here that was unfamiliar to me; in Syria, silence held danger, it could be shattered at any moment by a shell bomb or the sound of gunfire or the heavy footsteps of the soldiers. Somewhere in the distance, towards Syria, the earth rumbled.
The wind blew down from the mountains, bringing the smell of snow. I had an image in my mind – the white glow of Jabal al-Shaykh, the first snow I had ever seen, many years ago, Syria to the left and Lebanon to the right, the borders defined by the ridge, and the sea far below. We had placed a melon in the river and it had cracked from the cold. My mother was biting into the iced green fruit. What were we doing there at the top of the world?
A man next to me said, ‘When you belong to someone and they are gone, who are you?’ The man looked haggard, dirty face, dishevelled hair. He had stains on his trousers and reeked of urine. There were sounds in the darkness, like the cries of animals, and I thought I could smell the rot of death. This man gave us a bottle of water and told me to sit on it for a while to warm it up before we drank it. The night came and went and the sun came up. There was food on the ground and a new blanket. Someone had brought hard bread and bananas and cheese. Afra ate and then fell asleep again with her head on my shoulder.
‘Where are you from?’ the man said.
‘Aleppo. And you?’
‘Northern Syria.’ But he didn’t say where.
He took the last cigarette out of a box and lit it. He smoked it slowly, looking out across the arid land. He might have been a strong man once, but there was no flesh on him now.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘I lost my daughter and my wife,’ he said, letting the stub of his cigarette drop to the ground. And that was all he said about it, in a flat toneless voice. But then he seemed to be thinking about something. ‘Some people …’ he said, finally, after a long pause, ‘some people have already been here a month. It would be best to bypass the authorities and find a smuggler. I have some money.’ He glanced at me, hopeful, to see what I would say.
‘Do you know how?’ I said.
‘I’ve spoken to a few people, and there is a bus that can take us to the next town, and from there we can find a smuggler. I’ve seen people go and not return. I didn’t want to try alone.’
When I agreed to go with him he told me his name was Elias.
For the rest of that day, Elias was on a mission; he spoke to a few people, making calls from my phone, which had just a tiny bit of battery left. By the afternoon he had arranged for the three of us to meet a smuggler in the nearby town and from there we would go to Istanbul. It was strange to think how easy it had been to set up, that there existed an organised system for those of us who were lucky enough to be able to afford it.
The next day we walked to the bus station and took the bus to the nearest town, and there we met the smuggler, a short asthmatic man with eyes that buzzed around like flies. He drove us to Istanbul in his car. When we arrived, Elias was never far behind me. The buildings in the city were tall and bright, old and new, gathered around the Bosporus, where the Sea of Marmara meets the Black Sea. I had forgotten that buildings could still stand, that there was a whole world out there that was not destroyed like Aleppo.
At night, we slept on the floor of the smuggler’s apartment. There were two rooms, one for the women and the other for the men. In my room, there was a picture on the wall of a family who had lived there before. The photograph was nearly white from the sun and I wondered who they were and where they had gone. The night was cold and a wind blew in from the seas. It whistled beneath the wooden door frames and windowsills and brought with it the howls of dogs and cars. It was so much warmer than the open land, and at least here there was a toilet