صوفيا

Sophia - Or the beginning of the stories by Rafiq Shami ... One summer day in 2021, Salman Baladi decided to return to Damascus, after forty years, one month, and seventeen days since he left Syria in 1970 with a forged passport, and it took another six months to ensure that there was no arrest warrant against him when he returned. He read stories about expatriates whose homesickness and desire to return to their homeland led them, or tricks and deceptions by intelligence agencies, to arrest them as soon as they set foot outside the airplane door. So Salman hesitated to make sure everything was fine, even though doing so from Rome was extremely difficult. Salman had forgotten most of his eventful past in Syria, and now he was living happily in Rome with his family, but he never forgot the reason that made him flee his country: the firing of the Tinar, the policeman who was severely injured, then the defeat of his group and his escape, and the fear of arrest from which he narrowly escaped at the last moment. All these memories haunted him in his nightmares, almost every night during his early years in exile, but they began to fade and disappear over time.