It was a great day. His father relived it a thousand times. As for Bolbol, that one visit was enough for him. Lamia stopped knocking on his door in the morning to take him with her to his father’s house.
She told him she felt an affinity with the martyrs who had fallen that day. She’d spent that night in Abdel Latif’s house, and they’d both helped to treat the wounded over at Nevine’s larger house, which had been turned into a field hospital. The town didn’t sleep; the families of the fallen kept vigil by the bodies of their sons and daughters. The army and the Mukhabarat patrols made relentless house raids and arrested scores of young people. Bolbol stayed alone in his father’s house. Abdel Latif and Lamia didn’t return before dawn. Bolbol heard them talking about the wounded by name. He tossed and turned, but didn’t get up. Lamia slept in Fatima’s room. Before she and Abdel Latif went to sleep, Bolbol heard his father ask her to wake him in the morning so they could go to the funerals.
Come morning, Bolbol didn’t dare flee, afraid that Lamia would think he was a coward. He tried to think of something that would cheer her up, and so prepared a large breakfast, but she and his father ate only a few mouthfuls and drank a few sips of coffee before they left to go back to the field hospital. Loudspeakers at the mosque were inviting people to attend the funerals after the afternoon prayer; public defiance was at its height. Bolbol wondered if fear might finally have changed sides; Lamia told him that she had seen soldiers looking terrified the moment they opened fire on unarmed people. But no, Bolbol told himself, this was artistic license, nothing more. How could someone holding a weapon be frightened by unarmed people waving nothing but their bare hands? Yet her innocent eyes seemed to tell him that lies and exaggeration were simply foreign to Lamia; on the contrary, she was always humble in her estimation of herself, deferring to others and overvaluing their roles in her life. Often, she had made Bolbol feel he was very important to her, asking him to do small favors and thanking him profusely afterward. She was the type who considered the presence of others to be a reward in itself. Bolbol was relieved when Lamia and his father didn’t ask him to accompany them to the field hospital. He went back to bed. He was still there when the funeral procession approached the house; curiosity prevented him from going back to sleep. He climbed to the roof and saw a flood of people below. Women were performing zagharid, ululating triumphantly, and roses and rice were being thrown from balconies. His father climbed the steps to the church with Father Walim; they grasped the rope of the huge bell and tolled it with all their strength while twenty thousand people raised their fists in the air in reply. It was an awe-inspiring scene, and Bolbol didn’t notice the tears slipping down his own cheeks.
Lamia was in the middle of the crowd, weeping and shouting; even where he stood on the roof, he could tell that her voice was screamed almost raw. The funeral procession passed, and a few minutes later Bolbol heard the sound of gunfire. Six young men and a woman were killed close to where Lamia stood; she spent the night delirious, her mind refusing to grasp what had happened. Bolbol’s fear returned and increased; he felt as though he personally were under siege. His father paced the living room furiously and spoke on the phone to his friend Nadir, a math teacher, telling him he would meet him at the graveyard. He hung up and left in a hurry. Bolbol followed him with a recklessness he hadn’t thought himself capable of, but then he, too, was furious.
Lamia wouldn’t listen when his father said that women shouldn’t attend the burial. She followed them, and all three hurried to the graveyard. The streets of S were deserted, and the smell of death wafted through the houses and alleys. The electricity had been cut off, and they were all enveloped in darkness. As they went through the narrow alleys, men were preparing to pray over the bodies. Lamia headed toward a group of women, relatives of the dead. Bolbol sat on a tombstone and watched from a distance. His childhood friends kissed him hastily in greeting and continued to where the men were completing the burial rites. The faces of the martyrs gleamed in the light of the full moon.
Lamia was still filled with rage as they left S. She cursed the regime with a wide variety of obscenities while Bolbol kept quiet, unsure how to make her feel better. She left him suddenly in the neighborhood of Baramkeh. She kissed him affectionately and hailed a taxi to take her to the bus depot, and then Bolbol was suddenly alone in the middle of the traffic, a small rabbit in a sea of people. The faces of the crowds around him were impassive, and he panted for deliverance.
Now Bolbol was staring outside the minibus, switching from one side of the road to the other. If this nightmare ever ended, and they ever reached Anabiya, he would wash his hands of the past entirely. He no longer had a father or a mother, and all links to his siblings would be severed for good. He would insist that his own son bury him in the nearest possible graveyard. He didn’t want anyone to read the Fatiha over his grave; what good did that do the dead? Everything the living did for the dead just highlighted the solitude of the dead and satisfied the vanity of the living; all that chatter in remembrance of a dead person’s good qualities was nothing more than jockeying for social position. Few would have objected if the three siblings had tossed their father’s body into a ditch, but perhaps they, too, were taking risks only in order to win admiring glances from their friends and neighbors. Those looks hadn’t meant much to them before, but now they could see themselves being consumed by the supposed nobility of their task. If they succumbed to such vanity, they could easily wind up joining the ranks of the self-righteous, those people who consider themselves worthy of passing judgment on everyone who can’t live up to their own high moral standards—a group united only by its isolation.
By now they were pessimistic about ever reaching Anabiya at all. Bolbol had switched roles with Hussein, who had taken on the role of the sensible older brother, praising his father and trying to keep Bolbol and Fatima calm. At the ninth checkpoint, the guards were actually kind to them. They told them to hurry if they wanted to reach Anabiya before midnight and pointed out where the next checkpoint would be. They said it belonged to the security services and advised the siblings to answer any questions briefly and without any obstruction; the agents manning that station were miserable, as they hadn’t been on leave in months. The siblings prepared themselves, and Bolbol left it to Hussein to decide whether to take the lane for goods or for passengers. Hussein stopped a few meters before the start of the bottleneck at the checkpoint and hurried to the officer in charge. He explained their situation and asked to be allowed to pass in view of their special circumstances, mentioning that the body had begun to rot. The officer came with him to the minibus and glanced at the corpse. He ordered them to go into the goods lane and kept hold of their documents. Hussein said, “When we get to the Free Army territory, everything will be easier. Our identity cards will help us to cross checkpoints quickly.” Fatima closed her eyes and murmured a prayer; it occurred to Bolbol, as he looked at her, that this journey had turned her into an old woman. Despair had crept into her heart. He said to Hussein that they still had a little money left, which might speed up their passage through the checkpoint and help them get their identity cards back. Hussein pointed coolly outside. They were trapped inside a lane closed off by huge cement blocks and couldn’t leave until all the cars in front of them had passed through; money wouldn’t do a thing.