Read An Excerpt From ‘As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow’ by Zoulfa Katouh

A love letter to Syria and its people, As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow is a speculative novel set amid the Syrian Revolution, burning with the fires of hope, love, and possibility. Perfect for fans of The Book Thief and Salt to the Sea.

Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt in both written and audiobook formats from Zoulfa Katouh’s As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, which is out September 13th 2022.

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life. 
 
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe. 
 
But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.  
 
Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.

---

Chapter 4

When Dr Ziad finds me, I’m on the floor in the corner of one of the recovery rooms, clutching my

knees as I rock back and forth, shaking and crying, trying to soothe myself. Two little girls lay motionless before me, bullet holes ripped through their throats. Military snipers take to the roofs at the borders between the military’s posts and the Free Syrian Army’s protected zones. The girls look about seven, clothes torn, knees scraped.

The snipers’ victims are always the innocents who can’t fight back. Children, the elderly, pregnant women. The Free Syrian Army informed Dr. Ziad that, early on, the military would target them for sport. Even Layla had a very near miss in October; now she’s not allowed to leave the house. Ever. Not without me.

Dr. Ziad crouches beside me, his kind face weathered with pain.

“Salama,” he says gently. “Look at me.”

I tear my eyes away from the small faces with purple, bruised lips to meet his eyes. I press my hands to my own lips, begging them to stop trembling.

“Salama, we talked about this. You can’t work yourself to this point. You have to take care of you. If you’re drained and in pain, you won’t be able to help anyone. No one should have to handle this horror. Especially someone as young as you are.” His glance softens. “You’ve lost more than anyone

ever should. Don’t confine yourself to the hospital. Go home.”

My hands fall to my lap as I process what he’s saying. Over these past seven months, he’s become a father figure to me. I know one of his daughters is my age and that he sees her in me. I also know he’d never ask of her what he expects of me every day. To drench my hands in the blood of innocents and push it back into their bodies. Witness the horror and still come back the next day. And a small part of me, a very small one, begrudges him for it. Though he tries his best to take care of my health, not letting me exceed my limits.

I clear my throat. “There are still more patients—”

“Your life is just as important as theirs,” he interrupts, his voice leaving no room for negotiation. “Your. Life. Is. Just. As. Important.”

I close my eyes, trying to hold on to his words, trying to believe them; but each time I try to catch the letters, they vanish from my grasp.

Nevertheless, I stand on unsteady legs as Dr. Ziad throws a white sheet over the bodies.

—

Layla doesn’t say anything for a long time after I slump down on the couch.

With my eyes closed, I relay my conversation with Am, my voice cracking when I tell her the price. I hate him. Innocent lives don’t matter when he can fill his pockets from our suffering. No one wants to escape more than people who have been broken down to the core. They’re looking for a lifeline, no matter how brittle it may be.

“Say something,” I beg, and open my eyes when she stays quiet. She stares at the coffee table in front of her. She’s thinking of a plan. And then she grimaces.

“I have nothing to say.” Her brows are furrowed.

“Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

“We could sell our gold?” She twirls a strand of hair around her finger. The late- afternoon sun filtering through the stained windows pools in the middle of the living room, turning the Arabian rug under us into something ethereal. I watch the way the light dances around my shadow between the forest- green plants sewn into the material. If I focus on it, I can pretend whatever exists outside the yellow halo is all right— is safe.

Sell our gold.

Gold is passed on through our families. Deep beneath its glittering surface, it holds our history and stories in its thick braided strands.

When I went back to my demolished building after the bombing, I wasn’t able to find anything that belonged to me. The granite ensured it. My gold is still under there, buried, but Layla’s is here. Gold that Hamza gave her as part of her dowry.

“Who would buy it?” I ask.

Layla shrugs. “Maybe Am would accept it instead of money.”

I’ve never heard of anyone buying their way with gold, and we’re surely not the first ones to think of it. And anyway, I’m not willing to part with Layla’s—my family’s—gold like that. Not to someone as crooked as Am.

“He didn’t say money or gold.” I pick at the threads spilling out of the couch. “If he wanted gold, he’d say it.” Layla watches me while I continue to poke at the strands.

“So you don’t want to try and ask him?” she finally says.

“I’ll . . . haggle with him.”

She bites her lip before bursting out laughing. “Haggle with him?” she repeats. “What do you think this is? Souq Al-Hamidiyah?”

I point at the mahogany frame that houses a canvas Layla painted. It’s a painting I’ve always loved looking at. Dark blue skies mingling with the gray sea at the horizon. I have no idea how Layla was able to capture it so clearly, as if it were a photograph; the water sometimes feels like it’s about to drip out of the frame’s edges, soaking the rug. The clouds are congealed and huddled together, moments before a storm.

“Who convinced that man to let you buy the frame for half price?” I fold my arms. “That gorgeously made frame? Was it you?”

Layla smiles. “No, it was you.”

“Yes, it was. So . . . I’ll haggle with him.”

But I don’t say the rest of what I’m thinking. That I’m only humoring her. That I’m torn between my duty to my brother and to the hospital, the ropes holding me on each side both fraying at the edges. And I don’t know which will give before the other.

Though something in her gaze makes me suspect she knows all of that.

“You talk about Germany as if it’s the land where all our dreams will come true.” My eyes catch back on the painting. It looks so real. “We don’t speak the language. We can barely speak English as it is, and we have no family there. We’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere, and there are many who would try and take advantage of us. Refugees are being swindled out of everything they own, you know that. Not to mention kidnapped.”

Once, a lifetime ago, I wanted to live a year in Europe. Another in the States. Canada. Japan. Planting seeds in all the continents. I wanted to do my master’s degree in herbology and collect plants and medicinal flowers from all over the world. I wanted the places I visited to remember that Salama Kassab walked through them. I wanted to take these experiences and write children’s books with pages etched in magic and words that whisked the reader away to other realms.

“What about you?” I had asked Layla one day. “Where do you want to go?”

We were in the countryside at my grandparents’ estate the summer after we finished high school. University life was just two months away. The apricots were ripe and we had spent the whole morning filling a dozen baskets of them to eat and to give to our neighbors. We were taking a break, lying on our backs over the picnic blanket and watching the clouds. The sun was hidden behind them, her rays turning the sky into an azure blue. A butterfly flapped her wings and a bumblebee buried herself into a daisy. It was a quiet day, a good day where hopes and dreams would be traded. Where sweet childhood memories would be revisited.

Layla breathed in deeply, taking in the apricot scent. “I want to paint Norway.”

 “Like the whole country?” I laughed.

She turned to me and raised her hand to flick my nose. I squealed and covered it.

“You’re not funny.” She rolled her eyes, but a smile played on her lips.

“I’m hilarious,” I said and turned to my side. My hijab slipped a bit and my bangs peeked out. It was all right because we were hidden away from any passerby’s eyes. I shrugged it off a bit, and my ponytail fell to the side.

Layla sat up and looked around. Spotting no one, she gathered my ponytail behind my back and slipped off the hair tie.

“I have seen all shades of blue except the one in Norway,” she said quietly. Her voice carried over the breeze. “I’ve only seen it on Google, and it was breathtaking. I want to see the real thing. I want to paint every shade and have an art exhibition. Something called Blue from Every Angle. I don’t know.”

I turned around. “That sounds so beautiful, Layla. Very Studio Ghibli.”

She smiled and began braiding my hair. Something she did whenever I was stressed. “I have dreams that will take me away from here.”

In her glance, I could see the question—would I be okay if she left? She and I had been joined at the hip ever since we were born.

She was as close as a sister to me. With her being an only child and me an only daughter, we’d forged that relationship on our own.

“Salama!” we heard Hamza call from the distance. “Layla! Yalla, lunch is ready.”

Layla’s eyes sparkled at the sound of his voice, and she jumped up and ran toward him. He caught her by the waist and they nearly fell down.

I stood up. Watching them, I felt as if I were standing on the other side of a door I couldn’t walk through.

Layla’s brows furrowed. “What’s wrong?”

I realized my expression had been forlorn and quickly cleared it away with a smile. “Nothing.”

How childish my worries were back then. How innocent were our dreams.

Now, a pregnant, starved girl sits before me, her eyes too large for her face, while my stomach rattles about like an empty drum.

“Salama,” Layla says, and I look at her, snapping out of my daydream. “Today was full of sadness, wasn’t it?”

I pick at my sleeve. “Every day is.”

She shakes her head slightly and pats her lap. “Lay your head.”

And I do.

Layla’s fingers sink into my hair and she starts making small braids. My hijab lies discarded somewhere beside the sofa, and I sigh with relief at her gentle touch. Her pregnant belly cushions my head, and I feel the baby kicking against her stomach. Only fabric, layers of skin, and placental fluid separate it from the terrors of this world.

“Don’t focus on the darkness and sadness,” she says, and I glance up at her. She smiles warmly. “If you do, you won’t see the light even if it’s staring you in the face.”

“What are you talking about?” I mumble.

“I’m saying what’s happening now, as horrible as it is, isn’t the end of the world. Change is difficult, and it’s different depending on what needs to be changed. Look, I’ll even science it up for you. If a cancer has spread, wouldn’t whatever needs to be done to remove it be different than for something like a wart?”

A smile threatens my lips. “Since when do you know medical stuff?”

Her eyes twinkle. “As an artist, I’m a student of life. Humor me, Salama.”

“Well,” I say slowly. “With cancer, we need to perform surgery to take out the tumor, but it’s a tricky process. Chances of survival. Cutting into healthy tissue. It’s a lot to consider.”

“And a wart?”

I shrug. “Just treat it with salicylic acid.”

“And when that cancer surgery is successful, when the patient has fought for their life, wouldn’t their life be improved?”

I nod.

“Don’t you think the Syrian dictatorship is more like a cancer that has been growing in Syria’s body for decades, and the surgery, despite the risks, is better than submitting to the cancer? With something so deeply entrenched in our roots, change doesn’t come easy. It has a heavy price.”

I don’t say anything.

“There is light, Salama,” she continues. “Despite the agony, we are free for the first time in over fifty years.”

Her fingers feel heavy in my hair.

“You’re talking as if you want to stay,” I say.

She looks at me meaningfully. Like she knows exactly what I’m hiding in my heart. “The fight isn’t just in Syria, Salama. It’s everywhere. Like I told you, fighting starts here. Not in Germany or anywhere else.”

She chooses her words carefully, and each one squirms through my auditory canal, echoing over my eardrum, right through the nerve cells to my brain. They settle there like little seeds planted between the cells.

“How come you’re not as bitter as I am?” I joke weakly, but it comes out flat and rings truer than I’d like.

When Hamza was arrested, Layla went through two major changes. For the first five weeks she was inconsolable. Sobbing until her throat went hoarse, not eating or showering. Then, suddenly, she was back to her old self. Calm and loving with a smile that could power the entirety of Homs.

“First off, we can’t all be perfect,” she says, and I finally smile. Satisfied, she continues, “Because I see the love you have for me. I see your sacrifice and your kindness. I focus on the hope rather than counting my losses. I have love in my heart because of you. Because of all the help you gave me when . . . when they took him away.”

A tear blooms in the corner of her eye, slides down her cheek, and I catch it before it reaches her chin. She lost her parents when the bombs started falling. And then, in the middle of mourning her family, in the span of one week, we lost Mama, Baba, and Hamza. Worst of all, we still don’t know whether Hamza and Baba are alive.

I’d like to believe they’ve died. And I know Layla would too. Death is a far more merciful end than living every day in agony.

“If only everyone in the world were like you,” I murmur.

She lets loose a shaky laugh, and I take her hand to grip it firmly. But a thunderous noise outside makes us jump. Whatever warmth we were feeling evaporates, and the air is cold again. Layla squeezes my hand, her eyes closed. I pray with her that it’s nothing. Please God, let it be nothing. Let it not

be a raid! Please!

My heart lodges in my throat for several beats, but when no screams pierce the night, Layla relaxes her grip.

“I think it’s just rain,” she whispers, trying to hide the fear from her voice.

“Better grab the buckets, then.” I get up from the sofa as another thunderclap shakes the night. My head spins a bit, missing the safety Layla’s lap offered.

“And don’t forget to pray. Prayers are answered when rain falls,” she reminds me.

The wind blows past me when I open the veranda door to place the buckets outside. It cools my skin’s hot flush, and my heart begins to migrate back to its proper place in my chest. I inhale as much of the fallen clouds as I can. They’re gray and dense, hopefully bringing protection against the warplanes that could shatter our lives.

After that, I help Layla get ready for bed. She doesn’t sleep in her room anymore. Too much reminds her of Hamza. I haven’t even stepped in there since the day I moved in. I don’t want to see my brother’s clothes hanging from the closet, his favorite watch on the nightstand, and the photograph of his laughing face as he kissed Layla’s cheek during their wedding.

So Layla sleeps on the sofa. I fill it with pillows and blankets. Her eyes are misty, her expression faraway. I know that look. She’s in the past, and I don’t want to jolt her out of her daydream. Even though the memories ache, it’s the only way we get to see our loved ones— replaying their words to us, letting our imaginations magnify or soften their voices however we please. Layla moves purely on muscle memory and then lies back against the pillows.

Finally, her eyes clear and she looks at me. “Salama,” she says as if she didn’t know I’ve been there the whole time.

“Do you need water? Panadol? We can spare some now that you’re in your third trimester,” I say.

“No thank you. The baby’s being very polite today.”

“She’s being considerate of her mama’s feelings.”

“She?” Layla says softly. Her expression lightens.

I nod. “It’s a girl. I can feel it.”

“Really?” Layla rolls her eyes good- naturedly. “And is that a part of your medical detection skills?”

“When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you get a sixth sense about these kinds of things.” I wink. “Trust me, I’m a pharmacist.”

She smiles. “With my life. And my baby’s.”

“Too much responsibility!” I pretend to crumble, and she laughs. “Thought of any names?”

“Well, when Hamza and I used to discuss names for any future babies, he always thought of boys’ names. Always wanted a boy. He told me that he would be too soft if our firstborn was a girl. That he wouldn’t be able to deny her anything.”

“Oh, we both know Hamza would become a literal carpet for his daughter to step on.”

“Which is why we need to leave,” she whispers. “We can’t let her be born here. If it were just you and me, Salama, I wouldn’t leave my husband. But . . . it’s his child. It’s my baby.”

My breath hitches and I ball my hands into fists.

Lavender has antiseptic and anti- inflammatory properties. Purple petals. Can be used for insomnia. Lavender. Lavender. Lav—

“You— you were telling me names?” I choke out, and her gaze drops between us.

“Yeah,” she says after a minute. “If it’s a boy, Malik, and if it’s a girl—”

“Salama,” I interrupt.

“How did you know?” she gasps.

I snap back in disbelief. “Um, what? I was joking.”

“I’m seriously going to name her Salama if she’s a girl!”

“And why wouldn’t you? Salama is a great name,” I answer with a goofy smile.

She laughs. “I agree.”

I scoot over and whisper against her stomach. “You’d best be a girl. I love you, little Saloomeh.”

The pain in Layla’s eyes has mostly vanished, but traces still linger. Enough for the guilt to dig its thorns into my heart. I take a deep breath and exhale.

“Good night.” I smooth her hair back and tighten the blanket around her.

She squeezes my hand in reply.

As she succumbs to her dreams, I finally let my fear show, the words she said to me repeating on a loop in my mind.

With my life. And my baby’s.