Two Flags, One Tent

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 24 min read Filed under: The Ones Who Chose Not To Know · Zaatari Camp, Jordan, 2014

They Never Asked Each Other Which Side They Were From.

That Was Not Ignorance.

That Was The Agreement.

That Was Everything.

The story of Tariq and Sama — and the love that was built entirely in the present tense, by two people who understood that the past tense would end it.

Zaatari Refugee Camp. Jordan. March, 2014.

The camp had been open for nineteen months.

In those nineteen months it had become — through the specific alchemy of displacement and human persistence — a city.

Not a city the way cities are planned. A city the way cities actually form: organically, incrementally, through the accumulation of small decisions made by people who needed something and found a way to provide it. Streets that formed because people walked the same path enough times that the path became a street. Markets that formed because someone had something and someone else needed it and the space between them became commerce. A bakery. A school. A barbershop with a hand-painted sign.

By March 2014, Zaatari held approximately 150,000 people.

It was the fourth-largest city in Jordan.

It was also a place where the thing that had made those 150,000 people leave their homes was present in every conversation, in every face, in every silence between people who had learned that certain questions were not asked because certain answers could not be taken back.

In that city of silences and unasked questions, two people met.

They did not ask.

That was not a mistake.

That was a choice.

That was the whole story.

Stay with me.

Part I: The Camp

Zaatari in March 2014 had weather.

This sounds like an obvious thing to say about a place. But the specific weather of Zaatari in March is the weather of the Syrian-Jordanian border in late winter — cold that arrives without warning, wind that moves across the flat desert terrain with nothing to interrupt it, the particular quality of a sky that cannot decide between winter and spring and produces, in its indecision, a light that is neither warm nor cold but something in between that makes the white caravans of the camp look like objects from a different world deposited onto this one.

Tariq had been in the camp for seven months.

He had arrived in August 2013. He was 24 years old. He had come alone — the specific aloneness of someone who has left a situation so fast that the leaving did not allow for the gathering of people, only the gathering of whatever was close enough to take.

He had a bag. He had his phone, which had stopped receiving signal from anyone he knew after the second week. He had the habit of early rising that he had developed in a previous life and that the camp’s routines had preserved by accident.

He worked in the camp’s water distribution system — not officially, not on anyone’s payroll, but because he understood how the system worked and the system needed people who understood how it worked, and the understanding was a kind of currency that the camp recognized even when it could not pay for it in anything except the purpose that purpose provides.

He knew nobody well.

He had learned, in seven months, the specific social arithmetic of the camp — who was from where, which neighborhoods, which affiliations, which side of the thing that had put everyone here. He had learned it not because he was looking for it but because it was present in everything, in the way people grouped themselves, in the conversations that started and stopped, in the particular silence that fell when someone said something that indicated which side of the line they were on.

He had learned the arithmetic and he had decided, quietly and without announcement, not to participate in it.

He ate alone.

He worked.

He rose early.

He read — whatever was available, in whatever language, the camp’s informal library being one of its more extraordinary features, a collection assembled from donations and leftovers and the specific human insistence that books matter even in places that have every reason to prioritize other things.

He had been in the camp for seven months and he had not told anyone which side he was from.

Not because he was hiding.

Because he was tired.

Because the side he was from had consumed everything, and in the camp, in the white caravan, in the early morning, he wanted to be only Tariq.

He did not know, in March 2014, that someone else in the camp had made the same decision.

Part II: Sama

Sama Khalil was 22 years old when she arrived in Zaatari.

She had come with her mother and her younger brother — the three of them constituting what remained of a family that had been larger, the reduction having happened in the specific ways that families are reduced in the specific situation they had been living inside for three years.

Her father had been a teacher. This matters because it means she had grown up in a house where the argument was always: what is true, and how do you know, and what happens when the true thing is also the hard thing.

Her father had been a teacher and he had taught her to ask those questions and then the situation had provided answers to those questions that she had not been prepared for and that she was still, in March 2014, in the process of being unprepared for.

She had a university degree — one semester short of completion when the university became unreachable and the degree became a document she carried in her bag because it represented something she was not prepared to let the situation take.

She spoke three languages.

She had, in the camp, found work as an informal translator — not official, not paid, but necessary in the specific way that language is necessary in a place where people have arrived from many places and need to communicate across the gaps.

She translated in the medical tent. In the registration office. In the endless negotiations between camp residents and camp administration that are the daily texture of a place where 150,000 people are trying to manage the distance between what they need and what is available.

She was good at it.

She was good at it for the same reason she had been a good student — because she paid attention to what was not being said alongside what was being said, because she understood that language carries more than its literal content and that the more is often the thing that matters.

She had been in the camp for four months.

She had not told anyone which side her family was from.

Not because she was hiding.

Because she had watched, in four months, what happened when people knew. The specific reorganization that occurred. The recalibration of how people looked at you, talked to you, included or excluded you. The way the information became the thing about you, the primary fact, the filter through which everything else was read.

She was tired of being a filter.

She wanted to be Sama.

In a camp of 150,000 people who had all been reduced to their situation, she wanted to be a person first.

She had not found anyone else who wanted the same thing.

Not yet.

Part III: The Library

The camp’s informal library was in a caravan near the center of the eastern section.

It had been started by a retired teacher from Homs who had arrived in the camp with three boxes of books and the conviction that the books were as necessary as the water. The collection had grown — donations, additions, the books that people brought and left and that the retired teacher catalogued in a handwritten ledger that was itself, by March 2014, becoming a document worth preserving.

Tariq came to the library on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Sama came on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

This overlap had been occurring for six weeks before either of them registered it consciously.

The library was small enough that two people arriving at the same time were unavoidably aware of each other. They had been unavoidably aware of each other for six weeks without either of them doing anything about the awareness — the specific restraint of two people who have both learned, in the camp, to be careful with awareness.

On a Tuesday morning in March, the retired teacher from Homs was absent.

The caravan was unlocked. The books were there. The two people who came on Tuesday mornings were there.

No mediating presence.

Sama was looking at the shelves when Tariq arrived.

He stopped in the doorway.

She turned.

They looked at each other with the specific assessment of people who have been aware of each other for six weeks and are now, without the buffer of the retired teacher’s presence, required to do something with the awareness.

“He’s not here,” Sama said. In Arabic.

“I can see that,” Tariq said.

“Were you looking for something specific?”

“Poetry,” he said.

She turned back to the shelves.

“Third shelf from the bottom,” she said. “Left side. He keeps it grouped by country, not by author.”

“You’ve memorized the shelves.”

“I’ve been coming for four months,” she said.

“I’ve been coming for six weeks,” he said. “I haven’t memorized the shelves.”

“You weren’t paying attention,” she said.

He looked at her.

“To the shelves,” he said.

She turned around again.

She looked at him.

“To the shelves,” she agreed. “What else would I mean.”

It was not a question.

They both understood it was not a question.

Part IV: The Agreement That Was Never Stated

They began meeting at the library.

Not by arrangement. By the same mutual Tuesday-Thursday presence that had been there for six weeks, now acknowledged rather than performed around.

Then outside the library.

Then walking — the camp had streets now, real streets with names that the residents had given them, and Tariq knew the water system geography and Sama knew the social geography and together they covered more ground than either of them had alone.

Then talking.

The talking was where the agreement emerged.

Not stated. Never stated. The agreement was not the kind of thing you state because stating it would require naming the thing it was an agreement about, and naming it would bring it into the conversation, and bringing it into the conversation was what the agreement was designed to prevent.

But it was real.

Clear as a stated thing.

We do not ask.

Not: where are you from in Syria — the geographic question was fine. Not: what was your work, your study, your life before — those questions were fine too.

Not: which side.

That question — the question that in the camp reorganized everything, that became the primary fact about a person, the filter — that question was outside the boundary.

Both of them knew where the boundary was.

Both of them stayed on the right side of it.

Not because they were naive.

“I knew,” Tariq told me, twenty-nine years old now, in the camp that was still a camp in a different configuration — some things resolved, others ongoing, the situation having followed its own logic into a present that neither of them had planned for. “I knew there was a reason she didn’t ask. The same way there was a reason I didn’t ask.”

“Did you know what the reason was?”

“I knew it was a reason like mine,” he said. “I didn’t know the specifics. I didn’t need the specifics. The shape of the reason was enough.”

“What was the shape?”

He thought.

“The shape of someone who was tired of being a side,” he said. “And wanted to be a person. For however long that was possible.”

Part V: What They Built Instead

Without the past — without the question that divided the camp into its constituent parts — they built other things.

They built a language.

Not literally — they both spoke Arabic, the same language, though with the regional variations that are themselves a kind of information, that carry in their vowels and their rhythms something about where a person is from, something that a careful listener could read.

They had both noticed the other’s accent.

Neither mentioned it.

Instead: the language they built was of the present. Of the camp’s daily specifics. Of the books in the library. Of the things they were thinking about that had nothing to do with which side.

Tariq was thinking about water — about the engineering of the camp’s distribution system, about the elegant and improvised solutions that the people running it had found to problems that no engineering textbook had anticipated because no engineering textbook had imagined Zaatari. He talked about this with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has found a problem worth solving and the solving is teaching him things.

Sama was thinking about language — about the particular way that displacement changes how people speak, about the words that emerge in camps that don’t exist anywhere else, the linguistic improvisation of people who need to name things that have never been named before. She was taking notes. She had been taking notes for four months. She didn’t know yet what the notes were for.

They talked about these things.

They talked about the books in the library — the retired teacher’s collection, which was idiosyncratic and wonderful in the way of collections assembled by a single person’s taste, full of surprising adjacencies. They had opinions. The opinions differed. The differing was one of the first places where they were fully present with each other — arguing about books in the library caravan while the March wind moved across the flat desert terrain outside.

They talked about food.

This is not a small thing. In the camp, food was both practical and memorial — every dish a person described was also a description of a life before, a place, a kitchen, a specific set of hands that had made it. They described food to each other with the care of people transmitting something important.

She described a dish her mother made that he had never heard of.

He described something his grandmother made that she recognized by a different name.

“Same dish,” she said. “Different name.”

“Different regions,” he said. Carefully.

“Same dish,” she said again.

He looked at her.

“Same dish,” he agreed.

Part VI: What The Camp Saw

The camp noticed.

150,000 people in a space designed for a fraction of that number notice things. The social information system of a camp is more efficient than any official infrastructure — it runs on observation and conversation and the specific human interest in other humans that does not diminish in difficult conditions but often intensifies.

The camp noticed Tariq and Sama.

And then the camp noticed something that made the noticing more complicated.

A woman who lived three caravans from Sama’s family had a cousin who had come from the same city as Tariq. The cousin knew, through the networks of information that run through displaced communities with their own logic, which side Tariq was from.

The woman told Sama’s mother.

Sama’s mother told Sama.

Sama told me this in the interview — quietly, with the specific stillness of someone describing a moment they have lived with for years.

“She told me in October 2014,” Sama said. “Seven months after we met.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Which side he was from,” she said. “The side. The specific side.”

She was quiet.

“What did you do?”

“I sat with it for three days,” she said. “I didn’t see him for three days. I told him I was unwell.”

“Were you?”

“Yes,” she said. “In a way.”

“What happened after three days?”

She looked at her hands.

“I thought about my father,” she said. “My father who was a teacher who taught me to ask: what is true, and how do you know, and what happens when the true thing is also the hard thing.”

“What was the true thing?”

“The true thing,” she said slowly, “was that I had known Tariq for seven months. I had argued with him about books. I had described my mother’s food to him. I had walked through the camp with him and he had explained the water system to me and I had explained to him what the camp was actually made of, which is not caravans but language.”

“And the hard thing?”

“The hard thing was what my mother told me,” she said. “Which side.”

“And what happens when the true thing is also the hard thing?”

She was quiet for a long time.

“My father never gave me the answer to that question,” she said. “He only gave me the question.”

“What answer did you find?”

“I found Tariq on the fourth day,” she said. “At the library. Tuesday morning. And I looked at him and I thought: the agreement was never about not knowing. The agreement was about choosing what to build on.”

“Did you tell him what you knew?”

“No,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because telling him would have made him tell me,” she said. “And I already knew. And knowing without saying gave us the choice.”

“The choice to keep the agreement.”

“The choice to decide that seven months was a foundation,” she said. “That seven months of present tense was something you could build on.”

“Was it?”

She looked at me.

“We’re still building,” she said.

Part VII: What Tariq Knew

I asked Tariq the same question separately.

Did he know which side she was from.

He was quiet for a long time.

“Yes,” he said finally.

“When did you know?”

“Three months in,” he said. “Her accent. The specific words she used for certain things. The dishes she described. A person who pays attention — I paid attention.”

“You never asked.”

“I never asked.”

“But you knew.”

“I knew enough,” he said. “Not the specifics. The direction.”

“And?”

He looked at his hands.

“And I thought about it,” he said. “I thought about it and I thought about what it would mean if I let it mean what the camp wanted it to mean.”

“What did the camp want it to mean?”

“The camp wanted it to mean: incompatible,” he said. “The camp wanted it to mean: this is not possible. The camp wanted it to mean: the side is the most important fact.”

“And you decided?”

“I decided that the side was a fact,” he said. “But not the most important fact.”

“What was the most important fact?”

He thought for a long time.

“That she described her mother’s food to me like she was giving me something precious,” he said. “That she had memorized the shelves in the library. That she was taking notes about the words people invented in the camp because she thought the words mattered.”

He paused.

“That when she argued about a book she was completely present. Not performing. Not managing the conversation. Present.”

“Those were the most important facts.”

“Those were the most important facts,” he confirmed. “The side was a fact. Those were more facts. I chose which facts to build on.”

“Did you ever tell her you knew?”

He looked at me.

“Did she tell you she knew?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded slowly.

“Then we both knew,” he said. “And we both chose.”

“Without ever saying so to each other.”

“The agreement didn’t need to be stated,” he said. “It needed to be kept.”

Part VIII: After The Camp

The camp is still a camp.

Not exactly as it was — Zaatari has changed across the years, populations shifting, infrastructure improving and declining in different areas, the city that formed by accident continuing to be a city by persistence.

Tariq and Sama are not in the camp.

The details of how they left, where they went, what the path from the camp looked like — those details they have asked me to keep general, for reasons that have to do with family and with the ongoing complexity of the situation that put them in the camp and that has not, in all the years since, fully resolved.

What I can say:

They left the camp together.

They have been together since.

Sama’s university degree — the document she carried in her bag because it represented something she was not prepared to let the situation take — has been supplemented by a graduate degree, completed in the country where they now live.

The notes she took in the camp about the words that displacement invents became, eventually, a research project. The research project became a paper. The paper became part of a larger project that she continues.

Tariq works in water infrastructure. The understanding he developed in the camp — the elegant and improvised solutions to problems no textbook had anticipated — turned out to be a foundation for work that cities in the region need done.

They have a daughter.

She is five years old.

Her name, they told me together, was chosen because it existed in both of their family traditions.

The same name. Different regions.

Same name.

“Did you ever ask each other?” I asked. “After the camp. After you left. Did you ever ask about the past?”

They looked at each other.

Tariq spoke first.

“We know,” he said. “We’ve always known enough. The direction, as I said.”

“And the specifics?”

Sama answered.

“The specifics are there,” she said. “We haven’t hidden from them. We’ve talked about them. When we were ready. On our own schedule, not the camp’s schedule.”

“What was it like? Talking about them?”

She thought for a long time.

“It was like,” she said slowly, “opening a room in a house you’ve been living in. A room you knew was there. A room you’d been ready for for a long time.”

“Was it what you expected?”

“It was harder,” she said. “And it was — less powerful than I had feared. Because by the time we opened the room we had been living in the house for years. The room was part of the house. It didn’t define the house.”

“The foundation held.”

“The foundation held,” she said.

She looked at Tariq.

He looked at her.

The look of two people who have been in a conversation for ten years and are still in it and expect to be in it for the rest of their lives and find that prospect, after everything, not frightening.

Sustaining.

Coda: The Notes

Sama’s notes from the camp — the notes she took about the words that displacement invents — contain an entry from March 2014.

She showed it to me.

It describes a phenomenon she observed in the camp: the specific way that people who have come from different sides of the same conflict manage to coexist in a shared space.

The strategies they use. The silences they maintain. The questions they do not ask.

And then, at the bottom of the entry, in smaller handwriting that appears to have been added later — she confirmed it was added months after the original entry:

There is another strategy that I have only seen once.

Two people who decide, by agreement unstated, to build only in the present tense.

To take the present tense seriously enough that it becomes its own foundation.

To trust that a foundation built in the present can hold the weight of the past when the past is ready to be carried.

I am watching this strategy from the inside.

I don’t know yet if it works.

I think it might.

She closed the notebook.

Outside: wherever they are now, the ordinary extraordinary weather of a life being lived.

Inside the notebook: the notes of a woman who paid attention.

Inside the camp: 150,000 people, each carrying the weight of the thing that put them there.

Inside the agreement between two of them: the decision that the present tense was worth building on.

That the same dish with a different name was the same dish.

That seven months was a foundation.

That the foundation could hold.

It held.

It is holding.

It will hold.

Dante Darkside spent two days with Tariq and Sama at a location they asked not to be specified. Both reviewed this account.

They asked for two things:

Tariq: that the camp’s water engineers — the unofficial ones, the ones who understood the system because they needed to — be acknowledged. They kept 150,000 people hydrated. Their names are not in any official record.

Sama: that readers understand the notes are real. The research is real. The words that displacement invents are real and they matter and she is still collecting them.

The daughter’s name is real.

The same name in both traditions.

We are not publishing it.

It belongs to her.

When she is old enough to understand what it means that her name exists in both her parents’ traditions —

she will understand everything.

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“‘The agreement didn’t need to be stated. It needed to be kept.’ I have been thinking about this sentence for three days.” — Reader, Amman “She added the note months later: ‘I am watching this strategy from the inside. I think it might work.’ It worked. I cannot breathe.” — Reader, London “The same dish. Different name. Same dish. The whole story is in those six words.” — Reader, Damascus “They both knew. They both chose. Without ever saying so. That is the most complete act of love I have ever read about.” — Reader, New York NY “Sama is still collecting the words. The words that displacement invents. I need her research to exist in the world.” — Reader, Paris “Story 20. Twenty stories. Not once less than everything. How.” — Reader, Berlin