They were alone on the road again. All other cars disappeared, night fell, and the scene went back to being terrifying. Bolbol felt bleak, Fatima’s face plainly showed her apprehension, and Hussein was worried they were lost. They listened to the storm, and none of them cared about the state of their father’s corpse or whether it fell off the seat. Blueness now suffused the chest almost up to the neck, but they didn’t look at it anymore, so as to avoid seeing the bloating. Hussein had even stopped making proclamations about what time they would arrive. They had traveled more than a hundred kilometers and began to convince themselves they were over halfway there. At this point, they told themselves, mired in the unknown, going on was surely preferable to heading back.
The searchlights of the next checkpoint appeared in the distance. They slowed down. When they reached it, the soldiers on guard looked at the family in astonishment. These soldiers’ outfits were different, nothing like the uniforms at the other checkpoints. These soldiers were also poorer looking than they should have been, as if they had been cut off in this part of the world—they were certainly soldiers, as opposed to Mukhabarat or private militia, but they had been stationed here on the front lines in the full expectation they would die. A soldier of no more than twenty opened the car door and examined the body, aghast. He looked at everyone’s identity cards, smiled, and said he was from a village near Anabiya; he knew the family name. They exhaled in relief and smiled back at him. He took pity on the dead man and, leaning his head into the car, he told the siblings that at the next checkpoint, which belonged to the Free Army, they should find his cousin Hamada. He might help them secure accommodation till morning; they certainly couldn’t keep traveling tonight. Then he raised his hand in farewell and allowed them to pass.
It was fewer than five kilometers to the Free Army’s checkpoint. They asked for Hamada and added the name of his village; Hamada came out, looking surprised, and scrutinized the siblings. They introduced themselves and explained their task to him. He asked them if they knew what it meant to be traveling this road at this time of night. He genuinely wanted to be useful to them and offered to help them find somewhere to stay overnight in a nearby village, at least until dawn, when they could proceed with their journey. The siblings were adamant that they had to reach Anabiya before then; the state of the corpse would brook no delay: they had to bury it as quickly as possible if it wasn’t to disintegrate entirely. Hamada saw from their faces that they were hungry, so he suggested that they join him for dinner. Hussein asked if Hamada would provide them with a written directive to the following checkpoints certifying that he knew them and requesting facilitation of their passage. Hamada laughed and informed them that his influence extended about five meters from the point where they were parked. Every squadron at every checkpoint had its own system, and such a letter would be disastrous if it fell into the hands of hostiles. At that moment, the siblings realized they were truly in unfamiliar territory.
Hussein agreed to drink some tea and wait a little. After all, it would be no use arriving in the middle of the night; they couldn’t very well wake their uncles and cousins and ask them to bury a dead man at midnight. Fatima asked Hamada for some spirits so she could rub down the distended corpse. They drank hot tea, and Hamada supplied them with a small bottle of spirits and some cans of food. He guessed correctly that they were embarrassed to ask anything of people whose appearance so clearly demonstrated their poverty.
Hamada’s face was delicate and gaunt. He told them he had defected from the army a year and a half previously and joined this battalion, which had no funding. He said that his cousin at the previous checkpoint hadn’t wanted to defect, preferring to stay with the regime—and now, even if he wanted to defect, it would be difficult for him to do so, as snipers lay in wait on every road. Hamada finished by saying that his cousin hadn’t visited his family in three years. He said that the two checkpoints were waging a pitched battle for supremacy that was entirely imaginary; they wanted to keep the peace here, but they had been forgotten by everyone else. He would have talked till morning, repeating that the war was a futile bit of madness with no end in sight; it had been a long time since he had seen anyone from his region who would understand how lonely he was. He asked them to look up his father, a good friend of their uncle, when they passed by his village, so they could tell him that Hamada was doing all right. Hamada added that he spoke to his father on the telephone, but a personally delivered message still meant something in that region.
When Hamada bid them goodbye, he warned them to watch out for extremist squadrons, insisting that Fatima cover her hair thoroughly. Hussein embraced him like a brother and wished him victory. The family only realized their mistake after they left the checkpoint, all three siblings thinking the same thing, but afraid to speak the words out loud: Why hadn’t they asked Hamada’s help in burying the body in the graveyard of his village? After the war was over, they could go back to collect the remains. But the ease of their last couple of crossings had given them confidence they had passed the worst. At last, they had reached the liberated areas, and their identity cards were no longer a problem; no one would look at them with contempt and suspicion for being born in S and having roots in Anabiya. Bolbol remembered his father’s rousing words: “The children of the revolution are everywhere.” They discussed Hamada and his cousin with amazement and sympathy in order to expel any negative feelings that might slip back into their souls thanks to the continuing stormy weather. They weren’t alone on the road anymore, or not so completely; at one point they were overtaken by a few modern SUVs scurrying along with fighters inside. One of these pulled alongside, and its occupants waved to Hussein to turn off his lights; they didn’t respond to his plea in return to be allowed to travel behind them, and after a hundred meters the vehicle turned onto a muddy side road. Without lights, then, the minibus seemed like a big coffin shared by Bolbol, Hussein, Fatima, and the body. The calmest of the four was the corpse, of course, which knew no fear or worry; blue tinged, it swelled with perfect equanimity and didn’t care that it might explode at any moment. When it vanished, at last, it would do so willingly, unconcerned with wars, soldiers, or checkpoints.