Human cycle of civilization and destruction

“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.” — Jean-Paul Sartre

Mohammed Anis, a white-haired man, sitting on a bed amid the rubble, a litter of debris and smokes inside his home that used to be a splendid city apartment, now has been blasted into ruins, rubbish and dust with deep gouges in white walls as his hometown Aleppo was besieged with bombs, mortar fire, and starvation in the aftermath of six-year-long Syrian civil war. White wicker furniture, he used to sit and listen music, has been splintered and scorched.

Assad regime has obliterated so much of the city, his great collection of Vintage Cars that even included a replica of Adolf Hitler’s Mercedes, and him. He has his tobacco, music, and samovar. In between the bombs, those are comforts, he found. You see, there are some things that bombs and fighting just can’t kill.

As the Photographer reports: “How can you live here,” He asked him. “It’s my home,” Anis answered simply. Like many of Aleppo’s residents, he sleeps in debris. When he saw an old crank-up gramophone at the edge of the bed, perhaps the only thing around him that still works, had survived. Mohammed Anis told him, “I will play it for you… But first, I have to light my pipe. Because I never listen to music without it.” “Anis puffed on his pipe. He seemed to be somewhere else as well. He seemed to forget that we were there. He looked out the window and he had a look on his face of a person watching a beautiful sunset. He sat there, puffing on his broken pipe and staring out the window which has been shattered; and gauzy white curtains, which flap-like wounded white birds, as the music floated over the ruins of his house and the city outside. After six years of war, the Syrians want life. They just want to let the music play.”

He put a record on the turntable, and presses the needle down. The man holds his pipe in contemplation and listens to the music in his ruins and the human cycle of civilisation and destruction.

Source: Correspondent AFP