As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

by Zoulfa Katouh

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.

This is the land of your father, and his father before him. Your history is embedded in this soil. No country in the world will love you as yours does.”

“Don’t focus on the darkness and sadness,” she says, and I glance up at her. She smiles warmly. “If you do, you won’t see the light even if it’s staring you in the face.”

“Don’t you think the Syrian dictatorship is more like a cancer that has been growing in Syria’s body for decades, and the surgery, despite the risks, is better than submitting to the cancer? With something so deeply entrenched in our roots, change doesn’t come easy. It has a heavy price.”

“Auntie—” Ahmad begins softly, stopping to gasp for breath. “Yes, habibi?” I turn around and clasp his hands back into mine. If you live, I’ll take care of you, I vow. Just live. Please. Just live. “Am I going to die?” he asks, and I see no fear. Do all six-year-olds know what death is? Or is it only children of war? My hands shake.

“Auntie—don’t cry—when I go to Heaven—I’ll tell God—everything,” he chokes out. I

The unrest she was talking about was the government’s kidnapping of fourteen boys—all in their early teens. They were tortured, their fingernails ripped off, and then sent back to their families—all because they’d scribbled “It’s your turn, Doctor” on a wall after the success of the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. By “Doctor” they meant the president, Bashar al-Assad, who was an ophthalmologist. The irony of a man who was drenched in innocent blood taking a vow to do no harm was not lost on me.

He knows the answer. No Syrian family has evaded the dictatorship’s cruelty. We both lost family in the Hama massacre before we were born, but Kenan’s loss steeled his resolve from when he was a child. It grew with him. Shaped him. Unlike me. I ignored the loss until it became my reality.

“I want you to hold on to that. No matter what happens, you remember that this world is more than the agony it contains. We can have happiness, Salama. Maybe it doesn’t come in a cookie-cutter format, but we will take the fragments and we will rebuild it.”

Time is the best medicine to turn our bleeding wounds to scars, and our bodies might forget the trauma, our eyes might learn to see colors as they should be seen, but that cure doesn’t extend to our souls.

And then we’re married. I get married in my lab coat, a sweater three sizes too big, with dust on my hijab and dirt marks on my jeans. We don’t have cake, a proper wedding dress, or even clean clothes. But it doesn’t matter. It feels like the whole thing happens in snapshots.

His emotional growth is a plant that people forgot to water, so it tries to capture any moisture it can.

Fate has his strings, but we’re the ones who twist them together with our actions. My belief in what’s meant to be doesn’t make me a passive player. No. I fight and fight and fight for my life.

Grief isn’t constant. It wavers, tugging and letting go like the waves on the sea.

It reminds me that as long as the lemon trees grow, hope will never die.