Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

tales of orontes river

bloke never stopped, honestly – he crept around from house to house, secretly treating the wounded . . . He almost got caught by the security forces a few times, but luckily he was spared. Anyway, this one particular time, we heard someone knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and it turned out to be our neighbour Abu Ahmed, whose wife was in labour. The poor woman had been in excruciating pain for hours and hours and hours already, she was really having a very tough time of it – there were complications, something was clearly wrong, it seemed like maybe the baby was stuck. Well, it was the middle of February, half two in the morning, and the city was on lockdown, under curfew. And there was no doctor or midwife anywhere

to be found – not even a nurse to help Om Ahmed, poor thing. There simply was no one to deliver the baby. And ya haram, her husband was beside himself! He could see her life slipping through his fingers as he just looked on, utterly powerless . . . So Abu Ahmed came round to ours, and your grandad said to him: ‘Your only option is Dr Mukhtar. I’ve been informed that he’s hiding near here at one of our friends’ houses. I’ll get my son to jump from roof to roof over to their place, and get him to come and see her.’ Well, that prospect wasn’t easy for Abu Ahmed. How could he let a man examine his wife? Over his dead body! No way, not for a thousand swords . . . And so of course we all started begging Abu Ahmed

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