“One of them, toothless, clad in a dirty tracksuit and a wool beanie, with a nebulous tattoo of a heart (which he gave himself when he was nineteen and in love with a cousin) partly covered over by a lion (which he gave himself six years later, when her father forbade her to marry him), told me one day, ‘When we were younger, we used to come here to swim and fish.’ And then, ‘Once, I was trying to pull a body from the river. The current was strong, I grabbed the body by its hand, and the arm came off.’”
I read “The River Martyrs,” an article by Luke Mogelson in The New Yorker, about the men who drag the bodies of people — men, women and children — out of the river in Aleppo after they’ve been killed by government forces. (I know, I’m weeks behind.)
I haven’t been paying much attention to the war — it seems so far away, and so unreal — which is why I think it’s important to read the piece. It brings the atrocities in Syria to life — I don’t know if we can, or should, do anything, but it certainly is more important than reading about failures in Benghazi, or whatever other nonsense is in the news this week.
