(Zaman Al Wasl)- Om Mahmoud, 50, recounts the intimate details of her loss and forced migration from the al-Khaldiyeh neighborhood in the central city of Homs.
Om Mahmoud was forced to leave in 2012 by the regime forces and auxiliary militias.
Om Mahmoud was forced to leave in 2012 by the regime forces and auxiliary militias.
She left behind three graves and a destroyed house in al-Khaldiyeh neighborhood for the latest stop in her life to be a refugee camp. In her tent, Om Mahmoud keeps a black box filled with memories and objects, and with deep breaths, she tells the stories behind them.
Her eldest son Mahmoud loved to shell broad beans. He was shot in the head by a sniper as he returned home from a nearby restaurant. Oum Mahmoud found some 5 Syrian Pound coins in his pocket that may have been the change the restaurant when he paid for his plate of broad beans on that September morning. Mahmoud did not live to taste freedom and broad beans together.
Om Mahmoud keeps the coins she found in his pocket, and they are like a cord connecting her to her martyr Mahmoud every morning.
In the black box, she keeps her other son Wael’s wedding suit. He never wore the suit, as he was killed by a mortar rocket as he returned home from his work in construction. He had a little more money to gather to pay for the wedding, but he died before he could enter the bond the of matrimony. Instead, he entered the graveyard of Tel al-Nasr a disfigured body.
Her husband Abu Mahmoud lost part of his eyesight as a result of his sadness over the loss of his two children. He had no means of expressing his love and longing for them other than reading the Quran from behind thick black tinted medical prescription glasses. He died as a result of a heart attack as his family went in search of a doctor in besieged al-Khalidyeh, but did not find one in time.
Some coins, a wedding suit, and the black tinted medical glasses are the world of Om Mahmoud who opens the door to her memories every morning.
She opens her black box to sit with her departed sons and husband, but before that Om Mahmoud never forgets to bring out the key for her five-bedroom house which was reduced to rubble surrounded by soldiers and tanks. She hangs the key on a nail in the tent wall, and looks upon it as she remembers days past.
The key is not as long nor the same kind as that of the doors of occupied Palestinian homes, but it definitely resembles them.
It stands as evidence of the right to return to a homeland turned into rubble, ruins and the remains of broken doors that await the return of their owners and residents.
Comments About This Article
Please fill the fields below.