Driving along in the dark, the siblings hadn’t noticed the changes that had overtaken the body. Lamia was upset when she saw the current state of it. Everyone was taken aback by her racking sobs, and her tears caused them to weaken as well. Hussein wept, and Fatima saw her opportunity and plunged into a protracted fit of bawling. Zuhayr acted quickly and drove them to the small public hospital. Thanks to his uncle’s intercession, the hospital director allowed the body to spend the night in the morgue. The terrible burden was lifted. No one looked at Abdel Latif, afraid of finding his body so disfigured that they would agree to dump it in any hole in the ground—even throw it to the stray dogs.
Lamia was slender as a rail, and her long, thick hair was the color of carob. Her face was innocent, and her smile deeply reassuring. She knew no evil and had been born to give without any expectation of return. Now, after all these years, Bolbol supposed that she regarded him as little more than a sick man in need of her care. When they were younger, however, and parted by distance, she’d read his letters and believed that someone else must have written those texts so full of double entendres and poetic flights of fancy. These letters were the venue in which he could say how much he worshipped her. He wrote that it wasn’t right for the throne of a goddess like her to be touched by an ephemeral human—better for eagles to spirit it away while it lay vacant. He still remembered some of his letters by heart, since he’d read and revised and hesitated over them so many times before sending. And then there were the letters he hadn’t sent, which Lamia didn’t even know about—the ones that openly expressed his fervent desire and hunger for her body.
Once, Lamia admitted to him how impatiently she’d waited for his letters throughout the scorching summer holidays in Z, how she was overjoyed when the postman knocked on her family’s door and waved a letter at her with a smile. Bolbol had broken into a sweat when she said this and couldn’t admit that he loved her to tears. Now he believed Lamia was the only ideal that could salvage his life and perhaps even turn him into a less fragile person.
But he had been too afraid of seeing her hurt to admit all this: the scene of what he assumed would be their inevitable separation haunted his thoughts. He didn’t know why, but he was positive it would end badly, that she would say, I love you, but I can’t marry a Muslim. He hadn’t listened to the advice of their mutual friends when they encouraged him to confess his love. They had said that love was more important than marriage; everything else would come later—but on the evening of their arrival at her home, led by her husband, Bolbol felt that he had acted correctly. She wasn’t a hard-line Christian, but in the end she would never have wanted to anger her kindhearted, simple country family, who wouldn’t have been able to pay for a wedding anyhow. Bolbol quickly warmed up to this reasoning and declared himself well satisfied by his paralysis over the years.
Zuhayr was behaving with his usual gallantry. When Lamia opened the door to her house, Bolbol was struck by how exhausted she looked; he regretted having increased her troubles. More than thirty children were inside, eating dinner. Men and women were coming and going through the four open rooms on the spacious ground floor. That Lamia was hosting displaced people needed no explanation. No one could be surprised by the appearance of strangers; everyone was used to new arrivals crossing their path at any time of day or night. Zuhayr saved the siblings their explanations and simply introduced them as old friends from S on their way to bury their father’s body in Anabiya, praising the father as a great revolutionary in the process. Dropping these names was enough of an explanation.
Bolbol was deeply moved by Lamia’s sympathetic glances as she held back her tears and accompanied Fatima to the women’s room. All three of the siblings looked appalling, but no one noticed or found it unusual; they had all gone through similar ordeals. When she came back, Lamia squeezed Bolbol’s hand, pleased that he was carrying out his father’s last wish; she described his father as a great man, a martyr, and a revolutionary. She gave Bolbol no time to explain everything they had gone through on the road and went on to say that she was cooking for six families and thirty children, assisting them and making them as comfortable as she could. Zuhayr was kind to the siblings and thanked them for asking if they could help. Really, both husband and wife were like people from another age, Bolbol thought as he watched Zuhayr and Lamia gladly and indefatigably attend to the needs of each of their guests. They were nothing like his neighbors, who had driven out three families, displaced from Yarmouk Camp, on the pretext that they were extremists, probably terrorists, merely because the women wore the hijab. The sight of the expelled made one’s heart bleed; but, then, the sight of the impoverished local women was simply sickening. They encouraged their children to pelt the homeless families with stones, yelling curses at these traitors who’d turned their backs on a regime that had housed them, raised them, and educated them in its schools.
Hussein put an abrupt end to the discussion. He asked Lamia for two blankets and a pillow, and after dinner he slipped out to the bus, spread out on its floor, and fell into a deep sleep. Zuhayr suggested to Bolbol, who was grappling with his usual shyness, that he might like to bathe, but added cheerfully that he would have to heat the water in the cistern using firewood, not gas; the electricity only came on for two or three hours a day. Bolbol thanked him and asked for somewhere to lie down. He was so exhausted he could no longer grasp what the men here were saying, passing the time by discussing the latest news or trying to phone someone who had stayed in the besieged city of Homs. The story of their father’s body got no sympathy from them; they had seen too many bodies already. As ever, death was so close to them that they had stopped giving it any particular consideration.
Zuhayr generously offered to let Bolbol sleep on his and Lamia’s own bed in the corner of the kitchen, but Bolbol chose instead to use a twice-folded blanket for a mattress, then another to cover himself up. He couldn’t get over the fact that Zuhayr and Lamia were sleeping here now after giving everything they had to refugees from Homs—total strangers. Lamia repeated Abdel Latif’s favorite saying in a low voice: “The children of the revolution are everywhere.” Bolbol shut the kitchen door and tried to sleep. He was cold and slow to feel any warmth seep into his body. He tried to push away evil thoughts: Lamia slept here, right there on that bed in the corner of the large kitchen, leaving her bedroom to the children. Here, her breath circulated every night… The mattress, only a few centimeters away, smelled strongly of Lamia. Bolbol was bewildered by his growing state of arousal. There was, of course, one way for him to relax—he didn’t even feel especially ashamed at the prospect of betraying a man and a woman who had shown him every generosity. After all, the horrific tension was almost killing him, he had no way of sleeping, his senses were inflamed. Even crying would be better than doing nothing; he wished he could manage it. Crying would relax him, wash him clean. And no one would ask a man transporting his father’s corpse across the country why he was crying. Bolbol buried his head in his blanket and heard a knocking sound in his head. He began to feel that he would surely die here; in fact, he craved it; Lamia would then bury him with her own beautiful hands—such a terrible tragedy for her! It got to be eleven o’clock at night, and intermingling voices were still coming from the large room where everyone else was gathered as if for a party. He even heard distant laughter. Yes, there was only one way of relaxing. So Bolbol closed his eyes and tried to recall a particular image of Lamia. When they were students, she had brought over some extra course materials for him, and his mother had persuaded her not to head home for Deir Rahibat but to stay the night with them. Bolbol had spied on her at dawn as she was sleeping in Fatima’s room. She was like an angel in that bed, her legs revealed by a short cotton nightshirt. Her breasts were firm, and there was the ghost of a smile on her face… But now the shame came flooding in. Bolbol scrambled to his feet. He left the kitchen, lit a cigarette, and began to feel calmer. He quieted his conscience; he would sleep, he wanted to sleep, he needed to sleep so he could take his father’s body to Anabiya. From there he would cross the border to Turkey and never come back to this country again. What an excellent new idea. He went back to the kitchen and lay down. The voices in the next room receded, and he fell asleep.