The Living Name

The first time my father died, he was not a Syrian museum employee, but an Assyrian villager filling a bucket of water from the river. The second time we were running as fast as we could from a giant eagle, but did not make it. The third time I was not dreaming.

I was playing with a stray dog when my mother called me inside.

‘What’s wrong with the TV?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know’, she said. ‘Your father will fix it when he comes back.’

The screen was washed in a red hue, the sound stuttering, the newscaster unable to finish the word Al-Raqqah.

She set food on the table and watched me eat.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ I asked.

She did not answer.

‘I’m thinking of a name for the dog.’

‘It’s not yours to name.’

‘Can I bring him in?’

‘No, it’s haram.’

‘Why?’

She did not answer.

‘I’m thinking of naming him Mustafa, just like my cousin. Or maybe Ahmad. Or Hamada.’

The names watered her eyes. ‘May they rest in peace’, she said and left for the bathroom.

I should not have said the dead names. I waited for my mother to return so I could apologise, but she took a long time. I was alone with the red newscaster. I thought it was the devil himself and ran towards my mother in the bathroom, where I opened the door and found her naked for the first time in my life.

When she came out, I could tell she wanted to beat me, but was too tired. Seeing how scared I was of the newscaster, she flicked through the channels. I saw red buildings, red trees, red tigers, and red women who did not wear niqabs.

That’s why we didn’t hear what the rest of the city had heard from the news. That’s why we didn’t know the museum had been raided. That my father had been killed by a white devil – an American jihadist who had taken the name Mustafa. 

Days after the execution, I headed with my dog to the place where it happened. I was afraid of finding his head somewhere in the sand, that they might have forgotten to bury it with the rest of his body. The dog circled once, then began digging in a place that looked no different from any other, until he found a small black object. It was my father’s old Nokia phone.

I had to wait for a week before I could charge the phone. On it I found photos of strange things from the museum, animals that looked like people and people that looked like animals. I kept scrolling until I found photos of us having picnics by the park or near the Euphrates, playing in the grass and water with my dead cousins.

One photo I found was of something that looked like a dog. I asked my mother how old it was and she said it was from before the past. The dog was my father’s, and my father was gone, so I figured it was mine. I gave it a living name I had only ever heard: Bobby. 

That night, Bobby appeared in my dream.

The Euphrates was not the Euphrates. It was a giant elephant blowing an endless river from its trunk. A river in which my father tried to teach me to swim, failing time after time, until Bobby came to my rescue and pulled me out of the water. He whispered in my ear: That is not your father. Throughout the dream, I tried to escape this father’s swimming lessons, and find my other father, the real one away from this river. I roamed the land with Bobby, passing people who looked nothing like anyone back home, shouting my father’s name: Adel! 

I woke up to an airstrike hitting our building. I do not clearly remember what came after. It was like waking from one dream into another. In the first dream, my father was alive. In the second, my mother died. I remember fleeing the city with strangers, tracing the dead bodies across the minefield for a way out. The stray dog following me into the minefield. My last Raqqan memory.