Chapter 3: Pizza and War, Cake and COVID
Tariq and Amna's Story
Ramadan Kareem to Tariq, Amna, and their families back home.
Amna and I are sitting on the big, comfy brown couch that volunteers brought over last year and wrestled up the stairs of the family’s first American apartment. Arriving with only a few suitcases, they had needed everything. At first, their new place was as anonymous as a hotel room; now it feels like a family home. On the wall are new photographs of the kids smiling and playing, and opposite the couch is an azan clock that sings out the call to prayer and digitally displays the time in their native land. The song is hauntingly resonant, as if the singer were in the room with us.
Today the kids are off school for President’s Day, and Amna is working from home. Before delving into the past, we catch up over the delicious, health-conscious lunch she has made for the two of us: salad, chicken kebabs, and seasoned rice. Suleiman and Sarah play in their room while three-year-old Laith, who loves bugs, bounces a rubbery blue spider up my arm.
Suleiman gets indignant when told he can’t bring his lunch into his room. “It’s not fair,” he scowls with the same earnest sense of injustice that he voiced after coming home from a school lesson about Rosa Parks and the Mongomery bus boycott. I can imagine him as a future civil rights activist advocating for all that’s fair and right in the world, including kids being able to eat macaroni and cheese in their rooms.
Tariq couldn’t join us for lunch because he had a doctor’s appointment for insomnia. In general, he has been struggling with the pain of telling his story. Reliving his detention and torture inevitably has triggered nightmares, but he wants to keep going; he needs for their story to be told more than he needs his sleep.
After we eat, Amna brings me a glass of water delicately scented with essence of orange blossoms, a treat that I’d never known existed before we met. A drop transforms ordinary water into a summer garden. I savor a sip and then turn on a tiny digital recorder that, for their safety, will never be connected to the internet.
I press the Record button and we transition into another world: the years leading up to the crisis that brought them here to this country, this city, this couch with the recorder between us. She tells the story calmly and at times humorously, but I can feel the fear and tension growing in my body as I listen. Instinctively, I’m poised to flee from events that happened to someone else years ago.
Through this fight-or-flight journey of words, Laith, who knows he is safe, dances around us and chatters happily:
“Look at my shoes!”
“They’re very cute.”
“No, they’re not cute.”
“Ah! Are they cool?”
“Yes, they’re cool.”
Amna got pregnant with Suleiman a few months after they married. His arrival brought the two families together, melting away any lingering conflicts: the baby was all that mattered. During her pregnancy, she and one of Tariq’s sisters became very close. They both liked to talk, and her sister-in-law would come over in the afternoons for long chats.
Suleiman was making talking noises from the time he was a tiny baby. We joked that he came out talking because we had talked so much while he was in my tummy.
About a year and half later, Sarah arrived after a relatively easy pregnancy and another C-section. When Sarah was about a year old, they finally bought the beautiful home they’d been saving up for. With her sisters and mother to help with the kids, Amna was able to keep working at the job she loved.
In some ways, I’m a better mom when I’m working. Back then I was so organized and full of energy. When I was with the kids, I was completely focused on them. When I was at work, I was completely focused there, too.
She got pregnant with Laith three years later. This pregnancy was the hardest: she was sick all the time, and there was a problem with the placenta that required her to sleep only on her back for the last three months. Because she had had two C-sections already, she was told she would have to have one for Laith as well, or his birth would be life-threatening for her. About a month before he was due, she had such severe back pain that she called her aunt, who was also her doctor, and asked her what to do. Her aunt told her to rush to the hospital. They made it just barely in time for the doctors to deliver Laith by C-section.
A week later, COVID quarantine shut down the city and emptied the hospital.
War and COVID kept everyone shut in at home: no walks, no sports outdoors. But there were good times, too. By then we had our new home, and I tried to make it safe and fun for the kids. I decorated their rooms, and we played games and watched movies. When Tariq came home, we would have pizza—his and the kids’ favorite—and Nutella cake. Those were bad times in our country, but still those days are some of the nicest memories I have with our three children.
As hard as they’d worked to make their home a haven, its safety was fragile. Soon, with war and COVID still raging, they would have to leave it behind, along with their car and almost all their possessions.
First, though, Amna had another unexpected blow in the form of a family tragedy. When Laith was a year old and Tariq was out of the country for work, she got a phone call from her brother.
They would always call me first with bad news because they saw me as the strong one. I pretend that I’m strong, so that’s what they see.
The news was the worst she’d gotten in a long time: her kind, funny aunt, an angel in her life, had just died of COVID. After a year of physical isolation, her aunt’s passing was both devastating and strangely unreal. Years later, Amna still feels the urge to pick up the phone and call her. Her aunt is somehow still over there, back home, along with the other loved ones she can call but not touch.
Two days later, Tariq’s U.S. employer called him to work. He never told her the details of his assignments, and she never asked for more than he was willing to reveal. But when he got back from this trip, she knew something was very wrong. When she asked, he said it was nothing, but his silence stretched dark and taut between them.
When he came back, he was not the same. It’s like there was a black circle around him. He looked so upset, and he stared into space as if obsessed with something that he was trying to work out in his mind.
Finally, he told her that the local authorities had arrested him and detained him for hours while he was on a mission. They also confiscated his phone after forcing him to unlock it. Given the alliance between the authorities and an extremist group, the work documents and plans on his phone most likely were about to fall into the worst possible hands. Though he was free for the moment, their troubles were just beginning.
It was the first time Amna had ever seen her tough husband this scared.
“Enta Omri,” a favorite song of Amna’s
Your eyes returned me to the days that had gone by
They taught me to regret the past and its wounds…