A Woman in the Crossfire by Samar Yazbek Page A

never thought that murderers could just sprout up out of the streets like trees. Even Baniyas, that magical city, is now besieged by tanks and bullets, the city I know street by street, tree by tree, and house by house, the city whose beautiful imperfections I know by heart, Baniyas, where I can roll all the way down from the peak of the al-Marqab Castle to the edge of the sea without my body getting shaken up because of the soft slope that nature has made between the mountains and the sea, where I can hear the cicadas humming at the end of alleys that connect all the houses, and where I could sit for a hundred years and write novels without getting tired of the sight of that city’s beauty. Now Baniyas has been turned into a series of military checkpoints, which separate the neighbourhoods, Sunni from Alawite, where the army and the security forces arrest people and kill. Now the connecting arteries of Baniyas have been cut, just like the rest of the country, occupied by soldiers and security forces and murderers. I can no longer conjure up the shape of the Baniyas coast or its inhabitants or the sounds of the vegetable sellers. Now the only imagination I have left is bullets and killing and images of people being killed and beaten and arrested, the women who were killed. I can’t laugh or do anything at all. Syrian cities are besieged one after another – Dar‘a, Baniyas, Homs.
    Just before going out to meet a female journalist, I call her number, but her line is out of service. At the same moment a friend calls to tell me that she has been arrested by the security forces and that I need to be more careful. I stop for a moment in front of al-Hamra Street, thinking about how I had just seen her yesterday and how we had talked for a long time. She is getting ready to write an article about me. I feel all shrivelled up. A shouting Chinese woman snaps me out of it, as she spreads her wares out on the sidewalk. Al-Hamra Street is funny: the elegant shops open and their owners sit down outside them, while Chinese merchants display their cheap products along the edge of the sidewalk. Everyone is heading towards the Chinese goods. I laugh at the sight: a market inside a market, goods of all different kinds – clothes and shoes and wallets and accessories – and the funny Chinese women who chat with their customers in broken Arabic and move around vigorously. I walk back a little bit and look at my house right in front of me. That young journalist is now in jail. I tell myself it is a good thing she doesn’t know where I live. Her arrest must have had something to do with me. Every day somebody who I have been with or who I am going to meet gets arrested. Thinking about the journalist who had scheduled two different appointments with me, and how I didn’t show up for either one, I call him impulsively; the phone rings and he picks up, we talk for a little, and I feel a small happiness. The arrest campaign is ongoing, and there are more deaths and a slew of arrests in Homs today.
    The meaning of death and the meaning of fear change by the day. The fundamental meanings of our lives were changing with every passing moment. I need to focus and think about what I am going to do with no internet, unable to move around. It’s like they’re amputating our limbs while we’re still alive.
    On my way home, imaginary funerals swirl in my head, and I long to hear just one bit of good news amidst everything that is happening, just one bit, however small, that might make me less anxious, maybe even a bit of news that would give me the strength to go on living, to sleep like a normal human being, without Xanax. The only news I heard was of army tanks invading the town of Tafas near Dar‘a and the death of twelve civilians; the army’s assault on Homs on the Friday of Defiance in which nineteen people were martyred; and, finally, an eleven-year-old boy among those arrested today in Baniyas.
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