Desolation gripped the land. As she wandered among the destroyed houses, Nevine reflected that she had nothing left to do in what remained of her life. Deep within, an inner void whistled with a cold breeze. She didn’t care about the title “Mother of Martyrs” that was bestowed on women in her position. She sometimes wished her sons had been cowards and fled abroad as soon as possible, but at other moments she felt that everything had needed to happen as it did—that this was just another story of mass delusion. The shame and the silence they had lived through for years were exacting a price, and everyone would pay it, executioners and victims alike. Correcting hypocrisy may be hard, but it was inevitable in the end.
Before, she had loved life enough to want to live twice over, but there wasn’t a lot left for her to see. She just wanted to see her sons’ murderers cowering and afraid, to exchange her fear with theirs. Afterward she would close her eyes and die.
three
BOLBOL FLYING IN A CONFINED SPACE
They left the village at dawn. The weak light revealed the extent of the devastation. It seemed as if souls were still moaning under the rubble, shreds of clothing and body parts strewn over the abandoned fields and mixing with the skeletons of their goats and mules. The dogs had scavenged what they could and left the rest for the flies. It was complete and utter ruin. They had heard about scenes like this, but here they were facing them and smelling them for the first time in person, and it was quite a different thing. Bolbol felt he should despise the foolishness of what had occurred between himself and Hussein a few hours previously, but he wasn’t ready to comment or apologize, and believed that Hussein felt the same; the grudges in their life had heaped up like worn-out clothes in a locked wardrobe.
The sky was still overcast and black. They regained the hope that the rotting body might eventually reach Anabiya. The grave, to be completed, needed a body. The shroud would give the body a new form, dignified and white. They guessed that it would take about two hours to travel the remaining distance, and then it would all be over. Their cousins would complete the task and bury their dead.
There had been no network coverage since the day before. Anyway, all their phone batteries had run out. Hussein had forgotten to bring his charger, but he hadn’t regretted this when he saw that the towers along the road were all destroyed. They had no hope of calling ahead, and even if there had been a connection, it would have been no use. There was nothing to report. They were carrying the body and they were on their way to Anabiya. It was no longer important to get there at a particular time. They had lost their awe of death, and the body no longer meant anything to them—this morning they could have offered it to that pack of hungry dogs without a second thought.
They crossed a number of checkpoints held by the Free Army without difficulty. The fighters were good-natured and sympathized with their misery. They would uncover Abdel Latif’s face and then cover it back up immediately, unable to bear the sight or stench. The siblings’ identity cards came in handy here, at last; Anabiya was an influential region, and many of its sons were fighting in the Free Army, based in the countryside north of Aleppo.
When on rare occasions one of the local soldiers insisted on uncovering the entire body, he would see the scars and the splits and the marks on its face—the result of falling from the seat when Hussein was trying to toss it in the mud—and assume Abdel Latif had been murdered under torture. No one would have believed this was the corpse of a man who had died peacefully in a hospital in the heart of the capital and that it was the neglect of his children and their utter lack of guile that had caused its current degradation.
In any case, carrying a health hazard that needed to be quarantined as soon as possible was a great help in speeding up their journey. Aleppo appeared in the distance, along with pistachio fields, traces of bombardment, and more widespread destruction. The sight of the ruined city revived their sense of connection to the region. They reached Aleppo just before ten. Fewer than seventy kilometers separated them from Anabiya. The closer they got, the stronger they felt; they were not strangers to these fields, their relatives were not far away, and here the family name was tantamount to an identity card in itself. Almost everyone was a relative under the pavilion of their clan, which always strove to uphold its connections—if little else.
Bolbol breathed a sigh of relief, opened his small window, and filled his lungs with the clean air of the countryside. The soldiers at the last checkpoint had urged them to take the outer road, which twisted and turned around the villages before it arrived at Anabiya; entering Aleppo itself would embroil them in another labyrinth they might not easily escape. They didn’t know the road, but many travelers along the way helped them keep to it. They tried to hold off the feeling of power that comes from belonging to a herd; the closer they got to Anabiya, the more they tried to return to themselves, and reflected on their estrangement from this place that they didn’t really know. And sure enough, Bolbol’s eternal fear, that longtime companion, came back to him. He wished his own house were nearby; he would have bathed and purged his body of every stink that clung to him—from the body, the family, the revolution, and the regime—and gone back to his private peace and quiet. Fear might be his final haven, and it might even give him happiness. What had he cared about after he lost Lamia? He asked himself this, and his reply was: Nothing. The regime allowed him to eat and drink whatever he wanted, to spend his free time watching old Egyptian cinema. That little was enough for him; what would be gained by freedom? He had lost all his dreams, and it was difficult to break his cocoon and re-form himself. It was all too late. He was over forty, and all his dreams found expression in his own small house. His father had done a good thing by dying, Bolbol went on to reflect. They would sell his property—even if his big house was rubble now, the land was still worth something—and it would fetch enough for each of them to buy a small apartment in some poor area. Fatima would have to be content with a half-portion, as Sharia decreed; there was no way Hussein would allow her to dispute it. For some time now, Hussein had been dreaming of demolishing that hated house after his father’s death. Since his expulsion from it, it held nothing for him but bad memories. He had never gone back.
Bolbol was sure he was overthinking everything, as usual. He told himself he was a spider dangling in a web of forgetfulness. His absence wouldn’t cause pain to anyone; no one remembered him apart from Lamia, and even when she asked about him every now and then, it was a form of pity, nothing more. She needed him to prove to herself that she was still needed by others. The neighborhood vendors offered mute responses to his greetings; they might not hate him, but they had no affection for him either. He needed this web in order to be rid of the smell of his wife, the smell of the house they had shared that he hadn’t ever wanted to live and die in. Of course he cared nothing about it and fled it very easily. He hadn’t ventured any comment on it and spent seven years with his wife in a state of capitulation, raising no objection to the sofas she chose, the pictures she hung on the wall, or the plastic flowers she liberally distributed in every corner—though he found them strangely irritating and daydreamed about throwing them away. Their seven years together had been meaningless. Bolbol could now admit that he had been afraid of her, a peculiar kind of fear; he felt he didn’t deserve her, even though she was exactly like most other women.