In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

6 Revolution Download Aleppo, Syria: January–February 2013 An explosion. Followed by another. “Downloading,” Nizar says in the dark. He applies the language of the Internet to the live video game outside . Incoming fire from the Syrian government he calls downloading. Return fire by the rebels is uploading. “It’s going to shit something,” his cousin Radwan says. “What do you think, Uncle?” He calls me Uncle because I am more than thirty years older than he. When we drove into Aleppo five days ago, my shoulders jerked in fright at every burst of gunfire, at every explosion. Now I’ve stopped reacting unless it stays quiet. Then I feel uneasy. “It sounded close,” I say. We sit on the floor wrapped in blankets, shift closer to a woodburning stove in the center of the room and the dying embers inside it. Amer and Bassel, friends of Radwan and Nizar, sit beside me. I wear three pairs of long underwear, tops and bottoms, two pairs of socks, jeans, a wool shirt, sweatshirt, coat. No power, no heat in the apartment , in the building, in the block, in all of Aleppo. The brittle January air tastes metallic. Ice films the ceiling. Sometimes we refill the stove with wood, sometimes not. It depends how desperate we feel, how much more cold we can stand. Burning wood warms us but creates another kind of misery. 99 100 conflic t zones Much of the wood comes from the debris of buildings shit-kicked by mortar rounds. Busted-up doors, chairs, sofas. The glue used to seal joints emits a foul odor when it’s burned. We cough, our heads pound. Better to freeze. See your breath kind of freezing. Too cold to bathe. We douse our funk with the overripe sweetness of perfume snatched from the dressing room of an abandoned apartment. We crept into the apartment, down a hall and through a dining room, as if we didn’t want to disturb the absent family. Bread on the table, a plate of chicken. They were about to eat (lunch? dinner?) but instead fled. In another room Mickey Mouse sits in an airplane suspended from the ceiling. The plane spins above an empty bed (a boy’s?), the sheets folded back. Radwan gives in to the cold. He stands, opens a balcony door to retrieve a sack of wood for the stove. Frosty air rushes in. Beyond the balcony young men, many of them former university students, roam the streets. They belong to their own militias within the loose conglomeration of rebels known as the Free Syrian Army that is fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad. They carry pistols, Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades, and move openly, almost casually, in the street like pied pipers followed by chanting boys. “God bless the FSA! God bless the FSA!” The rebels’ passion for the revolution is real. But they have no plan for the future other than the immediate one of ousting Assad. They live day by day, with only the authority that comes with carrying a gun as their guide. The lines separating FSA forces and government troops zigzag between them, splitting neighborhoods into a puzzle of forever shifting , disputed territory. Many streets remain deserted, their apartments and businesses empty, controlled by government snipers. In the night, if the snipers see no one to shoot, they will kill stray cats and dogs, Radwan says. Even birds. Every morning we see dead animals. We avoid open areas. Instead we move through a maze of houses like interconnected caves. We enter one house, walk over a couch and through a wall blasted open by a rocket-propelled grenade, and enter another house. We continue in this way, house to house, until we reach our destination. One time I got confused and emerged from a house and Revolution Download 101 onto a street covered by a sniper. Radwan yanked me back inside. “You want to die, man?” he said. Although they are not part of the FSA, Nizar and Radwan carry guns. Nizar owns a Schweizer, a German-made pistol. Radwan carries a Kalashnikov. Nizar makes a big show of clearing the Schweizer’s chamber every morning. He likes shoving the clip in and taking aim at imaginary targets. Tonight he points it at me. “I will kill you, Malcolm.” He jokes, I know, but I also know he wants to shoot. To feel the heft of his pistol and the kick it gives when it’s...

Share