The next day Bolbol had wondered about the connections between Nevine, the martyrs, and the wormwood. He told the doctor who’d accompanied him that his father was a little delirious, but the doctor discovered that his patient, although on his deathbed, was fully alert and not delirious in the least.
Of course, Bolbol understood why his father had distributed his mother’s clothing; after all, what would a man on the brink of death do with the clothes of a woman who had died several years earlier? The people under siege shared everything—food, clothes, whatever they had that would keep them alive. But his father surprised him when he added the following night that every door should be thrown open to love, that love could sweep away the past all at once, which had helped to cleanse his being and strip away the withered branches that would never put out leaves again. It was agonizing, of course, to slice off your awful past and throw it away, but it was necessary if you were to catch the bouquet of roses floating down the river and carry it safely to the other side…
Bolbol had thought his father might be raving, because he was speaking in clear but disjointed phrases, like people do when suffering from partial memory loss or maybe while sifting through a surfeit of memories, the whole tumultuous chaos of the last four years. Bolbol listened with a lump in his throat; he considered his mother’s clothes to be his father’s business, and of his own accord he relinquished his own stake in whatever other household goods could be divided up between Fatima and Hussein. Meanwhile, his memories of Lamia never left him; what remained of them would have to sustain him. He felt empty and couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of the unsent letters to Lamia he had kept. Over the following days, he began to empathize with his father for the first time—his suffering had been kept hidden for years.
Forty-five years earlier, Nevine had been a lovely woman. She entered the teacher’s lounge one day and without any ado introduced herself as the substitute art teacher. Abdel Latif stared with a passion that embarrassed her. He had been searching for love at first sight and believed he had found it at last. A few days later, Nevine opened up about her background: she was a university student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus; she was teaching art to cover her course fees. Her father was a math teacher and her mother a primary-school teacher in al-Mayadin. Her family lived in the village of Muhassan near Deir Azzour, known as Little Moscow. Nevine had chosen to live in a small house in the meadows around S. She was nice to her students. Abdel Latif would wait until she was entering or leaving the school to waylay her, inventing some excuse for conversation. He told her about the geography and history of the Euphrates, and Nevine responded politely, merely confirming that his information was correct, in much the same way she replied to the blandishments of all her male colleagues—something about her accent, from the Euphrates region, made them all try to flirt with her. But she wouldn’t allow anyone into her private life, which was much quieter than was suspected by her small-town neighbors and the bachelor teachers. Quite simply, she was a middle-class girl from an educated family, conservative in most things, despite her clothes, which spoke of a liberality and particularity that, nonetheless, no one found especially provocative. When she wandered around S, which at that time was a small town of no more than ten thousand people, she seemed the archetypal fellaha from some distant village, rather than a painter fighting against tradition.
Abdel Latif didn’t dare to be frank about his feelings, much less his ambition to marry her. He lay awake at night, feeling as though he were drowning in a gray and indescribable space, somewhere between love and desire. There in S, everyone was a villager, each about the same as the others, but Nevine was the exception—her every quality struck him as entrancing: her beautiful voice when she sang old Iraqi songs, and her great kindness, made her seem like a leaf in an autumn gale.
The first three months after they met had been the most difficult for Abdel Latif. He was always trying to hint to Nevine how he felt about her: to signal all his pleasure and fear. True, he had trouble believing that this girl who taught three days a week and spent the rest of her time in art school was really as innocent as she looked, but he didn’t care. He believed that she liked him back, but was too anxious to find out for sure, and so went on loving her silently and sleeplessly.
He went to Anabiya as usual to spend the fortnight’s holiday with his family, who no longer objected to his choice to live so far away from them—indeed, for years now his family had done its best to make him feel welcome and tiptoed around any subject that might annoy or enrage him. The subject of his sister Layla was closed—the family no longer mentioned her at all. Her story might be too painful to be forgotten, but everyone was willing to try. They conspired to efface it by concocting fairy tales to cover the truth, relying on the sound principle that if you really want to erase or distort a story, you should turn it into several different stories with different endings and plenty of incidental details. They said, for example, that Layla had committed suicide because she suffered from incurable leprosy or that she was hideous and had been concealing a congenital defect since birth, and the legend that she had been a beautiful girl was a lie. The most horrible story is always the one that people believe, in the end, but nevertheless, the truth never dies, even if its voice is so faint no one can hear it. The true story was perfectly clear to those with ears to hear it: Layla was beautiful and strong-willed, and she refused to accept the humble, cringing life others had chosen for her. Instead, she had made a choice of her own—to die.
Abdel Latif returned from his holiday firmly convinced that Nevine wasn’t some brief infatuation. Her smile had never left him for a single instant. He felt like a man who not only hadn’t caught the bouquet floating down the river but had dived into the river’s depths and drowned. He resolved to make a clean breast of all this to her after his return to S and was therefore somewhat taken aback to find that his dear friend Najib Abdullah had married Nevine while he was away.
Without preamble, Najib had gone to Muhassan with his whole family in tow and asked Nevine’s family for her hand. Everything was settled without difficulty. They were married, and Nevine moved into her husband’s house in the middle of his family’s large estate. Everything was as it should be, apart from Abdel Latif’s suffering, which accumulated in devastating silence. Nevine was the only one who ever caught the least sign of that suffering, especially during the big party the couple threw to celebrate their marriage. Abdel Latif couldn’t hide his longing for her, nor his overwhelming regret at being too late to have caught the bouquet. She ignored him then, and it was years before she sought him out to lessen the torments of this man who had loved her for so long.