It looks like we're going to make this trip, it looks like it's all arranged, it looks like they're going to they are going to make us cross the border between Lebanon and Syria... it seems.
But I still don't believe it.
And so I focus on every present moment, with no expectations, just the here and now.
But then we really get to the border and really after a while we are in a car that travelling at high speed through Syrian territory, on the road to Damascus.
I begin to realize that we have really entered, I start to get emotional, I am at a loss for words. Words.
But the power of what is happening overwhelms me when we arrive in a suburb outskirts of the fascinating Syrian capital, and from the balcony he looks at us, greets us and then runs to meet our Syrian friend.
In that embrace we burst into tears: we are really here together, in your Syria, in your Syria, which is so dear to you.
Your Syria, which you have missed so much and is still missed by so many comrades on on the road, a road for me, as a foreigner, 10 years long.
‘I don't believe it, I don't believe it, are we dreaming? Pinch me, pinch me that maybe I will wake up’. We repeat it to each other on the first day and this phrase will accompany us for the whole week, such is the incredulity that it is really very difficult to put into words.
She has been in Damascus for two days, she was here for a conference on transitional justice in Syria, but she had not set foot in her homeland for 13 long years.
“I am thinking about the possibility of staying with you. Staying longer in the country with you, being able to meet people and travel through areas in which I haven’t been in years is very appealing. Qusayr is nearby, we could go back and see my home together. But I wonder if I will be ready to face and bear all the feelings that this will trigger, I don’t know if I’m ready, I need to think about it. But if we are together, I could really do it.”
And that is what would happen.
Seven days later, after many meetings, conversations, landscapes of destruction and mystical silence of the desert, we are standing in front of her father’s grave.
We leave our friend some space, in the intimate meeting with her father.
Later we come closer, the grave on which she cried lays next to dozens more.
“This didn’t use to be a cemetery. This was a garden, in between my uncles’ and my cousins’ houses, the entire block had my same last name. These are their graves, the garden became a cemetery since it was too dangerous to go bury the bodies in the municipal one. This one in front of us is the house of my grandfather, from my father’s side.”
Nowadays Qusayr is a city made up of 85% rubble or half-destroyed houses, the surrounding landscape was once a lush countryside, with olive groves, orchards, cultivated fields, but now to meet the eye there are only felled trees and the desert along the horizon.
Our friend stays with us the following two days.
After dedicating a morning to her places and those of her people still present, or that just came back to live in the city, the following day is all for us. Or rather, it’s for the people dear to us that came back from Lebanon to live in what is left of their houses.
A friend that we visit is overjoyed to welcome us in his home, has us greet his mother, from whom he had been separated for many years, despite the both of them living in Lebanon, because the situations in which they found themselves didn’t allow them to meet.
He tidied up his room a bit in his old home, even managed to place a wood stove and some mattresses, but the door is still missing and it’s basically like sleeping outdoors; we wonder how he can sleep there, in the cold.
In Homs, at another friend’s place, we saw them put in the door just as we were visiting, they told us that just a door is $100, so we can imagine the exorbitant costs that making a house habitable again would imply, after the bombings and the lootings took everything away.
Talking with our friend and their family, they tell us that up until a few months ago this place seemed like a ghost town, and that only after the regime’s fall some people started coming back; and now the city is repopulating again.
To think that we were shocked to see how deserted it was.
Another visit to our friends brings out yet more tears.
Their children can’t believe their eyes when they spot us, repeating our names with wide eyes and smiles.
They tell us what their home used to look like, which trees were planted and where, they point at where the grapevines used to climb up to the roof.
Amidst the thousands of words, they tell us that a few days ago some people who had come back to see what was left of their house were maimed by an inactivated bomb, hidden in the rubble, two people were seriously injured.
This day and the next acquire a special significance to me, the meaning of many years of hardships, frustrations, darkness, unable to imagine the light that deep down somewhere I would have liked to glimpse.
I remember, years ago, our friend who, in tears, shared with us how her father was killed, and today we were able to accompany her to greet him at his grave.
I can feel the tightness of the embraces shared in the middle of the tents in the refugee camps, where every now and then we would bring another friend of ours a hug from her mother, staying in Italy since many years now, living with another side of the family.
The feeling of this embrace is familiar, but we still hold each other in front of the entrance of her childhood home.
It’s time to go, we bid goodbye to everyone with our hearts filled with joy.
Our friend too, has that smile still plastered on her face.
“It’s the heavens that sent you here to take on this journey with me. Starting today, you have three houses here in Qusayr, that of my grandfather from mom’s side, that of my grandfather from dad’s side, and that in which I grew up. It’s your home now! Next year we’ll eat the fruit from their gardens together.”
These houses are all half-destroyed...but it’s a start.
We have lived for 12 years at 5 kilometers from the Syrian border, but today Syria has never been so close.
OPERAZIONE COLOMBA
