Fatima closed her eyes and dozed for a few minutes. She, too, was afraid of reaching Anabiya. In a few hours she would be a true orphan. She couldn’t rely on her brothers; they weren’t selfish, just enormously weak. In fact, she thought, the presence of a single weak sister would have suited them perfectly, if they were strong. The strong always like to surround themselves with the weak, the better to demonstrate their strength.
Bolbol heard Hussein wake Fatima and ask her to get their identity cards ready; they were nearing a checkpoint. Bolbol opened his eyes and straightened up in his seat. He was happy to ignore Hussein, who wasn’t bothered by this and let him carry on daydreaming. Things went faster than expected. Hussein was smiling as he took the arm of a soldier, and they walked toward the minibus. The fighter was a relative on their mother’s side, one of the many defectors from the regime’s army in that area. He was a raw recruit, no more than twenty-two, and his strong rural accent reminded them of their father as he greeted them politely and introduced himself. Wisely, he ignored the deplorable corpse. He spoke into a radio to arrange a smooth and quick passage for them and told them about the upcoming checkpoint. He said that extremist fighters harassed travelers and advised the siblings to keep quiet and ignore any provocations. The villages they passed through were deserted. Most houses had been destroyed, and those that were left had been abandoned. They bore the marks of fierce battles. They could smell fresh death and saw clear signs of mass graves. Everyone wanted to forget and make the time pass quickly so this nightmare would be over. They easily passed the next checkpoint. By now they were very close to Anabiya, but they didn’t recognize these villages or these roads. Nothing awoke any feeling in them, everything was the same, even the colors of the fellahin’s clothes were the same. Bolbol ignored Hussein’s anxiety; they were lost, the road was almost empty, and he simply wanted to be rid of his burden and go back to his other life. Bolbol tried to scrutinize Hussein’s face. He guessed that it was the last time he would see him. There was nothing between them anymore, but he was exhausted. He, too, wanted to be rid of the body, to be absolved of his promise to his father to bury him with his family, but he still felt moments of awful tenderness for their distant childhood. Images overlapped in a peculiar fashion; memories of his mother escaped him altogether, not wanting to keep still long enough to form a picture of them all as a family. Bolbol told himself that even mental pictures can be torn up: he couldn’t get all of them into a single image. They had never been happy, and everything they’d revered was a fantasy. Hussein had rid himself of this delusion, only to exchange it for another. But the fact was that their father hadn’t ever been as perfect as the image he had cared for more than the truth. He had been cruel; that was all. Burdened with constant fear of his past, present, and future.
In his later years, Abdel Latif had begun to renew his connections with Anabiya. He contacted his cousins, assured himself about his nephews and nieces. Abdel Latif felt a tenderness toward his hometown, but his pride prevented him from allowing himself the happiness of spending his last years near the graves of his loved ones: his wife, his sister Layla, his father, and his older brothers and sisters, of whom the only one still alive was Nayif.
At eighty years old, Nayif was still performing the same function, welcoming the prodigal sons of late family members. He would play this role dozens of times, sitting in the large room of his house, welcoming mourners and pointing out all the rules they would need to comply with, waiting for the relatives who lived far away and informing them of the necessity of undertaking their sacred duty. These were the only moments he could once again be the head of a family, venerated by all. He woke up at five every morning, ate breakfast, and walked to the graveyard to recite the Fatiha for everyone. He completed his promenade with a vain search for someone to talk to. Most of the young people had already abandoned the town for Aleppo. It was futility after futility for him. The days, all alike, accumulated, and he grew cynical while waiting to die. He retold the same stories he had already told thousands of times in the same words. And here he was now, waiting for the body of his last brother, so he could bury it. Abdel Latif would be the least painful, as Nayif’s memories of the man didn’t extend beyond childhood and youth. And, after the burial, Nayif would, as usual, disappear inside his house for a few months, waiting for his own death to arrive—a death that had already overlooked him so many times before. If he could only learn to forget, it might help him live longer; really, the best route for everyone would be to sweep away the dark rubble of memory and leave nothing behind but the clean white page Bolbol had spent his entire life trying to dream up for himself.
In these dreams, Bolbol once cast himself as part of another family—a family with a single, unified identity. In this family, Lamia was always mistress of his house and mother of his children. He even used to imagine it was Lamia in bed with him when he slept with his wife. But the more he repeated this dream, the more he summoned up her scent, the more it all lost its efficacy. Lamia, with her slim face, delicate lips, and slender body, became more like an affectionate mother than a sexy woman—useless for a man trying to get himself off on a lonely night.
The corpse was unbearable. It had endured three full days. The bloating was so bad now that the body looked as though it might burst at any moment. If it had been in the open air, the smell would have attracted every scavenger for kilometers around. Fatima held her nose, and Hussein opened the window to let out some of the intolerable stench. The body had turned into a putrid mass, no longer appropriate for a dignified farewell. It would be enough to recite a quick prayer over it and to throw a handful of earth into the grave and run.
They passed through more villages and were bewildered at seeing black flags raised over buildings both far away and nearby, along with the skeletons of tanks and burned-out military cars, all remnants of a battle that testified to its ferocity. For many of the dead, these desolate plains had been the last thing they had seen. Bolbol wasn’t in a serene-enough mood to think about them. They arrived at the next-to-last checkpoint, where huge cement blocks distributed over the road were forcing the cars down to a crawl. Armed men appeared nearby and in the distance, aiming their rifles, all clothed and masked in black. Their headcloths indicated they belonged to an extremist group occupying much of the countryside to the north and east of Aleppo that was renowned for its terrifying ruthlessness.
The siblings waited their turn in silence. They no longer had anything to say; silence was the token of their desperation and fear. Hussein asked Fatima to cover up completely, and she wrapped her headscarf around her face. A masked man carrying a heavy gun opened the door of the minibus and immediately stepped backward, alarmed at the stink. He asked them to pull over and get out. He spoke with one of his comrades, and then three more armed men approached. Their accents revealed they weren’t Syrian. One of them, a Tunisian, tried to speak in formal Arabic. The siblings explained again that they were on their way to Anabiya to bury their father’s body, and they proffered their documents and identity cards. The Tunisian asked where in Damascus they lived, and they told him proudly that they lived in S, thinking the name would facilitate an easy passage through the checkpoint. He spoke with someone over the radio. He told Fatima to stay in the van and Hussein and Bolbol to follow him to a nearby building, where he asked them to wait.