With the clarity and firmness that only the truth can have

From the house of S. and his family, the only landscape we can see is a gray moor at this point. It’s been raining continuously for three days.
We are visiting this family to get updates on the health conditions of their parents. Their father has got an eye health problems and their mother is being treated for breast cancer.
Soon, indeed, the Italian doctor will come to Lebanon and we would like to have everything ready for him to visit them.
They have five children, but their house is always full of people. The classic extended family: more families living on the same landing and sharing much more.
Today, however, the house is strangely quiet, almost empty. As soon as we get there, they make us sit down, they serve us the mate and peanuts.§
It is the second time that I come to visit them, and they already know how much I like to smoke hookah.
It is there, ready for our arrival.
After the first pleasantries and updates, the conversation took another turn.
In fact, as if it was that circumstance to call those memoirs and without any specific questions, S. began to tell us about the time he was in Syria and he had been arrested as deserter and imprisoned.

Instead of drama, he told us what happened in prison with the clarity and firmness that only the truth can have: the ways they were beaten and the tortures he - like many others we met - had been subjected to. He traced with his fingers on his body the map of all the scars: the ones of the rope that tied his hands, those of the cigarette burns that the military put out on him, the huge one from the bullet that crossed the thigh and came out in thousand pieces.
All of us, even two of his daughters, continued to listen to his memories flow while eating peanuts and breaking sunflower seeds with our teeth, without making more noise than necessary, so as not to miss a single word.
Suddenly I needed to take a breath and started looking out the window.
I watched the rain and all that water. Not water that cleans, that drags impurities, but stagnant water that  holds everything. Even the terrain under its weight sinks, giving way. In that all the same gray sky, nothing moved.
Several times I have superimposed the stories to the landscape and the landscape to the rumbling of my thoughts. The words and events flow continued to be calm and steady. It was interrupted only for a moment, when his tone of voice changed.
"This is what happened in prison. But really, the day I went out and finally looked at the sun, I felt the wind, I saw the landscape and then I said to myself: Wallah, life is beautiful... life is beautiful, Anjad".
Here, when you face challenges you cannot find a solution for, people often say: "Allah Karim".
"God is generous". I really don’t know if I would have chosen this adjective, but I know that - after all this - I can only trust.

F.