Hussein regained his equanimity. He tried unsuccessfully to forget about Bolbol. He kept thinking of how close they had been back in childhood, though there had also been all their petty fights as a result of Hussein constantly teasing his brother for his puny size, sage opinions, and perpetual good manners. It was in their childhood that they found safety and comfort—more so than in their present and future, anyway; it was the only thing they had, they thought, that others might envy them. But the truth was, that too had been an illusion; theirs had been no different from any other lower-middle-class childhood, with a mother darning their socks and letting out their clothes as they grew, and a father whose delusions dictated his life and made him overlook all sorts of telling details. He was sure that his children would become noted in society, but the time when that might still have been possible was definitively over. The only one left of Abdel Latif’s generation was his brother Nayif, who had refused to leave his village. He cared for the graves of his siblings and friends, buried them quietly, and held one ʿaza after another in the living room that hadn’t changed since his youth.
The road was easy despite the winter storms and the rain that never stopped falling all night. Hussein relaxed. In the end, the body would be safely delivered to its rightful place after all. At midnight, when they reached Anabiya, the lights were on in Nayif’s house. They heard the murmurings of the men who were waiting inside for the body and the sound of cups of tea being passed around. Qasim was strict and prevented anyone from seeing the body. He decided that the burial would take place at the morning prayer; they were used to burying the dead at dawn, as air raids rarely started before seven in the morning. Another young man went with him to the graveyard to dig the grave. Qasim paid no attention to his father Nayif’s instructions, nor to his late uncle’s wishes. Abdel Latif had chosen to be buried in his sister Layla’s grave, or so Hussein had told them, whereas Nayif ordered his son to bury Abdel Latif next to their mother’s grave, in accordance with their mother’s wishes. She had died forty years before and had mentioned she wanted her children’s graves to be near her own. But the armed young man considered such wishes an outrageous luxury. The grave Qasim dug for his uncle was distant from his other family members and easily lost among the profusion of graves. Layla stayed alone, aloof, and repudiated, surrounded by empty space on all sides. Every now and then, unknown young people would plant a rosebush on her grave, but it would soon wither and die. Her tale lived on despite the family’s efforts to erase it. Stories here might change over time, might be told in new ways, but they never died. Hussein seemed content and basked in the praise for being so brave in carrying out his father’s last wish. Nayif spoke briefly to Hussein and suggested he and Fatima sleep for a few hours; tomorrow would be a hard day. Most of the village’s inhabitants had left, but they still had to hold an ʿaza and wait for relatives and friends. Before Hussein fell asleep, he heard shots being fired in the air and movement in the next room where they were washing his father’s body before shrouding it. He clearly heard his cousins say the maggots should be killed in boiling water. More bodies arrived, fighters from the village who had been killed on distant battlefronts. Hussein heard voices discussing the names of the new casualties, but he didn’t care. He curled up like a hedgehog and tried to sleep. His body was exhausted and his soul perturbed, and a terrible estrangement from everything and everyone around him had taken root. He wished he could go right home in the morning. He didn’t want to see Bolbol or Fatima ever again; he didn’t want to know anything about his father’s grave or to visit it and care for it. He slept and no longer heard the loud voices. The volleys of gunfire were repeated, announcing the arrival of more bodies; or maybe they were the same bodies and their comrades were chasing away their fears by putting new holes in the sky, Hussein reflected, without caring either way. He had a strange dream he wouldn’t forget for a long while: Bolbol was floating, swimming in the sky and smiling, free as a bird. He was like an angel as he swam in space, scattering roses over the hordes of pedestrians in the Salhiya quarter of Damascus.
But at that very moment, Bolbol was convinced that his death was imminent. He had no hope of leaving this cell, which contained more than twenty prisoners who had committed terrible crimes indeed: One of them had been caught drinking in an olive grove—his breath had given him away at the checkpoint. Another had cursed God in the souk. The rest, like Bolbol, hadn’t observed their religious duties, though they seemed less afraid than the other condemned and acted largely indifferent. Most of them had been here for some time, waiting for an end to the negotiations that might secure their freedom. Strangers lost on the road, sons from families who had tried to flee across the Turkish border, others accused of being agents of the regime: they all lined up every morning in the religious classes given by a sheikh who cursed them and called them “deviants from the true path.” From his first moment in the cell, Bolbol’s senses felt as though they had frozen solid. He couldn’t sleep in such bitter cold.
In the early morning, the door was opened, and a huge prison guard ordered the prisoners to get up; it was time for ablutions and the dawn prayer. Everyone performed their ablutions, including Bolbol, who thought the icy water might end him entirely, but he endured the pain in silence and didn’t exchange a word with anyone. He was deeply upset, paid no attention to what was happening around him, having surrendered to his fate. He reflected that he wouldn’t feel too sad about it if he were killed.
It had been the winter of 2012 when, for the first time, he began to question the worth of what was happening throughout the country. The images of the young murdered protesters were engraved on his memory, and other pictures of crowds of mourners with bullets raining down on their heads. With equivalent hysteria, regime supporters called for even more brutality. On their websites, he read articles written by boys and young men who appeared to come from educated families, judging from their Facebook pictures. They castigated the regime for not having burned Deraa to the ground, adding sardonic recommendations about turning the city into potato fields. The majority of regime supporters approved the idea of burning the country from north to south, applauding the slaughter as if they had tremendous confidence in victory. This hope had been diminished four years later, but they still called for various cities to be pulled down on the heads of their inhabitants. On the opposite side, there were other groups undertaking the same actions, calling for regime supporters to be burned in their beds and cheering their murder. Bolbol would muse on this in silence and wonder what could be achieved by either side through a victory oozing with blood.
Bolbol reflected that when the walls of fear around you crumble, there’s only a strange emptiness inside. Nothing can fill it but a new type of fear, perhaps. You don’t know what to call it, but it’s still fear, no different in flavor, really, than the old type. It makes you feel you’re the only one afraid in a tide of humanity that regards dying as the ultimate solution to the enigma of living. And it was true, mass murder or suicide could be a kind of solution, Bolbol supposed. He often imagined whole communities committing suicide in protest against a life so soiled. He himself couldn’t bear living among a human flood goaded to such massacres, who evoked old feuds from the depths of history to justify their own slaughtering. He was convinced this was his own personal problem, not the problem of humanity as a whole: each human losing themselves, then finding themselves again by banding together with the other humans who seemed to most resemble themselves, or else transforming themselves in order to resemble those groups… all drowning in emptiness.