For months, Bolbol had avoided talking to anyone he didn’t know or even leaving the house. Going outside was hard work. He was content to travel back and forth from work and read state newspapers ostentatiously on the bus. On his days off, he watched black-and-white Egyptian films on cable and grieved for this golden bygone era. He didn’t know why he put himself through this, but at least this was a pastime that no one could possibly find suspicious; everyone was mourning for the beautiful days that they’d lost. Longer holidays such as Eid he spent making different types of pickles. He liked the new strategies he’d developed in order to keep himself sane, even though they were all strictly short-term arrangements. He didn’t dare acknowledge that his life was a collection of trivial acts that would sooner or later have to come to an end.
One day, his isolation was punctured. One of his father’s neighbors’ sons—an engineering student turned combatant in the Free Syrian Army—called Bolbol and informed him that his father’s health made it very difficult for him to remain in the besieged village. Bolbol couldn’t bring himself to say anything in reply—not out of shock from hearing about his father’s deterioration, but from fear of being arrested for speaking to a person who lived in S. The caller didn’t have a lot of time and said that they had been fortunate enough to manage to smuggle the ustadh out to the abandoned gas station at the edge of the village. He asked Bolbol to arrive at six o’clock that evening to take him away.
The call had come at three in the afternoon. Bolbol couldn’t chance saying a word to this person calling from an unknown number. What if the line was tapped? He was absolutely certain that the regime monitored every word coming out of the village. He had to think of a way out of this terrible mistake. Suddenly one of his rare bursts of self-assurance led him to decide to resolve the matter. He thought he would call Hussein. His brother should help in a situation like this. He dialed Hussein’s number and was overcome with frustration when he heard that phone service had been temporarily interrupted. There was still time, though. Hussein would probably get back to him when he saw the missed call. Bolbol sat in a neighborhood restaurant in Saruja and asked for beans and rice. He contemplated what he was about to do to himself: his father was going to come and live with him in his small house. Well, maybe his father wouldn’t be able to endure being in a district loyal to the regime.
Bolbol had worked hard to gain the trust of his neighborhood. The details on his identity card marked him out for suspicion; for four years now, similar details had spelled catastrophe for many others. Thousands of people disappeared without a trace, simply for being born in areas controlled by the opposition, just as many regime supporters had disappeared in those same areas. Kidnappings, ransoms, and random arrests were widespread and tit-for-tat responses meant they only escalated in frequency. People’s movements were tightly controlled. Any error could be very costly.
Bolbol minimized his time in public. To get to work he took the special bus for public employees, and to get home in the evening he took the same route back—like so many others whose identity cards and official documents happened to list the names of various now burned-out towns under “Birthplace.” He abandoned his few remaining old habits, such as visiting a coffeehouse every Friday, or loafing around Bab Tuma. He cut short any burgeoning friendships with his colleagues; all they ever did together was repeat the same conversations about rising prices anyway… and by the time they started furtively discussing indications that they had gleaned which pointed to recent regime losses, using code words familiar to opposition sympathizers, Bolbol had already taken to ignoring them. He didn’t want to venture so much as an ambiguous comment—he simply acted as if he hadn’t heard anything at all and then returned to the subject of his pickling projects, grumbling about the rising price of eggplant.
Three months before the long drive to Anabiya, there was a knock on Bolbol’s door at dawn. Three young men came in, boys from the neighborhood, all armed, accompanied by a local official who treated Bolbol with something like contempt. They ignored all his questions and overturned everything in the house. Not even the big portrait of the president in the middle of the living room won him any favor. Bolbol was offended, but kept quiet. He’d already scoured his home of everything that might have caused him harm in this situation: purging each and every suspicious belonging and even canceling all the television channels that regime supporters considered “biased,” such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, and filling his “Favorites” list with pro-regime channels: first came Al Manar and Al Mayadeen (the satellite channels run by Hezbollah), followed by Alalam from Iran, the Syrian News Channel, and then various other innocuous choices, like National Geographic, some food channels, and so forth. He’d gone over every inch of the place dozens of times to confirm to himself that the house was “clean.” He only wished he could change his ID number and his place of birth. Anyway, the soldiers searched the house carefully and left without apology, letting Bolbol drown in the chaos of his scattered possessions. They cursed him and his hometown, as usual, but Bolbol did his best to ignore it; he told himself they were just goading him into reacting so they had an excuse to kill him. Of course, if they shot him, his blood would be spilled for nothing. Defending himself against some mild abuse would hardly make him a martyr. When they were well and truly gone, he congratulated himself on successfully passing this thousandth security check. After this he gradually gained the qualified approval of his poverty-stricken neighbors, who likewise used to curse his birthplace loudly whenever he walked down the street. He had chosen to live in this poor neighborhood after his divorce from Hiyam; she had made it a condition that he leave all their furniture with her to pay off the balance of her dowry and in exchange for her raising their only son—another Abdel Latif. The boy had been named after his grandfather, as though to prove that Bolbol still had strong links to his family, in the absence of any other evidence.
Really, all of Bolbol’s behavior was an imitation of his father’s—an attempt to live longer in his shadow. That respected gentleman, weighted with idealism, lived in the past, a remnant of some dreamlike former age. His vocabulary and habits dated back to a different world and would not conform to standards of the present day. Bolbol’s father boasted of belonging to an era of “the greatest values and elegance,” as he called the sixties, adding that it had been quite lovely to boot. Bolbol often caught himself using the same flowery old words as his father. And he still remembered his father’s hysterical reaction when Hussein dismissed his precious 1960s as just a mirage—announcing that everything people said about those days was a lie that should finally be put to rest, and that those years were in fact the era of all the Muslim world’s defeats. His father had been furious for the rest of the day. That was probably the first time any member of the family had dared to contradict him or sully his sacrosanct memories.
As Abdel Latif had aged, he only became more attached to those memories of his youth, down to the tiniest details: a certain way of shining his shoes, a particularly elegant necktie, a way of speaking concisely and listening respectfully, making witty comments and telling anecdotes whenever his old friends were gathered. It was important to him to be charming, to hold a constructive and enjoyable salon. He considered his duties sacred, and the town of S never saw a funeral in which he wasn’t a participant. He remembered all his friends’ birthdays and other special occasions and shared the few supplies he was able to see brought in from Anabiya. According to his students, he was a strange man, though likewise a respected inhabitant of their town for more than forty years, who had arrived to teach in the school and soon became one of them. They originally called him the Anabiyan, in reference to his hometown, but everyone forgot this nickname with the passage of time, and he became, simply, Ustadh Abdel Latif.