Mamdouh tried to adapt to married life, but it turned out that his patience for his wife’s grandiose delusions—about her beauty, her family’s influence, her general estimation of herself—was limited. It was all exaggeration: she was just an ordinary, unremarkable girl. She persisted in believing that her looks and natural elegance were renowned, that everything she did could be described only as perfection, while in reality she fell far short of her ideal. From the very first month, Mamdouh knew the marriage was a mistake; he discovered that Fatima’s misapprehensions—which he had assumed were just words, and words that would soon be forgotten at that—were for Fatima indisputable facts in which she had absolute faith. And despite her genuine attraction to Mamdouh, particularly in the early days of their marriage, when she was still working all her long-endured sexual frustration out of her system—frustration left over from those lonely years when other men had found her beauty too imposing to ever approach her—she was soon terribly bored. She put up with it and tried to give everyone the impression that they were happy together nonetheless. Her self-confidence and pride made her believe she was capable of remolding her husband. His supposed weakness and the supposed power (largely imaginary) she held over Mamdouh served to satisfy her ego, but she no longer felt so certain of controlling him as she had before their marriage. All her attempts to impose a different regimen on his life were unsuccessful. Their relationship began to lose all savor, and it didn’t last the year. To Mamdouh, Fatima was just a short, failed experiment in matrimony. His ardor was slaked, and he could no longer stand to live with this remote and fatuous woman, whose family had allowed her to treat her fantasies as fact. Reflecting on his dilemma, he decided to escape before Fatima became a mother and his own folly also became a fact from which he could never be free. He told her he was going abroad to make his fortune and gave her the option of a divorce or waiting until he returned from Greece, adding that it was possible he might never come back.
After the divorce, her father said bitterly, “She married for the sake of some takeout from Broasted Express and the chance of sitting with some big shots in their fancy ballrooms.” These big shots regarded Fatima as the wife of a servant, nothing more, but their good-natured acceptance of her presence among them led her to believe she could count herself as their friend, with the right to participate in all their private affairs. She would ask the wife of a Japanese company’s local agent about the best slimming club in Damascus and wait gravely for a reply, or she would confess to the wife of a French oil company agent that she didn’t want to have a child for a few more years so that she could keep her stomach from sagging for as long as possible. The following day, back in the school where she was now a teacher, she would yawn in the staff room and grumble nonchalantly about her husband’s never-ending late nights with his friends and business associates. The aura of prestige always contains a little foolishness, and Fatima greatly enjoyed playing the fool, however unwittingly, especially when she saw the prospect of credulity in her colleagues’ eyes.
After Mamdouh’s departure, Fatima returned to her old room in the family home, reeling with dented pride, in utter disbelief that everything was over and that her total value had been reduced to six suitcases crammed with worn-out clothes and shoes, a collection of fake perfume bottles, and the balance of her dowry of two hundred thousand liras, which Mamdouh had paid after both parties signed the divorce contract.
That day, Bolbol had sat next to his father in his capacity as the elder brother, by no means enjoying this distinction. His father’s concealed rage kept him silent for a long time; this insult to the dignity he had maintained all his life had cut him deeply, and Bolbol sympathized with this respectable man who had been forced, because of his idiotic daughter, to shake hands with a student he considered worthless. Their father settled the matter swiftly, opened the door, and asked Mamdouh to leave. That night was the first time Bolbol truly realized that his father would die one day. Abdel Latif had gone into his room, closed the door, and wouldn’t speak to anyone for days. Afterward, as he did whenever he felt weak, he went to Anabiya, where he was content to walk through the meadows and respond to invitations from childhood friends to play cards and reminisce a little. After he returned from these visits, his confidence and sense of self were restored.
When it was their turn at the checkpoint, the agent on duty told Hussein that the Mukhabarat would have to check their identity cards while he examined the corpse. Bolbol sincerely wished that his father had indeed died on that day long ago, when it would have been so easy to carry out his request that he be buried with his sister. Kindhearted neighbors would have come by to condole with them as they had done when his mother died. On that occasion, a delegation of four men had accompanied the family to the graveyard, which was four hundred kilometers from the village, and one of them even hosted an additional ʿaza for the departed on their return. The neighbors prepared a generous feast for the mourners, grateful that Ustadh Abdel Latif al-Salim had allowed them to share his grief.
Bolbol saw Hussein coming back, escorted by an agent waving his gun and gesturing to the rest of the family to get out of the van. Hussein stood next to Bolbol and whispered, “They’re going to arrest the body.” Bolbol assumed there must have been some mistake, but no, when the agent led them to a tiled, windowless room, opened the door, and pushed them roughly inside, he understood that things were serious. It was true: they had placed the corpse under arrest. Their father had been wanted by more than one branch of the Mukhabarat for more than two years now.
The cell was crowded with more than twenty people of different ages. One of them, a woman of about seventy, told Fatima without being asked that she was being held hostage in her son’s stead, who had deserted from the army last year. Another, a young man of around twenty, missing a hand, told them that the Mukhabarat suspected him of having lost his hand fighting as an insurgent, and not in a car accident years before. He added that he and the two friends he was sitting with there in the improvised holding cell had been on their way to catch a boat from Turkey to Greece, intending to travel from there to Sweden. He’d never believed their journey would be as simple as that, particularly as their lives were bound to their identity cards, which showed their place of residence as Baba Amr, in the city of Homs. Like all young men from Baba Amr, one of the first places where revolution broke out and which was punished by merciless bombardment as a result, they had gotten accustomed to being stopped at every checkpoint. Meanwhile, other prisoners were snoring loudly or staring silently into the shadowy corners of the cell, their expressions making plain their sense of degradation. They had been here for some time, and bruises from beatings could be seen on their faces. One of them was wearing pants stained with clotted blood; his head was wrapped in his shirt. Bolbol tried to will himself to look at these people; no one knew what would happen to them once they were transferred to whichever branch of the Mukhabarat wanted them. He looked at Fatima, still listening to that old woman who wouldn’t stop chattering about her son, saying that it didn’t matter anymore if she died, and she was glad he’d deserted. Bolbol told himself that no doubt Fatima would now tell the old woman about her sister-in-law’s rape and her fiancé’s desertion; this last detail had stimulated Fatima’s appetite for gossip.