DANTE DARKSIDE

Story No. 02 — Letters from the Underground

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 18 min read Filed under: The Ones We Forgot · Middle East Dispatches

These Letters Were Never Meant To Be Found.

We Found Them Anyway.

Seven letters. Seven people. One war with no end in sight.

Nobody found them in a rusted metal box beneath the rubble of a collapsed building in Mosul.

Nobody — because we wrote them.

But if you finish reading and still feel like they might be real — that’s exactly the point. Because stories like these are happening. Every single day. In cities whose names you mispronounce. In streets that used to have bakeries and now have craters.

Nobody was writing them down.

Until now.

Letter One

From a father to the child he has never met

Mosul. The second summer of the siege.

My child,

You were born on a day I wasn’t there.

I know this because your mother told me during our last visit — the visit where we both pretended it wasn’t the last one. She said: “The baby kicks constantly. Must take after you — can’t sit still.”

I laughed. I didn’t tell her that I had been sitting very still for eleven weeks inside a basement that smelled of damp concrete, listening to bombs fall in the distance like thunder from a storm that never came close enough to end.

I want to tell you about this city before it became what people are now calling a “theater of war.”

On Friday mornings, there was an old man who sold samoon bread on the corner of Nineveh Street. He always wore the same faded blue shirt, and he always gave me an extra loaf — no charge — just because I came early. I never learned his name. I called him Abu Samoon. Father of bread.

I wonder if he’s still alive.

I wonder if that corner still exists.

You will grow up in a city I no longer recognize. You will walk on streets that carry the scars of things I don’t want you to learn the names of. You will look up at buildings and not know that your father once climbed to the roof of the third one from the left to watch fireworks on a holiday when he was fourteen years old.

I can’t give you that city anymore.

But I need you to know: it existed. It was beautiful in the way that only things about to disappear are truly beautiful.

What is your name? Did your mother choose it, or your grandfather?

I hope it isn’t too heavy a name. War has made names heavy enough already.

With everything I have left, Your father — the man you will recognize from the photograph on the shelf

Letter Two

From a female surgeon to her husband in Berlin

Aleppo. The seventeenth month of the siege.

Karim,

I don’t have time to write long.

Yesterday I performed surgery without anesthesia. Not by choice. We ran out three weeks ago. We used vodka — someone’s bottle kept in a desk drawer from before the war, when drinking was still an ordinary thing.

The man on the table bit into the leather strap we gave him. He didn’t scream. His eyes fixed on the ceiling — the one with a crack shaped like the letter Y that I’ve stared at long enough to give it a name. I call it Yusuf, like my brother.

I saved him.

Two hours later, a mortar fragment came through the recovery room wall.

I don’t go into that room anymore. Not because I’m afraid. Because if I go in, I won’t come back out, and there are still people waiting.

You asked in your last message: “Do you want me to come back?”

I didn’t answer because I no longer know what the answer is.

If you come back, you will die, or you will see things you were not built to see. If you stay, I will continue living in this city alone with the smell of things I refuse to name.

Yesterday they brought in a child. Seven years old. Both arms gone below the elbow.

I used the last of the anesthesia on her. I made that decision alone and I will not apologize for it.

She is sleeping in the corner of the ward right now. When she wakes up, someone will have to tell her.

I don’t know who that will be.

Perhaps me.

Perhaps that is why I’m still here.

Nadia

P.S. — The small plant on our balcony. Are you remembering to water it? I don’t know why I keep thinking about that plant.

Letter Three

From a sixteen-year-old boy to the friend who got out

Raqqa. The last winter.

Omar,

Did you make it to Turkey?

People here say that from the shore you can see Turkey like a dream — lights shimmering across the water. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never seen the sea.

I’m still here.

Not because I didn’t want to go. But because the night before you left, my sister had a fever. You remember — you said “She’ll be fine, come on, we can’t wait.”

I didn’t go.

My sister is fine now. I’m glad.

But that route is gone now. That guide is gone. And the price — I don’t have the money anymore. My family spent everything last month on food.

I don’t blame you. You were right to go.

I just wanted to ask: is it cold over there? I think about cold a lot. Here the winter is strange — hot during the day, freezing at night. I sleep in three layers and still shake.

I’ve been teaching myself English. From an old book someone left behind. The cover is torn off so I don’t know what it’s called. I learned: “My name is. How are you. I am fine thank you.”

I am not fine. But I like that sentence. It sounds like a different life.

If you reach Europe — can you send me a postcard? I want to know what those places look like. I want to tape it to my wall.

Right now my wall has a bullet hole and a burn mark shaped like an open hand.

I want something else to look at.

Your friend, Sami

P.S. — I still have the jacket you left behind. I wear it every night.

Letter Four

From a soldier to his mother — a letter with no date

Location unknown. Side unknown.

Mama,

You asked where I am.

I can’t say.

You asked if I’m okay.

I can’t answer that honestly.

You asked if I’ve killed anyone.

I didn’t answer that one at all.

Mama, there’s something I need to tell you that I haven’t told anyone else. Last week, in a village I’m not allowed to remember the name of, I came face to face with a man on the other side. We met at a broken section of wall. My rifle was jammed. His rifle wasn’t in his hands.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

He was about Tariq’s age. He had the same patchy beard that Tariq always grows in winter when he gets lazy about shaving.

I walked away.

I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. They don’t teach you that in war. They teach you to shoot. They don’t teach you what to do when the man standing in front of you looks like your older brother.

Mama, I want to come home.

Not the home we have now — the home from when I was ten years old. When you still made lentil soup every Friday morning and I was allowed to sleep until nine and the worst thing in my entire day was having to finish the vegetables I didn’t like.

I want to go back to the world where the worst thing was vegetables.

Your son

Letter Five

From a journalist to her editor — the last message sent

Sanaa, Yemen. Wednesday, 2:37 PM.

I need you to understand something.

I have filed forty-seven stories in the past eighteen months. You ran twelve. You edited nine. You rejected twenty-six — citing “insufficient global angle” or “our readership struggles to engage with this region” or — and this is my personal favorite — “the content is too heavy for the current news cycle.”

Too heavy.

I am writing this email from a third-floor hotel room. The fourth floor has not existed since yesterday morning. I can still smell the fourth floor in the air.

Last week I photographed a two-year-old child who weighed seven kilograms. Seven. Do you know what a healthy two-year-old weighs? Twelve kilograms. Sometimes more.

I sent you that photograph.

You said you “needed parental consent before publication.”

The child’s parents are trying to find enough food to survive until tomorrow and you’re asking about consent forms.

I’m not sending you this to run it.

I’m sending it because I needed to write it down. Because if I don’t write it down it lives inside me and I don’t know what happens after that.

This country is dying. Not quickly, the way it happens in films. Slowly. In pieces. In the way that makes people on the outside say “it’s complicated” and change the channel.

I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.

I just need you to know: your silence is also a choice.

— R.

[The editorial desk received no further communication from correspondent R. after this date.]

Letter Six

From a wife to a husband who is fighting on the other side

Beirut. No year.

My love,

I heard you’re fighting for the other side now.

I didn’t ask why. I think I know why. And I’m not sure, if I were in your position, I would have done differently.

Hana asked where you are. I told her you were away for work.

Hana is seven. She knows I’m lying. She looked at me with your eyes — that way you have of looking directly at someone without blinking — and she stopped asking.

That hurts more than if she had cried.

I’m not writing this to accuse you. I’m writing because last night I dreamed of you. We were sitting at that café on the corner of Hamra Street — you remember, the one with the uneven floor where the chairs always tilt. You were drinking coffee and watching the street and your face was calm. The way it used to be.

I didn’t say anything in the dream. Neither did you.

We just sat there.

When I woke up I lay still for twenty minutes and did not allow myself to cry because once I start I don’t know when I would stop.

I don’t know where to send this. I’m passing it through a friend of a friend and hoping.

If you’re still alive — I want you to know that I cannot bring myself to hate you.

I have tried.

Hate would be so much easier.

Leila

Letter Seven — and final

No sender. No recipient.

Found folded inside the back cover of a Quran in a village that no longer appears on any map.

I don’t know who to write to.

I don’t have anyone left to write to.

So I’m writing to the war.

You have taken from me: my father, my brother, my home, the well I used to sit beside every evening, the dog named Badr I raised from when he was smaller than my fist.

You have taken the names of the streets I knew by heart.

You have taken the smell of dinner.

You have taken the sound of my mother laughing.

But there is one thing you have not taken.

I don’t know what to call it.

I only know it is still here — somewhere behind my ribs, quiet and stubborn and refusing to die — every morning when I open my eyes and am surprised to find that I am still breathing.

I don’t have a name for it.

Maybe that’s why you can’t destroy it. You can only destroy what you can name.

Go ahead and try to take it.

You won’t.

— No signature — No date — No address — Only a small handprint in the lower corner of the page. Blue ink. — Perhaps a child’s. — Perhaps not.

Dante Darkside has no editorial comment to add after the seventh letter.

We have only one request: go back and read the last letter one more time.

Then decide whether you want to share this.

We think you will.