Abdel Latif would boast of how they lived: the whole winter they would cook lentil soup and bulgur wheat and walk barefoot to school; they would distribute Baath Party leaflets and get thrown in jail; they would face the whip and still hold out. Knowledge was a battle and politics a sacrifice, as well as a contest, he would conclude to his audience, who had heard the tale hundreds of times. No one in Anabiya remembered those battles now, but they certainly didn’t forget Bolbol’s uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Jamil, who, if he’d had better luck, might have wound up president of the republic. As it was he had been betrayed by certain friends who’d slandered him and his associates. As the price for their defamatory comments, those men had accepted an amount of influence that still wasn’t exhausted forty years later. Everything was upside down, now: the whole family was branded as traitors, and the slanderers were considered heroes.
The corpse of Abdel Latif, now laid out on a minibus seat, gave no indication of the man’s past strength of conviction—that Palestine would one day be fully liberated, for example, and that he would one day pray with his friends in al-Aqsa Mosque. Forty years earlier Abdel Latif had picked up his tin suitcase and left his village for good, after he had failed to support his sister Layla in her refusal to marry a man she didn’t love. Not even when she said, “I’ll set myself on fire before I marry a man who stinks of rotten onions.” And, sure enough, on the day of the wedding she had been forced into, she stood on the roof of her family’s tall house in her white dress, poured out a jug of kerosene, and set herself alight, carrying out the threat no one had taken seriously. She whirled around like a Sufi to best let the flames take her body, which had become a charred corpse before anyone could reach her. Abdel Latif had watched her from a distance, weeping for her silently, as his three children were doing now for him: despite how bad life had become, death could still seem terribly cruel.
Yes, as the minibus traveled on, the three siblings preferred to focus on memories and stories rather than think about being stuck on this journey. Bolbol said to himself, If I’d seen even half of this coming, I would have buried him anywhere there was space… Taking his father’s body to his friends in S would have been easier by far. They had fallen into Abdel Latif’s trap. As well as their burden his body was now their only means of escape—because it did still stir up some sympathy, sometimes, and it was the only justification they could point to for their being together on the road at such a time.
They were delighted when the next checkpoint showed them a little compassion. Bolbol reflected that in war, little things like that were enough to give you hope: a considerate soldier at a checkpoint, a checkpoint without traffic, a bomb falling a hundred meters away from you on a car that had cut you off and taken your turn in line… Chance has just given us a new life! If that car hadn’t shown up, the bomb would have fallen on us! This is how people think when even their highest hopes have been brought so low to the ground. The happiness of being able to end your journey at last completely overwhelms your sadness for the victims when you see their charred remains as you pass their car. You need to set aside your compassion so you don’t wind up facing yourself and acknowledging the bitter truth: in the face of a meaningless death, hanging on to the self becomes a task as sacred as it is selfish. Over the past twelve hundred days, Bolbol had often reflected on the numerous coincidences that had saved his life. He even began to act as though fate had taken a special interest in him; when somebody panicked and pushed past him onto a bus, he told himself that being forced to take a later bus was no doubt for the best. The first bus was probably going to be hit by a bomb or maybe get caught up in a sudden firefight. Death passes by, and you can’t grasp it. In war, death is blind. It never stops to look at its victims.
For the first time, it occurred to Bolbol that the road, with all its rituals and its twists and turns, resembled the people who traveled on it: In the early morning, the dew-laden trees in the distance and the moist earth on either side of the minibus had filled him with optimism. By the afternoon, however, he was exhausted. The changeable weather was damper than usual; storms would blow up and then subside. The three passengers were focused entirely on arriving; they couldn’t bear enduring the body’s company for another night. It had begun to rot in earnest now, and the cologne, which Fatima desperately sprinkled over it every few minutes, no longer helped.
Hussein seemed calm now. It helped Bolbol and Fatima to relax. They once again postponed the exchange of accusations they had each been nurturing. Bolbol stood the most accused, of course, for having embroiled everyone in this hellish journey they were no longer sure would ever end. The bravery they had boasted of had turned into a nightmare; the moment of their decision now seemed one of insane recklessness, but, even so, a secret satisfaction was creeping into Bolbol. He was no longer the person he had been for four years. He wished he could go back to the beginning, as he was now, so he could spit in his petty neighbors’ faces for perpetually spying on him and never trusting him.
He began to understand the secret of his father’s regained strength late in life: his psychic wounds all healing at once, his attitude changing, his no longer acting like a rotten fish waiting to be thrown into the nearest gutter. His eyes got back their twinkle; his body seemed to regain its youthful elegance; he started shaving again; he wore his new favorite clothes. Like a young man he exchanged his threadbare suits for jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers to help him outrun sniper fire. He didn’t sit and wait for the protests to pass his house but went to the mosque two hours before the afternoon prayer. He had never prayed in his life—everyone knew he was there to wait for the protests. He spoke with the young people and ignored their pleas to wait for them in front of his house where the protest passed every Friday. He thought up slogans and discussed new ideas. He reread the histories of revolutions and underlined many sentences. He offered copious explanations of the greatest revolutions in history, and his abundant enthusiasm made him into an icon. He resumed his role in the town as the respected teacher who was still fondly remembered by his students, and he lived the bitterness and the glory of the revolution alongside them. When Bolbol met up with his father for the penultimate time, he saw that Abdel Latif was no longer an old man filled with bitterness and loss, just waiting to die; he was an active man whose telephone rang at all hours, who had high hopes of living to see the regime fall and breathing in the freedom for which he had waited for so long.
In early May 2011, Bolbol found Lamia knocking at his door unexpectedly. Her eyes blazed, and she said, “There’s no time to lose, we’re going to S.” Without waiting for a reply, she went on to say she was joining the protests that day. Bolbol couldn’t get out of it, and they arrived at ten o’clock in the morning. She hugged Abdel Latif and embarked on a strange conversation with him about their moribund town, which expected sparks to fly today. Bolbol instantly resumed his other personality, the reckless, impulsive one that Lamia believed in, and went out with them. He was afraid, but when they blended with the huge crowd he could pretend he had broken with his former life, at least for the time being; peculiar feelings struck him and he shouted defiantly. His voice was weak at first, almost mute in contrast to his father’s and Lamia’s, who raised their hands in the air, their voices as strong as the other twenty thousand people shouting at once. Their voices rocked the town, whose entrances were being guarded by young men observing the road. They signaled to the other protesters when they spotted vehicles carrying soldiers approaching the town. After half an hour Bolbol merged with the others and truly began to shout. He felt a vehement delight; the moment he buried his fear was like his first orgasm. He tried to regain that feeling several times; although he couldn’t return to it, he could never forget it. It was an incomplete, unrepeatable pleasure, and it remained suspended in his life like the pendulum of a clock. More than twenty cars bristling with Mukhabarat and machine guns charged the protest and opened fire at close range. Bolbol saw bodies fall in a horrifying scene. Lamia, prostrate on the ground, was helped up by a young man who took her arm and escaped with her into a narrow alley. They were close to his father’s house, but Abdel Latif wouldn’t budge; he wanted to accept his own portion of death. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere. The Mukhabarat retreated after less than an hour—but that was more than enough time for a massacre. When Bolbol reached his father’s house, Lamia was waiting for him. She asked about his father, and he told her he had left Abdel Latif standing there, waiting for a merciful bullet. Again, the sound of gunfire broke out, and they heard young people running and cursing the regime and the Mukhabarat. Lamia opened the door when she saw that the neighbors had all done the same—letting the protesters seek shelter in their houses.