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

businessman. ‘Slightly ill-brought up, but not bad boys. They are provincial, it’s not their fault.’
    Maryam’s family, which included mainly elderly aunts and an uncle, made us an elaborate lunch of many courses. It was indulgent and embarrassed me because I knew that they were struggling to get food. ‘Just be quiet and eat,’ Maryam whispered, passing a plate. ‘You’ll insult them if you refuse, so say nothing.’
    There was a sort of thick lentil soup, rice, roasted chicken, there were piles of bread, there was even tinned fruit. Everyone ate quietly as we heard shelling coming from a nearby government base. Maryam had asked me emphatically not to talk politics with her family. ‘They have lived for so long under the Assad regime that they are frightened of talking to outsiders,’ she said. ‘So don’t ask, don’t put them in danger.’ So we talked about classical music, the opera and the British Museum. One of her cousins had been imprisoned for years in Hama during the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s; then he went to live in Aleppo. Maryam had briefed me beforehand not to talk about it. ‘He still has nightmares from those years in prison,’ she said. ‘We choose not to talk about it. And since people now suspect radical jihadis are entering the country, he has to be very careful.’
    One of the older aunts, Rosa’s sister, a lady with a soft gentle face, got up from the table and changed into anightdress. She said she was lying down to take a nap. Rosa picked up her coffee cup and said she would join her, in an adjoining bedroom. The two elegant, elderly ladies then left the room, before quickly running back to the table a few moments later when a particularly heavy bomb landed somewhere nearby.
    â€˜This is the background music of our lives,’ the uncle said ‘since we are talking about Bach at lunchtime.’ The relatives did not want their neighbours to see foreigners staying with them, so as the day ended Maryam and I left Rosa, crossed town and stayed in a darkened hotel where the secret police called me to their table and questioned me at length about why I was there. I pulled out my note of permission from Damascus, but they still held me for an hour, while Maryam – who was partially deaf and so spoke louder than most people, her shrill voice rising to a high pitch when she was angry – argued with them to let me go. Eventually, they did. We slept that night to the accompaniment of heavy shelling.
    The next morning, we left Rosa, who had not slept well and was irritated with the aunts over some small family matter, and headed towards Latakia, in the Alawite heartland. We wanted to see the mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, who had been president from 1971 until his death in 2000. We passed checkpoint after checkpoint until we got closer to Qardaha, the burial site. There were stone lions everywhere; Assad means
lion
in Arabic and is the name Bashar’s grandfather had adopted as a family name.
    Maryam was suddenly very conscious of her white hijab. ‘We are in the land of Alawites now,’ she said when we stopped at a café overlooking one of the austere mountainssurrounding Latakia. She picked up her can of Pepsi. ‘I feel uncomfortable.’
    â€˜But you’re Syrian. Your family has a home nearby.’
    â€˜I don’t feel Syrian here,’ she said. ‘This is Alawite country.’ I had never heard Maryam mention sectarian divides before, and she gave me an abridged history of the Alawites.‘They feel different. They
are
different.’
    The Alawites are a minority religious branch of Shia Muslims that represent about 12 per cent of the Syrian population. The core of Alawite belief differs from mainstream Islam; for this alternative belief, the Sunni rulers of the area had historically persecuted Alawites. But, during the