When the bell rang, my sister joined the line for the third grade and I queued up with the new students. The school didn’t have its own building but was housed in several old, rented rooms. We were herded into a gloomy, dusty classroom where we piled onto the seats. A sour-faced teacher arrived and rearranged us according to height.
I was seated in the second row beside Abdullah, who was next to Mahmud. Abdullah was the youngest boy in his family; he was skinny and always dressed in hand-me-downs. With his slight frame and baggy clothing, he resembled the scarecrows we put in our fields to frighten away the birds. He was shy and quiet, not studious, but good-natured and easygoing.
One bitter January day, Abdullah arrived at school shivering. Though his teeth were chattering fiercely and his whole body shaking, we were too scared to tell the teacher. That day, all our efforts to light the wood heater in our classroom ended in failure—the wood was wet and the wind just drove the smoke back into the classroom. The teacher told us to stop trying and went off to the principal’s office.
While the teacher was gone, Abdullah succumbed to his misery. No longer forced to hide his illness, he curled up on his chair, trembling violently. Through his tattered shoes, I could see his feet; with nothing to protect them, they were blue from the cold. The class monitor ran to the principal’s office and told the teacher, “Abdullah is dying!” The teacher brought back a leave slip for Abdullah and took him to the principal’s office, where Abdullah’s father came to take him home.
The next day Abdullah wasn’t in school. Since we shared a desk, the teacher asked me where he was, but I responded only that he was absent. For reasons that were beyond me, the teacher was very worried about Abdullah. In a menacing tone, he said to me:
“Every day after school, you must go to Abdullah’s house and review all the lessons with him. If you don’t, I’ll thrash you.” So I agreed.
I told my mother, who reluctantly agreed, but not before issuing me a stream of orders, “Don’t go near Abdullah, don’t eat with him in case he has typhoid,” and so on. Schoolbag in hand, I headed for Abdullah’s house.
I walked down the long, winding lane through the biting cold. The sky was heavily overcast and the wind howled through the oak trees. I stopped in front of Abdullah’s mud house, which looked deserted, and cautiously poked my head through the open door. The daylight could not dispel the gloom inside the silent house. I stepped over the threshold and saw no one. I assumed Abdullah was sleeping in the annex outside, but then he hailed me from the other side of the house, his feeble voice ringing with joy:
“Here! I’m over here! Come here!”
I crossed the dirt floor and found Abdullah lying on a thin mattress next to a narrow window, his head peeping out from beneath a pile of blankets. I sat down beside him. The remains of a log fire smouldered in a pit in the middle of the living room where there should have been a stove. Abdullah was wheezing, his deeply flushed face illuminated by the light from the window.
Gazing out the window, he said: “I told my mother to put me here; it’s too dark in the annex.” Through the glass, I saw only clouds, dark and gloomy. “Too bad we won’t see the sun today,” I commented.
I relayed the teacher’s instructions to Abdullah, but since I had no clue how to explain the lessons, we sat in silence. After a while, I got up to go. Propping himself up on his elbows, Abdullah pleaded: “Please don’t leave. I’m really bored. I’ve been alone all morning—my mother and father went to my sister’s because she’s having a baby, and my brothers all went off and left me.”
I visited Abdullah every day for the three days he was off sick, and after that we were inseparable. I asked my mother to give me some socks and a wool jumper for him. She was reluctant; I was the eldest boy and my clothes still had plenty of life ahead of them. They would travel from brother to brother until they were completely worn out. But in the end she agreed.
Only a few months into our first year of high school, Abdullah told me he was leaving school to enlist in the Defence Companies, a paramilitary force commanded by Rif’at al-Assad, the President’s brother. We said farewell to each other that day. When summer arrived six months later, Abdullah returned home for his first leave. Dressed in military fatigues and as shy as ever, he came to visit us. After my mother had brought us tea, he placed a plastic bag on the table and said with a laugh: “Some good deeds should be repaid tenfold, and others only once.” Pulling a bunch of socks from the bag, he said: “These are the tenfold kind,” and added, after extracting a jumper: “And these are the one-fold kind.”
At the start of the new school year, we moved to Latakia, so I did not see Abdullah again. I sometimes sent greetings to him via one of his brothers, and occasionally someone would bring me his regards.
In 1984, the Defence Companies were disbanded after Rif’at al-Assad failed to overthrow his brother, President Hafez al-Assad. Because someone had put in a good word for Abdullah, he was transferred to the Directorate of Military Intelligence.
One day, as I was undergoing yet another round of torture from the secret police in the infamous Palestine Branch, I cried out: “Abdullah al-Daliyah!” Abdullah al-Daliyah is one of our Alawite ancestors, a saint whose name the men from my village invoke to this day when they’re in dire straits. The man torturing me suddenly stopped and yanked off my blindfold. With a wild-eyed stare, he demanded: “Who are you?”
I kept quiet, since in the opposition we were strictly forbidden ever to disclose our names. He shouted in agitation: “Say something! Are you Bassam?”
I nodded. Turning away, he marched around the interrogation room, then closed the door and continued pacing up and down without looking at me. Finally he wheeled around and asked, his eyes full of tears: “Don’t you know me?”
I shook my head. After ten years, he was unrecognizable. With a sigh, he bowed his head. “I’m Abdullah . . . ”
Abdullah could do nothing to help me, but upbraided me: “Why did you do what you did? Ever since I heard you’d been arrested, I was afraid this day would come.” “Ask yourself why you’re here,” I retorted.
Abdullah paced back and forth like a caged animal, then abruptly opened the door and left. Shortly afterwards, I was moved to a different room.
All Abdullah could do for me was this: after my interrogation period was over and I was transferred to the Palestine Branch prison, the warden summoned me to his office. He pointed to a pile of things and said: “Your family sent you these.”
I took the things back to the prison block, where we examined the newfound treasure: a blue blanket with black stripes, several cartons of Hamra cigarettes, a box of candy, and two changes of underwear. For some reason, it occurred to me that the package had come from Abdullah.
I saw Abdullah one final time. About six months after I was released from prison, I was crossing Hijaz Square in Damascus when I was accosted by a man with a large paunch, wearing civilian clothes. He embraced me and congratulated me on my release. Seeing my confusion, he exclaimed: “Don’t you know who I am?” and I recognized him. We embraced again and sat together for a long while in the Hijaz Café. When I asked him about the blue blanket, he laughed. “I’d like it repaid tenfold!”
Abdullah was now married, with four children. While I was still in Syria, he lost his eldest son in the southern city of Darʿa. I didn’t reach out to him; I preferred to avoid condolence ceremonies, which had proliferated after the Assad family, desperate to cling to power, plunged the Syrian army into a war against the people. Abdullah contacted me a few days after his son’s death to reproach me for not offering my condolences: “You always pay condolences to the opposition; why don’t you do the same for us?” “Because, to be blunt,” I told him, “I believe your side are the unjust aggressors, and we are the victims of your injustice.”
Abdullah fell quiet for a moment, then asked: “Are you glad when we die?”
“Of course not,” I said. “It hurts me deeply. I probably mourn more than the people who do come to offer you condolences. No Syrian wants this to be a country where we rejoice over each other’s deaths.”
After our encounter, I left Syria for Egypt, and finally arrived in Turkey in 2014. My phone rang one day, a number I didn’t recognize. The caller asked if I was Bassam. I replied in the affirmative and asked who was calling. Laughing, he said: “Someone to whom you owe a blue blanket.”
After we hastily exchanged our news, Abdullah said: “Can you do something for me?”
“You know that if I can, I will,” I told him.
“My youngest son is going to desert from the army. Can you help him?”
“The moment he’s outside Syria, I’m ready to help, but inside the country, there’s nothing I can do for him,” I replied.
Pausing, he asked: “What should we do?”
Such a difficult question, one I’ve heard all too often!
If his son were to desert, I asked him, could Abdullah guarantee his own safety and that of his family?
Lost for words, he said goodbye and hung up before I could say another word.
A few months later, I heard his youngest son had been killed in Aleppo.
