Zelte der Sehnsucht

خيام الحنين

 
WORDS AND PHOTOS: NUSRAT DURRANI

You wake inside your UNHCR tent at dawn to the crackle of distant gunfire. You have no money or means of livelihood, but you pay $100 rent a month for the tarpaulin over your head. It’s 6.30 am and the sun is already livid. Or it’s winter and it snowed last night; the tent is leaking. The volunteer trucks haven’t delivered food since last week so you may go hungry today. Did the world’s compassion dry up again? Maybe the neighbors will spare you some pasta or lentils.

It’s been a month since you heard from your sister across the border, behind the hills, in Syria. Every evening you watch the orange clouds of gun-smoke and sand rise in the distance. She may be freezing on a boat on the ocean somewhere or blown to bits in an air raid. You had nightmares again last night, of your classroom being bombed, children exploding like fruit, splattered on the walls. Your ears are still ringing and your eyes burn. The shrapnel inside your thigh stabs every time you move. It will cost $700 to remove.

You walk out of your tent and stumble to the common toilets. The morning is crisp and cold like a razor. Your ritual at sunrise is to examine, one by one, the images draping the tents. Or they examine you as you pass by the arcade of lost dreams and forgotten desires:

1. A jeweled Rolex with gold strap
2. Diamond encrusted rings…
3. Pink, smiling babies, cuddly like little rabbits
4. A white woman in purple running gear sprinting down the road- exercise is so important!
5. Red and white polka dots juxtaposed against sunny yellow.. you never liked bright colors, and one day when you have a house again, you will avoid these..
6. A beaming male executive in a dark suit and crisp white shirt... off to work!
7. Fly to Canada on a holiday! Canada seems so far away… maybe in a year or two they will let you go to Beirut…
8. A bright blue tent with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn logos… Like my condition on Facebook! Follow my dispossession on Twitter?
9. A woman with dark hair and intense eyes, contemplating the scene… she reminds you of your mother… Thanks God she didn’t live to see this day…
10. Gorgeous Middle-Eastern men and women with broad smiles and sparkling teeth inviting you to the Plaza Palace… once you strolled that mall with Fozia, your fiancée… your new Corolla waiting in parking lot
11. An inverted, elderly white man in hunting clothes aiming his rifle at the kids playing in the dirt…  is it your imagination? Did mysterious white men destroy all you had?
12. A woman’s thick brown tresses… sometimes you smell her shampooed hair in your daydreams…
13. Beautiful white man with clear blue eyes and muscular naked torso, shielded by a straw hat, on a beach somewhere, smiling… you are a going to be a refugee, a slave forever, waiting your turn to take a shit…
14. Fresh, delicious looking shrimp, tuna and trout…. You haven’t eaten fish since you fled Aleppo…. You haven’t eaten anything since Thursday..
15. Portraits of Middle-eastern generals, soldiers, martyrs for your cause… which one of these bastards gave the order for your city to be decimated?
16. A bride in a white lace gown with flowers in her hair, seducing you, upside down…  Fozia wanted the wedding to be in November..  that was five years ago… she must be married now? Or in Sweden or Germany?

You light up you last cigarette, the nicotine makes you dizzy. Lebanese army helicopters chop up the clouds above like lettuce. Who chose to drape these huts in irony? Was it cruelty or miscalculation? Just the random, bureaucratic recycling of tarp or a brutal joke being played on you? Does anyone else notice or care?

It’s 1.30 pm and they said the volunteers are coming. You wait in another line, behind the elderly and the women as mushrooms of sadness sprout inside your chest. Your leg hurts and stomach growls. But hope rises in the sky like the irrepressible sun, bursting into flames in the mid-day heat of Beqaa. Another day, another chance to be grateful you are alive.

You can hear the trucks in the distance.