On Friday, my housemates and I all fled home in the middle of the night.

The conditions under our landlord were becoming unbearable, and the final straw was when he hit my French housemate on Friday evening.

We had already talked about leaving because we’d figured out he was spying on us (and we were actually planning on looking at a new place that evening). But our landlord’s violent outburst made the decision much easier.

I wasn’t there to see the incident (I had stepped out to buy a blanket.) But there were plenty of witnesses.

As soon as I reached the walkway to the house, our landlord came up to me to tell me his side of the story. I guess he thought I’d join his team if I heard his story first.

When I entered the home, my housemates told me our landlord, while he was drunk as usual, had hit Bryce, a Parisian Arabic language student living with us.

Naturally, I believed my housemates.

Because Bryce is a beginner in Arabic, I accompanied him to the local police station to translate his complaint from French to Arabic.

We then returned to the house, along with three police officers.

By then, Eva, our German housemate from Nuremburg, had already moved out.

Our landlord, who works part time at his liquor store and full time as an informant, immediately offered the police some whiskey – which they didn’t accept.

At two points during the discussion, two of the police officers pulled me aside to ask me if I felt comfortable living with our landlord. No, definitely, no, I answered. Both times, my landlord followed us down the hall to try to listen to the conversation. Both times, the police waved him away.

After about 2 hours of sitting around the living room with the police and our landlord, the police finally asked Bryce what he wanted.

He responded, “I just want an apology.” No charges, no legal action, just an apology.

For our landlord, saying sorry was more painful than getting a visit from the police or having to return one month’s rent. He did apologize, but not genuinely.

Around midnight, after the police left, our landlord, in his obsessive record keeping, got out his notebook and started calling the intelligence. I could hear him giving them our names. But then when I heard him give my friends’ names, I couldn’t take it. (I was horrified to learn that he not only had files on us but also on our friends).

This scared me because a lot of my friends are Palestinians and Iraqis, minorities who don’t have the same rights as regular citizens.

I asked him to stop. But then he called another intelligence agent and asked for one of my friends to be interrogated.

The entire time, I was yelling at him and trying to get the phone out of his hand and pleading with him to stop.

I finally cornered him, and I said, “Just promise me, promise you won’t hurt my friends!”

He said, “You made me apologize like I was a child. You made a complaint about me. I’ll make a complaint about you.”

I responded, “What do you want? Do you want me to apologize?”

“No,” he said. “You can apologize to your friends when you’re all in the interrogation center.”

I kept on asking him, “What do you want from me?”

I asked, “Do you want to kill me?”

He said, “No. But now, wherever you travel in Syria, you’ll be followed (as if that’s not already the case), and your friends are going to prison.”

I continued pleading, “How much money will it take? I’ll give you anything, anything, whatever you want. Just don’t hurt my friends!”

He refused any offer of reconciliation.

As we were leaving, he promised I’d pay the price.

With the help of some friends, we were all able to get out of the house in one trip.

We went to the house we were going to look at that evening where one of our friends was living, we settled into some empty rooms, and we hoped the new landlord would accept us the next day.

We’d fled the Jewish Quarter Friday night, and Saturday morning we found ourselves to be living in a Palestinian neighborhood.

In the morning, Eva and I walked around the new neighborhood.

The Jewish Quarter, from where we’d fled, is largely empty and abandoned (gee, I wonder why, with such a nice neighbor as our landlord – a secular Christian who gives all faiths and all humans a bad name). By contrast, the Palestinian neighborhood (Al Amin Street) is lively and filled with open-air markets, craft shops and lots of foot traffic.

On Saturday evening, the manager of our new house came over (the actual owner lives in the Netherlands). He said we were welcome to stay in our new rooms, and he invited us to a party at his house, which is also in our new neighborhood.

He suggested, “We’ll start a new community.”

I like that idea.