He asked himself: What do the martyrs need? Nothing, was his reply, and he went on: Even if they were alive, nothing. He liked the idea of renunciation and asceticism in these times, the same way he liked seeing himself as a living martyr seeking death at every moment, a man who had truly destroyed the walls of fear by reviving a cherished notion: that of the brave man who couldn’t have cared less about that cruelest of all humanity’s fears—death. He kept a vial of poison in his pocket, small but enough for a quick death, and planned to swallow it if he were ever arrested. He wouldn’t give them the pleasure of torturing him. He thought of all the courageous people he had read about in the histories of various other revolutions who had climbed the scaffold without faltering, spitting on their murderers and striding forward into oblivion with total composure and resolution.
Meanwhile, Nevine thought for a long time about all she had left: nothing but graves. Once again, she was an outsider longing for her childhood home. Her sons’ friends tried to alleviate her loneliness, but how to carry on living was the greater problem. Basically, there was no one left; at night the town was completely desolate. A few thousand people still clung on, but they couldn’t go outside after curfew. Few houses had completely escaped destruction, and the town had become communal property; what remained wouldn’t sustain anyone for more than a few weeks. Supplies were exhausted; animals were dead; water pipes and electric wires were completely destroyed. Everyone was thinking up other ways of surviving, with never a moment free from considering the question of how to keep clinging on to life. They had to dig up old wells, remember the old ways of storing the beans that grew wild around the edges of the nearby meadows. Reaching the distant fields full of produce had become impossible; regime troops had closed off all the entrances and exits to the town, and four large military campaigns had allowed them to occupy observation posts and embed large groups of snipers around the place who kept watch over every possible—and impossible—way of reaching the fields.
Everyone wanted to smash their mirrors. It was hard enough looking at other people’s faces without feeling miserable, let alone one’s own. They had heard about starvation from books and fairy tales, but now they were experiencing it for themselves, along with selfishness and a new lust for survival. People fought fiercely over a handful of herbs and a few wild mushrooms. Everything had changed in the small town, and what had been normality a few months earlier now became unimaginable. Abdel Latif walked the empty streets among the destroyed houses, looking for some scrap of food that might have been forgotten, a few handfuls of bulgur wheat or rice, a little corn or olive oil, the remains of some ground lentils, but he never found anything, as others had been there before him. He spent hours combing through the rubble, walking through nearby scrubland looking for anything edible: rabbit, dog, cat—anything would do, and everything had become acceptable. People slaughtered dogs and invented new recipes for them; they drove cats out of every corner. Many people died of starvation. He didn’t want to go home empty-handed; the sweetheart waiting for him there was withering away with each passing day. Their late-woken feelings helped them both to find their innocence once again; they knew all the phases of the moon and kept watch for each.
Because Nevine hadn’t kept him waiting long. She said that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone. Abdel Latif understood her well enough.
That day was in the winter of 2013, two weeks before Christmas. Abdel Latif had been to the church earlier in the afternoon—it had been substantially destroyed in the last bombardment. Father Walim had been one of the last Christians to leave before the siege finally closed around the town, and he had charged Abdel Latif with looking after what remained of the church, reassuring him that the archbishop had already moved all the manuscripts and icons to an unknown location in Lebanon. Abdel Latif understood him well enough, too: he had to care for the soul of the place—that was his task. So every now and then he would go there and wander around the rubble. Only a small part of the large hall was still standing, and in the middle of it a door led to a narrow room holding priests’ robes and some small bottles of oil. Abdel Latif was astonished that these had been left untouched; the looters hadn’t spared anything else—not even the huge bell this church and all the other churches in the area used to boast of. Syrian ironmongers had made it especially for a church in Antakya, but they were so proud of their craftsmanship they didn’t want to see it hanging so far away, and so they hid it instead. A few years later they gifted it to the church in S, where they could enjoy its peals every Sunday.
Abdel Latif went inside and spent some time reading a book he found in the rubble; the book was torn, but there was still a possibility its binding could be repaired. When he left the church in the evening, Nevine was sitting on a large boulder outside, waiting for him. He was surprised to see her there. He sat beside her, and she repeated that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone. The two of them went quiet and didn’t move. Then Abdel Latif took hold of her hand and kissed her timidly. He pulled her into an embrace, and they sank into a long kiss; Abdel Latif immediately considered it the only real kiss in his life. Still, they both acted quite properly. They stood up and went to the house of their friend Sheikh Abdel Sattar and asked him to marry them. Nevine invited the few remaining friends of her sons to witness the signing of the marriage contract.
Happily, a few people were still around to celebrate the wedding with them—the front lines were relatively quiet that night, so there was no need for every man to be at his post. The wedding was perfectly ordinary, and not in the least bit strange, as Nevine had feared—it was simply an occasion for joy. Fighters fired into the air to celebrate the newlyweds, and no one who remained in the town—sharing their hunger, thirst, and cold, caring for the graves of the martyrs—refused Ustadh Abdel Latif’s invitation. He felt a powerful sense of renewed connection to everything, and there were new, different feelings now, too, driving away the image of himself he’d been nursing all these years—an elderly man killing time as he waited to die. He took up once more all his old and powerful ideals about revolution and living an honorable life. Deep down he felt himself to be fortunate; he would witness the end of a regime that had brought him nothing but shame since his youth. His former party comrades had betrayed every principle and pounced upon every advantage, had imprisoned their old friends for years at a time, and hadn’t hesitated to sell out their cause to stay in power.
Life settled down after the siege closed around the town. Abdel Latif no longer had anything to do but pass the time. He planted flowers on graves and in the walkways of his graveyard, which he hadn’t expected to grow so huge. He organized everything, numbering the graves and recording every detail in a large register: the names of the victims, how they had died, their last words, their family names and ID numbers, and a full description, including height, eye color, skin tone, and any distinguishing marks. Perhaps no one would stay in town for much longer, he used to think, but the day would come when they would all return, and when they did, they should know where their loved ones were buried. He didn’t know why people would want to know this, as such, but considered running the graveyard a sacred duty just the same; the living looked after themselves well enough.