Death Is Hard Work Read online

  Fatima would sometimes recall the day they met. On that day, Fatima had been waiting for the bus that would take her to a teacher-training institute in Mezzeh. It was pouring rain, and the bus stop was crowded, and she accepted Mamdouh’s invitation to give her a lift in all innocence. She thought he was a friend of her brother’s and got into his car without more than an instant of hesitation. She was astonished when he told her that he was always seeing her at the bus stop and that he liked her. He added that he was a student of her father’s at the high school. She accepted it, all of it, as quite normal: he liked her, and it wouldn’t stop there. She secretly believed that most young men felt the same way about her and that this one just happened to be the only man with the courage to say so. Like all her classmates, she had composed many an imaginary tale about being pursued by lovers, and his presence in her life satisfied this vanity in front of her classmates. She intended them all to see it when her suitor drove her to the institute every morning, and she took her sweet time getting out of the car, speaking to him as if issuing orders while he nodded deferentially. Even though she had liked him from the first instant, she wouldn’t surrender so easily; she dealt with him quite loftily and was coy about her feelings. Deep down, she held herself in high regard, and Mamdouh patiently professed himself delighted to obey her every whim. He was as much attracted to her illusions about him as to her, since she supposed him to be an exceptional person; she spoke about their future in an outlandish manner, full of unrealistic enthusiasm and optimism, and Mamdouh was delighted with it all. She liked his stylishness and his little gifts, which were limited to bottles of perfume, Italian shoes, and jeans, all ersatz but made to look like they came from grand shops in Damascus. She was absolutely entranced by his seductive words about love and the happy family they would be devoted to building.

  It was a quiet sort of love story. Fatima convinced herself that even if Mamdouh wasn’t rich now, a man with his connections, with such fine manners and so much wisdom about life, would doubtless get rich by and by, and so she married him despite her father’s objections. Her father said it was impossible that such a proud girl should marry a man indistinguishable from any other, a man he described as “mercury,” and moreover one who had no demonstrable moral values or virtues to prevent him from becoming a pimp. Fatima defended Mamdouh calmly, and her father eventually surrendered, although he foresaw her future misery, and the thought of it hurt him deeply.

  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.

  Th
e 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.

  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 conv
ersations, 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.