A Woman in the Crossfire by Samar Yazbek

is being surrounded, buried, all alone and drifting beneath the darkened sky, as if in a painting by Dal.; its wounded people slowly die while their mothers watch, mothers whose bloody trembling fingers are wrapped with perforated bed sheets. Before the martyrs’ eyelids are closed, the mothers moisten their throats with a few drops of water. People watch the young bodies strewn all around the square disintegrate from behind their windows. After the electricity has been cut off, stenches rise from the dead in the darkness. All people can do is stare at those bodies, which were once beloved and beating with warmth, as they turn to dust.
    Not far from my window, hailstones fall, and my heart turns into a hunk of scrap metal in the face of my impotence, as Dar‘a is slowly dying for all of us to see, while the whole world watches. Among those of us who comfortably tuck in our children before going to sleep, there is a thin imaginary line separating real pain from hypothetical pain, and no matter what we say about feeling the sorrow of those mothers, it is a lie. Pain appears in the wake of actual loss. Pain is not purely coincidental now.
    Not far from Damascus, just an hour by car, there is a calamity taking place that seems more like the stories we read about in the papers, one we cannot believe is actually happening here. Entire families are surrounded by tanks and soldiers and snipers. Women hide out in their homes, shaking and shuddering from the popping sounds of gunfire, the gunfire that never stops. Anyone who dares set foot outside is a potential martyr. Nobody is around to bury the bodies lying outside the al-Umari Mosque in Dar‘a. Even as voices start to rise up in the city calling upon the authorities to let the martyrs’ families bury their dead, the wounded remain holed up inside the houses for fear of being picked off outside or bleeding out in the open without any first aid. I manage to confirm that several pharmacies have been bombed and burned. Why are they setting the pharmacies on fire? So that people won’t be able to treat the wounded, of course. Some residents escape the city and flee the country by crossing the Lebanese or the Jordanian borders, leaving death and destruction behind. What does today have in store for the city? Will demonstrators go out this Friday, this Friday of Rage that has been called for by demonstrators in every Syrian city? Will a single one of them dare cross the threshold of his house, with tank turrets and snipers’ machine guns all around them?
    Last Friday Damascus was a ghost town. It wasn’t Damascus.
    Despite the calls spreading throughout the Syrian cities for people to come out and despite the death of so many young people, security forces were deployed in all the squares, the number of their personnel and platoons rose into the thousands. With the road to Jawbar closed, my female friend and I drove through Abbasiyeen Square, and there was a strange deadly calm. As we circled the square, the security was just starting to gather; it wasn’t yet time for the demonstration. My friend drove us through the streets of Damascus as we looked for signs of life. My eyes played tricks on me, and I cried to see the city empty except for the screams of death and those murderous eyes that were gathering, the eyes of young people who stepped off government-owned tour buses. They carried sticks and chains. I thought about how I had lived in Syria for 40 years but had never seen anything like those faces, their dusky complexions, petrified wooden bodies, hate-filled eyes.
    Was 40 years enough time to create such a frightening generation of murderers?
    During the afternoon, on our second time around, the situation in Abbasiyeen Square was different: the number of security forces had increased, even along the side streets, and as our car looped around the square, we saw military checkpoints blocking the Jawbar road. There were many different groups assembling