The Clothesline Swing. Ahmad Danny Ramadan
a hakawati.”
You took a second. You looked me in the eye, and you smiled, and you said, “Tell me a story, then.”
That smile, that beautiful, deep, unbearably sweet smile that breaks through layers upon layers of protective iron around your soul, that smile is what made me ask you to come with me to Mount Qasioun, what made me kiss you, what made me fall in love with you while we navigated a city engulfed by war.
For the rest of our time in Damascus, you stayed over in my apartment twice a week, fabricating stories to your mother about your whereabouts. You slipped into my pajama pants and they fitted you perfectly. We played cards with my roommate, and stayed up too late. When you reached your limit on social interactions, you always had that look in your eyes, which I picked up on easily. I pulled your arm, and walked with you to my bedroom. My roommate giggled, making assumptions about our desire for privacy. Instead we cuddled most of the night, and fell asleep mid-conversation.
Our morning coffees on my balcony were frequently interrupted by the shouts and screams of army officers and the police, running after another person to arrest. They would pull on the prisoner’s shirt and drag him to the ground while the women in his family wailed in agony from their windows, tightening their white scarves upon their heads. The prisoner would be pushed into the trunk of the car under the eyes of gazers, among them you and me, before they locked the trunk on him and drove away. The first time we saw that scene, our hearts bounced and we hid in my bedroom for two hours. After a couple of arrests, we got used to the screaming and the wailing and we would just return to our morning coffee and turn the radio back on.
I lost count of how many times we woke up at three a.m. to the sound of distant explosions coming from the other side of the city. The calm in the streets carried the sounds of war swiftly to our ears and woke us up, frightened and lonely. You whined one night, half asleep, pulled out of your land of dreams, worrying that the explosions were too close to us. I brushed your hair with my fingers, calming you down. “It’s fireworks, it’s just the sound of fireworks,” I whispered, and you went back to sleep.
One night, the explosion was too close; it shook the apartment and woke us both up. We heard the explosion and thought it might have happened right outside our street. It was followed by the sound of machine guns rushing through the streets.
We crawled on all fours as we escaped the exposed bedroom to the windowless bathroom. I lay down in the bathroom tub and you rested your body upon mine. Your eyes were open wide, like small white dishes. You shivered and started to bite your lips. “My back hurts,” you said, pointing to the small burn on your upper back ribs. “I got you,” I whispered, and hugged you closer until the sound of machine guns morphed into an unrecognizable noise.
That night in the tub, I made love to you as if I were reciting poetry about the beauty of Damascus. I woke your senses with opening lines and flirtatious gestures, sneaking into your world like the first drops of sun rays on the mountains of Damascus. I coloured your face with the shades of sunrise as I pulled on your earlobes with my teeth. I roamed the corners of your body like a lost traveller exploring the old sleepy streets of the city, knocking on the doors of your soul with the tips of my fingers like a shy delivery boy knocking on the wooden doors of old homes in Sarouja carrying warm bread and baladi cheese. I turned your body around and tickled your feet, and you laughed like a child riding the dowikha in al-Jallaa amusement park. I murmured whimpers of pleasure in your ears, like the sighs of an old wooden bridge aching under the pressure of the souls it carries. I joined my body with yours and we moved as if we were slipping up and down the hills of the waving roads of al-Muhajireen. I printed breathless kisses on your forehead while I let your body slip away from mine, covered in my bite marks and glorious sweat.
That night, you made love to me as if you were an invading army in a sudden war. You exposed my body with steady hands and planted your head between my ribs. You covered my mouth with your palm, fearing the thin walls and eavesdropping neighbours. I surrendered to your hands like a frightened teenager taken away into an abyss of pain. Through struggles, fights and tight teeth on my skin, you could finally give a glorious bloody birth to your soul for me to see and touch. You moaned then restricted your own moans, like a resilient prisoner who doesn’t want to see the look of victory in the eyes of his capturers and torturers. As you entered my body I felt speechless, as if all of my body had given up on living. I tightened my arms around you as if I were drowning, clutching your body. You finally left my side with apologizing eyes and deep regrets that you’ll never share. I caught my breath as I returned from a journey into your inner thoughts.
By the time we opened the bathroom door and returned to bed, the sound of machine gun fire was long gone.
Those moments were the only times we could be ourselves completely, naked in each other’s arms, almost unaware of the world around us. Outside of my bedroom, we had to calculate every step and every gesture, fearing the war, fearing our own families, fearing everything other than the two of us.
“Hakawati, don’t go,” you told me as I got dressed a couple of mornings later. You were topless in my bed and we could hear the voices of our friends as they were waking up. What was it? Was it a birthday party we had thrown the night before, and everyone stayed too late, so it became too dangerous to go back to their homes across Damascus? I can’t remember. We ended up spending the night playing cards and drinking cheap vodka. “We are eight people in my house, and I don’t have any food for breakfast,” I said as I searched for a clean t-shirt. “I’ll be back in ten minutes, I’m just running down to the shop across the street.”
“I’ll go with you,” you told me, and I smiled. You reached out with your hand and I reached with mine. Our fingers touched for one second. From afar, we heard the sound of a small explosion, but we didn’t care. It’s Damascus. You grabbed my hand and pulled me back to bed, I laughed, I called your name in denial, then I gave in, you unzipped my pants, I reached down yours. Our fingers were crossing paths along our backs. Your lips were locked with mine and our bodies collapsed into bed.
“It’s getting hot here,” I told you, and you reached for the window. At first I thought you had dragged the windowpane too fast and broken it. In the corner of my eye, I saw the flames expanding across the street, like a rose of fire suddenly bursting to life. The thunder-like sound resonated in my ear, and pieces of glass and wood rained on me. I grabbed your body and we rolled to the floor, the glass piercing our backs. I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself screaming.
Then, like the calm following a storm, the explosion stopped and it was suddenly calm again.
“Are you okay?” I asked you, your eyes wide open.
“Yes. You?”
I stared at your face for a second and then I stood up. Dazzled, I walked to the broken window. I looked out for a second, turned around to you and said, “It’s a car bomb, right across the street. Right outside the shop.”
But all of this is a distant memory now. These memories are my only solace as I lie here on this bed, on the second floor of our heritage home in a calm, quiet corner of Vancouver’s West End, an old man of nearly eighty, trying to forget the days of terror back in Syria without losing the memories of love we built together.
I have spent endless nights, sleepless, counting your breaths as you cling to the last bits of life left inside you. Your beautiful chest, covered in white hair, rhythmically moves up and down like the waves upon the shore of Beirut, where you saved my life once. Your chest hair was black then, a masterpiece of masculinity on your muscles. You looked at me from afar, and you smiled. I allowed my eyes to wander about your body, remembering your curves and the touch of your skin, before I smiled back.
I was the weak one for thirty-seven years; I’m the one who always gets sick, crawling in bed and cursing the mere touch of anyone. I’m the one who cries when he hits his toe on the leg of that damned table. I’m the one with broken bones and a dislocated shoulder. Yet you outrun me to death? I feel cheated, betrayed even. It’s not like I didn’t do my best! I promised you on that beach that I would quit smoking and slow down on the whisky. Look at me now, an old, grumpy man wandering around with a glass in hand and a cigarette