Cinnamon by Emily Danby Read Free Book Online

had stopped moving, her body had started to turn blue with cold and her breathing was loud and rasping. Tears came and she gasped for air as if teetering on the edge of an abyss. Aliyah stared at her mother, who forced herself to appear not to care; were she to take her daughter in her arms as she wanted to, she knew that the girl’s father would fly into a rage. He didn’t wait long before grabbing Aliyah by the hair and pulling her into the room, where he started to kick her, screaming death to her whore of a mother for bearing him daughters. Her mother began to plead with him to let the girl be, biting her lip hard each time he called her the daughter of a whore. ‘But I’m the one who puts food on the table,’ she muttered repeatedly, her voice barely audible.
    Aliyah had never known her father to lose it like that. She couldn’t understand what provoked him to want to kill his own children. The thought of the first punch, or the first strike of his giant foot against her body filled her with terror, but she soon lost consciousness, only to wake up a few hours later with every limb of her body in pain. Her mother’s refusal to go to work so she could look after her daughter – her way of punishing him for the beating – exacerbated his frustration. She wept all day as he cursed and swore, having realised that his wife would not be returning with the necessary provisions to fill the hungry stomachs surrounding him.
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    It was the same image of him which seemed to be coming towards her now, drawing closer from the distant horizon as she stumbled along on her high-heels. Aliyah paused for a minute and turned her head. The window was still closed and from a distance it seemed a dark, black speck.
    She had no other hope but to return to al-Raml. The district formed a partial wall around Damascus, like a viper encircling the city. On the inside of the wall, the city was cramped, standing motionless before the parade of concrete houses and the peculiar clans of people setting out in every direction, in search of a morsel of bread.
    Despite the sectarianism which, over recent decades, had given each clan its own character – from al-Riz district, to ‘Ash al-Wurud, to Jaramana Camp – each group resembled the rest and they were all interconnected. Their slums reached out into the heart of the city, like Dwel’a, which stretched into Jaramana and on to Bab Touma.
    Al-Raml was home to an odd assortment of poor folk, who had carried their humiliating poverty with them when they fled to south Damascus. The people built small rooms for themselves from sheets of tin and badly made cement bricks. Impoverished Palestinians and dark-skinned Ghouranis – people of the Jordan Valley – lived alongside the destitute people who had arrived one day from the coastal mountains, dividing into large groups. The new arrivals lived in miserable settlements, established chaotically by mobsters, cheats and traffickers. Senior military officers took hold of the fringes of the city and sent their own ‘communities’ to live there, the new settlements forming the officers’ spheres of influence. They created ‘ghettos’ too, laid out like a monochrome mosaic, the colour of poverty and despair. Those who migrated from the neighbouring countryside and from more distant rural areas, dreaming of a decent life, became mercenaries, bodyguards, secret police and smugglers. The rest – among them the people of al-Raml – turned their daughters into servants, just as they had done over a hundred years previously when the girls were pawned to Aleppan tradesmen. Meanwhile, the girls’ fathers became day labourers, scattered about Damascus’s public squares, where they would accept any offer of work that came their way. Very quickly, the district attracted a group of poor university students, who lived by the dozens in adjoining rooms. Tenth-rate prostitutes settled in