floors were destined to become a prison, and much later on people would say, “Even God does not know where those prisoners are.” Whispering, I ask my aunt why the women are gathering, and she tells me we are at a wedding. I ask her where the toilet is, and she directs her gaze towards an open toilet, a plastic bucket used by the women in plain view.
I flee from this scene to my grandmother’s house. My daughter doesn’t scream in the night to wake me from my dream, so I drift into another, less severe one. I am sitting on the edge of the wide window in my grandmother’s house, which overlooks the neighbors’ plot, and I watch my mother cunningly steal two figs and a walnut. She cracks the walnut for me, peels off the skin, and serves it to me with the two figs on a plate decorated with Romeo and Juliet. Her hands are dry and calloused. Hand cream is no longer available in Syria. We don’t talk; I eat slowly and with difficulty.
The next day, I looked for figs in several stores. Figs here resemble jewelry, with each one placed in a protective cube and wrapped in a box like a luxury chocolate. This fruit is rare in this northern land.
In another part of my dream, my son asks me every evening to bring his father to play with him and his sister. So, in the dream, I go and bring him from his grave to spend time with them, returning him in the morning. Every morning, the children go to school, the mother goes to work, and the father returns to his grave.
Cemeteries here are beautiful; they look like forests with graves nestled among the trees. I often visit them to take photographs for my documentary film, a project I started in 2011 and have yet to finish. I gather materials, accumulating them over time; they are all valuable and will find their place in the narrative. Just as my mother used to do, hoarding things she didn’t need in the corners of the house, in the garden, between us and her. The war in Syria is not over yet, and the regime has not fallen. I made a vow to those I’ve photographed to create a film from these materials once the regime falls – a promise I still intend to keep.
I recorded the following conversation between my two children while I was photographing Saint Laurent’s tomb:
My daughter: Why does my mother take pictures of cemeteries so much?
My son: I don’t know, maybe because she loves roses.
My daughter: You’re a year older than me, so you will die a year before me. What color of roses would you like?
My son: Orange.
My daughter: How can we choose which grave we want?
My son: Do you want to bury me here?
My daughter: Eh?
My son: Why do you choose which grave you like?
They usually don’t ask me questions, and sometimes they talk about me in front of me as if I don’t exist.
Bus No. 121 has arrived, and it has started snowing again. The bus moves slowly, obstructed by large trucks in front that shovel snow and load it onto other trucks for transport to stop the roads getting overwhelmed. The snow here doesn’t stop. I’ll be late getting to my destination: I deliver wrapped grape leaves (yalanji) to a Syrian restaurant once a week. I’ve become good at rolling grape leaves because I was always good at rolling marijuana cigarettes, which are legal here. Holding the pot, I wonder how proud my mother would be of my quick and perfect wrapping of the grape leaves, only to remember the sound of her bracelets and her tired, exhausted face – a look I didn’t understand then, but do now.
