Bolbol couldn’t get through to Hussein. He felt cold to his bones. There was no choice but to go alone to pick up his father. The sheer density of the checkpoints between him and the rendezvous point meant the length of the journey was out of his control, but he still managed to arrive at the appointed time. When he saw his father leaning on the wall of the abandoned gas station, Bolbol felt empty inside. His father was somewhat dazed and had lost a lot of weight; his face was haggard, his breath was foul, and it was clear that he hadn’t eaten for some days. Even so, he was clean-shaven, wore a tie, and his clothes were spotless.
Abdel Latif smiled when he saw Bolbol coming toward him. Bolbol squeezed his father’s hand. A group of armed young men appeared from nowhere, some of whom Bolbol recognized, and they all raised their hands in farewell to their comrade as they passed. Abdel Latif refused to lie down in the back seat of the taxi. Bolbol asked his father not to talk to the driver; he might be an informer, and Bolbol knew the sorts of things his father was likely to say—open praise for the people of his rebel town and curses for the regime. Bolbol didn’t say a word, praying that everything would work out. He asked Abdel Latif what medicines he needed, but his father just shook his head and proceeded to glower at every checkpoint soldier with overt resentment.
When they got home, Bolbol laid him down on the bed and went out to find a doctor. He reflected that the doctors of this neighborhood might also be informers who would consider Abdel Latif a terrorist if they knew where he’d been these last few years—stubbornly clinging on inside that besieged village. But there were rumors about a back-street doctor named Nizar, who had been thrown in jail at the beginning of the revolution, and who’d had some public clashes with the rest of the neighborhood when he refused to give up his home in it. After tracking him down, Bolbol more or less explained the situation, and the doctor—who turned out to be a kind and conscientious young man—accompanied Bolbol to his house as soon as he was finished with one more consultation. On the way, Bolbol told him that they were originally from the town of S, a veiled reference to where their sympathies lay. The doctor caught it at once, and the name of the town was all it took to rouse the young doctor’s fervent respect.
The doctor was assiduous in his care. Abdel Latif always used to say that the children of the revolution were everywhere, which was why they would, in the end, prevail. The doctor was surprised to find a portrait of the president hanging in the living room but made no comment about it on that first visit. The next day, Bolbol explained his position in the neighborhood, implying that he himself was a clandestine revolutionary. The doctor didn’t care for this obvious dissimulation, considering Bolbol’s tack to be little better than collaboration with the regime, but he well understood Bolbol’s anxiety and felt reassured as to his basic good nature when Bolbol gave him a couple of jars of pickled cucumbers and peppers. The doctor brought over various drugs free of charge and became a firm friend of Abdel Latif. He visited every day, and the two would whisper together. Their eyes would gleam when Bolbol’s father told his doctor friend stories of life inside the siege; they laughed and spoke vehemently and with great hope of victory.
But on the third day of his father’s treatment, Bolbol returned from work to find that the president’s portrait had been removed from its usual place on the wall. Abdel Latif gave him no opportunity to ask about it, and Bolbol didn’t dare object. He put the picture in his bedroom, but there it kept him up at night. This was odd; it was just a picture, after all, but spending night after night in the same room with it caused Bolbol’s worst and most terrifying preoccupations to resume. He covered up the portrait and propped it in a corner of the living room, behind the metal cupboard where he kept his plates. He didn’t dare to throw it out or tear it up; he would need it as long as he lived in this neighborhood. Between Bolbol’s unwillingness to challenge his father directly, and Abdel Latif’s studied avoidance of the topic, they both eventually forgot about it entirely.
Bolbol insisted on closing all the windows in the house for fear that the laughter of his father and the doctor would leak out and catch the attention of someone passing along the alley, who might then stick around to hear their conversations or the revolutionary songs they sang together between bouts of exchanging news from the battlefronts and commentary on political developments. The two of them were agreed that it was a revolution against the entire world, not just against the regime. Abdel Latif still loved big words, and he used plenty of them when describing the things that had happened during the brutal siege, when those who had remained behind had been forced to cook the leaves off the trees and to eat grass. They made bread from chaff, and shared what little they had left.
Their conversations about their inevitable victory conveyed nothing to Bolbol. His only thought was of his father’s illness—particularly, how he might rescue himself from the predicament it had caused. Bolbol offered to help his father bathe but was refused; Abdel Latif didn’t like seeing himself as a weak old man. Blood analyses showed that his illness was worsening and that hope of recovery was slight. Behind the siege lines, there had been whole months when he hadn’t taken his medicine, whole days together that he hadn’t eaten. He kept telling Bolbol about the siege, as if asking him not to forget, but Bolbol wanted very much to forget everything that had happened over the past four years. He felt like someone else—a stranger. His father deserved a true son of the revolution, someone brave like Dr. Nizar. The doctor wasn’t afraid of being associated with the revolution and had refused to flee the country even after he was arrested and tortured for three months. Bolbol couldn’t bear to hear him telling the details to Abdel Latif, who in turn regaled Nizar with tales of the torture undergone by the many other detainees he had known. These prisoners had returned hating the regime more than ever; when they spoke of what they’d endured, it was as though they were implying that revenge was the very least they could do in response. Bolbol’s father described in exhaustive terms how, in prison, many had transformed from peaceful revolutionaries to advocates of the utmost violence against the regime and its troops. He added, “Prison can kill you. The person who leaves is not necessarily you, even though they have your appearance.” Few retained their self-control and their reason; few remained loyal to their initial ideals. The terrible pressure of each successive story told in Bolbol’s house made him wish he were deaf—but he despised himself when he tried to avoid listening. It was only in the final weeks that he really began to worry that his father would die. The day they went to the hospital was the first time that Bolbol really thought about the chaos that could surround a body after death, given the state of things. It didn’t even occur to him that his father had been serious about that last wish he had repeatedly extracted Bolbol’s solemn promise to carry out.
Bolbol, Hussein, and Fatima successfully made it past the third checkpoint after the town of Deir Atiya, but the bleak road ahead didn’t exactly inspire them with confidence. Night was falling, and they had only gotten a quarter of the way: they were nowhere near Anabiya. The same mysterious number from which Bolbol had received his instructions as to where to collect his father on the outskirts of S had called his phone a number of times since that awful day—and now Bolbol was regretting that he’d never picked it up again. He was sure his father’s friends wouldn’t have let the ustadh be buried so far away from them. Perhaps they were even more resourceful than he’d ever guessed, these children of the revolution—they had managed to infiltrate everywhere, communicating by way of a system of secret codes. Maybe those men could have collected the body from anywhere at all and brought it anywhere with no problem. Maybe they should have been tasked with arranging the burial. Bolbol was suddenly confident that Abdel Latif’s friends could easily have spirited his father’s body away from the hospital and buried him in the new cemetery he had himself laid out during the siege in S. Then the dead man would have breathed freely, so to speak.