The Morning They Came for Us by Janine di Giovanni Page A

what I think,’ she had told me. ‘I am outspoken.’ She had initially taken a strong stand behind Assad and against the rebels. Now she was not so sure. She wanted to meet me to see if I wouldtake her to Homs so that she could see the destruction for herself.
    Renda quickly ushered me inside her small, modern apartment and locked the door behind her. ‘I don’t want to let the neighbours see you here,’ she said. ‘I’ve been getting all kinds of threatening emails for the past few days. And someone keeps calling me and hanging up when I answer.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s the Mukhabarat. What are they going to do? They want to frighten me.’
    We sat and drank green tea and she told me that she had only felt in the past two weeks that her world was spinning out of control, that a real war had come to Syria, that perhaps she had judged the opposition wrongly. She had begun to question what was happening in Homs, in Aleppo. Even Darayya, which she did not really believe . . . but …
    â€˜Only now? You only realize it now?’
    Renda nodded. She clutched her hands in her lap. ‘It’s not my fault – who wants to see their country turning to war? You avoid it if you can, you avoid thinking about it. You don’t want to believe it.’ But now, she said, 2,000 people had fled the capital alone. Refugees were flooding the Turkish, Jordanian and Lebanese borders. The winter was going to be harsh. ‘If Syrians go to Lebanon as refugees, the Lebanese will not welcome them entirely,’ she added. ‘Look at the situation of the Palestinians there.’
    She had no way of knowing, but in two years’ time, more than four million Syrians would be refugees, crossing the borders and fleeing to neighbouring Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt. The luckier ones – or maybe not so lucky, as the migrant crisis in the late summer of 2015 demonstrated – gotto Europe in boats, with the help of smugglers, or on foot. There would also be nine million displaced people inside Syria by 2015. By the end of the summer of 2013, Renda would also close up her small apartment and leave for Beirut, going by road with a few suitcases, planning to stay for a few weeks; but she would stay for months, then eventually – without being aware of time passing – she imagined she would be there for years.
    One morning, Maryam and I had permission to go to visit her relatives in Homs, which was divided into government-held and rebel-held areas. Maryam’s family were Sunnis, but they were on the government side, at least geographically, if not philosophically. We took her mother, Rosa, along with us, and put her in the front seat. I put on my white headscarf, which matched Maryam’s and Rosa’s, and my big dark glasses. Rosa assured me I looked Syrian. At every checkpoint, Syrian government soldiers did not even bother to look in the back seat and see me, a foreigner.
    â€˜Go ahead, grandma,’ they said to Rosa, and let us pass. She chastised a few of them (‘what would your mother say about your bad manners?’), and when we were held at one particular checkpoint for several hours, inside Homs, she began to lecture them about their ‘rudeness to adults’.
    â€˜Do you really think I want to be here,
Teta
?’ he asked her incredulously. ‘Do you think I want to be a soldier?’ They showed us around the house they had confiscated from a Sunni family and were now living in. A few bedrooms with dirty sheets, where soldiers with muddy boots were lounging, sitting with a teakettle. There was no phone line to their headquarters, and they did not want to let us go. They sattalking to Rosa for hours, about their families, their holidays, their children, their schooling.
    Eventually, they let us go. ‘They’re not bad boys,’ said Rosa, who had been the wife of a successful and wealthy Damascus