At dawn on the fifth day, their cousins accompanied the three siblings to the outskirts of Aleppo. The checkpoints were all opened to them, and the journey was easy. They bid each other goodbye at the last checkpoint before his cousins turned around to go back. The siblings felt relieved and cheerful; they had carried out their father’s last wish, and they weren’t carrying a body with them. A long silence settled over the three of them. Fatima was content to sleep all the way back. No longer able to speak or nag, she, too, wanted to go back to her house. Hussein and Bolbol ignored each other.
When they reached Damascus in the evening, Bolbol got out of the minibus and raised his hand in a wordless farewell to Hussein. He had appreciated his silence. His neighborhood wasn’t far, and he walked back through the shadows along the Corniche Highway. It was nine o’clock when he opened his front door. The smell of his father wafted through every nook of the house. Bolbol sat there in darkness. He felt more alone than he had ever felt. He resolved not to let anyone call him anything other than his original name, Nabil, from now on. He felt as though his head had been gnawed by the dogs that had attacked them and that he, too, was now just a cadaver. He got up and put his head under the hot-water tap. He wanted his features to melt and disappear. His silence would last all night. He walked to his bedroom, slipped into bed, and felt like a large rat returning to its cold burrow: a superfluous being, easily discarded.
ALSO BY KHALED KHALIFA
No Knives in the Kitchens of This City
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. As well as being a screenwriter, he is the author of four novels, including In Praise of Hatred, which was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Leri Price is a translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. Her translations include In Praise of Hatred and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, by Khaled Khalifa, and Sarab, by Raja Alem. Her translation of No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was short-listed for the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2016 by Hachette-Antoine
Translation copyright © 2019 by Leri Price
All rights reserved
Originally published in Arabic in 2016 by Nawfal, an imprint of Hachette-Antoine, Lebanon, as Al mawt aamalon chaq (
)
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71764-3
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