From Germany to Idlib by car

Two days after receiving German citizenship, I climbed into a friend’s car and set off for Idlib. I had been away for 15 years.

The journey from Europe to Asia took three days, much of it spent with my knees against my chest. After Turkish traffic fines, dreary border posts and a six-hour wait in Serbia, we reached Bab al-Hawa.

The welcome was extraordinary. Officials smiled, hurried through our paperwork and treated us with courtesy. Critics accuse Syria’s new rulers of polishing the shop window while neglecting what lies behind it. They may have a point. But anyone who crossed the border under Bashar al-Assad will understand the difference. In those days, a checkpoint felt like the Last Judgment: one road led home, the other to prison.

This time, we entered safely. That alone felt miraculous.

I asked my friend to stop beneath the first olive tree we saw. I knelt, gave thanks, scooped up a handful of red earth and breathed in its scent, like a sentimental hero in a novel. The breeze carried the smell of home.

Mahmoud Darwish wrote that the road home is more beautiful than home itself. He was right.

Idlib was my den, and for years it was also the capital of the Syrian revolution. In revolutions, even the capital can migrate to the margins.

My family had flown ahead. My wife did not know I was coming; I had kept the journey secret. But there was someone else I was impatient to see: Saba, my first love. Perhaps, in some hidden corner of myself, I had returned because of her.

The city of Idlib was crowded and filthy, alive with motorbikes that the old regime once regarded with suspicion. There were speed bumps everywhere, packed markets and smiling traffic police.

One officer noticed the German number plate.

“Where have you come from?” he asked.

“Germany”.

He looked at me almost reproachfully. “Why did you come back?”

That is the Syrian condition. Those who remain dream of leaving; those who leave dream of returning.

At a notary’s office, only one of four employees was working. The room was full of returnees trying to repair the legal wreckage of exile. The clerk worked tirelessly, barely lifting his head.

“You are the most honourable man I have seen”, I told him.

He did not look up.

In two weeks, I grew fat on invitations. Once I ate lunch twice: I was already expected at one feast when I met an old friend who swore I must eat with him too.

I gorged on Idlib’s yellow figs. In Germany, figs are expensive, sold individually and taste nothing like the fruit of my childhood. As a boy, I could eat half a crate in a day.

My children adapted quickly to the noise, dirt and late nights with their cousins. It was their first visit to the land of their fathers. They grew accustomed to everything from squat toilets to the prevalence of face veils, to overly-tight abayas that revealed a lot.

I arranged to meet Saba at the education directorate. She brought her sister as a chaperone, which rather spoiled the romance. I had brought her a painting.

“Have I grown old?” she asked.

“You have grown thin”, I replied.

“From longing”, she said.

For a moment, the old story seemed to be waiting for us. But the lion returning from Germany proved less courageous than the lion of memory. I fled back to the life I had built.

At Friday prayers, I stood in the back row as usual. I pray, but avoid sermons. Syria seemed more religious than before, yet somehow less Islamic. People prayed and fasted, but the mosque itself was still being robbed of shoes and donation boxes. Public piety remained easier to display than virtue was to practise.

The fortnight vanished. To my surprise, I began to miss Germany. It, too, had become home – only without Idlib’s figs, its red earth or Saba.

Syria’s predicament, I realised, resembles my own. Both of us may need a second revolution: not another uprising, perhaps, but the harder work of rebuilding a life.

My wife flew back. I returned in an old car, my knees once again folded against my chest. Syria’s leaders travel by aircraft while its people weave through potholes on motorbikes.

And I left carrying the oldest burden of exile: the knowledge that I now belong to two countries, and completely to neither.