The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom. Christina Lamb
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the exams.
Each morning, I sat on the doorstep to watch them go, swinging their schoolbags and chatting with friends. The step was my favourite place to sit, playing with mud and watching people coming and going. Most of all I was waiting for someone in particular – the salep-man. If you haven’t tried it, salep is a kind of smoothie from milk thickened with powdered roots of mountain orchids and flavoured with rosewater or cinnamon, ladled into a cup from a small aluminium cart, and it is delicious. I always knew when the salep-man was coming as the boom-box on his cart broadcast verses from the Koran, not music like other street vendors.
It was lonely when they had all gone, just Yaba smoking and clacking his worry beads if he didn’t go to his sheep. To the right-hand side of the house, between us and our neighbours who were my uncle and cousins, was a tall cypress tree which was dark and scary. And on our roof were always stray cats and street dogs which made me shiver because if they came after me I couldn’t run away. I don’t like dogs, cats or anything that moves fast. There was a family of white cats with orange patches which spat and swore at anyone who came near and I hated them.
The only time I liked our roof was on hot summer nights when we slept up there, the darkness thick around us like a glove and a fresh breeze cooled by the emptiness of the desert. I loved lying on my back and staring up at the stars, so many and so far stretching into the beyond like a glittering walkway. That’s when I first dreamt about being an astronaut, because in space you can float so your legs don’t matter.
The funny thing is you can’t cry in space. Because of zero gravity, if you cry the way you do on earth the tears won’t fall but will gather in your eyes and form a liquid ball and spread into the rest of your face like a strange growth, so be careful.
2
Aleppo, Syria, 2003–2008
People have always looked at me differently. My sisters are so pretty, particularly Nasrine with her long glossy mahogany hair and fair skin that freckles a little in sunshine. But me – well, I look more Arab, my front teeth are big and goofy, my eyes roll around and go cross-eyed and my glasses are always falling off my nose. And that’s not all.
Maybe because Ayee was a bit old when she had me, forty-four, I was born too soon – forty days which is the amount of time Christians say their prophet Jesus fasted in the wilderness before his crucifixion. My brain didn’t get enough oxygen and something happened that means the balance part doesn’t work and it doesn’t send proper signals to my legs, so they have a life of their own. They kick up when I am speaking, my ankles turn inwards, my toes point downwards, my heels point up and I can’t walk. It’s like I am forever stuck on tiptoes. Also my palms and fingers go convex instead of concave if I don’t concentrate. Basically my extremities are like those Chinese fortune fishes that curl up and then are impossible to straighten.
When I didn’t walk like other children, my parents took me to a doctor who said there was a missing connection in my brain that would form by the time I was five and then I would be able to walk, as long as they gave me plenty of protein and calcium. My mum made me eat lots of eggs and have vitamin injections, but my legs still didn’t work. We went to lots of doctors. My brother Shiar called from Germany and gave them the name of a specialist to take me to in Aleppo. He laid me in a machine that was like a plastic coffin for an MRI scan. Afterwards he said I had something called balance deficiency which is a kind of cerebral palsy. I didn’t understand these long words but I could see it was scary for Ayee and Yaba. The doctor said I would need surgery and physical therapy.
Also as Manbij was a dusty neglected place, and maybe because of the gangs of cats and dogs, I got asthma so badly that I often wheezed until I was blue in the face. So when I was four we moved to Aleppo where I could get medical help and where my sister Nahda and brother Bland could go to university. Nahda was so smart she came top of all the students in Manbij and was the first girl in our family to go to university. She was studying law and I thought maybe she would be a famous lawyer.
Aleppo is a very historic place – some say it is the oldest inhabited city in the world – and the biggest city in Syria. You could get everything there. We lived in a Kurdish neighbourhood in the north-west called Sheikh Maqsoud, which was high up and looked over the whole city with its pale stone buildings that shone almond-pink in the late-afternoon sun. In the middle was the walled fortress on a mound which had watched over Aleppo for perhaps a thousand years.
Our new home was a fifth-floor apartment at 19 George al-Aswad Street, named after a Christian who used to own the land – around 10 per cent of our population was Christian and the Christian cemetery was just near by. I liked it better than Manbij because there were no cats and dogs scratching and howling on the roof or scary dark tree from which I had to hide under the blanket, and it was bigger with four rooms, a bathroom and two balconies from which you could watch the world go by. My mum was happier having lots of Kurds around. And best of all, one of the rooms was a living room where we watched TV.
My brothers Shiar and Farhad were both living abroad and Mustafa stayed in Manbij running a company digging water wells, which was good business because we lived in times of drought. At the beginning all my sisters were with us in Aleppo, but Jamila, Nahda and Nahra got married one after another (I cried each time!). After Jamila’s wedding when people came to our house in Aleppo to congratulate the bride and groom, I sat on the sofa glaring at our cousin Mohammed who she was marrying. Jamila might have had a temper that came and went like a gust of wind, particularly if anyone tried to interfere with her housekeeping, but she had looked after all of us.
After that it was just me, Bland and Nasrine. Bland slept in the TV room along with me, Ayee and Mustafa when he was not away travelling. Nasrine had a tiny room of her own.
Our block had six floors, but the one above ours was condemned so we were the highest. All the other people in the building were Kurdish but came from different towns. The neighbours on our floor had children – four girls, Parwen, Nermin, Hemrin and Tallin, and one boy, Kawa, who was the youngest. I loved them, but whenever we played games I always felt like the weakest link and often they ran away from me, laughing as I tried to drag myself after them in my odd way like a rabbit. I looked like a rabbit with my teeth and I crawl-jumped like a rabbit. Another family two floors down had a pet tortoise which they would bring upstairs. I loved to have it on my lap and would sit and watch when they ran away. I was neither comfortable nor welcomed in the kids’ world.
My substitute for all that fun deficiency was TV. I watched everything, starting with cartoons and Disney DVDs. My family loved football, so we all watched that together. Then when I was eight and we got a satellite dish, I watched documentaries about history and science. And much later when we got a computer I discovered Google and began collecting every bit of information I could get. Thank you, Sergey Brin, I would like to meet you one day.
To start with I went to a physical-therapy centre called the Fraternity. It looked like a traditional Syrian house with a big courtyard with swings and a fountain. There was no lift so I had to use the guardrail to pull myself up the stairs. The therapists there smiled but then made me do complicated things like balance training using rubber balls. They also strapped me into a device with bands fixed round my waist and down to my legs to try and get me to stand straight. It looked like something that might have been in one of Assad’s torture chambers.
I was supposed to go to the Fraternity to exercise twice a week, but I kept having asthma attacks and ended up in hospital so many times that the doctors there got to know me. The attacks always seemed to be in the middle of the night and sometimes the air became so squeezed from my wheezing lungs that Ayee thought I was going to die. Gentle Jamila always comforted me. After she left home to marry, Bland and Nasrine came with me instead. Anything seemed to set me off. Worst of all was smoking – just about all men in Syria smoke and some women. No one was supposed to smoke in our apartment, but I could smell it even from the ground floor. I always seemed to have attacks at holiday times – I spent four Eid festivals in hospital.
In my country there