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What we did found is this excerpt of a text from Lotte Lentes:
THE BOY, THE DUST
A person is no one without a homeland. Wherever he goes, he’s just a guest. Comrade Binefsh
They said the dogs arrived the same day I did. The seven medium-sized salukis were the first thing I saw when I got out of the battered Toyota that took me and two other guys from Akhtarin to Aleppo. They had told me I’d be going to a prison. At first I thought they were going to lock me up because of what had happened in Akhtarin, but the man who drove the jeep laughed out loud when I tried to ask him about it. We drove over badly paved roads, past bombed and abandoned suburbs, kilometers of grass and sand. The windscreen wipers found it harder and harder to move all the dust they collected to the corners of the window. ‘You’re not the first European to start out a bit too enthusiastically, you know.’ He fiddled fruitlessly with the the car radio, managing only to change the frequency of the white noise. On the handle of the weapon that lay on his lap the whole way was a sticker of some comic book character I didn’t know. The sticker hadn’t been stuck on well, you could see small pockets of air beneath it. ‘If we punished people for that, we’d have to send you all back where you came from within a week. Or lock you all up, but what good would that do? The man said I would get assigned chores in prison. ‘Providing support,’ is what he called it. He said I was lucky to have been called away from the front after only three days. ‘Working at the prison is much better,’ he said. ‘it’s quieter, there’s more food, electricity, that sort of thing, and you can call home as often as you want.’ That was clearly meant to reassure me, but next to him in the jeep it still felt as if I was being punished. I hadn’t travelled from Roubaix to Aleppo to become a prison guard, they had promised to make me a warrior.
The Toyota stopped in front of a school, a small two-storied building that was one of the few in this neighbourhood that had remained standing. Along the underside of the grey outside walls and around the taped-up windows flowers and musical notes had been painted, the green paint was cracked, like the worn print on a T-shirt. At about a hundred meters from the school the seven salukis milled about nervously. When the driver honked, the group dispersed.
Three elderly men stood in the sand in front of the school, they had wrapped cloths around their heads and looked suspiciously in our direction. A swarthy, uniformed man appeared in the door behind them, he reminded me of a Turkish soap-opera star. He had broad shoulders and his greasy hair was combed tightly backwards. The dimples in his cheeks gave him a boyish air, yet it didn’t occur to me to move. Not even when I heard the Toyota behind me pull out and disappear. This had to be the commander, the man in the jeep had told me about him. He was rumoured to have been a K-1 fighter in his former life, to be some kind of fighting machine who preferred to kill with his bare hands. He was recovering from a grenade shard in his neck and had fought in the battle for Mosul, one of the last victories I had still watched at home on my laptop. The first thing the commander did was ask us our names and we gave them. He wrote them down in a little note book, from left to right. I felt relief: he was European too. Then he ordered us to line up with our arms behind our back. The sun burned sweat stains in the polo neck I had been wearing for days, I tried to appear as bulky as possible. This reminded me of scenes in movies and tv shows I’d seen, I thought, and maybe I had been wrong before, maybe now it was really starting after all. ‘Don’t let this building fool you.’ The commander pointed at the school and only now I noticed that he was missing two front teeth, which made it sound as if he was trying to talk with a melting ice cube in his mouth. ‘This, gentlemen, this is a prison. One of the best wartime prisons around, if you ask me. In this building we keep the infidels that our brothers found on our streets: aid workers, spies, journalists, you name it. And we have exactly three duties to these people. One: we make sure they stay alive, two: we make sure they don’t escape, and three: we make sure they regret every moment of their lives that they didn’t bow down to Him, the Greatest, the One and Only.’ The men behind hem nodded vigorously and raised their index fingers to the sky. ‘You are here travelling through. You have proven yourself unfit for the war God has ordered us to wage. You will be schooled here, you will have to work hard, show us that you are men, and he who succeeds shall, God willing, be rewarded.’ The men behind him murmured again and after a moment’s silence the commander said my name. He said it briskly, curtly, with a little pause between the two syllables: Ma- jid. I tried to straighten my back even more and suppressed a smile. My eyes focused on the piece of swollen purple skin that peeped out from the commander’s collar, and I hoped for more explanations, for orders, a uniform and a weapon.
‘I heard what happened in Akhtarin.’ A frown appeared on the commander’s high forehead, it looked like it had been carved into it with a level. How could he have found out so soon? And who told him? ‘Let me be clear, we don’t have the time and the space here for that kind of nonsense. You are just here to carry out orders, don’t forget, or else the bullet through your brain will be a fun video message for the people at home.’ I saw from the commander’s face that he meant it, and from the enormous hands resting on his belt I could see, too, that he was quite capable of carrying out his threats, even without a weapon. There were a lot of those videos on YouTube, I had probably seen all of them. Whenever a new one came out, we would watch them in the community centre, five, sometimes six times, and I had always imagined myself to be the resolute executioner, never the kneeling boy in the orange jumpsuit. ‘You are nothing here, Majid, nothing at all, do you understand?’ I suppressed the urge to salute and nodded. The commander stood so close to me now that I could see that his teeth hadn’t been pulled, but had broken off, just below the gums. I could hardly keep my eyes off of them. The commander left us to the three men. I was assigned Abu, the tallest and oldest, a man with course, grey hair and friendly eyes. ‘Forget him, my boy,’ he said, after the commander had gone inside again. ‘Better a hand full of bees than a hive full of flies, right?’ He slapped me encouragingly on the upper arm and took me to the sleeping quarters.
This was months before Abu would declare that he had known right away that I was a chosen one. He had known from my proud stance, from the way I had looked steadfastly into the eyes of the commander. I was a boy without fear, he said, and you can only win a war when you have no fear.
During my first week in the prison we only saw the seven medium sized salukis in the distance, but as the days went by the sallow, lean animals approached bit by bit. At night I heard them cry. Like me, they awoke with a start each time there was an air raid, even if it was in town, kilometers away. Abu slept through everything. It was as if I just started to realize, those first nights in the school, how far from home I really was, and the dogs, their nervous sniffing, their fearful reflexes, they calmed me down in a strange way. So I fed them, because nobody had told me not to. I looked into their watery
eyes and stroked their pelts, bristly as a doormat. The nights were pleasantly cool but short, the sun seemed always to hang just below the horizon. The dogs were the only remedy for my insomnia, but they drove Abu and the others crazy. At first they played games with them. They made the dogs think they were throwing food into the cells, so they jumped up against the closed doors nervously, aggressively. I wasn’t allowed near the prisoners yet, as far as I was concerned we might as well have been guarding empty classrooms, but now their existence was confirmed for the first time. Through the door I heard how they tried to calm the animals, in many different languages, their voices shaking, and I felt bad for them. For the dogs as well as for the people.
On a Tuesday afternoon Abu killed the dogs. He claimed the commander wanted him to do it, because the animals were haram. Everything that came in contact with a dog’s tongue had to be ritually cleaned. ‘And I just can’t use that kind of hassle.’ Abu shot six of them within a minute. He did it in a relaxed manner, didn’t even seem to really aim his gun, still he hit most of the dogs right between the eyes. They fell over and squealed until their lungs were completely empty. Then he gave me the gun and pointed at the last one.
I wish I had missed on purpose, because I wanted to spare the dog after our nights together, but that wasn’t it. When I got my hands on the weapon the animal meant nothing to me anymore. Suddenly I only saw the drool in its mouth, the tangles in its pelt, the dumb, agitated eyes. I missed because I couldn’t shoot.