Only a couple of hours later, he was shaken awake into a state of instant terror. Hussein was standing by his head, shouting that the nurses were throwing their father’s body out into the street. Lamia was waiting for them in the minibus, worried and angry. They had called her to come and take the body away because, once again, the bodies of soldiers killed in a nearby battle were being brought to the hospital.
Zuhayr had gone ahead; as they arrived, they could hear him fighting with one of the nurses who had now taken up cursing their father. Bolbol went into the morgue to sign for the body so Hussein and Zuhayr could carry it back to the bus. It was a terrifying scene. There were more than forty corpses there in military dress; some had lost their lower extremities, others half their heads. A furious officer was speaking to someone out of sight, requesting more ambulances from the hospital in Homs. Bolbol felt sick. He managed to reach the office amid the chaos, but the nurse there didn’t understand what he wanted. Bolbol asked for the doctor on duty. The nurses were opening the morgue fridge and piling bodies on top of one another like lemon crates; their tiny fridge hadn’t been designed to deal with so many bodies. Bolbol dug through the mound of papers on the office desk and found the release forms. Clutching these, he looked through the large register, signed his own name next to his father’s, and left like he was fleeing hell, almost deranged by fear. If someone thought to ask him for his identity card in all this chaos, he could wind up dead.
On the ground floor of the hospital, a large number of people from the surrounding towns and villages were looking for the bodies of their sons who had died that night. The furious nurse was still cursing Abdel Latif, calling him a terrorist, threatening Zuhayr and Lamia and insulting their whole family. Everyone piled into the minibus, which was thankfully ready to leave. Lamia looked sadly at Abdel Latif’s face. It had begun to swell; its skin was turning blue and a shade of green that looked almost moldy. Back at the house they drank coffee while Lamia rewrapped Abdel Latif’s shroud, removing the smelly blankets that were still soaked from the slabs of ice and replacing them with clean ones. She also placed sweet basil around the corpse’s head, perfumed him all over, and gave Fatima the large bottle of cologne to sprinkle on him from time to time. Then the five of them sat in silence, sipping their coffee, surrounding the dead man, and waiting for dawn.
two
A BOUQUET FLOATING DOWN A RIVER
At dawn, the minibus hurried away from Z.
The air was cold, and the cologne wafting through the car put the siblings in a serene state of mind. The feeling that they had the whole day ahead of them made them feel confident of arriving at Anabiya before nightfall. The road was narrow, and the big passenger buses passing alongside them made them less desolate and afraid; they weren’t alone out here. The bus passengers looked pitiful, and they seemed to have been traveling a long time. Their clothes were tattered and poor, and desperation had settled on their faces as they stared at the road ahead. Most of the buses were old, their glass windows shattered, and on the backs of each were bundled the possessions of these people fleeing the country for somewhere safer. It was a mass exodus, hundreds of thousands of people heading from the north and the east toward the unknown.
Bolbol closed his eyes and relaxed. The cool breeze had revived him and woke again his longing for the old days with Lamia. He’d felt proud when she had looked at him with affection for carrying out his father’s last wish. He had declared to Lamia that he would see to it that Abdel Latif was buried with Aunt Layla (whose story Lamia knew a little about) no matter how dangerous the journey became—saying that he would carry out his father’s last wish even if it cost him his life. In front of Lamia, he affected to be careless about his life, as he imagined a brave man might. She wasn’t surprised; he had a history of doing idiotic things no one would have believed him capable of.
When Zuhayr had disappeared into prison, who knew where, Bolbol had gone to meet an influential officer, a relative of one of his friends, and asked outright about his whereabouts. Even now Bolbol couldn’t forget the quizzical look on the man’s face as he sought to clarify the nature of the relationship between Bolbol and Zuhayr. That simple question, asked for the sake of a person he didn’t really know, could have consigned Bolbol to an endless nightmare. And Lamia still remembered the night her mother died; she had been astonished to see Bolbol arriving before dawn, wanting to help with the burial. He had traveled all night despite the challenge of finding transport at that time. He had done many things for her over the years, and after the looks of gratitude she had given him he began to feel that he was carrying out his father’s instructions solely on her account.
Lamia was one of the few people—perhaps the only one—who gave Bolbol the courage to act recklessly. She never knew it, but his greatest follies had been committed on account of just a few words she’d once spoken in defense of his character, calling him “bold” and “impetuous” when his other friends preferred “indecisive” and “cowardly.” Her belief in the courage he in fact lacked had helped him commit more than a few sins in his time (sadly, they went unremembered by all), but despite everything, he had never been brave enough to declare his love for her. Even now his knees started to shake as he imagined what she would say to him: The right moment for this passed a long time ago.
Discovering love is like seeing a bouquet floating down a river. You have to catch it at the right time, or the river will sweep it away: it won’t wait for long. You have only a few intense, mad moments to give voice to your profound desires. In fact, there had been plenty of bouquets floating tranquilly by, rocking gently close at hand, easily within Bolbol’s reach… Lamia had waited for him to say something, especially after the long summer holidays were over, but Bolbol stayed silent as usual or merely suggested a walk in Bab Tuma. Eventually she realized that the years she had spent waiting for him to pick up those bouquets floating down the river were over, but despite knowing that they had missed their chance, she didn’t conceal her happiness at receiving his letters nor her longing for the next. And so, the thread of their usual conversations would resume where it had been broken by their separation while the river swept the bouquet away.
Whenever she went home for the holidays, she was astonished at the letters that were already waiting for her in her hometown. Bolbol wrote that the very sound of her footsteps was his joy. He even described her handbag in terms borrowed extensively from an ode of the great poet Riyadh al-Saleh al-Hussein. He told her that he had read the poem in question the previous day, on account of her, and on account of her he had also gone to the empty college canteen and sat on their seat in the garden. She replied to every one of his holiday letters, told him how much she missed him, and she didn’t bother to hide her happiness at everything he wrote. Sometimes she put a few small wildflowers in her replies, letters that he read dozens of times and kept in a secret place in his closet, afraid they would fall into someone else’s hands. For him, these weren’t letters but an enormous and personal secret. They were like precious icons hidden in the deepest vaults of a monastery, forbidden and untouched for hundreds of years. As time passed, the secret cast a hidden magic over things; what Bolbol wanted was for Lamia’s letters to become enshrined just as he imagined them, a real collection of icons he might suddenly reveal to his future children, after many years, so they would be forced to see their father in an entirely new light.