They Stayed Put, but Their City Disappeared

They Stayed Put, but Their City Disappeared
When they reached the chorus — "How sweet it is to live in one house, how sweet to live
in one hometown" — one of the singers, Safana Baqleh, began to weep into her hands.
"We need each other." For their spring concert, the women’s choir — the Gardenia Chorus, they called themselves — had chosen a repertoire of wedding songs representing the many peoples of Syria: songs in Arabic, Kurdish
and Circassian, songs from places now synonymous with ruin, like Aleppo and Hama.
"We are living in the same place but we have lost the people who lived here." In the narrow lanes of the old city, dominated by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia and militant group
that backs Mr. Assad, funeral posters announce the deaths of smiling young men.
Still, it was impossible not to notice how Damascus had been altered since pro-democracy protests erupted nearly seven years ago, only to be crushed by President Bashar al-Assad and then morph into a civil war
that scattered Syrians across the world and turned their country into a chessboard for more powerful countries.
Still, some afternoons, government forces blast artillery into rebel enclaves on the city’s edge; in retaliation, rebels fire shells
into the narrow lanes of the old section of the city, not long ago killing a shopkeeper playing backgammon with his neighbor.
21, 2017
DAMASCUS, Syria — On a cool evening in early November, in a back room of the Damascus Opera House,
a women’s choir was rehearsing an old favorite, a sunny ballad from a childhood cartoon.