Everything was concluded without fuss. Despite her unhappiness in her marriage, she never admitted to having made a mistake she, too, would silently regret. She’d known that Abdel Latif wasn’t the man for her; she liked him well enough, but not enough to marry and live with him. For several months after her wedding Abdel Latif did nothing, and remained alone, striving to get over his wound. He avoided Nevine and made excuses whenever his friend Najib Abdullah invited him around—Najib, who never even noticed that he’d stolen the girl his friend hoped to marry. But then there was a lot Najib didn’t know: he was also unable to see that he was living with a woman who dreamed strange dreams and possessed a sensitivity so exquisite as to be excessive. To Najib, everything was normal; his mother had pointed this woman out, so he broached the topic of marriage with her, and Nevine didn’t refuse. Everything was soon over and done with, and life went on smoothly and happily. It wasn’t long before monotony imposed the rhythm of forgetfulness on everyone but Abdel Latif. Her perfume, even at a distance, still stirred him, her walk dazzled him, and at times her penetrating eyes threatened to destroy his defenses and expose his weakness. Nevine forgot all about her own art; she became a normal mother and teacher, accepting the duties of her lot without complaint. Within a few years she was like all the other women of S; she never used her beautiful voice, forgot her Iraqi songs, and even lost her sweet accent, which now only slipped out on rare occasions.
Bolbol found it all hard to believe. He just couldn’t think of his father as a lonely, unrequited lover. At last he understood the secret of Abdel Latif’s love for Iraqi songs! For whenever Nevine abandoned something from her past, Abdel Latif reflexively picked it up and kept it, polishing it anew and storing it in some remote corner of his life. He kept many of Nevine’s old paintings, dusting them off and rescuing them from decay where they had been left in the school storeroom. And yet, despite everything, this same supposedly sensitive man berated Bolbol bitterly when the latter slunk back to the family seat after his divorce, the bereaved man showing a cruelty in the midst of his grief that Bolbol found unbearable.
This return to the family home was supposed to lighten the suffering of both the widowed father and the divorced son. Lamia, when she visited them, couldn’t bear to see Abdel Latif so bereft as he marked five years after his wife’s death. He wouldn’t indulge her suggestion of taking him back to her village for a long visit, even though she declared with enthusiasm that it was more than fitting given the closeness of their friendship, adding that a long visit would delight Zuhayr and their two children, too, and that perhaps Abdel Latif could help her revive her parsley. He just looked at her and smiled, then went off to prepare dinner. He told her, “When your beloved goes away, they take the keys of happiness with them and throw them into that deep pit known as the grave.” His wife hadn’t left him any happiness, he said, but had taken everything with her: sleep, the secrets of cooking, their morning coffees together and evening walks through the town. Now he was abandoned, alone, waiting to die—she had taken everything with her. Not that he told Lamia about his depression—and he’d never told anyone that it had been forty years since he had last tasted happiness, on that holiday to Anabiya when he was dreaming about Nevine. No, for him, everything was finished. His memories of his wife were a simile, so to speak—an interregnum, no more, resembling love—before he could be with his true beloved. So much time had passed, and Nevine was still surprised by Abdel Latif’s occasional furtive glances; most oddly, in recent years these glances had begun to break through her reserve, leaving her bewildered. From her depths, pleasant feelings surfaced that she couldn’t describe.
Surrendering to one’s memories is the best way of escaping the wounds they preserve; constant repetition robs them of their brilliance and sanctity. So as the minibus was leaving the checkpoint at Z, that’s just what Bolbol did, swamped with pain as he was, feeling as though he were sinking into the earth… The morning was serene, and a peculiar silence had settled after a night of intense bombardment, but they knew it wouldn’t last the closer they got to the zones where the fighting had been at its most intense for two and a half years. The opposition forces had captured the principal roads, weakening the regime forces and threatening their supplies of fuel and wheat… Bolbol tuned out and once more revisited his father’s last nights in his house. Abdel Latif had been exhausted and overcome with pain; he knew he wouldn’t survive, and again a vehement desire to die seized him and never left him.
His father spoke in a faltering voice about death and love, about the revolution and the martyrs, about the great future waiting for the children who had been born in these past four years and those who were yet unborn. An image of his wife returned to him, but he didn’t linger on it for long. He prayed for mercy on her soul in a few conventional phrases, just as people did before the war when a stranger’s funeral passed by. He elaborated on his relationship with his beloved Nevine. Bolbol understood this desire to narrate everything all over again, to reveal a side of himself that no one had known. Abdel Latif wanted to leave his final story in Bolbol’s hands—not only his final wish. Abdel Latif was increasingly cheerful as the day drew nearer when he would lie in Layla’s grave. He still missed her, in spite of everything, and was delighted whenever he heard the fantastic stories that star-crossed lovers wove around her, although they personally preferred to live loveless rather than die for their grand romantic dreams. These failed lovers, this host of ordinary men and women who had surrendered to the ways of this cruel earth, considered Layla their patron saint. They left roses on her neglected grave in secret, composed songs to her, and described her savage beauty with endless fascination.
Abdel Latif may have stopped mentioning the mother of his children, but nevertheless Bolbol recalled that his father had been assiduous in visiting her grave on holidays, as custom demanded. Still, the decades they had lived together were enough. Nevine compensated him for all his losses and had restored life to his soul and his body. The dead are more comfortable when they’re buried beside their loved ones; they speak to one another in a secret code impenetrable to the living. If it wasn’t for his sister Layla, and Nevine’s wish that Abdel Latif be far away from her when he died and was buried, he wouldn’t have asked to be interred in Anabiya. Nevine had refused to allow him to be buried in the same grave as her. How could he have found rest among the graves of her son and her husband, Najib Abdullah, his old friend? Several times he asked her to reconsider and allow him to stay close to her, as he wanted to die in her arms, but she wouldn’t discuss the matter. She wasn’t interested in surviving any more loved ones. She had no intention of being a custodian for any more graves.
Nevine had begun to believe that she would be around for many more years to come. This abundance of time dazed her. Nothing would satisfy her save going back to the land of her childhood. She wanted to cast off everything that might hamper her from flying freely away down that lengthy road lined with meadows… She liked to think that there she would go back to singing the sad songs of her childhood that befitted her two martyred sons; there she would be rid of her burdens, and everything superfluous would be shed. Men were plentiful everywhere; there was no use getting attached to one. Abdel Latif couldn’t change her mind, even as she moved in with him. The most wretched of creatures are those who are worshipped; what Nevine wanted was something far better: to be someone who worshipped and adored, not just another beloved worshipped by someone who adored her. She realized why she had always been miserable: she had never been a lover herself.