"As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow" by Zoulfa Katouh, Chapters 1–3

When the aisles prove to be truly empty, I trudge to the counter to pay for the lemons and bread with Baba’s savings. From whatever he was able to withdraw before that fateful day.

Outside the supermarket a desolate picture greets me. I don’t recoil, used to the horror, but it amplifies the anguish in my heart.

Cracked road, the asphalt reduced to rubble. Gray buildings hollowed and decaying as the elements try to finish what the military’s bombs started.

Misery reigns strong in the dead, heavy branches and rubble, thwarted only by the hope in people’s hearts.

Several men stand outside the supermarket, their faces gaunt and marked with malnourishment but their eyes sparkling with light.

And I know we’ll all succumb to a fate worse than death if the Free Syrian Army isn’t able to stop the military’s advances on Old Homs.

And today, the echo of the oscillating saw from the amputation Dr. Ziad made me stand in for is stuck in my mind on a loop.

For seventeen years, Homs raised me and cultivated my dreams: Graduate from university with a high GPA, secure a great position at the Zaytouna Hospital as their pharmacist, and finally be able to travel outside of Syria and see the world.

Having spent one year at pharmacy school, I was the equivalent of a seasoned doctor, and after their last pharmacist was buried under the rubble of his home, there was no other choice.

The rest of the way back home reminds me of the black-and-white pictures my history textbooks showed of Germany and London after World War II. Flattened homes spilling their interior wood and concrete like a perforated intestine.

“It could happen. Don’t be so pessimistic.”
I laugh at her affronted expression.

Our spirits are defiant, and our history is glorious.
And our martyrs' souls are formidable guardians.

Luckily it rained last week, so Layla and I put out buckets to collect the water. I use a small handful for ablution and pray.

Whatever control I exude during the day falters when the sun sets.

My terror has mutated in my mind, bestowed with a life and a voice that never fail to show up each night.

Even when the pain subsided, and my ribs healed, and my hands scarred, he didn’t leave.

That’s how it started with him: a snide remark here and there, nudging my thoughts toward leaving Syria, until one day he decided I should ask Am for a boat.

Sometimes I wonder how my brain could conjure someone like him.

So I take it you want to be crushed under this house. Alive and broken and bleeding. No one coming to save you because how could they? Muscles as atrophied by malnourishment as yours are can barely lift bodies, let alone concrete.

Then he crosses the threshold and stands in front of me.

He had just turned twenty-two, freshly graduated from medical school, and had applied for a residency at Zaytouna Hospital.

“I can’t go out there in good conscience without knowing for sure. I need to hear those words.”

The aftershock doesn’t blow me away. It razes the building to the ground, and I’m standing over Mama’s mutilated body.

“That will be Layla if you continue to be obstinate.”

The carnage in front of me has been seen in so many cities throughout the years. The same story but a different location. I’m sure the martyrs’ ghosts roam the abandoned homes and streets, their fingers running across the flags of the revolution painted on the walls.

The dirt underneath my old sneakers is marred with blood of the wounded carried in day after day.

Surgery equipment and medications are at an all-time low, and I can see the effect of it on the sunken faces lying on the beds all around me. Lately I’ve begun using saline and telling the patients it’s an anesthetic, hoping they believe it enough that it’ll work as a placebo.

Despite all our lacking resources, our hospital fares far better under the Free Syrian Army’s jurisdiction than ones in the regions controlled by the military.

We’ve heard stories of those captured by the military. The patients in the hospitals are dying not from the injuries they sustained during the protests but from what is inflicted on them inside the hospital.

His salt-and-pepper hair is disheveled, the wrinkles around his brown eyes more pronounced.

“Incoming. Reports of a bomb hitting Al-Ghouta. Twenty casualties. The seventeen injured are being brought here,” he says.

He knows that my fear of Layla’s becoming the next mangled body I bury will wither my resolve to stay.

The girl’s head has lolled to the side, and blood drips from her shirt onto the floor.

He’s adamant about my leaving Syria and would do anything to make that happen.

“I—uh...I was wondering about—” I stutter and chastise myself. I should have thought of what to say.

A whole lot can happen in ten minutes. A sudden respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, another patient vomiting blood and bile.

But still my stomach gnaws with apprehension at what horrors await me at his hands.

He wades his way through the sea of bodies until he reaches me by a half-broken window that’s covered with a flimsy sheet.

He nods, but his expression is impassive. It’s not out of the ordinary now to be a family of one.

Indecision is a poison germinating in my blood vessels.