‘The Noose Boy’: Short Fiction by Rawaa Sonbol

Four of Rawaa Sonbol’s short stories were included in the recent wide-ranging collection of contemporary Syrian literature, Aftershocks, edited by Alia Malek and published by McSweeney’s last December. All four stories are from Sonbol’s most recent collection, Do, Yek.

Yesterday, we ran a conversation with author Rawaa Sonbol, which you can read here.

THE NOOSE BOY

By Rawaa Sonbol

Translated by Katharine Halls

REMOVE UNWANTED HAIR FOR good with the newest laser technology. I read the billboard on the side of the bus shelter and kept walking, anxious eyes fixed on the end of the street, past the billboard and the broken bench inside the shelter, the pale expanse of the model’s armpit printed on my mind until it was dislodged by the headlights of the bus, which appeared in the distance on the opposite side of the street, beeping its horn and sending a near-hysterical thrill through the group of waiting people, who thronged toward it.

I should have got here two minutes earlier, I thought, cursing my luck, knowing that I was certainly not going to enjoy the luxury of sitting on a seat in the bus, and I’d be lucky to even find somewhere to stand. Might as well try. As I stepped into the road to cross to the other side I suddenly saw the rope dangling in the air, and before I knew what was happening, I could feel the cold touch of the braid under my chin and grazing my face, and I squealed in terror and stepped backward, dodging the noose, and heard the mocking laugh.

I looked up toward the source of the laugh, and there I saw him, a boy of fifteen or so with a malevolent face, lying on his stomach on top of the bus shelter. Goddamn you, I screamed in fury, taking hold of the thick rope so as to pull it from him, but at the same moment he yanked it toward him, so that it flayed the palm of my hand, and dissolved into laughter again. You psycho! I shrieked, my voice trembling, and he responded with an obscenity. Two women standing nearby asked if I was okay, and one handed me a tissue; nobody else looked like they were planning to intervene. With my hands clasped to my neck, I crossed the road, my heart pounding violently, but by that point the bus had pulled away, and I was going to have to wait for a miracle to send me another one.

On the other side, I stood and watched the boy with a mixture of fear and hatred, pressing the tissue against the friction burn in my palm; twenty minutes went by and he was still there, his slight frame and the darkness keeping him out of sight, lying in wait like a sly marksman, with only his head peering out. When a lone woman approached, he’d skillfully let down the noose, and although I was too far away to hear anything, I could guess that he was answering the screams and insults with the same malicious laugh.

After that I stopped paying attention, because I was doing sums in my head as I listened to the constant cries of Jaramana, Jaramana, leaving right now, Jaramana from the drivers of the shared taxis lined up near the bus stop, resolving to ignore them once I’d worked out I really couldn’t afford the fare. I’ll wait for the bus, I told myself, then responded to a phone call from a journalist who asked a few questions for a report he was writing about the workshop on “strengthening citizenship,” organized by a humanitarian organization based in the capital, which I’d just that day attended, and after that I called my husband to let him know I’d be late, and since it was nearly nine p.m. I spoke to my son too, reminding him to check his timetable and put the right books in his rucksack ready for school the next day and wishing him good night, and then just as I’d hung up, I spotted the headlights of the bus, and at the very same moment I heard the scream.

You little wretch! On the opposite side, a man had the boy by the arm and was yelling this over and over as he shoved him to the ground and began to punch and kick him.

Either curiosity or a vengeful urge or a mix of the two made me ignore the bus and cross the street to join the other bystanders and watch: the wife of the man was hovering to one side, one hand fearfully clutching at her neck, while her husband, still punching and kicking, furiously recounted to the circle of people how he’d stopped to buy cigarettes from the kiosk, his wife a few paces in front of him, when he heard her shriek and saw the rope and the boy; the men listened intently, some occasionally contributing a kick or a punch or an insult of their own, but the boy himself was guffawing brazenly in a way that only increased the man’s rage and violence, and then brazen became witless, and in a few moments more he was wailing bitterly. Leave him now, that’s enough, for the Prophet’s sake, cried the man’s wife, tugging at his elbow, so he gave the boy one last kick in the stomach for luck, then left him, a sniveling, groaning, trembling heap on the ground, and walked away huffing and puffing with his wife.

A young man standing among the observers stepped forward to help the boy, who gripped the extended arm and leapt to his feet, baring a face streaked with blood and tears and snot. They hanged my mother, he yelped brokenly, eyes fixed on the young man. They hanged her.

There is no power or strength but in God! exclaimed the young man, and I heard the same words murmured by other voices around me. Who were “they”? How had they hanged her? And why? Nobody dared ask; we just looked fearfully at one another as the cold crept into our bodies, a cold I knew well, a harsh cold that made the bones hurt and the heart shudder.

A woman held out a small plastic bottle of water to the boy as he stood leaning on the young man’s arm, and he poured the water down his throat in one go, then loosed himself from the arm and tossed the bottle aside, wiped the snot and blood from his nose with the palm of his hand, glancing left and right, dragged his feet with difficulty to where the rope lay on the ground and threw it over one shoulder, turned his back to go, and then suddenly looked back toward us, spat in our direction, burst out laughing, clambered up the side of the bus shelter, and lay down on the roof with his rope.

Reprinted from Aftershocks, edited by Alia Malek, with thanks to McSweeneys, Alia Malek, Rawaa Sonbol, and Katharine Halls.

Rawaa Sonbol is a Syrian author of short fiction, theater, and children’s literature. She has published three short story collections: The Tongue Hunter (2017), which received the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity, The Green Dragon’s Wife and Other Colorful Stories (2019), and most recently Do, Yek (2023), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Almultaqa Prize. She lives in Damascus, where she works as a pharmacist.