QUEBEC—The school bus turned onto a snowy Ste-Foy cul-de-sac just after 3 p.m., coming to a stop in front of an apartment building.
Ali eyed its opening doors from the front lobby, where he was saying goodbye to a stream of visitors who had come to give their condolences.
“His girls are home,” he said.
Two days had passed since the children, 12 and 10, were told, with the help of a psychologist, that their father was dead. Abdelkrim Hassane, 41, was among six victims of a fatal shooting inside Quebec City’s largest mosque just a few minutes’ drive away. In the family’s apartment upstairs, Hassane’s widow was caring for their youngest daughter, a 15-month-old baby.
The girls are among 17 children who no longer have fathers — men who were killed where the families worship.
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On Wednesday, Hassane’s eldest girls went to school as the family’s support network, led by Ali — Hassane’s friend of 23 years, who asked to be identified by first name only — busily arranged the logistics of the coming days. Funeral in Montreal first. Burial in Hassane’s home country of Algeria after that.
His cellphone rang every other minute, his voice low and solemn. Dark circles around his eyes betrayed a sleepless night at the hospital Sunday, where he learned Hassane was killed moments after the men had waved goodbye to each other at the mosque, Ali leaving, Hassane lingering.
But as the girls stepped off the bus, clomping in big boots up to the door, frizzy curls poking out of their toques, he transformed.
“Girls, you’re home!” he called out to them excitedly, putting on a grin as he propped open the door and ushered them upstairs.
He knows he can only distract them from their grief for so long.
“When the apartment is empty, when no one is coming and going, that’s when they’ll feel the absence of their father,” he said.
The young ages of some of the victims’ children may ease, for now, the task of explaining the inexplicable — why their fathers are gone. But inside the Ibrahima Barry household, there has nonetheless been confusion for the littlest of his four children, his 2- and 3-year-old sons.
Hours after learning his older brother was among the dead, Thierno Barry flew from his home in New York to his brother’s Ste-Foy apartment, to be with Ibrahima’s wife and children. Since then, visitors have repeatedly commented on how much the brothers look alike — “It’s remarkable,” said one of Ibrahima’s co-workers to Thierno Barry Wednesday night.
But the boys, giggling as they played with strangers’ shoes down the hall, can’t tell the difference.
“They have been calling me dad,” Theirno Barry said.
Ibrahima’s two eldest, girls aged 13 and 6, have a better grasp of what’s happened. “We have tried to speak to them (as) diplomatically as possible,” he said.
It is not only the children of the dead who need comfort. Hours after her mosque was reopened following the attacks, blood stains still on the carpets and a bullet hole visible in the wall, Yasima Hadj-Sahraoui asked what she should tell her 13-year-old son and other kids from the mosque.
“Most of them were born here — they feel absolutely, totally Québécois. We have, every time, tried to teach them the good values of Islam, not to do bad things. What can we say to them?”
For now, Farhat Guemri has just been trying to listen. He was with his boys, 12 and 10, when shots rang out inside the mosque Sunday night. They hid together in an imam’s prayer room until the shooting stopped.
He tried to protect them, both during the attack and after — covering their ears from the screams and telling them to close their eyes to carnage around them.
“But then police took us and we walked through the room, and I couldn’t prevent it,” Guemri said.
Psychologists have been arranged for the boys at their school, and for now their well-being is Guemri’s sole focus. Asked how he is doing, he has no answer, having not yet stopped to consider it.
“I want to make sure that my kids are all right,” he says. “We’ll see about how I’m feeling after that.”
The day after the shooting, he tried to stop his boys from watching television. But inevitably, they saw accused gunman Alexandre Bissonnette’s face in the news. Guemri used it as an opportunity to talk.
“I asked my son what he would say if he could speak to this man,” Guemri said, his voice cracking.
“And he told me: ‘Dad, I would ask him why he hates Muslims.’ ”
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