An Excerpt from Samar Yazbek’s ‘Where the Wind Calls Home’

Syrian writer and journalist Samar Yazbek’s poetic, tender Where the Wind Calls Home was published last week by World Editions, in award-winning translator Leri Price’s fluid English translation.

The publisher writes of the book:

Ali, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole—is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there … While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety. Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life and hope and love.

Here, an excerpt from chapter eight:

Ali didn’t know himself. His life came to him intermittently, just as he had lived it. He forgot whether or not he should regard himself as one of those people who lived according to the laws and history of the mountain. It didn’t occur to him to consider the shape of his face, his feet, his nose, or to question where these sharp features on his face had come from, or to ask himself who he really was. Or, moreover, why he had to be a part of all this. Why should he spend even a single moment on this nonsense that others wallowed in like a limitless luxury, when they knew what they wanted in life and could name it: a hope, or a goal. It was simple, really. Here he was, lying motionless, looking at the tree and the Other. He wasn’t focusing on the movement of the sun, or what might happen if it went out and this planet vanished from existence. It appeared that everything was interchangeable, capable of altering suddenly and incomprehensibly. He was interested in trees … in the wind and the clouds and the mountains, in the rain and the stars, in the moon, the scent on the breeze. He was interested in anything that helped him drown out every sound beyond that call from within, interested most of all in those elements that didn’t rely on jabbering, as he called it. As such, he wasn’t particularly fond of animals, nor did he pursue birds. The wind had a special place in his soul. He believed he knew the wind even better than the clouds, the rain, and the snow. He used to gulp down the wind and breathe it in when it passed over his cheeks and settled in his open mouth, as if he could eat it up. He would feast on the wind, chewing it and swallowing it down; he could tell the direction it came from with his eyes closed, saw the rain in it before it fell, sensed oncoming snow by how cold it blew.

Yes! The wind was something fundamental to him, as were the trees and the clouds. He had never thought of these elements this way before; he hadn’t chosen them, or even consciously recognised them as necessities. He just thought that living among them in this way was life, and felt totally assured that he would never be parted from his trees and his beloved elements. His daily sessions of sitting on the roof of their house in all seasons, away from the family and the neighbours, were a part of his being that no one else knew about. During pitch-black nights, as he lay watching, his ribs moving with the stars, and his soul peeling away like the skin of a ripe pear, he knew he wanted to stay like this forever.

Now he thought that if the wind blew, perhaps he would regain some strength. In an impulse that was exploding like thunder, he wanted to live—yes, that’s what he wanted … to wake up every morning in his village and see Nahla’s face, then let the wind stroke his cheek and come to rest in his stomach. This was something deep and vital that he couldn’t explain. He didn’t even know if he could call it vital, but he could feel it deep down, in his bones.

As soon as he lifted his head with that languid pendulum motion and saw both his boots, his soul surged with wakefulness. Even though he wasn’t yet certain whether any life lay ahead of him, at least he could still feel his feet. Thank goodness—this comfort offered him strength! Back into his mind came memories of gentle breezes whose fresh scent wafted beneath his nose. Perhaps the sky would decide to help him and send a gust of rainy wind. But it was summer.

He moved his foot and felt confident that he could sit up. His frustrated hope made him more determined, but as he moved his foot and pushed his head up and leaned on his right elbow, he saw that the back of his boot had a hole, a treacherous blank. The significance of the hole he didn’t grasp at first. He couldn’t see clearly, despite the dazzling light and his clear line of vision. Then the small gap in his boot became clearer. His right foot. It was his right foot. The boot was open at the heel. Slowly he began to realise that his boot had been mutilated at the heel. He stared, inhaled deeply, and raised himself up so that his torso was half upright. Yes, his right heel was missing. As soon as he moved his foot, soil and leaves got stuck in the bloodied hole, and he felt a pain he had never before experienced. A piece of his body, then, must have flown through the air with the soil and the sand, its pieces scattered.

A part of him really had been buried.

It wasn’t a dream.

His eyes swept his surroundings. Perhaps he would find his missing piece. Then it suddenly occurred to him that his heel must have disintegrated permanently. Every new movement brought the discovery of a fresh agony, but the knowledge that he was still alive awakened his determination. This awakening seemed different. He hoped no other part of his body was missing. He would keep on having moments like this, moments of shock and amazement; he would turn his head and see the body of the Other behind the tree, sitting in the same tottering way, leaning on his right elbow, looking at him. Ali would wonder whether the Other had also lost part of himself, maybe his heel. Then a fantasy overwhelmed him that he was looking at nothing but a mirror, that this being was still moving and had the same wound in his left ear. He wished he could see the being clearly, and pull him out of his head. Ali started thinking about the wild animals that would come as soon as night fell. He was ready for them!

What had his flesh looked like as it scattered in the air? It must have been like motes of dust.

Ali bit his lip and tasted salt blended with something as bitter as an acorn. Bitterness with extra salt. He thought briefly that he was like the calf that walked around with half a head; but the thought of the calf brought memories of the wind, and the tree by the maqam, and these inspired him with patience. He knew the wind like no one else did; he used to play with it as it swooped over the rocky precipice. The day after he rejected school and was beaten by his father, Ali leapt up from his bed before daybreak. It was early winter and in the mountains the cold dawn hit people’s faces like a razorblade, but the weather didn’t stop Ali going out, despite the sores on his feet from the pomegranate cane. He walked across the village and through the forest until the rocky outcrop appeared. Below the rocks loomed a cleft that faced the opposite mountain; the earth was split there, creating a deep slope. The villagers called it the slope to the Valley of Hell.

Ali sat on the edge of the rock and the desire to fly came back to him. He took off his plastic sandals and unfurled his legs in the empty space. He wiggled his toes, blue and scored from the pomegranate cane, and sighed in contentment as the wind played with them. The breeze was cold and cutting, so much so that he relaxed as he lay down and gazed into the chasm below. The sky gambolled with him too, and he was soaked by the rain which had been falling since sunrise. With the tips of his fingers, he clung to the protuberances of the rock, and he looked down to the other side. He wondered whether there was an unfamiliar tree there, one he hadn’t met before. Humayrouna told him that there was nothing special there, only a small stream he already knew and sometimes bathed in, and a forest that could be reached on foot from the next village—it was flatter from that side because the mountain slope was less steep. Perhaps he should pack a small bundle of clothes and go down into the wadi and walk until he found a place where he could live without having to come back. An idea returned—he would love to live up high with the wind. He lay back and made his body a right angle attached to the rockface. To someone in the distance he would seem like the base of a right-angled triangle. In fact, he was imagining someone looking at him from above, and this person would see Ali as part of the rockface, his lower half hanging in the wind and his feet swinging in the abyss while his other half clung on, his hands outstretched in a cross, his fingers furrowing the jagged edges of the rock. He wished this cliff would turn into a towering, rocky pillar holding up a bed of stone, with two oak trees next to the bed: the tree of their home, and the tree of the maqam. He relinquished his wish, because the tree trunks would never grow in a lump of rock, but Ali was nevertheless certain they would find some way to extend their roots downwards, pushing through rocky shafts in search of soil. This idea appealed to him, and he smiled. Then he swallowed some raindrops and stuck out his tongue, relishing the taste of the small drops, moving them over his tongue and laughing out loud—something he only did very rarely. Then he forgot the pain in his fingers and his back, the marks on his skin from his father’s cane. The cane had been made from a pomegranate tree and was slender and flexible. Earlier that morning, before he slipped out of the house, Ali had anxiously, covetously, pulled it out from under his father’s bed where it was stored as though it were a precious treasure. He held the cane in a firm grip and felt how smooth and streamlined it was. He had closed a resolute fist over it and fled to the cliff, waving it in the air all the way, and when he got there he threw it into the wadi and watched it fall while raindrops skipped over his tongue. He needed nothing but his dream of a rocky bed resting on a towering pillar. It should be easy. Once, he had heard a story about a man who lived like that … and yet …

The sky had blackened and rain poured down in sheets. Ali straightened up again and swung his feet. Looking into the chasm, he felt no fear. His back was hurting and he couldn’t lie down anymore, so he drew up his body and curled his knees beneath his chin, then stood and walked to the edge. He steadied his feet, spread his arms, felt his back tickled by goosebumps (or so he thought) and opened his eyes. He saw the vastness of the sky and the expanse of the forests. He was ready to fly. The wind tempted him to come and play—and he said to himself that playing with the wind meant flying. Ali wanted to join in with the wind’s thrilling games, just once without having to rely on the tree branches. He breathed in deeply, swallowing air down until he could feel his bones emerging from his chest, and just at that moment, as the rain hammered down, the wind dropped. Ali woke up from his urgent desire to take flight and moved a couple of paces back from the ledge. He took hold of a sharply jutting ridge of rock that had a plant growing underneath. He didn’t look to see what kind of plant it was, but it was thorny and scratched his fingers. Ali curled up in a ball, hugging his knees to his chest, and muttered, “I’m going to live here.”

Ali didn’t live there. He stayed until nightfall, without moving. When he was tired, he curled up in a ball. His family looked for him all day in vain. Nahla’s prayers could be heard all over the village as she screamed into the wadi opposite their house—fearing her son had fallen into the valley and joined his aunt—while his father roamed the forests shouting his name. They stumbled across him the next day. The neighbours said he was unconscious with half of his body hanging in the wind, curled up on himself like a ball of thorns. He had stuck out his tongue and bitten it, and a few drops of blood trickled from the cut. As they brought him back, Nahla swore an oath by every maqam of every saint that she wouldn’t make him go back to school. And she made another vow, feasible because it required no sacrifices or money from her. She swore to walk barefoot alongside her son to the maqam of the great saint; perhaps he could cure Ali of his absent-mindedness. She refused to say his lunacy, as they did in the village.

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novel Planet of Clay, also published by World Editions, was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize. Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards—notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award and the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards. She was recently selected to be part of the International Writers Program with the Royal Society of Literature.