 |
Mahmoud Bishara was invisible, and that’s exactly how he wanted it. Being invisible was how he survived.
He wasn’t literally invisible. If you really looked at Mahmoud, got a glimpse under the hoodie he kept pulled down over his face, you would see a twelve-year-old boy with a long, strong nose, thick black eyebrows, and short-cropped black hair. He was stocky, his shoulders wide and muscular despite the food shortages. But Mahmoud did everything he could to hide his size and his face, to stay under the radar. Random death from a fighter jet’s missile or a soldier’s rocket launcher might come at any moment, when you least expected it. To walk around getting noticed by the Syrian army or the rebels fighting them was just inviting trouble.
Mahmoud sat in the middle row of desks in his classroom, where the teacher wouldn’t call on him. The desks were wide enough for three students at each, and Mahmoud sat between two other boys named Ahmed and Nedhal.
Ahmed and Nedhal weren’t his friends. Mahmoud didn’t have any friends.
It was easier to stay invisible that way.
One of the teachers walked up and down the hall ringing a handbell, and Mahmoud collected his backpack and went to find his little brother, Waleed. Waleed was ten years old and two grades below Mahmoud in school. He too wore his black hair cropped short, but he looked more like their mother, with narrower shoulders, thinner eyebrows, a flatter nose, and bigger ears. His teeth looked too big for his head, and when he smiled he looked like a cartoon squirrel. Not that Waleed smiled much anymore. Mahmoud couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his brother laugh, or cry, or show
any emotion whatsoever.
The war had made Mahmoud nervous. Twitchy. Paranoid. It had made his little brother a robot.
Even though their apartment wasn’t far away, Mahmoud led Waleed on a different route home every day. Sometimes it was the back alleys; there could be fighters in the streets, who were always targets for the opposition. Bombed-out buildings were good too. Mahmoud and Waleed could disappear among the heaps of twisted metal and broken cement, and there were no walls to fall on them if an artillery shell went whizzing overhead. If a plane dropped a barrel bomb, though, you needed walls. Barrel bombs were filled with nails and scrap metal, and if you didn’t have a wall to duck behind you’d be shredded to pieces.
It hadn’t always been this way. Just four years ago, their home city of Aleppo had been the biggest, brightest, most modern city in Syria. A crown jewel of the Middle East. Mahmoud remembered neon malls, glittering skyscrapers, soccer stadiums, movie theaters, museums. Aleppo had history too—a long history. The Old City, at the heart of Aleppo, was built in the 12th century, and people had lived in the area as early as 8,000 years ago. Aleppo had been an amazing city to grow up in.
Until 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Syria.
They didn’t call it that then. Nobody knew a wave of revolutions would sweep through the Middle East, toppling governments and overthrowing dictators and starting civil wars. All they knew from images on TV and posts on Facebook and Twitter was that people in Tunisia and Libya and Yemen were rioting in the streets, and as each country stood up and said “Enough!” so did the next one, and the next one, until at last the Arab Spring came to Syria.
But Syrians knew protesting in the streets was dangerous. Syria was ruled by Bashar al-Assad, who had twice been “elected” president when no one was allowed to run against him. Assad made people who didn’t like him disappear. Forever. Everyone was afraid of what he would do if the Arab Spring swept through Syria. There was an old Arabic proverb that said, “Close the door that brings the wind and relax,” and that’s exactly what they did; while the rest of the Middle East was rioting, Syrians stayed inside and locked their doors and waited to see what would happen.
But they hadn’t shut the door tightly enough. In Damascus, Syria’s capital, a man was imprisoned for speaking out against Assad. In Daraa, a city in southern Syria, some kids were arrested and abused by police for scrawling anti-Assad slogans on walls. It was as if the entire country suddenly went mad. Tens of thousands of people flooded the streets, demanding the release of political prisoners and greater freedoms. Within a month, Assad had unleashed his tanks, soldiers, and bombers on the protesters—his own people. Since then, all Mahmoud, Waleed, and everyone else in Syria had known was war.
As Mahmoud and Waleed turned down a different rubble-strewn alley than the day before, they stopped in their tracks. Ahead, two boys were cornering another boy against what remained of a wall, about to take the bag of bread he was carrying.
Mahmoud yanked Waleed behind a charred car, his heart racing. Such incidents had become all too common in Aleppo. Getting food in the city was increasingly difficult. Yet for Mahmoud, the scene evoked memories of an earlier time, just after the war began.
He had been on his way to meet his best friend, Khalid. Down a side street much like this one, Mahmoud had found Khalid being beaten by two older boys. Khalid, a Shia Muslim in a predominantly Sunni country, was clever and smart, always quick with the right answer in class. Despite their differing sects, Mahmoud and Khalid had been friends for years, sharing a love for comic books, superhero movies, and video games.
But right then, Khalid had been curled into a ball on the ground, his hands around his head while the older boys kicked him.
“Not so smart now, are you, pig?” one of them had said. “Shia should know their place! This is Syria, not Iran!”
Mahmoud had bristled. The differences between Sunnis and Shiites was an excuse. These boys had just wanted to beat someone up.
With a battle cry that would have made Wolverine proud, Mahmoud had launched himself at Khalid’s attackers.
And he had been beaten up as badly as Khalid.
From that day forward, Mahmoud and Khalid were marked. The two older boys became Mahmoud’s and Khalid’s own personal bullies, delivering repeated beatdowns between classes and after school.
That’s when Mahmoud and Khalid had learned how valuable it was to be invisible. Mahmoud stayed in the classroom all day, never going to the bathroom or the playground. Khalid never answered another question in
class, not even when the teacher called on him directly. If the bullies didn’t notice you, they didn’t hit you. That’s when Mahmoud had realized that together, he and Khalid were bigger targets; alone, it was easier to be invisible. It was nothing they ever said to each other, just something they each came to understand, and within a year they had drifted apart, not even speaking to each other as they passed in the hall.
A year after that, Khalid had died in an airstrike anyway. It was better not to have friends in Syria in 2015.
Mahmoud watched as these two boys attacked the boy with the bread, a boy he didn’t even know. He felt the stirrings of indignation, of anger, of sympathy. His breath came quick and deep, and his hands clenched into fists. “I should do something,” he whispered. But he knew better.
Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. The trick was to be invisible. Blend in. Disappear.
Mahmoud took his younger brother by the hand, turned around, and found a different way home.
