Bolbol went to the officer in charge with an attitude of supplication. In a trembling voice, he explained that time was of the essence; he spoke about the dignity of the dead, not mentioning that they were stuck with this corpse if they couldn’t reach Anabiya. He made himself look wretched, begging without complaining. He hated how naturally the pose came to him; a brave man would say something different, would affirm his right to move about freely and take his father’s body to its graveyard in good time…
The officer looked at Bolbol coldly, used to the blandishments of those who had fallen inside his trap. As far as he was concerned, all these people hated him and wouldn’t have any mercy if their situations were reversed. The roles of executioner and victim were eternally being exchanged, were they not?
Bolbol thought of the pouring rain and raging storm outside. Night would fall soon, and they wouldn’t be able to finish their journey in this weather. The officer said that transporting bodies in this fashion was forbidden, but because he believed that they were acting without malice, he was waiting for confirmation of the death certificate. Bolbol offered to try and get the pronouncing doctor on his cell phone, but the man in charge cut him off sharply: “Life and death are only a matter of official documents.” He pointed at the fax machine on his desk. Bolbol asked permission, again, to call someone at the hospital who might be able to expedite matters, and the officer nodded his acquiescence. Bolbol dialed the doctor’s number and explained the problem to him. The doctor promised to look for the fax from the checkpoint and to get back to them as quickly as possible.
Bolbol had almost no money left; he blamed himself for having wasted it, for not having properly calculated the cost of their long journey: he should have divided the sum between the total number of anticipated checkpoints. They had nothing they could sell here—Bolbol’s phone was ancient and wouldn’t fetch more than a thousand liras, while Hussein would never relinquish his phone for any price—and the two thousand liras left in the siblings’ collective possession wouldn’t get them anything. The doctor called back and told Bolbol that the hospital’s fax machine had been out of order for three months. Only then did Bolbol remember Fatima’s ring and wondered how much it might fetch. He went back out into the driving rain and explained the situation to Hussein and Fatima, who were huddled in the minibus for shelter, but still soaked right through. Fatima had slipped her feet under the blanket that served as their father’s shroud. Hussein explained that he couldn’t turn on the heat; they needed to save gas.
They all looked at one another, acknowledging that they were lost in the wilderness, until an agent rapped on the bus’s window and gestured at Bolbol to get back out. The agent returned the documents to him and said that a fax had arrived from the hospital; the officer was allowing them to proceed. They couldn’t believe they were being allowed to go on their way. The minibus set off, and Hussein put as much distance as he could between themselves and the checkpoint. He regained his good spirits, and Fatima muttered strange litanies and asked him to look through his cassette tapes for a prayer for traveling. Hussein didn’t reply; he was busy speaking to one of his friends on the phone, telling him the name of the village they’d passed through a few minutes earlier. His friend told him there were still ten kilometers until they reached the final regime checkpoint. After that, they would enter the territory of the Free Syrian Army. Hussein focused on the road. The rain stopped, but the wind picked up speed; it tilted the minibus, and the corpse began to topple. Bolbol grabbed it before it could fall over and considered laying it flat on the floor. He dismissed the idea, however; to move it would be to risk revealing even more of its decay. They did their best to ignore the stink, though they were on the brink of passing out: the cologne mixed with the corpse’s odor weighed the air with a putrid, lethal stench, and the biting cold outside prevented them from opening any windows.
Each sibling was too ashamed now to admit that they regretted ever setting out on this journey. Why hadn’t they looked for a more convenient graveyard, or maybe called one of those charities that volunteered to finance burials for strangers to the city?
Their silence also made it clear just how little they could stand spending so much time with one another. An entire day was intolerable; there was nothing left in them of the affectionate siblings of old. The ties of blood simply weren’t enough to sustain the falsehood of family harmony given all the things that now divided them—a lie that in any case had disintegrated long before. When Hussein told their father what they were all thinking, back then, he paid the price of his recklessness; Bolbol meanwhile kept trying to live the lie of respect and the sacred family bond. There were many times he would have liked to tell his father that he was cruel to his children and kind only to his students and strangers. The image Abdel Latif presented to the world was paramount; he cared too much about what people said about him and believed only the best of what they said. He didn’t respect his children’s weaknesses because he didn’t remember his own, nor his old inability to escape with Layla from his own family’s influence. He had waited for her to turn to ash before he let out a stifled cry and left Anabiya for good—Anabiya, where now he wanted to be buried. Bolbol wanted to ask him: Why, after you left it all behind—those cruel faces that knew no mercy—why would you want to be buried on their cursed land?
It wasn’t the first time he had pictured himself standing in front of his father, speechifying to him, telling him to his face that he was a weak, emasculated man with barely a quarter of a dream to brag of, which wasn’t nearly enough to achieve anything effective. His tirade would conclude: You’re like me, but you wrap your delusions in big words about the liberation of Palestine, which your generation left to rot. Or maybe something about the respectable family Abdel Latif had always wanted, filled with successful, educated, socialist children working in respectable professions: Like all poor people you want your children to become doctors or engineers, but your uniqueness is a fantasy and the cost of it has buried us.
When Bolbol decided to study philosophy, he felt he was disappointing his father. All his life Abdel Latif had venerated the great philosophers who had changed humanity, but for his own children he wanted professions that would safeguard them against going without. But Bolbol felt incapable of doing anything differently. He wanted to understand the world, and tried to be one of the best students, but everything went against him: his teachers despised thought and sold grades and exam answers to the highest bidders; everything that ran most counter to the essence of philosophy existed in abundance in the philosophy department. They despised debate, politics, reflection, and research; the faculty guided students to storefronts where hucksters sold extracts from lectures and where the professors took a commission from every sale. As for the lecturers who tried to reimpose the kind of philosophy that actually provoked reflection, they were either dismissed or finally shut themselves up at home in despair. Student informers wrote reports accusing them of sedition, inciting atheism, and cursing the party as well as Arab nationalism. Thought was a veritable crime, and it necessitated interrogation.
Bolbol soon lost his enthusiasm. He bought lecture notes and followed the teachings of professors who vaunted the ideas and wisdom of the Leader. He didn’t dare admit his cowardice to Lamia. When he was with her, he was possessed by his old image of himself, of which nothing now remained but the remnants of his old, dead ambition. He became one of the herd that only wants a degree to get a job. Soon he was employed at the Institute of Food Storage and Refrigeration, where he recorded the quantities of tomatoes and onions prepared for warehousing and then, at the end of the season, would record how many tons had gone bad. It was trivial work that required no philosophy. Bolbol stopped caring about new ideas, and day by day he became a model employee—scared of everything. What frightened him most were those perilous situations in which he found himself agreeing with Lamia when she spoke of necessary change; she would declare loudly that the populace had reached the last stages of servility and that revolution was the only way of uprooting society’s backwardness, as well as the dictatorship, and bringing to account the murderers who had plundered the country from east to west. Abdel Latif agreed with her enthusiastically, and Bolbol chorused his agreement, too, but deep down his heart was cold like a rotten quince. How it pained him now, the hypocrisy he had shown on so many positions just to satisfy Lamia and retain the privilege of her friendship. If it pleased her, it was enough for him. Even today, the look she had given him that morning as she bid him goodbye was all he’d needed to hoist his father’s body onto his back and carry it through checkpoints, storms, and the arid wilderness.