The Girl From Aleppo: Nujeen’s Escape From War to Freedom. Christina Lamb

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СКАЧАТЬ like snakeskin with little beady black eyes. That first day she barely moved and I was terrified I had damaged her as I was notorious in my family for breaking everything I touched. For the first few days I would check her every two minutes to make sure she was still alive. We kept her on the balcony, fed her salad leaves and called her Sriaa, which is Arabic for fast because she was very slow. Even slower than me.

      The only person who didn’t like the tortoise was Yaba. He complained she was haram or unIslamic. I laughed, but then summer came and we slept outside on the balcony and one night we were all awoken by loud cursing. The tortoise had climbed on to my father and he was furious.

      The next day I couldn’t see Sriaa anywhere. I looked all over the balcony, becoming more and more suspicious. Finally, I went to Yaba. ‘Where is she?’ I demanded. ‘I’ve taken her to be sold,’ he said. ‘It’s for the best, Nujeen, it’s cruel to keep animals confined.’

      ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘The tortoise was mine and was happy here. How do you know what will happen to her now?’ I bawled my eyes out.

      I couldn’t complain of course as he had got rid of her for religious reasons. And afterwards I was secretly relieved. I had been so worried about Sriaa dying. If you hold a tortoise by its tail it will die. I wouldn’t have been able to cope with that.

      With the other children from the building off at school, and no more tortoise to watch, there was nothing to do but watch TV. The satellite dish meant my room suddenly opened into a whole new world. National Geographic, the History Channel, Arts & Entertainment … I liked history programmes and wildlife programmes – my favourite animal is the lion, king of the jungle – and scariest is the piranha which can eat a human in ninety seconds.

      Mostly I watched documentaries. Everything I know about aliens or space or astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin is from documentaries. I was very cross with Gagarin because he said that when he became the first man to cross the Karman line into outer space in 1961 he didn’t see any signs of God. That is very hard for us Muslims. But later I saw another programme which said he didn’t actually say that. We are always being deceived.

      The TV was on all the time, its blue aquarium light flickering night and day until sometimes Ayee or Mustafa shouted at me to turn it off so they could sleep. As I didn’t go to school, sometimes I watched till 3 a.m. then got up at 8.30 a.m. to start again. My favourite day was Tuesday when they broadcast an Arabic version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? I loved quiz shows. There was also one every evening at six called Al Darb which means The Track where people competed as teams. I could usually answer all the questions.

      It wasn’t a big TV – 20 inches – and it had a big crack on one side because once I grabbed the TV table to try and stand up and the TV fell on me. I cried, not because I was hurt, but because I thought the TV would never work again. Every so often Bland got cross with me. ‘Nujeen, you’ve convinced yourself that you love home and TV and that it’s better than going out, but no one really wants to be indoors all the time,’ he said. I ignored him. But sometimes I did wonder what other disabled people did. Then I went back to the TV.

      Ayee, Nasrine and I liked watching tennis. The US Open, the French Open, the Australian Open and best of all Wimbledon with the umpires so smartly uniformed in green and purple and the grass courts so perfect like carpets. Soon I knew all the rules. Ayee liked Andy Murray, while I liked Roger Federer and Nasrine liked Nadal, just as in football I liked Barcelona and Nasrine liked Real Madrid.

      The one time everyone watched together was during the World Cup in 2010. My family loves football! As usual everyone in the area hung flags for their favourite team. I hung an Argentina flag from the balcony for Lionel Messi. Our neighbour had an Italian flag. But I was distracted and kept crying for my second mother Jamila. The doctors had said I would get better as I was older but my feet, which were supposed to have straightened, seemed more curled up than ever. Eventually my brother Farhad in England found out about a famous orthopaedic surgeon in Aleppo. He was so sought after that it took months to get an appointment, so we went early one morning to his surgery to get a ticket and found villagers who had been waiting all night. We were number 51. Every patient got five minutes and we finally saw him in the late afternoon.

      When he saw my feet he was cross and told my parents they shouldn’t have let them deteriorate, that I should have been doing exercises. He said I would need to have three operations together as soon as possible and sent us to the hospital for blood tests, then he would operate the following day. He did a new operation on my ankles and two others to lengthen my knee ligaments, which had become too short from lack of exercise. It cost my family $4,000, paid for by my second eldest brother Mustafa from his water wells, and this time the whole of my legs were in plaster, from hip to ankle, only my toes poking out, and I had to lie flat.

      I was supposed to stay in hospital but insisted on coming out after one night to watch the football. I was desperate for Argentina to win, otherwise Spain. However, the pain was so bad I screamed all the way back in the taxi and again at home, until I drove Mustafa and Bland out of the room because they couldn’t bear it.

      Finally, the pain stopped but I was in plaster for forty days, which felt like a very long time. Then Mustafa paid for a special brace to put my legs in to strengthen the muscles. They looked like robot legs, and oh they were agony! I had to wear them ten hours a day and I complained so much. But after a week I got used to them and they meant that for the first time I could stand with the help of a walker. I could see parts of the apartment I never normally went into like the kitchen and I could see the citadel from the balcony without any help. Ayee says it was like I was newborn.

      About that time I started watching an American soap opera. It was called Days of Our Lives, about two rival families called the Hortons and the Bradys living in a fictional town in Illinois and a mafia family called the DiMeras and their love-triangles and feuds. They all had beautiful big houses with lots of clothes and appliances and each child had their own bedroom. One of the men was a doctor in an immaculate shiny hospital, not at all like Al Salam where I had been. Their lives were so different to ours. To start with I didn’t understand what was going on and sometimes the story was odd, with characters coming back from the dead, but after a while I caught up. I watched it with Ayee and it drove Nasrine mad. ‘What on earth do you see in this?’ she asked.

      We had our own family soap opera. My parents were desperate about Mustafa not getting married. As second son, he should have got married after Shiar in 1999, but first he said he should wait for Jamila, then once she was married he said he needed to devote himself to work as he was our main provider. But now he was thirty-five which in our culture is very old to be unmarried. We have arranged marriages – not love-matches, which from what I could see from Days of Our Lives was not a very good system. My mother kept going to meet suitable brides from our tribe, but Mustafa always refused to take it further and just laughed. It didn’t matter whether he was there in the apartment or not – it seemed like all anyone talked about. I hated it. Whenever they raised the subject, I shouted, ‘Not again!’ and covered my ears.

      4

       Days of Rage

      Aleppo, 2011

      It was 25 January 2011, just after my twelfth birthday, and I was watching Days of Our Lives, worrying that I might be a psychopath because my favourite characters always seemed to be the bad guys, when Bland rushed in from work and grabbed the remote. I looked at him in astonishment. Everyone knew I was in charge of the TV.

      Bland is usually so calm and laid back that I always feel there is a part of him nobody knows, but this time he seemed to be spinning like СКАЧАТЬ