What did his father’s body mean? It was a harsh but justified question that night. All three of them were wondering it, but none had a clear answer. Silence had settled over the minibus. Hussein stayed silent to stifle his anger; Fatima was trying not to breathe, so they would forget she was there. The sounds of missiles and anti-tank bombs were getting closer; Hussein said dispassionately, “They’re bombing Homs,” before retreating back into his silence. They were all hoping for a miracle to come and save them from this desolation, the fear they couldn’t put into words, which burrowed into them all the same. These lulls offered a rare opportunity to talk but always came at inappropriate times, when no one was capable of speaking.
Fatima opened her window again. A cold breeze crept in. She suggested uncovering the body, but neither of her brothers replied, and she wasn’t about to reach out herself and draw back the blankets. Instead she tried to mop up some of the water streaming over the floor of the van from the melting ice blocks packed around the corpse. She was frightened, thinking about the terrifying smell oozing from the body’s pores, and her fingers were trembling by the time Hussein said they had no choice but to spend the night in the town of Z—but they didn’t know which side road to take, and the main highway between Homs and Aleppo had been closed for more than two years.
Hussein turned the minibus in what he thought was the right direction and sped on through the gloom. The road was full of holes, and Bolbol and Fatima held on grimly as the vehicle lurched and almost toppled over. Unable to hold on to anything, the body shuddered. Hussein’s rage was evident by now; he tried to call some friends to fix up a place to stay, raised his voice more than once, and eventually halted at the roadside, cursing the unreliable cell signal. Bolbol told him coolly not to worry about where they would stay; they would go to Lamia’s house. Fatima’s eyes glistened, and she looked at Bolbol sympathetically. Hussein said nothing, but a few minutes later he asked what sort of welcome they were likely to get from Lamia, in her husband’s house, after all these years. Bolbol was positive that it would work out, and in fact he only needed to tell Lamia in a steady voice that they would be in Z in a quarter of an hour, and that they needed her help, in order to be proved right. She was as kind and generous as ever, Bolbol thought as he hung up; she had begged them to be careful and promised to wait for them at the entrance to the town with her husband. The checkpoint there had a bad reputation as far as dealing with strangers; they had started filtering out and disappearing travelers who had been forced to pass through the town, or ransoming off the children from rich families.
Bolbol felt oddly powerful; Lamia’s voice had energized him. Hussein, meanwhile, felt defeated; he hadn’t expected he would need Lamia today of all days. Bolbol had resumed his friendship with her some years earlier. He had met her husband and made a concerted effort to behave like a friend to them both, not an old lover purposely stirring up a husband’s jealousy, as Zuhayr, Lamia’s husband, had believed at first.
In that first meeting, several years after their graduation, he had invited Lamia and Zuhayr to dinner along with two other couples to celebrate meeting again after so long. Hiyam, Bolbol’s wife, and Zuhayr were outsiders in that clique, listening as the ex-classmates laughed and recounted stories of their friends at college. In telling these stories, they realized that, if they were really honest with themselves, not a single one of them had made much of a mark during their student days; they hadn’t made trouble, they hadn’t protested the administration, hadn’t distributed pamphlets for far-right or far-left parties, hadn’t tried hashish or lived on the edge in any way. They’d all been rather pathetically well behaved. To conceal this, they conjured up some additional stories about their own small acts of valor—and all conspired to hide the fact that they were merely plagiarizing untold stories from their classmates’ biographies.
Bolbol wasn’t a source of concern to Lamia’s husband, which was all he really cared to know about him at this moment. The men never became close, but neither were they enemies. Bolbol would never have believed that Zuhayr, a powerful man and a former political prisoner, could ever fear a man like himself, who was afraid of his own shadow. Bolbol wished he could close his eyes and relive all his memories with Lamia and, this time, change things. The poems he had written her, the letters with which he had pursued her over summer holidays… He’d poured his heart and soul into those poems; he liked to believe that, at the very least, she’d found them too amusing to throw away. If she had stayed with him, he would be a different person entirely, he was sure. Lamia would be sad to hear of Abdel Latif’s death; she’d liked him very much. In fact, they had remained close over the years; Lamia would visit or call every now and again, sometimes bringing books by and accepting gifts in return. Equally, she had remained friends with Bolbol’s mother, who’d maintained her tradition of cooking molokhiya for Lamia—the girl’s favorite dish—and she would always insist on giving Lamia a selection of the pickles she was famous for, known locally as Um Nabil’s Miracle. Lamia had always found time to visit Bolbol’s family, and although these visits grew rarer after graduation, they were a sufficient expression of mutual respect and affection.
Now, crammed into his seat and reviewing all these memories, Bolbol realized that his own pickling skills must have come from his mother. Everything he did was a copy. It wasn’t too pleasant to discover that he was just an imitation of his family, repeating throughout his life the very acts he used to despise.
Bolbol said to himself that Lamia was an angel, that she would defend his father’s body with all her strength. The soldiers at the checkpoint into Z were irritated at being unable to “interrogate” these strangers as much as they would have liked—the family would have been rich pickings for any checkpoint. Unfortunately for the soldiers, Lamia had informed Zuhayr of the problem posed by the family’s identity cards, and he had instantly comprehended the delicacy of the situation. He’d beaten them to the checkpoint, bringing along his uncle, who was connected to influential men in the regime, in order to mediate their swift passage through. Bolbol quickly explained their problems, giving a digest of their adventures to date: the congestion at the checkpoints and their difficulty in leaving Damascus in the first place, adding that they had been traveling now for ten hours. The staff at the checkpoint, a mixture of Mukhabarat agents and volunteers from the town, was unsympathetic but didn’t spend too long scrutinizing their papers. They made do with examining the death certificate and then allowed the travelers to pass without even a mutter, though, under other circumstances, and at the very least, the family deserved a good round of cursing out, seeing as they embodied all the necessary qualifications for such—in the view of any checkpoint manned by the Mukhabarat or any of the sectarian groups funded, unofficially, by the regime.