“The Monster Is Gone”—a story by Anna Lekas Miller

How do you talk about war and exile with your child, when all you want to do is protect him from the truth?

 

Anna Lekas Miller

 

Would Laila need a jacket in Damascus?

Damascus. What was the weather like in Damascus? Laila looked at the weather app on her phone. Sixteen degrees. What would it be like to feel the sun on her face? She looked out the window. It was four in the afternoon and already pitch black in Stuttgart, the freezing December air whistling into the crevices of the broken window that the landlord still hadn’t fixed. Every time she called him, he muttered that she should really be speaking to him in German by now. Every time she tried to speak to him in German, he complained that her German was terrible.

Damascus. Laila never imagined that she would be packing to go to Damascus. Somehow, during the ten years since she’d last tasted her mother’s waraa’ ‘inab or smelled the jasmine flowers that spilled over the balcony in the springtime, the entire country had turned into a black hole in her mind.

Over the years, she’d convinced herself that she didn’t need Syria. Why not reinvent herself? Omar certainly had. Shortly after she’d arrived in Germany, he’d gotten a scholarship to study engineering in the United States — and it seemed that he’d never looked back. Now he had a blonde wife and three children — she knew that because she stalked him on Facebook whenever she had a little bit too much to drink. 

A wife and three children weren’t the only things he had acquired since moving to the United States. He also had a gut. It didn’t match her memories of his bare chest, firm under her hands, the athletic build of someone who could run just as quickly from bullets as he could nimbly dodge the sniper’s aim. Laila remembered watching him at the demonstrations, his chest held high, as if daring the bullets to try to pierce through his courage. So young, so stupid, so full of hope.

Now, she looked at her belongings strewn out across her bed. The winter coat that had become part of her body in Germany was probably far too warm for sixteen-degree weather. It seemed so real, so concrete — each of Hadi’s tiny outfits neatly folded, ready to be placed in the well-worn suitcase that had followed her from Damascus to Stuttgart, ten years earlier. 

Hadi. What would Hadi think of Damascus? She looked at the sleeping child on the mattress next to hers, his long, feathery eyelashes fluttering in slumber. If she ever needed proof of how long it had been since she had last seen Syria, she had a ten-year-old child to remind her. Every day, he looked a little bit more like Omar, those big, dark eyes burning with curiosity about the world around him. But Hadi had never been to Syria. He had never had to stop going to school, because suddenly a sniper was looming over the end of his street. He could enjoy fireworks without crouching behind the sofa. He had never been afraid of the knock on the door that could take away everyone that he loved.

Would Omar be in Damascus, too? 

The last time she’d seen Omar had been the night that they’d spent lying next to each other, right before he left to Beirut. At the time, she thought she might follow him there. Even though she longed to stay in Damascus, she knew that it was becoming more dangerous every day. Dozens of their friends had been arrested by the regime — it was only a matter of time before they were picked up, too. 

“Someday, we will be back and we won’t be afraid anymore.” Omar brushed a piece of her long, black hair behind her ear. She didn’t know if she believed him, but she felt comforted as he pulled her closer to him, kissing her gently at first, then deeper. She could feel the layers of their love for one another mingling as their bodies came together in what felt like a promise that whatever happened they would always be there for one another, no matter what the future might hold.  

She just never imagined it would be one in which they hadn’t spoken in ten years.

OMAR BOUGHT THE TICKET WITHOUT TELLING KATHY. It didn’t feel like he was buying a ticket to another country. It felt like he was buying a ticket back in time, back to the days he’d spent chanting in the street with Faris, the nights he’d spent tracing his fingers across Laila’s body, bathed in moonlight. 

Laila. Laila was the only one who had ever truly understood him. Laila had felt the same infectious pulse of the revolution in her veins, the invincible feeling of running faster than they ever imagined their legs could carry them, their bodies alive with the knowledge that they had once again defied death. 

Did she have to move on so quickly? It was less than a year after she arrived in Germany that she posted a picture of a baby’s hand on her Instagram, before disappearing all over again. Who was this person who had so suddenly swept her off her feet? It almost felt as if that last night they had spent wrapped around one another had meant nothing to her. Laila was annoyingly private on social media, posting just enough to remind him that she was still lurking, but not enough to give away any meaningful information. It was infuriating.

Now, Laila was the only person that he wanted to talk to. Had she also stayed up every night for the past five nights, watching first Hama, then Homs and finally, Damascus, be liberated? At first, he hadn’t believed it. “Who cares?” he told his brother, who called him feverishly when the rebels started moving towards Aleppo. He had stopped watching the news from Syria in 2016, when the regime had surrounded Aleppo and every last shred of hope he had ever felt had vanished. From that point onward, he’d fully committed to his life in the United States. He threw himself into his studies. He downloaded a dating app. If Laila could move on, so could he. He went through the laborious process of answering asinine questions — “one thing that’s non-negotiable for me is…” and “what’s on your bucket list?” Would anyone understand what he had been through? Most of the conversations went nowhere, but he was determined to swipe until he found someone that pushed Laila — and by extension, Syria — out of his mind. 

Just when he thought he might be ready to give up on girls who liked long walks on the beach (but only with guys who were at least six feet tall) and brunch on the weekends, he came across a picture of a girl with blonde hair cropped into a neat short bob and a kind smile. According to her profile, she enjoyed boating and waterskiing on Lake Michigan. Visiting Hawaii was on her bucket list. She didn’t seem to have a problem with the fact that he spoke English with an accent, or that he was only five-foot-nine. Her name was Kathy.

“I’ve been wanting to try the new Lebanese restaurant on Packard Street,” she replied, as soon as he mentioned that he was from Syria. He breathed a sigh of relief — he never quite knew how people were going to react, especially with Trump’s promises of a Muslim ban.

Besides, he had been missing good shawarma and the halal cart next to the university didn’t quite cut it.

“Do you want to check it out together?”

The restaurant advertised itself as a “Mediterranean Grill” and was nothing to write home about, but Kathy was smart and funny. Her unusual skills included being able to water ski while blindfolded and name obscure world capitals. Her non-negotiable was that she wanted to have a family — and quickly. One after the other, one, two, three children, in quick succession until all of a sudden Omar was a father of three, trying to keep up with the mortgage on a three-bedroom house in the suburbs of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Even though he had a degree in chemical engineering, he got a job driving trucks for Kathy’s father’s trucking company, moving construction materials from Ann Arbor to Chattanooga, Tennessee and back. He dreamed of owning a fleet of trucks himself, sitting back and being the boss, like his father-in-law. 

Now, he was watching the young men in Umayyad Square as they rifled their way through the presidential palace and broadcast it all on YouTube. What did it matter, how many trucks he owned or how much money he made? Suddenly all of these considerations seemed trivial. He should be there, pissing on the remains of the Assad regime. 

“Are you coming back to bed?” Kathy looked bleary-eyed in the door frame. Omar felt guilty. Kathy already got so little sleep as it was, and his nocturnal schedule over the past two weeks was hardly grounding.

“I’m sorry, honey, I will soon.” He closed the laptop. Tomorrow. He would tell her about the ticket tomorrow.

EVERY DAY HADI LOOKED MORE LIKE OMAR, with those long, thick eyelashes that made his big dark eyes seem even bigger. Would Omar know if he saw him? Sometimes Laila fantasized about telling him. “Hi. It’s Laila. You have a ten-year-old son now.”

Every time she typed out the Facebook message, she stopped herself from sending it. Ten years had passed. Omar seemed like he had a successful business and three beautiful children, who called him daddy or baba. Why tell him now what she should have confessed from the start?

Instead, she focused on Hadi. Imagining a future where Hadi would never be afraid to speak his mind gave Laila the strength that she needed to jump through the hoops of German bureaucracy. Even though he looked like her — well, Omar, really — he spoke German like the blonde-haired children in his school. Watching his childlike mind soak up the language like a sponge was magical and mesmerizing. She imagined him as a chameleon, fluently moving between worlds that had always felt foreign to her. 

Still, she wondered how much he understood about where he was truly from. How would he ever know if she never told him? Even though she longed to tell him about what was happening in Syria, she struggled to find the words to make sense of such evil — and the scale of loss and grief — for herself, much less a ten-year old.

“Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a beautiful country,” she began, wondering if it would be any easier to tell as a children’s story, one in which a hero vanquished the enemy, where good and evil were clearly defined.

“But it was so beautiful that an evil monster took over, and was so obsessed with staying in power that he didn’t care how many people he hurt.” Somehow describing Bashar al-Assad as a monster both distanced her from him and felt more accurate than any newspaper account that she had ever read.

“He was like the bullies at school?” His eyes grew wide in recognition. Even though he spoke German just as well as his classmates, they were still startled when they heard him speaking Arabic to his mother. One of them had even called him habibi — but as an insult.

“Yes, but even more brutal,” she said, carefully measuring her words. “If anyone dared to question his power, he would snatch them up and take them to his dungeons.” Hadi’s eyes grew big and scared. What had she done? She wasn’t telling her precious child the story of a far-off land — she was giving him a very thinly veiled account of the very nightmares that she was trying to escape.

“One day, the little girl and her friends decided that they were going to stand up to the monster.” She could feel herself scrambling for a protagonist — and suddenly, it came to her in the form of her, Omar and Fares, linking arms in the street, a sea of bodies, calling for the regime to fall.

“Even though they were scared, they knew that they were stronger together.” Laila paused for a moment. How could she tell him about the joyous days of the revolution without the brutal years of the civil war? If she wasn’t careful, barrel bombs were going to start playing a role in her bedtime stories.

“Did the monster have green scales?”

“Yes,” she laughed. A monster with green scales was far less terrifying than one with steely blue eyes. “He had green scales and would spit enormous balls of fire at the little girl and her friends. It got so dangerous that the little girl had to take a long journey, far faraway.” She wondered if a little part of him knew that she was the little girl, holding her stomach on a tiny boat, terrified of the inky black sea, not yet knowing that he was growing inside of her.

“Eventually, she made it all the way to a new kingdom, where she knew that the monster could never reach her. And she started a new life, happily ever after.” He nuzzled into her and Laila stroked his hair, wishing that they could stay like that forever.

“I’m happy for her, but I hope she gets to go back someday.” Laila hoped that he didn’t notice her trying to blink back a tear.

“Me too.”

“CAN YOU REMIND ME TO CALL THE CREDIT CARD COMPANY?”

It wasn’t unusual to hear Kathy up and about as early as seven-thirty in the morning. Long before Omar’s morning coffee had settled into his veins, Kathy was often already checking off items from her never-ending to-do list, often with at least one child clinging onto her.

“What’s going on?” he asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Even though Omar had always been nocturnal, keeping up with Kathy and the pressures of fatherhood had demanded that he become an early riser. His recent late nights meant that he barely slept at all.

“I got a call telling me that there’s a $2,000 charge to Lufthansa.” She effortlessly bounced Meghan on one arm, her cell phone in the other. Children had only made her more efficient, organizing schedules around breakfast times and bath times, school lunches packed in color-coordinated insulated lunch boxes, somehow double-checking that all of their bills were paid while simultaneously making sure that everyone was eating their vegetables.

“Lufthansa. Some German airline, or something.”

Lufthansa. The flight he’d booked the night before went from Detroit to Beirut by way of Frankfurt. Of course it would come up as a fraudulent charge. It was far more money than they typically spent on anything. He cursed the success of the Syrian revolution. Why couldn’t he have simply paid a smuggler in cash, like the good old days? He should have included her in his decision. Even if fantasizing about traveling to Syria made him feel like he was ten years younger, an airplane was no time machine. He had responsibilities now — responsibilities to Ryan, Kristen, Meghan and Kathy.

“It was me,” he confessed. “I bought a ticket to go to Beirut.”

He watched as his words registered on her face. First, her soft, pale brow that had only recently started to reflect her age furrowed in confusion. Then, she set Meghan down in her high chair and looked at him again, her ordinarily kind blue eyes narrowing.

“It’s to go to Damascus.” He cautiously took a sip of coffee. He should have included her in his decision. Who was he to say that she wouldn’t understand that he wanted to see his homeland for the first time in a decade, that she wouldn’t want to share in his excitement? She might have given their children American names that he could barely pronounce, but surely she would understand his desire to return home for the first time since he fled Syria.

“The airport still isn’t open, but you can fly into Beirut and take a taxi from there.” Why couldn’t he stop talking? “It’s only about two hours.”

“So I’m supposed to just stay here with our three children while you run off to a war zone?” Whenever Kathy was angry, her voice became low and quiet, rumbling ever so slightly but never into a roar. It was so different than Laila, who would rant and rave about something as benign as a difference in political opinion. He wished that she would lose her temper, that she would scream at him and break plates without caring whether their children saw her lose it, or not.

“It isn’t a war zone,” he protested. This was the problem with Americans: no matter what happened in the Middle East, they could never see it as anything but a war zone. The same way all the talking heads on CNN were now confidently predicting that Syria would be “another Libya or Iraq,” as though “liberation” itself were the problem, and not the hands that delivered it.

 “It’s a beautiful place, where I spent the happiest days of my childhood.” For a moment, Omar imagined what it would be like to watch his family grow in Damascus. What would it be like to raise his children around dozens of aunties, uncles and cousins? Even if they couldn’t speak Arabic yet, it wasn’t too late to learn. Perhaps he could speak to his children in the language of his heart.

 “We could go — all of us, together.”

Instead, Kathy pursed her lips.

“Now you’ve really lost your mind.”

“WHY ARE YOU CRYING MAMA?”

Laila hadn’t noticed that Hadi had stirred awake. 

Ordinarily, Laila didn’t let herself cry — especially in front of Hadi. But ever since the regime had fallen, it was as if something inside of her had burst. How could she explain that these were not tears of sorrow — they were tears of joy, of disbelief, tears that had been trapped in her body for so many years, that she had no idea where they were coming from?

“Do you remember the story that I told you about the evil monster who would never give up his power, no matter how many people he hurt?” She abandoned her packing to crouch down next to him, a smile spreading across her face as she realized that the story hadn’t been over, after all.

“He had green scales and used to spit balls of fire at the little girl and her friends.” Hadi had an attention to detail unlike any that she had ever seen — it must be Omar’s talent in the sciences and mathematics that he somehow inherited. Whereas she spoke in metaphors and allegories, Hadi always challenged her in just how literal he could be.

“Exactly,” she smiled. “Even though the little girl was happy, life in the new kingdom wasn’t always easy.” Laila looked over at the German grammar book that she had furiously studied when she first arrived in Stuttgart, hoping she might one day master the language. Now she would settle for someone not correcting her mid-sentence. “She had to learn a new language and she had to figure out how to be a grown up, all by herself.”

“Did she make a lot of mistakes?”

“Yes, but she was trying!” She playfully swatted him with a pillow. “The little girl never thought that she was going to be able to go back to her kingdom — and she was so worried about her friends who still lived around the monster.”

“But her friends never gave up the fight.” Now she felt the tears streaming down her face — and for the first time, she didn’t do anything to try to stop them. “Even though it was too dangerous to go to protests, they didn’t stop dreaming of the day that they would harness enough magic to be free from the monster.” How was Omar explaining this to his children? She wished that there was some kind of blueprint, a manual to explain the unthinkable — and then, the unimaginable — to a child. And just like that, it came to her: magic.

“One day, they all got together once again, but this time they felt a surge of power and knew that they could fight the monster.” At first, she had ignored the news alert that rebels were moving towards Aleppo. But after a few hours, she couldn’t stop refreshing the Al Jazeera live blog, sleeplessly watching the rebels take Hama and Homs, wondering what would happen if they reached Damascus.

“They gained back their kingdom from the monster and his minions, one little bit at a time.” Within a matter of days, she found herself scrolling nonstop through videos of prisoners running free, ninety-second clips of pure, ecstatic joy. Magic truly was the only way to explain it.

“They went to the monster’s dungeons and zapped the locks with their magical powers.” One particularly joyful video showed two brothers who hadn’t seen one another in seven years embracing. She watched it on repeat, wondering if Omar would go back and try to see his brothers, too. “Suddenly, everyone who had ever tried to fight the monster was running free through the streets of our kingdom.”

“What did the monster do?” Hadi cocked his head and looked at her. Did he know? He had to know.

“He tried to snarl at them, to spit fire at them once again, but when he snarled, nothing came out!” Waking up the morning after, Laila had felt a lightness she’d thought she’d long left behind, and wondered if Omar was feeling it, too. “He was so embarrassed that he ran away.”

“The monster is gone?”

Laila pulled him close, wrapping her arms around his chest, wondering what he would think of their beautiful kingdom. “The monster is gone.”