Death Is Hard Work Read online

  Hussein was still annoyed at himself. The thousands of sayings and aphorisms he’d spent twenty years memorizing had proved useless in the face of a bad traffic jam—but he refused to let his defective memory get the better of him. He repeated a few sayings on different topics, just to keep in practice: aphorisms on unfaithfulness and hope and the betrayal of friends. He considered this a useful exercise; these sayings might be required sometime soon, and they needed to be primed and ready. He called a few lines of Ahmad Shawqi to mind and recited them vehemently, enunciating majestically: “Crimson freedom has a door / Knocked by every blood-stained hand…” The following line only came back to him with difficulty: “… he will ever dwell among the pits.” But no, he had mixed up Shawqi’s poem with one by Shaby, “If One Day the People Wish to Live, Fate Must Respond.” But this combination pleased him; if anything, it struck him as fortuitous that he’d accidentally blended two poems with very different meters and rhyme schemes. He had in fact read these lines dozens of times on the pages of his almanacs and liked them very much; he used them to shame cowards who preferred the regime to any unrest. He repeated both incomplete lines in a murmur as if in lament for his revolutionary father.

  Bolbol paid no attention; he was content with the three previous months he and his father had spent talking everything over. Fatima understood the recitation as a belated reconciliation between Hussein and their father. She wanted to thank God out loud for this miraculous resolution, but Bolbol’s heavy silence made her hesitate, and she decided to wait for a more suitable opportunity to voice her opinion on the long rift between father and son. True, their estrangement had gone through many different stages, and occasionally each man had even approached the other, trying to turn over a new leaf, but no matter what, their relationship never regained its original, cloudless perfection from the time when Hussein had been the spoiled favorite.

  The soldiers at the last checkpoint within the limits of Damascus made do with a cursory glance over their papers and allowed them to pass. Many corpses were leaving the city today, and just as many were coming in. The sight of them was abhorrent to the mud-spattered soldiers; the bodies heralded their own imminent end, which they naturally wanted to forget. Hussein didn’t look at his watch. He heaved a sigh of relief; he had been delivered from the traffic of Abbasiyin Square, and Damascus was falling away behind them. Now the goal would be to reach Anabiya before midnight. Fatima and Bolbol recovered their optimism and reviewed the necessities for their journey: bottles of mineral water, cigarettes, identity cards, and the little money they had left.

  He died at the right time, Bolbol told himself. The body wouldn’t rot as fast in this cold winter. They were fortunate he hadn’t died in August, when flies swarm over and tear at the dead. Death is a solitary experience, of course, but nevertheless it lays heavy obligations on the living. There’s a big difference between an old man who dies in his village, surrounded by family and close to the cemetery, and one who dies hundreds of kilometers away from them all. The living have a harder task ahead of them than the dead; no one wants to see their loved ones rot. They want them to look their best in death for that final memory that can never be erased. The last expression worn by a loved one necessarily comes to epitomize them. When the facial muscles of a suffering man slacken in the midst of his pain, his grief is what remains of him and he looks like nothing so much as a newborn child.

  At the checkpoint outside the gate to Damascus, just before the highway, the soldier nodded inside the van and inquired what lay beneath the blanket. Bolbol said calmly, “My father’s body.” The soldier asked the question a second time, with a new edge in his voice, pointing to the heavy pile of blankets, and Bolbol reaffirmed his answer. The soldier motioned to Hussein to proceed into the GOODS TO DECLARE lane, where public-transport vehicles were lined up, and a different soldier, who was about twenty years old, was circling each one with a bomb detector. The soldier then left the checkpoint and went inside a one-room shed, previously a workshop and now used as an office as well as barracks for the checkpoint soldiers. After a few minutes, an officer marched toward the minibus, wrenched open the door, and ordered them to uncover the body. Bolbol lifted the blanket from his father’s face. It was still fresh—his death still raw and tender. With studied callousness, the officer demanded the official documentation for the body, and Fatima presented him with the death certificate signed by the director of the public hospital and the morgue official, together with their identity cards. He scrutinized the cards and then surprised them all by asking for the dead man’s identity card as well. Bolbol almost started explaining to the man that all corpses share a single name—that they slip away from their histories and families in order to affirm their membership in one family alone, the family of the dead, and that no dead person can have any proof of identity beyond their death certificate—but Fatima slipped their father’s identity card from her bag and offered it to the officer, who peered at the face of the body and then at the twenty-year-old picture on the card. In those days he had often laughed, their father; now, in death, his face was that of a stern, tough man. The officer took the identity cards and went back to his office. The three living occupants of the minibus exchanged glances and decided to wait in the bus without moving.

  Hussein, in his place behind the wheel, was looking angrily at his watch and muttering inaudibly. One of the waiting truck drivers approached him and said plainly, “No goods can get through without the right documents.” Hussein quickly got out of the minibus and went up to the makeshift office. He paid a bribe known as a goods-transit document, and their identity cards were returned. Feeling strangely victorious, he sped them all away from the checkpoint. Bolbol was thinking over the fact that his father was now a commodity like hookah coals, crates of tomatoes, sacks of onions. His ongoing silence discomfited Hussein, who announced that he had paid a thousand liras, and that they had to reach Anabiya before midnight.

  For a moment Bolbol found himself wondering whether it might not be better to return to Damascus and arrange the burial in one of the graveyards there—although he knew this was absurd given how expensive graves were in Damascus. A good grave was so rare that people had begun advertising them in the classified ads, and they only had thirty-five thousand liras left among the three of them … Returning was out of the question; even if they had the money, how would they obtain official permission for a burial? Moreover, how could they convince the next shift of soldiers at the checkpoints they’d already passed that they had changed their minds? Or, indeed, that Abdel Latif had died in Damascus and not in a rebel town nearby?

  After all, as a general rule, corpses don’t much care about where they’re buried. Just thinking about it frustrated Bolbol no end. It was a little past noon, he was tired, and he was fed up. Fatima lifted the blanket from her father’s face, telling herself that a little fresh air, though cold, might do him good. She opened her window, even though the dead don’t breathe and aren’t likely to care whether the air is fresh or not. Bolbol told her to cover the body back up so the ice blocks packed tightly around it wouldn’t melt, and Fatima complied without demur. Bolbol was now hoping they could all just ride in silence until they reached Anabiya. Their relatives would take care of the burial itself, and afterward he could escape from his family for the last time. He would go back to his nest and skulk in his room like a rat until his dream of moving to a faraway country was realized. There, in that distant land, he would inter himself in snow, and he would never complain about anything ever again. Right now, though, he couldn’t keep from dwelling on the cramped and uncomfortable interior of the minibus, not to mention whatever surprises were bound to lie in store for them farther down the road, which he anticipated with dread. He couldn’t think of anyone having successfully managed to transport a body all the way to Anabiya in three whole years.

  Hussein felt uneasy at the silence, and since his memory didn’t furnish him with a suitable pearl of wisdom, he snapped at Fatima to stop opening
the window and then reminded his siblings spitefully that they wouldn’t arrive at Anabiya before midnight, perhaps not even before dawn. Then he glanced at them in the rearview mirror, and the three of them exchanged looks of fear. All of their calculations had gone up in smoke; they’d already been delayed longer than they could have anticipated; there were few cars on the road, and the distant, blank wilderness—everything they could see, in fact—only made them more afraid.

  At the beginning of the national highway, cars were turning onto a side road. Hussein asked a taxi driver if the highway was closed, and the man replied that there was a sniper up there, and he wasn’t allowing anyone to pass. “He got them three hours ago,” the driver added, pointing to four bodies lying on the road ahead: a man, a woman, a young man, and a girl. Bolbol considered the fact that they had chosen to die as they had lived: as a family. Hussein swerved the minibus onto the side road, following the other cars, and winding up in a series of narrow lanes. Somewhere nearby was being bombed, so close to them that they could see the bombs dropping out of the plane. Shrapnel was scattering around them. Hussein tried to block out everything but the road ahead. The last thing they needed was to find themselves pinned down in the middle of some burned-out olive grove.

  A large number of cars were ahead of them. Doubtless one of the other drivers knew a safe route and was leading the charge. Bolbol wondered if they would wind up trapped where they were, but when he saw that all the other cars were now returning to the highway, hope was renewed. Hussein was already praising his own ingenuity in saving them from disaster; Bolbol was interested only in getting back to brooding about their dead father and wished Hussein would shut up. Bolbol noticed that the body was listing over; he tried to rearrange it to make it more stable. He considered tying it up somehow but wasn’t prepared to have the debate this suggestion would open. Fatima reminded them of the sandwiches she’d brought for their long journey, and Hussein suggested that they pull over at the nearest rest stop when they began the approach to Homs. Bolbol hadn’t eaten anything since the previous night. In his view, it was indecent to worry about food so soon after a parent’s death.

  Fatima was silent and put the sandwiches back in the plastic bag. Bolbol avoided looking at the right-hand side of the road. He was used to the sound of low-flying planes, the sounds of artillery and rocket launchers; for three years now there hadn’t been a break in the noise. The bombardment of Qaboun and Jobar never stopped, and they could see traces of it on the buildings along the highway, but Bolbol wasn’t interested—he remained indifferent to it all. Hussein drew their attention to the Qatifa checkpoint in the distance and said he would get right into the truck lane to save time. Bolbol made no objection and gave him some of his money. On the one hand, of course, Bolbol told himself, this was all a humiliating and ignominious experience, but then, on the other, it was difficult not to consider his father rather fortunate, given the thousands of corpses left out for birds of prey and other hungry scavengers … He tried not to dwell upon the four sniper victims who’d been left back on the highway, where no one dared to approach them, but his mind betrayed him, and he couldn’t get the thought of them out of his head. All he wanted to do was lie down next to his father as he had done when he was a small boy, but the same fear that made him long for that comfort prevented him from sleeping so close to a dead man.

  The long procession of trucks was exasperating; it would be hours before their turn came. Bolbol expected Hussein to try and expedite matters, but like him, Hussein was getting scared. He didn’t dare to speak with the obviously irritable checkpoint guards. But Bolbol guessed that the agents manning the checkpoints were probably afraid, too; perhaps they would take pity on a dead man? He got out of the minibus and went over to the nearest officer and explained the situation with a concise and well-worded speech, but the officer didn’t hear him; too many other people were talking to him as well, and Bolbol’s voice was as weak and frightened as a wet baby bird in a moldy room. There was nothing for it: they were stuck in the line, with no way out. They were besieged by cars from all sides, and huge cement barriers prevented any vehicle from leaving its lane. On his way back to the minibus, Bolbol saw that Hussein was incensed at his behavior, as usual. He was telling Fatima that Bolbol was an idiot, a ditherer who had waited for them to reach the point of no return before lifting a finger to help, and then still failed to talk to the officer and convince him of their extraordinary circumstances. Fatima tried her best to alleviate the tension by telling both her brothers about her sister-in-law, who had been released from prison the previous week. The girl’s face had turned yellow, she had lost half her body weight, and her head had been shaved to the bone. At night she raved deliriously. Fatima was sure she had been raped while she was inside. Hussein was ready to provide some pithy response, but Fatima went on, saying that the girl had scabies, too, so her family had been forced to isolate her in an old chicken coop on the roof, after all of which her fiancé dropped her and demanded compensation from her family.

  The four bodies on the highway tarmac remained on Bolbol’s mind, and now the story of Fatima’s sister-in-law burrowed into him as well. It’s often the case, in similar circumstances, on long journeys, that people will trade small talk and cheerful anecdotes to soften life’s blows and distract from its cruelty: they’ll talk about their children’s achievements at school or the best season for making jam. But here in this minibus, such small talk as the siblings were able to muster did them absolutely no good; none of them could find any way to connect with the others. In ten years, the three of them hadn’t been gathered in the same place for more than an hour or two during Eid, certainly not long enough for each to learn where life had brought the others. At first, when they’d left the hospital, they hadn’t hidden their annoyance at being forced back together, but soon enough each sensed their common investment in avoiding any upsetting subjects. Here was a real opportunity to talk about whether they could possibly be a family again—but Hussein didn’t care, Bolbol actively opposed it, and Fatima was too busy trying to play the role of the noble sister reuniting her family after the death of a parent. It was a role she had heard a lot about: it was something like her natural inheritance. The older brother inherits the role of the father, and the sister by necessity inherits the mother’s role; but in this case it required a strength that Fatima, who’d grown old, didn’t possess. She had become a mother, yes, but not like her own. She had given up her dreams of wealth, making do with a lot of complaining and occasionally hiding away a little money from her and her husband’s salaries in a bank account no one knew about. She had become a miser on account of her humble income, collecting any castoffs from her childhood home and accepting charity from her in-laws. Her middling intelligence left her looking forever forlorn. All that remained to her now was the hope that either her son or her daughter would somehow compensate her for her lost dreams, so she might finally take revenge on the world for the loss of the pride she’d been famed for when she was a girl, convinced that she was striding purposefully toward a life of brilliance and happiness.

  Fatima was nearly forty now, and the traces of her lost pride were still visible on her face. Everyone who loses their pride becomes a miser of a sort; their self-importance increases, their eyes die out, and their resentments accumulate. They incline to gossip and tell stories about all the heroic things that didn’t happen in the life they never lived. Fatima, too, passed through all these stages and, in the end, surrendered. She focused on her son (who had entered a dentistry school) and her daughter. The latter was still only fourteen, but Fatima liked it when people said that they resembled each other, droning automatically, “What a pretty girl!” Fatima had prepared her children for a very different life and often repeated to them the story of her first marriage to a great businessman. In reality, he had been nothing more than a small-time fixer who liked running with the big shots. He facilitated their dealings with government agencies and carried out their dirty work, such as watchin
g their wives whenever business took them abroad or accompanying their underage daughters on shopping trips to Beirut.