And so, Abdel Latif kept insisting that Bolbol be his audience during his last days. Bolbol alone knew about his father’s secret love; he imagined Hussein’s shocked expression when he discovered that the family home in S was to be split four ways instead of three—the only inheritance remaining to them.
One morning, Abdel Latif woke up early, eyes bright and face flushed. The previous night he had spoken to Nevine over a satellite phone belonging to a squadron commander he knew well. He’d beamed when he saw that there was an unknown number on the line, and he closed the door of his room behind him, emerging cheerfully a few minutes later to say that he would go to sleep early that night, after which he went right back into his room. This shyness struck Bolbol as rather peculiar, under the circumstances. In the morning, he found his father drinking coffee in the kitchen, and Bolbol’s cup was already waiting for him. His father surprised him by saying that if he’d lived much longer, he would have been nothing but the caretaker of the martyrs’ graveyard, which he had constructed himself. He cared for the plants and the flowers and the trees and listened to the raucous laughter of the departed martyrs every night. He spoke to them about their blood, which hadn’t been spilled in vain; he told them how the tyrant would soon depart, and children would go to school in clean clothes again, with heads held high and eyes filled with faith in their future. He spoke to Bolbol about martyrdom and revolution, confident in victory, and he didn’t want to hear any criticism. When Bolbol made his opinion clear, saying that the revolution was over and had become a civil war, and how the regime’s superior army would win in the end, his father made do with shaking his head and smoking voraciously without comment, ignoring what his son was telling him. Bolbol was irritated at being ignored and wanted to add that the international community—Russia, America, and all the West—was agreed that the regime should stay and that it would outlast this orphaned revolution, but Abdel Latif was done with the conversation, seeing how it would only corrupt his dreams. He didn’t want to be cruel to his son, but made it clear that he was here to talk and Bolbol here to listen, nothing more; in a few days he would be far away, and then Bolbol could go back to his opinions and his capitulation, could go on living in a neighborhood supporting the regime. He could dance to the sectarian songs broadcast by the speakers fixed above the houses where Hezbollah agents, who no longer hid their faces, gathered openly with National Defense troops—militias that the regime had recruited and armed, made up of volunteers, mostly regime supporters and Iraqi Shiʿites. Most members of these militias were unemployed or had criminal records, and no restraint was placed on their capacity to insult, arrest, and murder at will. They inspired terror even in fellow loyalists.
When Bolbol passed them, he greeted them as cheerily as he could manage; he tried to smile and never let his voice falter in calling out to them. His father, on the other hand, once spat on the ground in a clear show of defiance and said to Bolbol, “These traitors and invaders should all drop dead.” Bolbol tried to hurry their pace. He begged his father to stop his puerile behavior. Militias like these could kill anyone without having to answer for it. He told his father a dozen stories about what they had done to people, especially families who were sympathetic to the revolution. For instance, they burned down a family’s house when they discovered the son had been arrested at a checkpoint for smuggling medicine into the areas of Homs still under siege. On another occasion they kidnapped a girl from a neighboring district who died after being raped continuously for four days, and her family was forced to officially declare that she had died in a road accident if they wanted to get her body back. The neighbors stayed silent; deep down, many approved of the punishment her family had received. No one came to mourn with the girl’s family after her body was thrown into their living room, wounds still fresh. The family couldn’t bear to stay and left for Argentina to join distant relatives of the girl’s father. As for the father himself, he refused to leave the country before getting revenge on his daughter’s murderers, whom he knew by name. He returned to his hometown near Homs and shut himself away there, waiting for the moment when he could point a gun in the faces of the murderers. He hung a list of their names on his wall.
Bolbol did his best to avoid hearing such stories, but some still managed to reach him. Somehow his ordinary, enormous baseline level of fear had managed to worsen since his father came to stay. He believed that the walls containing his usual fear—like a musty, battle-scarred citadel—had finally been knocked down, and he was falling into open space. He couldn’t keep it up forever; living in this neighborhood made him pay for his life twice over. He was deeply lonely, and at the same time didn’t want to belong to any community. He was far from neutral in his mind: for example, he couldn’t stop himself from feeling cheered whenever he saw a funeral procession for the regime’s casualties pass by. He couldn’t meet their eyes in the posters hung on city walls declaring them to be martyrs. But fear prevented him from even gossiping with his coworkers when they gloated over the growing worries of the regime’s supporters, who were also beginning be afraid. Fear had become the only true opposition; it was now each individual versus their own fear, and no one trusted the regime any longer. The ongoing impasse was too terrible to be endured, and everyone had begun to speak of their fear openly. Anyone who had been confident of victory a year before began to feel powerless and weak, increasingly vulnerable, even in mortal peril. Since he was incapable of close observation of anyone else, Bolbol kept an eye on himself, only to discover that he was the most craven of all.
In the final months of 2013, the city had begun to feel a new pressure that no one could explain. In rare moments of clarity, Bolbol would say to himself that it was due to the idea of revenge, pure and simple, taking alarming root in the regime; it no longer wanted to win so much as to punish. He mused sardonically on this dreadful idea: he would wake up one day and see his street empty, everyone having run for their lives. The district chief had already fled, having spared no effort in surveilling every inhabitant of the neighborhood during his tenure. He wrote reports on all the suspicious characters there, including his own relatives, as had the young men who weren’t content with supporting the regime but carried weapons and insulted their childhood friends and generally made everyone’s life hell. Suspicions alone were enough to lead to corpses lining the streets. Suspicions alone were enough to cause someone to disappear without a trace.
Bolbol didn’t ask many questions, frightened of getting tangled in the same net of hatred and turning into yet another person bent on revenge. He would find a means of getting rid of his fear, he told himself, but it was difficult to get rid of the thought of revenge. It wasn’t even enough for your enemy to be dead for the fire of vengeance to be extinguished; you had to be the one to murder him yourself if your bloodlust was ever to be satisfied. It was terrifying to see such sentiments no longer hidden but plainly written on silent faces expressing nothing but wrath.
His father regretted leaving the land of the martyrs, as he proudly called his village. He wanted to sit quietly that night, but he was afraid of dying with Bolbol’s defeatist talk being the last words he heard from his weak, used-up son. He got up, went to the kitchen, and began to peel some potatoes; despite being clearly exhausted he was resolved to fry some the way Nevine made them. He cheered himself up by returning once again to her story, caring little that Bolbol found it painful to think of her as his father’s second wife and sweetheart, not Auntie Nevine, the wife of his father’s old friend. Afterward, Bolbol had the ridiculous idea of avenging his mother somehow… and then he fantasized about doing the same thing with Lamia if Zuhayr died: this time he would kneel at her feet and beg to be allowed to remain at her side. He used to think that love meant a happy old age with your beloved—as if the years before that were worth nothing, merely something to be gotten through in order for the lover to reach the moment when his torment would stop, a new life would begin, and the daydreams he had enjoyed hundreds of times in his warm bed would be reconstructed in reality. Happy were those who spent their old age with their lover. Old age was a deliberate reliving of childhood, and the time that separated these stages was just a distraction, however long it lasted, even if this meant years had to be willfully squandered before you could begin to understand their superfluity. This is what happened to his father when he met Nevine again. As for her, she didn’t need much time to think over his proposal. Mainly she was surprised by his folly. She’d thought that things between them had died, or else grown so obsolete that they could no longer mean anything to anyone. A few indirect comments weren’t a declaration of love under any circumstances—just as some shy and occasional glances were hardly a confession of desire.