by Katrin Trüstedt
The sleet falls so incessantly this Sunday that the sky turned a dull gray and we don’t want to go anywhere, my child, his friend and me. We didn’t go to the theater or to the Brazilian Roda de Feijoada and we didn’t even bake cookies at the neighbors’ place, but instead are playing cars on the floor and cooking soup and painting the table blue when the news arrives.
3:07pm: Assad has been overthrown; 3:11pm: Assad had to leave the country (I hadn’t read the news yet so I’m hopelessly behind); 3:14pm: Celebration at Oranienplatz. The father of my son’s friend sends a photo from Rio-Reiser-Platz and at 3:17pm we’re suddenly in a hurry to get out. We put on our shoes and jackets on halfway down the stairs, and run without hats, scarves or gloves to Mariannenstraße, where police cars are waiting, individual Syrian flags are being waved and helicopters are circling overhead.
We take my son’s friend home and move on without clear direction, down Oranienstraße, past the honking parade of cars on the corner of Skalitzer Straße, Syrian flags hanging out of the windows, fluttering on hoods and being waved out of car windows, suddenly there are no more cars, and we are right in the middle of it.
“It’s a good day for us,” someone turns to me, between people singing, hugging each other, stretching long flags between them, drumming, jumping up and chanting something in Arabic that I don’t understand. “14 years, 4 months and 14 days,” he says. “Thank you for crying” – he sees that I have tears in my eyes. “You’re crying, but we’re happy.” “Germany has been good to us, we are grateful.” He says goodbye to me and Luca, “Bye little man”, and moves on. A young woman with short curly hair and a Palestinian scarf around her shoulders smiles at me.
“Shall we walk with them a bit more?” Luca asks. We turn off Skalitzer, which has become Oberbaumstraße, just before it rises up to becoming a bridge, where the memorial “To the Unknown Refugee” stands. At the corner of Falckensteinstraße, we stand for a while with a group in the sleet. “Our president attacked his own people, we fought back, we almost made it too, after two years, then Russia intervened, Iran, Hezbollah; they had to reconnect, with others, but now they’ve made it. We are free.”
“And you support the insurgents?” I ask. “Yes – they’re our uncles, our cousins.” – ‘What you read about them,’ another interjects, ”that they are ISIS and things like that – that’s not true.” They all shake their heads vehemently.
“We haven’t seen our family all these years,” they say, ”we haven’t been able to go home.”
“I haven’t seen my mother for nine years,” says one of them. “Me 14 years,” says the other. “But Germany took us in, and we are grateful.” I feel uncomfortable when I hear this; I don’t mention support for the regime, but Germany could have done more in Syria, I object. “But Germany has done something,” they counter: ”Germany has taken us in.”
“Do you want to go back now?” I ask.
“Not right away, we wait and see.
“Germany is our second home,” they say.
“When everything has calmed down, you can come and go on vacation there, it has everything you could wish for.”
“Please leave this place. Please go home,” it sounds from the loudspeakers in a half-hearted attempt to get through the cheering and the music and the drums.
“Tell me again what they said,” says Luca as we move on.
“Tell me again!”
“What do you mean overthrown?” Luca asks as I try to explain the story to him. “How?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Why not? Where is he now?”
“I don’t know that. Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow.”
We are on that part of the stage of this world event where it is not the event itself that is taking place, but the exiled choir commenting, lamenting, or, as in this particular case of the fall of a dictator, celebrating.
“Fourteen years!” says Luca.
“Fourteen years, four months and fourteen days,” I say. “And now they’re celebrating being liberated.”
“Why aren’t they going home now? Why can’t they go back yet?”
I break off the story of this liberation here, at this moment when everything is still open; I don’t go on to say how in the dialectic of liberation, liberation can also turn into its opposite and become oppression, as has happened so often; how violence usually leads to counter-violence; how the insurgents are a motley crew and the Islamist and jihadist militias among them could build an Islamist government, as we will inevitably read in the news tomorrow. Even if such skepticism is appropriate; even if it cannot be assumed that this liberation will lead directly to a liberal democracy, with Russia and Iran following suit; and even if we will probably not be going on vacation to Syria any time soon; here, now, in the sleet without scarf, hat and gloves, where Oberbaumstraße is setting off to becoming a bridge, that is very much besides the point, the liberation a message we need more of, as the father of my child’s friend had said, an event that we must honor – now, here, in the sleet in Berlin, everything seems possible.
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