Within a few months of marrying, they had nothing to talk about other than television serials, which they both followed closely so as not to discover that they had been living in entirely different worlds from day one. They wanted to get the nuisance of living over and done with. His wife dreamed of the moment when she would lie on her deathbed, clasping Bolbol’s hand: a rusty, sentimental image, and a common self-indulgence for people who worry that they might end up forgotten, that they’re nothing more than an encumbrance to be tossed aside into oblivion. Bolbol’s wife was prepared to sacrifice her entire life for this indispensable, dramatic image. She always said, with hope in her voice, “Goodness me, we’re aging so quickly!” For her, life had three moments: birth, wedding, and death. What came in between was an isthmus that had to be crossed with a minimum of inconvenience. The only distinguishing characteristic Bolbol had liked about his wife was her lack of demands on his time and thoughts. She was content with not too much sex, considering it a method of communication at best, not a pleasure that should be experienced as fully as possible, at leisure and via all the senses.
The closer they got to Anabiya, the more oddly dejected Bolbol felt. A deep feeling of guilt weighed on him, although he didn’t know why. Perhaps because of how he had distanced himself from Abdel Latif in his final years, and for no good reason. His father had suggested that Bolbol come back and live with him in the big house after his divorce, but Bolbol had made do with staying there for a few months before returning to his isolation. He had wanted to discover another self inside himself, the self he’d imagined throughout his life in his daydreams. He imagined himself brave like Zuhayr, worthy of a woman like Lamia, or foolish like Hussein, or a thinker like Sadiq Jalal al-Azm. He had adored the great man’s books and way of life, a life Bolbol knew nothing about but still imagined, as he imagined so much else. He spent years alone in total isolation, drinking cheap booze on the weekend, eating cold, stale food, playing with himself, and getting more and more afraid. He couldn’t drop down to earth, and he wasn’t able to fly, as though he were hanging from a rusty nail in the sky.
Once, Bolbol hadn’t enjoyed being alone, but he soon became more involved than he should have been in the search for his definitive form. Simply put, he hadn’t done anything; his existence was tantamount to a vacuum. All he had done was observe other people’s lives and discover they were like him: a collection of walking lumps taking up space, spending their lives striving to negate death. They repeated the same actions day in, day out, and when, like him, they noticed that time was passing, they made some futile gesture toward extricating themselves from their addiction to daydreaming instead of living—that ultimate human weakness. Faith was the path that came closest to providing some small comfort, but there, too, Bolbol didn’t know how to take the first step. It would have taken a powerful faith to stave off the questions that kept him awake at night, not a half faith. He noticed the faces of his neighbors, when they returned from church every day, were more worried than they had been beforehand; even worship hadn’t rescued them from their nagging questions, it seemed. It pleased Bolbol to affect a talent for reading human nature, but his lack of conviction in the truth of his intuitions always returned him to square one.
His daydreams became more and more all-encompassing. In them, his body was made anew; it was beautiful, slender, strong. In narrating his fantasies to himself he didn’t mind one bit that he was borrowing clichés from the so-called plebs, especially because for the purposes of his daydreaming he had also purloined for his personal use a few of the gorgeous sculpted models appearing on the endless television commercials. Though sometimes, too, he imagined himself transported back to an earlier, more refined era, rather than indulging in the vulgarity of a modern-day setting, and considered himself outstandingly sophisticated for doing so—but manufacturing the past required an energy and imagination he had to admit he didn’t possess. It is hard to discover that your self is nothing but a delusion. You consider yourself aloof from the oppression and power of the masses, but in the end you realize any individuality you might have perceived is a lie and that you’re just one more worn-out pair of shoes walking the streets. Bolbol felt oddly comforted when his crowded daydreams finally spat out these conclusions shortly after he turned forty-two, and he realized all of a sudden that time had passed and he had never asked himself what he had been doing all these years.
For seven years, Bolbol had lived in the same alley where Lamia had lived as a student. Most of its residents were immigrants, penniless soldiers, public-sector employees, and fellahin who had migrated to the city from their distant villages. Most were Christian, but Druze and Muslims of all sects had moved in over the previous thirty years. Although the alley itself was no longer solely Christian, it had retained its churches and Christian graveyards.
When Bolbol went outside, he became a different person. He smiled at everyone walking on the street, didn’t raise his voice to the grocers, averted his eyes when a woman passed him, and tried to help small children if he saw them stumble and fall. He thought that creating a good impression would help him to form friendships and forge a sense of belonging in his new neighborhood, but in his daydreams he lusted openly after all the women. He wished he were one of those men who chased every girl who dared to show her thighs to passersby. He would wait for an opportunity to take his neighbor Samar home after she finished work at the Post Institute so he could grope her under the stairs, bare her breasts, and bury his face in them—or, rather, he liked to pretend he might be the sort of reckless libertine who might do just that. But despite his kindness and his increasing flattery, his careful demeanor and his elevated morals, no one ever acknowledged him. They saw him as merely pathetic, another lost soul searching for some peace away from his rural family.
And yet, even still, he didn’t know why his heart sank the closer they got to Anabiya. Maybe it was this: he didn’t want to see his father’s final defeat, returning after more than forty years to a home he had willingly left in search of himself—a self that was admittedly just a collection of slogans borrowed from a past era, but a self that his father had clung to nonetheless. It’s hard to admit your emptiness after half a century of delusion, to be reduced to a suppurating mass giving out foul odors, with maggots sliding in and out of your sides… Putrefaction is the real insult to the body, not death. Now Bolbol understood why bodies are shrouded before burial. It is the last moment of dignity, the last image the deceased’s loved ones should preserve before the body disappears from their eyes forever.
Bolbol looked at his watch; it was just after ten o’clock in the morning. The first opportunity he’d had in three days to indulge in one of his preferred imaginary scenarios—the ones in which he was handsome, reckless, and successful. Hussein’s scowls in the rearview mirror were beside the point. Bolbol felt their task and their relationship would come to an end at the same time, as if their father had arranged it this way, giving them these three days to explore everything between them. And yet, contrary to this, he felt their relationship was the best it had ever been. Their fight had purified their souls of the residue of the past. Bolbol told himself that they had needed one last battle to go back to how they had been, two children who could erase a train from existence with the scribble of a pen or perhaps draw a calf on skis. People accepted all sorts of irrationality from children, as if respect for the imagination was bound to age alone. If they had remained children, neither would be afraid of the other.