From his position in the corner, tucked away as much as possible, Bolbol could see the faces in the shadows of the room: dark, afraid, and sad. The detainees murmured to one another in voices like the droning of an old bee, monotonous and incessant. It was impossible to say what would happen to any of them. No one could enter a place like this and know what was in store for them. So many people had disappeared in the previous four years, it was no longer even shocking; there were tens of thousands whose fates were unknown. Hussein asked Fatima to say that she was divorced from Mamdouh but not to mention her remarriage, believing that her first husband’s name and regime connections might improve the siblings’ standing with their jailers. Fatima nodded without asking why this mattered. She knew how much he liked giving commands, and she generally liked to obey him. Taking up their old roles made them feel less afraid, and they would go through these motions as often during their journey as they had—without ever understanding why—during their childhood.
The floor of the cell was cold, and the loud, nonstop conversation of the Mukhabarat agents came in through the one small window. Bolbol remained aloof from the detainees, careful not to say a word, careful not to get himself in trouble. He asked no questions and allowed no one to question him and avoided so much as feeling sympathy when he heard stories that ought to have aroused immeasurable rage and sadness. He could almost have fallen asleep were it not for the clanging of the huge iron door as it opened every now and again. His memory summoned up the tales he had heard of the horrendous tortures endured by detainees in just such situations. The facts related by those fortunate enough to be released from cells like these were discussed and circulated everywhere, too terrifying to be believed. In his heart he knew that he would never be able to endure torn-out fingernails or electrocution or suffocating indefinitely in a congested cell or being forced to walk over rotting corpses. Probably he would just die after his first session. He closed his eyes, oddly reassured by this. He, at least, would leave behind a corpse with no last will or request; he didn’t even care if his body was reduced to ashes or left for the dogs to gnaw. When the time came, he would be capable of lying next to his father without fear. This thought gave him the courage he needed, without having to boast of any real or imaginary exploits.
The next agent to open the door asked for one of the relatives of the corpse in the minibus to please step forward. Hussein ignored him, still absorbed in a long conversation about car tires with the three young men who had been on their way to Sweden. His animated features communicated his deep satisfaction as a torrent of aphorisms flowed from his tongue with an eloquence wholly unsuited to this environment. Bolbol was forced to get up when the soldier beckoned him to follow.
He was brought to an officer who couldn’t have been more than thirty. All of the family’s documents were in his hands: their identity cards and the death certificate signed in accordance with the proper regulations. The officer asked Bolbol for details of every single family member and friend of his father. He said he would transfer them to the main facility for questioning and detain the body, likewise in accordance with the proper regulations. Though the officer’s cool tone left little hope, Bolbol pleaded with him to be allowed to continue with their journey, adding that he himself supported the current regime—he and his father had been estranged!—and going on to say that he had lived in the suburb of M, where a mix of religions was found, for more than twenty years. Bolbol heaped curses on his father for the benefit of the officer, who once again turned over the papers in his hands and looked at them contemptuously. The short silence that followed these pleas allowed Bolbol to hope that the officer wasn’t serious about handing the family over to the Mukhabarat… but he didn’t know how he could plead for mercy for his father’s body.
The officer explained that according to their records, Bolbol’s father was still alive and still wanted. It didn’t matter if he had in the meantime turned into a cadaver. Then he added that his commanding officer would settle the matter in the end and asked Bolbol to go through to the other room to fill in and sign this and that form. Bolbol was dripping with sweat. They really were going to take the body. Yet another agent went into the holding cell and took the minibus keys from Hussein. He drove it to a nearby garage and locked it, notifying the guard that it wasn’t to be taken off the premises without the express permission of the officer in charge.
This same agent came back and led Bolbol into the next room and said that it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Another corpse had been arrested the previous month and sent under armed escort to Tishreen Military Hospital, where a committee had had to look into the matter and sign off on the body’s status. The corpse wasn’t surrendered to its family until all the appropriate procedures had been followed, which the agent then took it upon himself to explain at length. First, they entailed going to the civil-records office and updating the deceased’s status, then going to the central registry and issuing a cable that would suspend the outstanding warrant. The body would be kept in custody until being transferred to the military hospital for examination, where the death of the wanted man would be confirmed and the legal procedures to permanently cancel the search warrant completed. The agent couldn’t seem to make up his mind from one sentence to the next as to whether the state regarded a person as being merely a collection of documents or rather an entity of flesh, blood, and soul. Bolbol nodded desperately and asked the agent to go into more detail, but eventually he stopped talking and ordered his prisoner to go ahead and fill out the form.
Bolbol felt the pressure of the silent agent’s observation as he wrote in the required details about his family members and the members of their extended families and then surrendered the form. Gathering his courage, he offered a bribe to the agent who had explained the procedures to him, referring to it demurely as a “goods-transit document.” The agent gave him a sardonic glance, but they agreed on twenty thousand liras—if the body was released. The agent took Bolbol back to the holding cell and wished him luck, saying that he hoped the commanding officer would settle the matter swiftly, and adding that they would keep the family at the checkpoint till the arrival of the cable that would determine their fate.
Time passed slowly; the prisoners were all ensnared in their various conversations, which Bolbol resolved to ignore. He was thinking of the labyrinth they would be lost in if the Mukhabarat really decided to transfer the body to the military hospital. His fear increased every time he thought of the possibility that a person might be nothing more than a collection of papers. He heard the old woman describing the destruction of Homs to Fatima, adding that she had been arrested three times since the revolution—she pronounced the word openly and without fear—but that this was the first time she’d ever been held as a hostage. Bolbol wasn’t surprised at the old woman’s mettle; she reminded him of his father and his father’s friends, in whose hearts fear had seemingly died forever. But he was surprised at Fatima’s zeal in narrating the tale of her sister-in-law, which she naturally launched into as soon as she was given an opportunity. She asked the old woman if it was true that the secret police raped women being detained, and the woman laughed and murmured, “Men too,” adding that a thousand years would pass before this outrage would be forgotten.
Whenever the door opened, an agent would throw a new prisoner inside. The cell was getting more and more intolerably crowded, but everyone knew that they wouldn’t be there long; they couldn’t be kept there all night, otherwise their jailers would already have separated the men from the women. Bolbol wondered whether there might not be a real prison in the nearby complex, something older and more permanent than this temporary setup, but he halted that train of thought immediately, telling himself that holding cells were one commodity still more than plentiful in his country. The door opened again: a mother and her two children came in. She wasn’t kept waiting long. She sat by the old woman and Fatima and told them that she didn’t know what she was being accused of; she had been on her way to Beirut, where her husband worked in construction, and they had ordered her to get off the bus she had boarded at Deir Azzour. A few minutes later, the woman said that she had six brothers in the Free Army, and now they had been forced to fight alongside a battalion of Islamic extremists in al-Mayadin, since their own funding had been cut off and their supplies had run out. She added that many Free Army troops had defected to the Islamist side because they supposedly had more money. The woman said all this in a loud voice; Bolbol kept a safe distance as he observed her.