Despite starvation, everyone still clung to hope and spoke optimistically about the days to come. They realized that despair meant drowning in the abyss, so kept faith with the confidence that was the only possession they had left. The regime, with all its might behind it, inflicted unimaginable losses in every battle, but the people of S couldn’t retreat; they had burned all their bridges.
Nevine was surprised she was still capable of doing so much. She would talk animatedly about her previous life, and Abdel Latif would listen sympathetically. He lit candles for her every night, and they would reorder the place afresh. Outside they would move lightly among the ruins, exchanging kisses in the abandoned, shattered houses. They took shelter from a rain shower under a roof, embracing each other as though they might be separated at any moment. They had no time to search for the right term to define their new life together even though they both liked big words. They relished all the small details they had been missing in their lives. They went hungry with each other and with everyone else, and they gathered grasses and concocted soups out of narcissus bulbs and nameless herbs. They hoarded salt carefully, made bread from whatever remnants of lentils, chickpeas, or beans were available, or really out of anything that could make up for the flour that was usually missing. The usable roads linking S to a nearby town that wasn’t under siege were secret and few, and they brought in only a small quantity of medicine and flour. Abdel Latif and Nevine didn’t approve of the monopoly that the fighting men had on the majority of the smuggled goods, but they didn’t have time to find fault or to fight over a handful of flour. They worked vigorously to plant Abdel Latif’s garden with vegetables they could dry and store, such as beans, eggplants, tomatoes, and a few ears of corn; under siege, one didn’t have the luxury of choice.
Nevine couldn’t shake off her fear of winding up alone. Abdel Latif no longer gave her the time or space to talk freely about her past life; they had discussed the past enough to forget it. He was always keeping her occupied with daily plans, and she soon fell in with him and entered enthusiastically into their new life. She joined him in making butterfly nets and ran behind them like a small child, indifferent to the bombs and missiles exploding incessantly nearby. She was convinced that the best way of beating the war was to stop talking about it. She had stopped being afraid of dying a long time before and was even more reckless than Abdel Latif, who would rush off to the front lines swinging a first-aid kit at the least provocation. Nevine would walk calmly through the empty streets, looking at the bombs raining down over the town, and the only thought she gave them was this: They won’t kill anyone, unless it’s from fear. There was no one left for the bombs to blow up, after all. They’d already murdered everyone there was to murder; now they were destroying only already destroyed houses. The fighters could protect themselves well enough by digging long trenches and erecting secret fortifications, shoring up their already strong defense lines. In the end, though, war is war, and it wouldn’t be over easily or quickly. It carried its stench with it wherever it reached, wafting over everyone, leaving nothing as it had been. It altered souls, thoughts, dreams; it tested everyone’s capacity for endurance.
Nevine’s resolution not to spend her remaining years alone wasn’t trivial. She knew she would die, but not soon. It took many tries before she could tear off the vines of loneliness, which began by constricting her breathing and ended by giving her the crushing sensation that nothing else lay in store for her. She woke alone every morning, unconcerned with the preoccupations shared by the rest of mankind. Nevine no longer thought of being a grandmother; that dream was over, and now she was suspended in space. She wouldn’t reconsider her break with her husband’s family; her absurd battle with them for influence had wasted enough time already. She’d spent years embroiled in gratuitous conflicts whose triviality she felt only now. Everything she had built was destroyed—the family, the house—the only thing she could do now was wait to die, but death remained such a distant prospect, in her mind. Victory in the revolution meant nothing to her anymore, other than the chance of seeing her son’s murderers dragged through the streets. She was gripped by fantasies of revenge for losses for which there was no possible restitution. After losing their compassion, a person becomes little more than another corpse abandoned by the roadside, one that should really be buried. She knew that she was already just such a body, but she still needed to die before she could find peace under the earth. And for her, dying was the hardest work of all.
A year after her marriage to Abdel Latif, Nevine’s feelings had changed. She no longer felt she was waiting to die, and she no longer wanted to stay in S, but then she couldn’t let herself move away from her son’s grave. She didn’t like living so close to the dead, but whenever she thought about leaving, she felt paralyzed—her legs went numb. Sometimes she felt a great yearning for the gossip and fleeting quarrels with her former sisters-in-law, who once tried to intervene in her life, but all that was finished. They had always been haughty women, convinced they belonged to such a powerful family; now, they were migrants in refugee camps, expecting sympathy. They had lost everything: their houses, their children, and their lives of plenty.
As he listened to his father go on and on about Nevine, his town, and his revolution, Bolbol could only assume that he was making it all up. It wasn’t possible for a man in his seventies and a woman over sixty, the mother of two martyrs, no less, to chase through meadows after butterflies and write each other love letters as if they were separated by a great distance; equally, it was impossible to sit in the sights of a never-ending military bombardment and yet spend hours talking about the moon. But, then again, he could hardly call his father a liar.
In those moments, Abdel Latif had wanted to tell Bolbol that he was no longer a lonely old man in need of care; he hadn’t been toppled; he had regained his former vitality, and all at once. He reflected on his life without anger, he entertained no illusions, nor did he let himself get carried away. In this, father and son were much alike: Bolbol understood the truth of his own life, too, in those days—that he had changed considerably, and that the solitude whose merits he discussed with Abdel Latif wasn’t so terrible. He still remembered how his name had changed from Nabil to Bolbol; Lamia began to call him Bolbol as a pet name, and in the early days of his solitary life he had liked hearing others use the same name that Lamia used. His original name was almost completely forgotten at this point. Whenever Bolbol saw it on official documents, he felt it belonged to someone else. “Bolbol” sounded lighter and more human to him, whereas “Nabil” suggested some well-adjusted man still dreaming of a grand future. Recently, Bolbol had lost even the impulse to dream and make plans; carrying out his father’s last wish was an exercise of what little remained of his will. After all, you have to do something if you aren’t just going to lie down and die—if you don’t want to sink down to the center of the earth.