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Through the huge hole that used to be the wall of his apartment, Mahmoud saw gray-white clouds from missile strikes blooming all around. He shook his head, trying to clear the ringing, and spied his little brother. Waleed was sitting right where he had been before the attack, on the floor in front of the TV.
Only the TV wasn’t there anymore. It had fallen five stories to the ground below, along with the outside wall. And Waleed was centimeters from joining them both.
“Waleed! Don’t move!” Mahmoud cried. He hurried across the room, his ankles turning painfully on broken bits of wall. Waleed sat still as a statue, and he looked like one too. He was covered with a fine gray powder from head to foot, like he’d taken a bath in dry concrete mix. Mahmoud finally reached him, snatching him up and away from the cliff’s edge that used to be their wall.
“Waleed—Waleed, are you okay?” Mahmoud asked, turning him around.
Waleed’s eyes were alive, but empty. “Waleed, talk to me. Are you all right?”
Waleed finally looked up at him. “You’re bleeding” was all he said.
“Mahmoud? Waleed?” their mother cried. She staggered to the door of her bedroom, Hana crying in her arms. “Oh, thank God you’re alive!” their mom said. She dropped to her knees and pulled them both into a hug. Mahmoud’s heart was racing, his ears still buzzed, and his shoulder burned, but they were alive. They were all alive! He felt tears come to his eyes and wiped them away.
The floor beneath their feet groaned and shifted.
“We have to get out of here!” Mahmoud’s mother said, putting Hana in Mahmoud’s arms. “Go, go. Take your brother and your sister. I’ll be right behind you. I just have to grab a few things.”
“Mom, no!”
“Go,” she told Mahmoud, pushing them all toward the door.
Mahmoud clutched Hana with one arm and took his brother’s hand. He dragged Waleed with him toward the front door, but Waleed pulled back.
“What about my action figures?” Waleed asked. He looked over his shoulder like he wanted to go back for them.
“We’ll buy new ones!” Mahmoud told him. “We have to get out of here!”
Across the hall, the Sarraf family filled the corridor—mother, father, and twin daughters, both younger than Waleed.
“What’s happened?” Mr. Sarraf asked Mahmoud, and then he saw the missing wall and his eyes went wide.
“The building’s been hit!” Mahmoud said. “We have to get out!”
Mr. and Mrs. Sarraf hurried back into their apartment, and Mahmoud carried Hana down the stairs, pulling Waleed behind them. Halfway to the ground, the building shifted again and the concrete stairs broke away from the wall, leaving a five-centimeter crack. Mahmoud grabbed the railing to steady himself and waited a long, breathless moment to see if the stairs
were going to collapse. When they didn’t, he ran the rest of the way down and burst out onto the street, Hana still in his arms and his brother right behind them.
Rubble was strewn everywhere. Missiles and bombs thudded nearby, close enough to shake loose parts of walls. A building shuddered and collapsed, smoke and debris avalanching out into the street. Mahmoud jumped when it fell, but Waleed stood still, like this kind of thing happened every day.
With a jolt of surprise, Mahmoud realized this kind of thing did happen every day. Just not to them. Until now.
Everywhere around them, people fled into the streets, covered in gray dust and blood. No sirens rang. No ambulances came to help the wounded. No police cars or emergency crews hurried to the scene.
There weren’t any left.
Mahmoud stared up at their building. The whole front had collapsed, and Mahmoud felt like he was looking into a giant dollhouse. Each floor had a living room and a kitchen just like theirs, all decorated differently.
The building groaned again, and a kitchen on the top floor began to tip toward the street. It collapsed onto the sixth floor, and then into Mahmoud’s apartment, and on down like dominos. Mahmoud barely had time to yell “Run!” and drag Waleed and his sister away before the whole building came crashing down into the street, thundering like a jet fighter.
Safe on the sidewalk across the street, clutching Hana and Waleed, Mahmoud suddenly realized his mother had still been in the building. “Mom! Mom!” Mahmoud yelled.
“Mahmoud? Waleed?” he heard his mother cry, and she came out from behind the pile of rubble with the Sarraf family, all of them covered in gray dust. She ran toward Mahmoud and embraced him, Waleed, and Hana.
“We went out the back stairs,” she told them. “And just in time.”
Mahmoud looked up at where his apartment had been. It wasn’t there anymore. His home was totally destroyed. What would they do now? Where would they go?
Mahmoud’s mother was carrying their school backpacks, and she traded them for Hana. Mahmoud couldn’t understand why his mother had bothered to save their backpacks until he saw that they were stuffed with clothes and diapers. She had gone back for whatever she could take from the apartment.
Everything they owned was in these two backpacks.
“I can’t reach your father,” Mahmoud’s mother said, thumbing her phone. “There’s no service again.”
Mahmoud’s father was an engineer with a mobile phone company. If the phones were out, he was probably working on trying to fix them. But what if his father had been hit by one of the bombs? Mahmoud’s stomach twisted into knots just thinking about it.
But then there his dad was, running down the street toward them, and Mahmoud felt like he could fly.
“Fatima! Mahmoud! Waleed! Hana!” his father cried. He wrapped them all in a hug and kissed little Hana on the forehead. “Thank God you’re all alive!” he cried.
“Dad, our house is gone!” Mahmoud told him. “What do we do?”
“What we should have done a long time ago. We’re leaving Aleppo. Now. I parked the car nearby. We can be in Turkey by tomorrow. We can sell the car there and make our way north, to Germany.”
Everyone stopped while Mahmoud’s father walked ahead.
“Germany?” Mahmoud’s mother said.
Mahmoud felt as stunned as his mother sounded. Germany? He remembered the map of the world that hung in his classroom. Germany was
somewhere up north, in the heart of Europe. He couldn’t imagine traveling that far.
“Just for a little while,” Mahmoud’s father said. “I saw on the TV they’re accepting refugees. We can stay there until all this is over. Until we can come back home.”
“It’s cold in Germany,” Mahmoud said.
“Do you want to build a snowman?” his father sang. They had seen Frozen in a movie theater—back when they could get to the now- government-controlled side of the city that had theaters.
“Youssef—” Mahmoud’s mom warned.
Mahmoud’s dad looked sheepish. “It doesn’t have to be a snowman.”
“This is serious,” Mom said. “I know we’ve been talking about leaving. But now? Like this? We were going to pack. Plan. Buy tickets. Book hotel rooms. All we have now are two backpacks and our phones. Germany is a long way away. How will we get there?”
“By car first.” Mahmoud’s father shrugged. “Then by boat? By train? By bus? On foot? I don’t know. What choice do we have? Our home is destroyed! Were you able to get the cash we’ve put away?”
Mahmoud’s mother nodded, but she was clearly still worried.
“So we have money! We will buy tickets as we go. More importantly, we have our lives. But if we stay in Aleppo a day longer, we may not even have that.” Mahmoud’s father looked from his wife to Hana to Mahmoud to Waleed. “We’ve spent too much time talking about it and not doing anything. It’s not safe here. It hasn’t been for months. Years. We should have gone long ago. Ready or not, if we want to live, we have to leave Syria.”
