Foghorn Echoes

Danny Ramadan

Description

Hussam and Wassim are teenaged boys living in Syria during America's invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable. Split between war-torn Damascus and Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.

Sujets

• Canadá
• Syria
• Canada
• SK
• AB

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838854676
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE
FOGHORN
ECHOES
ALSO BY DANNY RAMADAN
The Clothesline Swing

First published in Great Britain in 2022
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the USA in 2022 by Viking,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Danny Ramadan, 2022
The right of Danny Ramadan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 465 2 eISBN 978 1 83885 467 6
Book design by Jennifer Griffiths
To those who took to the sea and those who the sea took.
O sea traveller, I’m here to bid my farewells
I burden winds with my love and send them after you.
But I fear the storms and the tides,
Instead my soul will travel with you: to deliver you, and to bring you back.
AMIL MUBARAK , Lebanese poet
THE
FOGHORN
ECHOES
CONTENTS
2003
2014
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
Vancouver
Damascus
2017
Acknowledgments
A Note about the type
2003
Children shouldn’t know the horror of war, but Hussam was old enough by now. At first his parents barred him from the news while all of Damascus buzzed with tales from neighbouring Iraq: stories of mass graves and downed airplanes, of buildings as tall as mountains crumbling to dust, of invading Americans with blond hair and blue eyes. The cafés replaced the music channels on their television sets with an endless stream of news reports. Teachers substituted their physical education classes for military preparations sessions, teaching Hussam and his peers how to load a gun and how to build a functional gas mask. Wealthy neighbours sold their homes in haste and bought airplane tickets across the Mediterranean. Finally, when his mother needed his help setting up an emergency stash of canned fruits and pickled vegetables, she sat Hussam down and told him of the war.
“Every push by the Americans causes an attack by the Iraqis,” she said. “No one will win.”
He repeated what he’d learned in school. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
Hussam became mesmerized by the war. After school, he ignored the calls of his friends to join them for a street football match and ran home instead. He unbuckled his school uniform belt as he climbed the stairs and kicked off his dusty boots at the gate of their one-bedroom apartment.
“No running in the house,” his mother said. Hussam dodged her and rushed to the living room, turned up the volume on his father’s old TV. He flipped the three Syrian channels for news segments on the American invasion with the same enthusiasm he’d once used to search for cartoons. Fascinated by fighter jets, combat tanks, and speeches from mustachioed military leaders, he mimicked the knee kicks of marching troops and the hand salutes of loyal soldiers to foreign flags of stripes and stars. Resting the wooden end of his mother’s broom on his shoulder, he stomped like a guard, ready to jump into the hallway and snap his prized rifle at an elusive enemy.
In Hussam’s fifteen years, he’d never visited Iraq. He knew of the country through his studies of regional history, aware that it was a capital of a long-lost Islamic empire. His father reminisced about the bygone glory of Islam, which had been shattered by what the old man considered unholy attacks on the one true Allah and His devoted people by the infidel West. At school, a boy from Iraq had recently joined Hussam’s class. A refugee, he was told. A black-haired, short-tempered teenager with sun-kissed skin who spoke Arabic with a strange accent.
“Did you hear of the Iraqi man who shot down an Apache helicopter with his shotgun?” Hussam sat with three friends around a square plastic table; they each held thirteen playing cards tight to their chests and exchanged suspicious glances they’d learned from watching black-and-white westerns on rented VHS tapes. His mother set a tray of black honey-sweetened tea and a generous dish of mamoul on the table and poured the tea into golden-rimmed glass cups. It was a late May afternoon, and the streets of Damascus roared with the shamal winds, whipping dust and sand, tilting the trees into respectful bows.
If Hussam’s father knew they were playing cards, he’d be raging mad. The exam season was only a month away, and they needed to focus on their studies. “Especially the son of Omar and his first wife,” his father said, referring to Wassim, for he rarely could recall the names of Hussam’s friends. Hussam’s mother was more forgiving of his hobbies and allowed him to play the occasional card game, warning him in time of his father’s return.
“I heard he shot it down with a single bullet,” Wassim said, drawing a card. Wassim had never seen a military helicopter, only the ones that dropped colourful papers on the rooftops across his neighbourhood on national holidays, reminding people that the newly elected Syrian president was a progressive leader who supported the Iraqi brothers in their righteous war against the imperialist Americans. Whenever this happened, Wassim would hurry to the roof to sweep his pigeon cages so that none of the birds would peck at the sharp papers. He’d inherited thirty-three birds from his uncle, who’d died young of an unknown illness eighteen months earlier. Last summer, Wassim had built small birdcages on his family’s rooftop using old wires and cheap wood. He printed his name in black marker on the feathers of the birds’ inner wings and tied a ribbon to their feet before releasing them to the open skies. After a couple of hours of fluttering between clouds and darting through the maze of the old neighbourhood, the birds would return when Wassim whistled sharply and waved a flag made from an old T-shirt. He would count and examine the birds as he ushered them into the cages, surprised each time that all of them returned. He locked the deadbolts and hung the keys around his neck.
Wassim slammed a card on the table, initiating a new round. He parroted what he’d heard on his father’s TV. “The Iraqi used his old shotgun to bring down the flying monster. He inherited the gun from his grandfather who used it to kill British invaders back in the 1920s.” Wassim’s voice was changing, becoming crisper and deeper than the piercing screams he and Hussam used to exchange while playing soldiers and thieves in their neighbourhood of Mazzeh.
Wassim raised his cards to his face, but Hussam could see his eyes, which were blue, unlike any he’d seen before. They contrasted his tanned face and crowned his high nose. Downy hair that hadn’t blackened quite yet gathered on his upper lip, its colour similar to the soft fur Hussam noticed on Wassim’s body last time they went to a swimming pool. It covered his forearms, rounded his chest muscles, and led to his belly button like an arrow pointing down. His clear skin looked hot to the touch.
Hussam, on the other hand, struggled with acne that he used all the old wives’ tricks to combat, passed down to him from his knowledgeable mother. Weeks ago, on his fifteenth birthday, she’d poured cinnamon tea over a pot filled with honey and boiled it until all that was left was a golden slop. After plastering the hot sludge on her son’s face as he screeched in pain, she held him still and blew on it until it cooled.
“This will make all the girls in the neighbourhood coo after you.” She fanned his face, then skinned the mixture off. He groaned. “Your father wants to talk to you,” she said when she’d finished her treatment. She handed him a wet towel for his agitated face and sent him to his parents’ bedroom.
Hussam walked into the bedroom he was rarely allowed to visit. It was warm with his mother’s crochet work interweaving colours and patterns into pillowcases and tablecloths. Photos under her vanity’s glass documented Hussam’s childhood, along with a black-and-white wedding photo in which she looked terrified and a recent photo of his father smoking argileh on the beach in Lattakia. His father sat on the side of the bed and tapped twice on the blue cover, inviting Hussam to sit next to him.
“Luqman the Wise was precious among the people of Allah.” His father pulled out the Quran that rested on his bedside table. “And he passed his knowledge to his son in Ten Commandments not to be disobeyed.”
Hussam rested his temple on his father’s chest.
“O my son, do not associate anyone with Allah,” his father recited from the holy book, his voice deep and rhythmic. “And We have enjoined upon man to care for his parents. Be grateful to Me and to your parents; to Me is the final arrival.” Hussam heard the words breathed out of the lungs before they were uttered by the mouth. “O my son, indeed if sin should be the weight of a mustard seed and should be within a rock lost in the heavens or in the earth, Allah will bring it forth. Indeed, Allah is Subtle and Acquainted.” Hussam caught a whiff of beard oil and the miswak his father brushed his teeth with. “And do not walk through the earth exultantly. Indeed, Allah does not like everyone self-deluded and boastful.”
“Baba?” Hussam said.
“Son, it’s time you stop calling me baba like children,” the old man said. “You can call me Abu Hussam. I’m your father and you are my son, but you are a man now and we are two brothers.”
Hussam’s eyes filled with tears, but he was quickly admonished by his father.
“Men don’t cry, son.”
“Yes, Abu Huss