Al hay al russi

The narrator has been living in the zoo of Damascus for a while, occupying a room with his girlfriend Nonna, on the rooftop of a small building. The narrator, Nonna, and the giraffe, by far the zoo’s most popular figure, form a strange, yet happy family. It hasn’t always been this way. Before Nonna came into his life, the narrator and the giraffe were on their own. Well, sort of. Everyone came to visit her in the evenings, after hours. They would all gather on the narrator’s rooftop: the depressed zoo director, Victor Ivanitch, Abu Ali Sulayman, the French teacher and clothing shop owner, along with his old poodle Moustache, Raisa Petrovna, the Afghan Hound, and sometimes Essam, the local hero — who once confronted Borya’s mafia, and protected Artin’s bar from his racketeering.

In these days, he, the narrator, was very obviously the giraffe’s favorite. She would react differently to his presence, and he would not hesitate to hug her fury head bent over him on his rooftop, when he missed his deceased mother (whom he had never hugged). The giraffe has his mother’s eyes, and like her, the giraffe would watch with him an archival Spain-Uruguay soccer match on TV. When Nonna came along, she seemed to have her own relationship to the giraffe, bringing her the fresh scallions she seems to love so much, and seemingly reading the giraffe’s mind.

Why doesn’t the giraffe sleep? Nonna wonders. Because of evolutionary reasons: She needs to stay alert and escape lions and other predators, explains the narrator. Obviously, the giraffe was born in captivity and has never encountered any of these predators. This is the reason why a brand new color TV is brought to the rooftop, for the giraffe to finally see the predators she unknowingly fears. It is not always easy to find images of lions feasting on their prey on TV, and when the narrator and Nonna do find such images, the giraffe stares at the screen, unperturbed. What they mostly come across on TV are silent scenes of death and violence, unfolding in the neighboring Ghouta district — the roaring government planes are constantly in the background, along with the smell of burning plastic.

A sleepless giraffe in Damascus is a surprising and unexpectedly moving story. Set in the margins of the Syrian civil war, the novel depicts a group of colorful people, the inhabitants of the fictional “Russian quarter” (incidentally the novel’s Arabic title), trying, naturally, to hang on to joy and to life, while brutal violence is unleashed a few hundred meters away.

Yet, despite these efforts, and precisely because of them, this community is ultimately dragged into violence, when one night, and for unknown reasons, Essam decides to cross over to Ghouta, and gets killed. As his body is returned, the need to burry him in dignity becomes existential: Not burying him in the way befitting their hero would amount to acknowledging the war and giving up their way of life. Burying him in the way he deserves however opens the gates of hell — and culminate in the death of the giraffe, shot in the head in the book’s closing scene.

A sleepless giraffe in Damascus is a sweet moving portrait of a plethora of human and non human characters. In the self-contained magical realist world of the Russian quarter, war is akin to horrific abstract art showcased inside the safe frame of TV — until in one fateful night, it no longer is abstract, or framed, and all this colorfully loud community is forced out into the grim real world.