The bus crawled painfully toward the hundreds of vehicles flooding Abbasiyin Square. Three Suzuki pickup trucks with hoisted flags gleamed ahead of the siblings, heading in their direction; elderly men were standing in the open backs and trying to clear the road. One of them yelled through a bullhorn, loud and clear, “Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs!” He followed this up with “Make way for the martyrs, make way for the martyrs!” But no one cared. The Suzuki trucks approached Hussein’s minibus and tried to escape the traffic. Hussein noted aloud that they were coming from Tishreen Military Hospital and added that there was no transport to take the poor to their graves. Bolbol couldn’t take his eyes off the man with the bullhorn. He stared at him until he was lost from view.
There was no getting away from death, Bolbol told himself. It was a terrifying flood drowning everyone. He recalled the days when the regime still bothered to put effort into the funerals it staged for its fallen. On television, an ensemble would play some song written especially for the state’s many martyrs, and on every coffin there would be a large bouquet bearing the name of the commander in chief of the army and the armed forces (who was also the president), another in the name of the minister of defense, and a third in the name of the deceased’s comrades in arms in his squadron or department. A female anchor would announce the name, function, and rank of the martyr, and this would be followed with a shot of the family declaring how proud they were, how glorious it was, that their son had been martyred, faithfully laying down his life for the nation and the Leader. Always those two words—“nation” and “Leader.” And yet, after several months, the band, the bouquets, and the flag disappeared; so did the female anchors crowing about the penniless boys martyred for their loyalty to the nation and the Leader; and so did all reverence for the word “martyr.” Bolbol looked at the city as it dwindled around them. He remembered how passionate his coworkers had been when they used to tell their horror stories: searching for bodies that had been lost or buried improperly, through hospitals stuffed with corpses… Tracking down the remains of a loved one had become hard work—even more so when a family, immediately upon being informed of the death of a son, was forced to go over to the battlefield and dig through a mass grave, or else among various devastated buildings and the iron skeletons of tanks and burned-out guns. But the bloom went off even these sorts of stories, eventually, and no one bothered to tell them anymore. The exceptional had become habitual, and tragedies were simply mundane—perhaps that was the worst part of this war. In any case, though, as Bolbol looked at his father’s corpse, he felt a certain degree of distinction; at least this body was being cared for by its three children and not left to the mercy of the elements. He almost told Hussein and Fatima about their father’s last moments—in fact, he was surprised that he hadn’t already done so—but instead lay back, convinced that there would be plenty of time on the long drive to talk over the exploits of the departed, to recall a past that had never been particularly unhappy.
Hussein was still annoyed at himself. The thousands of sayings and aphorisms he’d spent twenty years memorizing had proved useless in the face of a bad traffic jam—but he refused to let his defective memory get the better of him. He repeated a few sayings on different topics, just to keep in practice: aphorisms on unfaithfulness and hope and the betrayal of friends. He considered this a useful exercise; these sayings might be required sometime soon, and they needed to be primed and ready. He called a few lines of Ahmad Shawqi to mind and recited them vehemently, enunciating majestically: “Crimson freedom has a door / Knocked by every blood-stained hand…” The following line only came back to him with difficulty: “… he will ever dwell among the pits.” But no, he had mixed up Shawqi’s poem with one by Shaby, “If One Day the People Wish to Live, Fate Must Respond.” But this combination pleased him; if anything, it struck him as fortuitous that he’d accidentally blended two poems with very different meters and rhyme schemes. He had in fact read these lines dozens of times on the pages of his almanacs and liked them very much; he used them to shame cowards who preferred the regime to any unrest. He repeated both incomplete lines in a murmur as if in lament for his revolutionary father.
Bolbol paid no attention; he was content with the three previous months he and his father had spent talking everything over. Fatima understood the recitation as a belated reconciliation between Hussein and their father. She wanted to thank God out loud for this miraculous resolution, but Bolbol’s heavy silence made her hesitate, and she decided to wait for a more suitable opportunity to voice her opinion on the long rift between father and son. True, their estrangement had gone through many different stages, and occasionally each man had even approached the other, trying to turn over a new leaf, but no matter what, their relationship never regained its original, cloudless perfection from the time when Hussein had been the spoiled favorite.
The soldiers at the last checkpoint within the limits of Damascus made do with a cursory glance over their papers and allowed them to pass. Many corpses were leaving the city today, and just as many were coming in. The sight of them was abhorrent to the mud-spattered soldiers; the bodies heralded their own imminent end, which they naturally wanted to forget. Hussein didn’t look at his watch. He heaved a sigh of relief; he had been delivered from the traffic of Abbasiyin Square, and Damascus was falling away behind them. Now the goal would be to reach Anabiya before midnight. Fatima and Bolbol recovered their optimism and reviewed the necessities for their journey: bottles of mineral water, cigarettes, identity cards, and the little money they had left.
He died at the right time, Bolbol told himself. The body wouldn’t rot as fast in this cold winter. They were fortunate he hadn’t died in August, when flies swarm over and tear at the dead. Death is a solitary experience, of course, but nevertheless it lays heavy obligations on the living. There’s a big difference between an old man who dies in his village, surrounded by family and close to the cemetery, and one who dies hundreds of kilometers away from them all. The living have a harder task ahead of them than the dead; no one wants to see their loved ones rot. They want them to look their best in death for that final memory that can never be erased. The last expression worn by a loved one necessarily comes to epitomize them. When the facial muscles of a suffering man slacken in the midst of his pain, his grief is what remains of him and he looks like nothing so much as a newborn child.