Since Theo was no longer letting me stand on his back, I took the bucket that we had been given to wash our laundry in and flipped it over to use as a stool. Unfortunately, the bucket wasn’t high enough. I needed another six- to eight-inch boost, so I folded up a few of my blankets, stacked them on the bucket, and at last stood at eye level with this sloppy, sorry excuse for a cage. As I stared at the wires, I thought of characters from movies and literature who had been in similar situations, and asked myself how they’d managed to get out of them. The characters that came most immediately to mind were the velociraptors from Jurassic Park: I remembered how they’d systematically tested the electrified wires holding them in, never touching the same spot twice, so I decided to do the same. I started by shaking each vertical wire in the window grate individually. None of them were welded in place and the tops of every one wiggled freely, while the bottoms were jammed tightly into the tiny gap in the window frame where the glass used to be. These wires were paper-clip-thin and would bend easily. Then I moved on to the horizontals, which were much thicker and harder to bend, quality steel, and found that only three of the thirteen were welded on, and only on the left side. The entire screen had simply been woven together before it was welded in these three spots and was held together by tension alone.
As soon as I figured it out, I smiled.
“Gotcha,” I said.
I woke Theo up and explained that if we unwove the verticals we could bend the horizontals back and create an opening big enough to slide through. I had been watching out the window since Abdullah moved the grain bag and was absolutely certain there was never a guard stationed in the rear of the building. On some nights shots rang out from the rooftop across the street next to the bombed-out building, which meant there was a sniper stationed where—if he saw us—he would have a clean shot as soon as one of us stuck his head out the window. Because of this, and since it was my plan, I volunteered to go first—which Theo had no problem agreeing to.
When I suggested that we split up once we were out for our own safety, Theo was all for it. It was obvious he wanted to get away from me just as much as I did from him. Since he wouldn’t be with me, I had to get a head start on learning the Arabic I’d need to communicate once I was free. The phrases I needed were simple: Please help me! I was kidnapped by criminals! I’m a Canadian! Where’s the Free Syrian Army? The rest I knew. I figured it was safer to say I was kidnapped by criminals—if they knew I’d been held by al-Nusra, whatever FSA group I managed to link up with might get scared enough to give me back.
Besides getting the wires off, the most crucial piece was timing. There was never really a safe time. Our best bet for getting out without being seen was to do it under the cover of darkness, but we both knew we couldn’t walk around Aleppo at night without getting either shot or snatched all over again. So we had to get out of the window while it was still dark, but minutes before sunrise. During a normal month a pre-sunrise escape would be almost as dangerous as any other time because everyone wakes up so early to pray and many stay awake after that. But luckily, this wasn’t a normal month: this was Ramadan—and during Ramadan, the dawn prayer marked the beginning of a fourteen-hour fast. Instead of staying up after they were done praying, during Ramadan the majority of the jihadis went right back to sleep, because nobody wanted to be up for fourteen hours in the Syrian heat without being able to eat or even drink water.
This meant that the dawn prayer would be the fixed point our entire escape would revolve around. Abu Ali would come down with our breakfast early in the morning as usual so that we could eat before prayer, and he wouldn’t return until evening when he brought our dinner. Meaning if we got out, we would have a fourteen-hour head start before anyone even knew we were gone.
Theo and I agreed that we could get out by unweaving the vertical wires just down to the “third rail,” which was what I called the lowest welded horizontal wire, then folding the verticals down over it and sliding out the top. The verticals would remain held in place by the remaining horizontal and where they were jammed into the bottom of the frame, which meant I could work on unweaving them for a day or so before we planned to leave, folding them back up so that nobody would notice at a glance.
The only problem now was how to get Theo level with the window so I could pull him out after I was through. I got the idea of making a rope out of our tee shirts to tie around the iron window frame, leaving a loop at the other end for his foot. Theo could then step into the loop while on the bucket, put his head, arms, and shoulders through the window frame, and then use the rope to hoist the bottom half of his body up so that it was horizontal with the window, while I pulled.
Theo was slightly thicker than me, and as a fail-safe in case he wasn’t gliding through the window with ease I figured we needed some kind of lube for his chest and