Even Our Smiles Are Taken Away

“Mama, is Bashar [al-Assad] gone yet?”

“No, my dear.”

“So that means we’re not going home?”

My husband, my three children and I found somewhere to live, a space no bigger than nine square metres. We spent the first three months of our exile waiting and dreaming of returning. Little did we know that this was only the first of many displacements.

I used to try and help my children’s dreams grow, and to strengthen their resolve to fulfil them. My ability to do so was now limited by those nine metres.

My young daughter played with her building blocks, making a house.

“Mama, I’m building a house with a lot of rooms. With a kitchen, so you don’t have to get tired cooking and doing the washing up on the floor. Mama, Mama, we’ll even have a bathroom.”

As for my 12-year-old son, he spent a week gathering stones to build a house in which he and his friends could play. But it was not to be – a tiny despot seized it and took it over. This despot was our landlord’s son. We did not even have the power to defend our children’s most basic right to play.

My son felt sad, defeated and wronged. He had learned how his rights could be easily usurped.

This incident led to us being kicked out of the “palatial” nine square metres they had deigned to allow us to occupy. Our third exile began as we looked for another place to live.

When we searched for accommodation, the people in that city treated us like foreigners and demanded ridiculously high rents. This was despite the fact that the properties for rent were not permanent homes but small places lacking even the most basic utilities – spaces not fit for farm animals.

Others treated us like creatures used to living among wild beasts in the wilderness.

Their attitude was, “Don’t rent your homes out to refugees. They’ll destroy them.”

Eventually, we found a place where we could live for free, a room 12 metres square, with no extras.

Every day there was something new to torment us. We heard that a friend had been killed. Another had been arrested. There was terrible pressure, especially from our landlords – looks, comments, and the way they poked their noses into everything, large and small, directly and indirectly.

The worst thing was the way they looked at us, as if we were unable to make our own decisions, down to the food we ate and the clothes we wore.

The pressure increased until it became unbearable. It was as if our patient, calm and uncomplaining attitude had brought disaster upon us.

Our landlords could hear everything we said, so we had to lower our voices during every conversation, and restrain every movement so as not to bother them.

And yet what they understood from our silence was that we were conspiring against them and saying terrible things behind their backs, so they began harassing us. They started with my smallest daughter and moved on to my husband. And there was no solution but more silence.

I remember one day when I climbed up to the roof and found an old car mirror. I had become desperate to look in a mirror. I was so happy that I held it as if I had found a treasure. Finally, I could brush my hair, finally I could see myself in a mirror again.

How I’d missed my home, my mirror, my hairbrush. I gazed into the car mirror and fell into a long daydream. But my joy was short-lived. The mirror was confiscated because it was not part of the rental agreement, which only covered specific furnishings.

We had become used to the things we held dear being taken from us, even our smiles.

The cruelty of every moment of every day meant that I waited impatiently for evening just to sleep and stop thinking. Twelve hours of sleep a night is enough to kill all dreams. But then, my children’s questions in the evening made things even more difficult.

My son started thinking about leaving school so as to be able to help his father at work and bring more money home, so that we would be able to leave and stop living at the mercy of others.

My daughter went back to her nightly questions, “Mama, will we go back home tomorrow?

“No, my dear, not yet.”

“Then when, Mama?”