8

Blowing your nose, spitting or urinating in the middle of the night were ordinary behaviors.

Years later, I would understand that there were places in a foreign country where you paid to go to the toilet. As I waited for sleep to come, I looked at the stars as usual from the gaps between my thoughts.

On such nights, my father would light a cigarette before coming home.

When he finished his cigarette, he would pull the rope on our wooden door, slightly lean the door and enter our garden, then climb the stairs to the roof and fall asleep on the sofa reserved for him, all tired.

Muhammed's father took off his hat as usual and put it on the wooden table. Muhammed did as usual, but his father took out his jacket from his pocket, licked it with the tip of his tongue and wrapped it all up.

That evening, father and son waited for his classmate from the air force academy to arrive, then relaxed and began to enjoy the cool air, but this time his father was neither singing nor saying a few words.

He continued to drink his strong Russian vodka, his hands were shaking.

He occasionally looked at the few lights of the distant Aleppo villages and listened to the train getting ready to depart.

This train had been operating since the Ottoman Empire. A long, deep sigh escaped from his heart. The two friends suddenly stood up and there were two small glasses of Russian vodka left on the wooden table.

Look, my son, he said, I guess I'll be back before your mother falls asleep, then I heard the sound of feet descending the creaking stairs, but my father's plastic shoes were slipping as they came into contact with the wooden stairs.

He was so deeply intoxicated that he thought this wooden staircase was part of a dream.

Even when my mother told me the next morning why my father hadn't come to breakfast and I remembered this moment years later, I couldn't decide whether she had made it up or not.

There would be a lot of scorpions in the middle of the night sleep and in the Aleppo heat because the houses we lived in were not made of reinforced concrete, and sometimes a stubborn cockroach would crawl on the thin blanket or sheet when I slept.

My sleeping soul would suddenly startle, I would suddenly stand up and cry.

That morning, I opened my eyes at the same time as my family.

The sun had dawned on all of us, only a faint red color from the mountains ahead was trying to illuminate the environment.

I was looking around with helpless sleepy eyes like a baby left alone. I was rubbing my eyes in front of everyone as if I wanted to be a baby, then my mother came.

She shouted, "Children, don't get up," she muttered, I immediately put on my slippers that were next to the bed, I didn't want to walk around barefoot, in fact we had to use the sofas whose feet were made of brass because the scorpions could not climb the feet of these sofas made of brass, they would slip and fall to the ground after a few attempts.