Samar Yazbek’s ‘The Silent Night-Dwellers of Damascus’

This essay, by the extraordinary Syrian writer Samar Yazbek, appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam.

The Silent Night-Dwellers of Damascus

By Samar Yazbek

Translated by Maisaa Tanjour and Alice Holttum

After the Fall

 

They are the beggars of Damascus—its children, its teenagers, scattered in every corner of the city. They don’t hesitate to grab your clothes, admonishing you to give them something to satisfy their hunger. Those who smear their small bare feet with frozen mud in the bitter cold of February just to make their misery clear, those in the alleys of Old Damascus; they won’t eat you, and their filth won’t stain your clean clothes. They are the silent night-dwellers who cry out during the day. Stubbornly, I tried to understand their movements, their actions; they became my obsession for days, to the point that they themselves began to wonder: Who is this “clingy aunt”? Who is this parasite who wants to turn our tragedy into a spectacle? Perhaps this is what we all do—those of us who write about the suffering of others without the ability to save them. It is yet another disgrace added to the shame of humanity.

At night, human voices emerge which are different from those we hear in the full blaze of day. Their owners don’t seem to be searching for anything specific; rather, they’re possessed by anger and emptiness. Many emotions flicker in their eyes, but two are most prominent: numbness and rage. The usual begging and pleading appear like a thin crust, one that a true human being, an observer, can break through. Even a monstrous novelist might shed a few tears at the sight of those imploring and deceptive looks. Yes, there is emptiness and rage—but, my dear, you have neither the time nor the energy to figure out each and every look on its own. And don’t be fooled: when we speak of the “silent night people” of Damascus, we don’t mean they’re a homogenous group, one that can be analyzed, understood, or classified. That is a pitiful, outdated notion. No group can be measured by fixed standards—especially in a place like Syria, a land that has grown so terrifying it defies belief. The silent night people are the very same ones who, by daylight, scream and run and shout. But night strips them of their voices, save for those who linger, growling, swearing, and cursing, eyes burning with hatred and anger, until exhaustion drags them into sleep. These are people ready to tear down the whole world. And one day, they’ll swarm like locusts to devour it.

Let us agree: this isn’t a story about the street children of Damascus, but an attempt to write against forgetting, against simplification, against the official narrative of childhood. War doesn’t just give birth to orphans; it births a whole new concept of childhood—a childhood with torn shoes, treading over the city’s body as if walking on its skulls. It is about misery stripped of any human feature. This is a text about voices that do not scream, about looks that dismember the city more than the shells ever did. Don’t be terrified. Don’t be afraid as you read these words.

Because I was living in Old Damascus, specifically in the Qaymariyah neighborhood, I had observed three groups of “silent night people.” One stood in Bab Touma Square, and the other two appeared just beyond the square after the first left turn. They were not fixed groups—sometimes individuals appeared alone, sometimes their composition changed—but the Qaymariyah group held the most prominent place in my mind. It consisted of three girls: one barely over three years old, silent and old for her age; the second about seven; and the third approaching adolescence—she said she was thirteen. She was the only one who agreed to give me a name, which I later learned was not real.

On my way to see them every night, there was an old woman who wouldn’t stop talking and begging, alone in her wheelchair. She sat in the alley, repeating her pleas, receiving money from passersby. Around her, boys with sharp tongues moved about, swearing at her, disappearing, then returning. I watched her from afar, trembling at her shivering cold. After she collected her money, a young man appeared; he approached her and snatched what was in her hand. She cursed him and prayed for his death, and he fled while the boys flocked around him. This scene was repeated with precise regularity. Everyone knew their role. The young man’s eyes were wide, watching the old woman like prey. He lunged, then ran away. She howled, then fell silent, then resumed her begging.

I was told that entire groups operated by putting old women and children out to work. This old woman wasn’t playing a role, she was truly disabled. Her face, pale under the yellow streetlight, contorted as she screamed and cursed at the boys, who pinched her, shouted in her face, or tried to snatch a loaf of bread from her hands. At some point, the boys would leave and the young man would walk away. He’d disappear; I could see no sign of him. Then, after midnight, she would fall completely silent… and then he would return. It must have been him, sometime around dawn; the same young man would come and take her off somewhere. In the morning, she’d be gone, but by early afternoon, she would always be back, placed in the same corner, in the same state, as though nothing had happened. She never responded when I spoke to her. Yet despite her disability, she remained a serious competitor to the nearby group.

As for the three girls, they were alone, apart from a boy who refused to tell me his age and looked astonished that I’d even asked. He simply repeated a single phrase: “I want to eat, Auntie.” You, dear reader, could offer him a sandwich and he’d take it. But he would also curse you, because it wasn’t the money he needed. The young man who took money from the old woman also demanded it from the boy, and if he didn’t get it, he’d beat him. Once, he struck him—slammed his head against the wall—right in front of some passersby, who kept walking as though nothing had happened. A brief glance at the boy’s bleeding head, and they moved on. For a moment, you feel like nothing moves forwards in this city, but rather slips backwards, to a time before speech, when everything was understood through crying.

In Bab Touma, the nocturnal crowds never stop. The streets are packed, and on every corner, a child extends a hand and asks, as if the question of need has become part of the street’s architecture, carved into stone like Sumerian inscriptions. The food shops overflow with customers and child beggars sprout there like grass: tender grass, dry grass, grass trampled underfoot or glanced at indifferently, then left behind.

I decided to come after midnight, to stay and wait, to find out when they would leave.

It was a night in late February of last year.

In other parts of Syria, people don’t venture out after five in the afternoon—I saw this in Latakia and Jableh. But Damascus is different. Syrians argue endlessly over whose version of events is true. Each has their reasons. Each belongs to a different “Syria.” What is said in Damascus isn’t a lie, and what is said on the coast isn’t a lie. They quarrel over right and wrong, while each carries their own share of truth, their own portion of sorrow, and their own burden of shame. But in the narrow alleys of Bab Touma, life carried on with the “night people” in a different way.

I was standing in the corner, watching the three girls. My eyes were on the little one—barefoot, barelegged, wearing a dress that reached her knees and a pair of shorts underneath. Her feet were caked in dark mud, as if someone had smeared them with a thick paste. The same mud clung to her hands and face. The small, skinny feet and the dust-streaked face made her look like a creature that had just stepped out of a film, not out of an alley. She sat on the rain-soaked ground. Her dress was damp. What color was it? No color. Maybe it had been white once. She looked only at the feet of the passersby, her eyes always fixed at the level of their steps, her hands stretched out without a word, without a gesture. If you came near, she flinched.

By day, there was another girl, the one on the verge of adolescence. Black, sharp eyes, her hair tied in a ponytail. Barefoot too, though not smeared in mud like the little one. Her hair was thin, matted. She wore a loose-sleeved dress over long trousers. She was the one in charge. She spoke, begged, pleaded, got angry, knocked on the doors of the world with her voice. Sometimes quiet, sometimes firm, sometimes screaming, howling. The little girl—three years old, or a little more, or a little less—would call out “Uncle” and “Auntie” during the day, while at night, her gaze would drop to where the feet moved. Some passersby, when touched by a moment of guilt or sorrow or anger, or a fleeting mercy, would give them money. Others avoided them.

One day, Suaad—that was the name the dark-eyed girl gave me after a long negotiation in exchange for money—grabbed the skirt of a woman passing by. Suaad told me that was her name, then gave me a different one on another day. Every piece of information had a price, and she knew that perfectly well. Clever, trained, and fully aware of the rules of the game. When Suaad tugged at the woman’s skirt, the woman slapped her, screamed, and ran off, shouting behind her, “Thief! Thief!” Suaad didn’t stay silent. She shouted back, “Liar!” then hurled a heavy insult, spat on the ground, and barked at the two girls who were with her to follow. But she had already let go of the little girl’s hand. The terrified child started running after her, alone.

If you wanted to sit in Bab Touma Square, there were still some benches left from a small park that had long since ceased to be a park. I sat down with Suaad. She agreed to sit and talk, but started off firmly: “I don’t want to say anything. And if you can help me, then do it and leave.”

“Where are your parents?” I asked her.

“Dead,” she replied curtly.

I asked about the two girls—were they her sisters?

“No.”

“Then whose daughters are they?”

She gave me this sarcastic look, as if to say, Are you stupid?

At that moment, she looked as though she were thirty, even though her features still belonged to a teenager. Strong, confident, unyielding. I thought she must be harassed often—she was beautiful—but the filth covering her face cut that thought short. That filth seemed like part of the uniform, a daily necessity.

“I can help you,” I told her plainly. “Where do you sleep?”

She pointed to the street. “In the street,” she said. Then she added, “If you want to help me, give me some money.”

“Don’t you want a place to sleep?” I said.

She gave me that awful look again then ran off. All the information I’d gathered over the past days confirmed that the ones exploiting these children were gangs spread out across Damascus.

Suaad was certainly born at the beginning of the revolution. She knew nothing of the Syria we once knew. She had spent most of her childhood on the street. A strong girl. Tough. Ready to devour you. She defended the two girls fiercely, though she never admitted they were her sisters. Maybe they were not—though I had a hunch they were. At night, Suaad would fall silent. The two girls would fall silent. And the boy who was always with them would fall silent, too. After ten o’clock at night, I would pace back and forth in front of them, telling her, “I live here. If you need anything, I’m here.” She’d ignore me completely. I would stand in a distant corner, where the dim streetlight didn’t reach me, and watch the three girls and the boy. I heard her call him “Muhammad.” The little one could barely walk. She would sit on the ground, stretching her legs out into the path of passersby. If someone wasn’t paying attention and stepped on her foot, she’d scream. Startled, they’d turn back and give her money. A clear, deliberate tactic. She’d take the money, hide it in her tiny hand, clutching it tight. After a while, she’d stretch out her hand towards Suaad and hand it over. Suaad would tuck it into her pocket. Then, the money would pass to Muhammad’s hand. I had no idea where Muhammad went after that. He would disappear for hours, then come back. Suaad walked like a man. When you’re a girl sleeping on the streets, you have to learn to walk like you fear no one. She moved like the leader of a small gang.

She looked around her with confidence—never begging, never degrading herself. She must have been harassed, maybe worse. Beautiful, homeless, young. Surely many had told her, “Come with us.”

I kept thinking about it—probably too much.

The day after she had run away from me in Bab Touma Square, I told her I could connect her with organisations that could help her and her “sisters.”

“They’re not my sisters,” she said scornfully, then added, “Give me money for a sandwich.” She jerked her head derisively and walked ahead of me with a theatrical, sarcastic strut, her eyes gleaming with contempt for the world, as though it were about to explode from within her. Her thin, matted hair looked as if it might catch fire at any moment. All the mockery, the hate, the shame a single eye could carry, I saw in hers. And she had every right. Every right to look at me—to look at the world—like that.

She placed one hand on her hip, stood with her feet slightly apart as gang leaders do, raised her head to the sky, and pointed to Muhammad, who was standing a little way off—always in the same spot, as if drawn there in ink.

He started walking towards her, and I turned my back and withdrew into the daytime city. As midnight neared, fatigue began to settle over the girls’ faces. They lay down on the ground, barefoot, each one stretching her mud-caked feet halfway into the alley.

Anyone passing by had to sidestep them, adjust their stride, acknowledge their presence—if only for a brief moment. There they layed, weary, drained, silent. The boy came and went, disappeared, then came back. I followed him once. He moved down another alley towards a different boy standing off at a distance—a small, wiry kid, thin but full of life. It looked as if the two of them were carrying out a task.

Not far from them, another group I hadn’t seen before: two girls, probably around nine or ten years old, with a toddler no older than two, barely able to stand. She looked exhausted, filthy, tottering. The groups were scattered, each occupying its own patch. Boys moved between them, stringing them together, like go-betweens. Other boys moved alone, darting around lightly—begging, shouting, swearing.

One boy, maybe seven years old, when I didn’t look his way and kept walking, cursed at me, then darted away. They do that, sprouting up everywhere. Maybe here, in Bab Touma Square and the Old City, they know there’s a high number of visitors and strangers, so they gather in large numbers. It is their chance to scrape together a little, to stay active, their movements managed by whoever has assigned them to the alleyways.

I remembered the woman who shouted “Thief!” at Suaad, then urged the gathered crowd to “catch that homeless animal,” as she put it. She was characterising these kids as a bigger threat than any of the dangers surrounding the people of Damascus. When I stepped towards her and said, “She’s just a child,” she snapped back, “They’d kill for a thousand lira! I live here. I know what they do. They’re an organized network. These aren’t children—they’re criminals.” Then she shot me a look of heavy disdain and superiority, and flicked at her skirt as if dusting herself off—or perhaps shaking the guilt off her soul—granting herself, and only herself, the privilege of survival.

No one can say for certain where all these displaced people came from. But it’s a long war. At night, they transform into silent creatures—perhaps from exhaustion, or maybe because their daytime work bears its fruit at night, through this silence… and the display of bodies. Muddy, waxen bodies. I watch them closely, under a sky that bears witness to human cruelty and depravity. Bodies lying everywhere, becoming part of the ordinary everyday scene, part of the portrait of the new Damascus—the post-war Damascus. Anyone who sees the devastation surrounding Damascus, its countryside, and its towns might guess where these children came from. I met a young woman who works for one of the civil society organisations. She insisted on hiding her identity and the name of the organisation. She said some of the children come from the north, and not all of them are necessarily war orphans.

She said that some children are sent by their families to the streets to beg for food or whatever they can manage. I asked her, “Are there many families who send their children off?” “Yes, there are many,” she replied. “And there are young girls who are subjected to harassment. I have three cases of child rape.”

“Children, boys and girls, appear suddenly, then just as suddenly disappear. No one knows what happens to them.”

When I began researching the lives of these nocturnal wanderers who sleep on the streets and walk among us, I did not intend to consult statistics or knock on the doors of children’s rights organisations. My only concern was to follow the personal lives of the three girls. They were silent. Only Suaad, the eldest, was allowed to speak.

On the sixth day, at eleven o’clock at night, the girls were lying in the street—small, exhausted bodies, muddy feet, hands outstretched, waiting for a coin from a passerby moved by conscience or a fleeting moment of pity. Suaad paced back and forth to each end of the alley like someone reviewing their position on a battlefield. The city at that moment was breathing slowly. The young men of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham moved among the people, watching them unblinkingly; the people looked back, some with curiosity, others with suspicion or indifference. Groups crossed paths and ignored one another, and some hurried by, as though to escape the possibility of meeting an eye that might indict them for their silence.

I approached Suaad again; this time, I tried to be clearer. I told her I was a writer and journalist, and that I wanted to help her. She looked at me with disgust and asked, “How much will you give me for what I say?” It wasn’t an innocent question, but a confirmation of the power dynamic she’d established from the very first moment. With every attempt, I repeated, “I want to help you,” making phone calls in front of her to convince her. But each time, she would dismiss me, mock me, or demand money for nothing in return. When I suggested that we take care of the littlest girl, Suaad laughed and said with biting sarcasm, “What little girl? No one here is little.” Her voice was sharp, as if she were spitting everything out at once. But for the first time since I’d met her, I saw something stir in her eyes—a flicker of water, a thread of a tear, something glistening about to drop, then gathering itself back. In a weary, defeated tone, she said, “Let us make a living and leave us be.” Then she went back and sat down beside the two girls and gathered them into her arms, as though the whole world rested in that embrace.

Their muddy legs gleamed under the cold streetlight like weathered wooden sticks. When I tried to approach again, she screamed, “What’s it got to do with you?”  She stretched out her hand then hurled a heavy insult at me before walking away. I couldn’t reply. I stepped back, feeling that I had lost the ability to break through this wall. I was certain someone would soon come to take them off somewhere, letting them loose again in the morning.

The hour had passed midnight. Suaad was holding the little girl in her arms, her eyes shut from exhaustion. The number of passersby had begun to dwindle. A pair of lovers walked past—not touching, but their eyes revealed that scandalous, unspoken look. The young woman paused for a moment, looked at the three girls, pressed a hand to her mouth, and closed her eyes. She was thin, wearing tight jeans, and it looked like she’d been crying. The young man beside her pulled out some money and held it out to the girls. The scene was harrowing—especially that little girl, barely three years old, if not younger. She looked closer to two, frail and pale as though suffering from anaemia, her tiny body hardly able to endure the cold. Nearly naked, barefoot, lying on the ground like a discarded stone in a forgotten alley. The next day, the neighboring shopkeeper would tell me, “These are the necessities of the job, madam.” He said it as though offering a simple explanation for a painfully complex scene. By one in the morning, I couldn’t bear it any more. I was shivering from the cold, circling around them, not knowing what awaited me—or them. I left, carrying with me a terrible, hollow emptiness.

At four-thirty in the morning I woke up terrified. I had barely slept three hours and I knew I wouldn’t be able to close my eyes again unless I saw them—unless I made sure they were still there, in their usual corner of the alley. I left the house a little before dawn, running through the alleys damp with Damascus’s gentle rain, wondering what I would find. When I arrived, the scene was exactly as I’d left it: the three girls lay asleep, as if they’d turned into creatures of clay and light, wrapped in a thin, grey blanket that barely covered half their bodies. Suaad held the little three-year-old in her arms, while the third girl clutched her hand and rested her head on Suaad’s shoulder. Muhammad, the boy who drifted in and out of the night like a shadow, was asleep in the far corner, covered with a different blanket. The fine rain fell onto their heads. The ground was wet, the air cold and the sky heavy. And yet, no one moved. Only their cheeks, catching the misty drizzle, and their noses, barely visible under the blanket. Suaad’s lips had turned blue from the cold, her face frozen like a stone. The little one slept deeply, mucus running quietly from her nose as though she’d grown used to sleeping this way. The middle girl was frighteningly beautiful—a fragile beauty pleading for salvation. I approached slowly, careful not to wake them, not to startle them. Still, Suaad opened her eyes. She didn’t move. She just looked at me—that same mocking, deep gaze, sharp as a blade. Then she blinked. She didn’t say a word. Didn’t so much as twitch a muscle. But that look was enough. It was everything that could be said. A whole language without letters. I wanted to hear something from her. Anything. A sentence to break the silence. One story. But she wouldn’t; she wouldn’t tell me where she came from, or who the little girl was, or who Muhammad was. She left me there, hanging in limbo—like the thousands of Syrians who pass by these children every day and return to their homes burdened with emptiness and unanswered questions. For a moment, the thought crossed my mind to sit beside them. To be like one of those kind grandmothers in the old tales. To tell them a story. To pull the blanket up around them. To buy them a warm breakfast. They could have been my granddaughters. But instead, I left them. And I walked through the streets of Old Damascus—those alleys that were once a refuge for lovers and memories, now a refuge for rage, for displacement, for unknown fates.

The rain, which I had once thought of as celebratory after years of exile, now felt like lashes. It didn’t caress my face—it whipped it. I walked away, feeling the weight of betrayal pressing down heavily on my back. Betraying them, especially Suaad, who was there, despite everything, guarding the two little girls like a wounded lioness. Maybe they were nothing more than tools in some organized child exploitation network. Maybe they truly were sisters. Maybe Muhammad was their brother. Or maybe none of them had known the others, and life had simply thrown them together, just like that, on the pavement, in this defeated time.

But the only certain thing was that Suaad—that young girl with the dead eyes—stood like a solid wall between the two others. She was protecting them with all her rage and silence. And in that last glance she had given me, she was saying: “Come closer and I’ll kill you all.”

In the end, this isn’t a report. It’s nothing but scattered writing—against documentation, against archiving, against reducing childhood to numbers and statistics.

Just words.

Words that walk barefoot with Suaad and sit beside her in silence under a rain that won’t stop.

I wish I had told her, “I’m sorry. Just… sorry.”

Artwork by Etab Hreib.

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 has published two collections of short stories, seven novels, and four non-fiction literary narratives. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and 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. Her latest novel, Where the Wind Calls Home, is shortlisted for the National Book Award 2024.

Maisaa Tanjour is a freelance translator, researcher, and interpreter with extensive experience working in diverse professional, humanitarian, and multicultural settings and organisations. Born in Syria in 1979, she now resides in the UK. Maisaa holds a BA in English Language and Literature and a Postgraduate Diploma in Literary Studies from the University of Homs. In 2005, she moved to the UK to pursue further postgraduate studies at the University of Leeds, where she earned an MA in Interpreting and Translation Studies (English-Arabic/Arabic-English) and a PhD in Translation Studies.

Alice Holttum is a part-time freelance translator and translation proofreader. She was born in Edinburgh in 1979 and currently resides there, working also as a furniture maker. She has a Joint Honours BA in Russian and Arabic (2004) and an MA in Applied Translation Studies (Arabic-English, 2006), both from the University of Leeds.