The Bicycle Thief of Damascus
John-Paul Walti - United States

In the fall of 2007, twenty-four Sunnis fit into a single habitation of an unfinished apartment complex near the Al-Sayedah Zaynab shrine in Damascus. Any more and it became unbearable. Needless to say, this upset the landlord to no end. Each month roughly 30,000 people crossed the border into Syria and through the fabled gates of Damascus. What did he expect?

Doctor Aram Kalas Kadri delivered eight babies in the building that year. During this time, it was difficult to find a working toilet, let alone a proper place for a woman to give birth. The hospital where Aram Kalas Kadri had served seventeen years of his life was hundreds of miles away now, and that was to say nothing of the artillery shells that reduced the 47-year old building to a chalky pile of barbed concrete. Of course, this mound of debris consisted of much more, but even a brief description of its remains – the Doctor’s diploma from the University of Iraq in Basra, the ocular textbook with underlined passages of blindness, or the Iraq national soccer team’s mug filled with maliciously sharpened number 2 pencils – are of no use to us now. His last memory of the hospital still stood tall in his mind though, and he considered himself fortunate for that.

Doctor Aram Kalas Kadri charged these mothers for his services, of course. All except for the one that died; he did not charge her for that. He had tried to limit his medical assistance to the apartment building itself, but this became a futile endeavor. There were too many things wrong with people. There were Syrian hospitals and Red Cross tents at three locations throughout the city, but they were often overcrowded, with lines sometimes stretching for blocks. This also said nothing of the fact that to be an Iraqi in Syria was significantly more expensive than to be Syrian. The price of water, a taxi ride, bay leaves or even a bit of tobacco was raised the moment a distinctive accent was heard. But if a baby needed to come into the world, well, at least they were charged a fair price.

The ceilings of the rooms in the apartment building were high, and gave the illusion of openness, but reality from one vantage point is often very different from another. To escape the heat and sour breath of bodies, many of the men without families congregated on the rooftop at night, where they could smoke in quiet among other men and look out upon the city of Damascus from a distance. The steady line of cars and buses below carried the smell of exhaust. Exhaustion. The sky held no stars, but the stars became very close to them there. The men looked cautiously towards the dark clouds in silence, as if they might suddenly materialize into something menacing, a dust storm perhaps, or a wound in the sky of biblical proportions, but at times the men were also moved to speak.

“They say the Americans have dropped poems over the southern end of the city,” one man said.

“Is that true?”

“Poems?” the landlord asked.

Each man that spoke did not change the tone of his voice or the expression on his face. Nor did they look into each other’s eyes, which in their exhaustion gave the impression that their voices somehow belonged to each other; that their words were an extension of their own thoughts.

“What good is an American poem — what can they teach us that’s worth anything at this moment? Today I watched an opened artery empty into a soup bowl, what good are poems?” But the moment the Doctor said this he felt embarrassed at the pretentiousness of his statement — he knew he was not the only man to know suffering or to have witnessed such things.

In the silence that followed, each man returned to similar memories, which were set sharply into the folded corners of their brains like cirsium thistles. Aram Kalas Kadri watched a helicopter move north towards the Orontes Valley, and although there was no way for him to know that it carried a frozen heart in a bed of ice within a cooler, he recalled a time after the birth of his daughter when he gave great consideration to the life of his heart. He calculated how many times it had knocked his blood through his arteries and how much longer it could go on. He discovered picoseconds and yoctoseconds, and then and only then did he want to live in that time, with seconds stretched out like years ahead of him. He wanted his daughter to feel such considerations in her life. He wanted to hold his own heart in his hands then; he had wanted to instill an understanding of his gratitude at its defiant persistence. But he no longer paid attention to these sentimental thoughts. Of course he did not know that the helicopter carried a frozen heart, but he looked upon it with the intuition of a doctor. Somehow the voices of these men could still raise themselves out of even the stillest cells of their hearts, and after some time another man spoke up and momentarily released each man from the mire of his grief.

“They found a woman’s body, a Sunni from Umm Qasr, floating near the Tremiti Islands in the Adriatic Sea. They say she floated seventeen days without sinking,” one man said.

“It is not possible,” the Doctor said. “Our bodies are made of water, they cannot float more than a few seconds without air.” Aram Kalas Kadri was annoyed with his mood. His pessimism was a stone in his belly that he could not pass. But it was a fact, and a man must live on facts if he is to survive. “There are no real poems and there are no miracles,” he added, because some men’s grief is limitless.

The men’s eyes closed and opened, as their words came and went. It was past midnight, and a southern wind cooled them slightly. Aram Kalas Kadri stood and walked over to the edge of the building and stared at the dim light of a closed bookstore.

“Hey, that boy,” he said, pointing down to the street below.

But no one moved from his place to peer over the edge. No one even looked his way.

The sight of a boy stealing a bike five stories below disturbed him more than anything he could have imagined. He could hear the boy slamming the lock with a hammer; slowly, steadily, he came down upon it with great force.

“That bike does not belong to you,” the Doctor said. “Hey, stop. Stop that I say.” The sound of his voice startled a flock of birds resting on a laundry line and they rose into the sky in their collective fear. The men looked at him intently now.

“Quiet yourself, Doctor,” one man said.

“You’ll wake the whole neighborhood,” another man added.

In Damascus, the children run the streets at night. This was nothing new — of course a mother would want her child to feel his own freedom after such an exodus. Of course a child would demand it. But the sight of a boy stealing another child’s bike unnerved him. He left the rooftop without hesitation. He ran down the stairwell, over the feet of sleeping men, through the smell of sour bodies. He moved with such intensity that he did not hear the men curse him or the sound of his footsteps echoing through the stairwell. The fear that he would lose sight of the boy made him anxious. By the time he reached the sidewalk, sweat formed into small droplets on his forehead, and he could smell his odor distinctly against the wind, but he was not too late and saw the boy peddling down the right side of Mannaseh Street. He ran after him, shouting and holding his right hand against his chest. The boy turned right into Ephraim Street and Aram Kalas Kadri did the same. It did not take long for him to find himself surrounded by children. Their bright eyes were turned towards him now. Unlike the newborn babies, their wet eyes had seen what the world had to offer, and he knew nothing he could say would change that. What can a man say in the face of such things? It was all very clear to him then. He fell to his knees before they reached him and he tried to stay that way as long as he could.

As they hit him, the Doctor began to follow the boy again. He followed him through the streets of Damascus and then into the desert. Although he wanted to run faster he could not; he seemed locked into some still cavity of time, almost at rest, and he had no control over how fast he could move. Perhaps it had always been this way, he thought. Still, he followed the boy through the gate of Bab Al-Salam, and then further across the cold sand of the desert, and there hidden between the slender shoulders and thighs of dunes lay hundreds of bicycles, perhaps even thousands, tossed on top of each other like bodies. The wind blew over them. Sand fell into the spokes, covering pedals and wheels. The sight of this caused him to weep. The Doctor fell to his knees and felt the sudden sensation of a bone breaking.

On the rooftop of the half-finished apartment complex, the men remained still, however, for even though there was no way for them to know what had become of the Doctor, they looked upon the dark clouds with the intuition of poets.