Death Is Hard Work Page 4

  Bolbol got up when he saw Hussein had at last run out of steam. He wanted to make the peril of their enforced idleness clear, to explain the labyrinth he had foreseen them all entering, had foreseen overwhelming them, but he changed his mind when he saw that his brother, even half asleep, was still blathering about tires. Bolbol went up to the cell door instead and caught the eye of the agent he’d spoken with earlier, miming that he wanted another word. The agent opened the cell door, and Bolbol reminded him of their agreement; the agent promised that everything would be all right if they raised the sum from twenty to thirty thousand. Bolbol said this was fine, but explained that they weren’t from a well-off family and that this sum was all they had in the world. The agent returned Bolbol to the cell and asked him to stay close to the door.

  Bolbol sat next to Hussein and explained everything to him. Hussein was taken aback; he’d secretly been hoping that the body’s being impounded by the police might actually prove the best possible outcome—saving the family from who knew what dangers might still await them on their trip. Bolbol steeled himself to deliver the news that they could of course still be detained as hostages … Hussein scratched his head and found himself let down by his memory once again; no anecdote or saying seemed entirely germane to their situation. He pushed the question to one side and said that if the Mukhabarat had taken the corpse into custody, they would have to dispose of it themselves. They could burn it or sell the organs or throw it into a mass grave—what would the dead person care, after all? Bolbol was astonished. He felt his brother’s burgeoning fear deeply, not to mention Hussein’s ever-present wish to take revenge on their father one way or another. In Bolbol’s opinion, though, contrary to Hussein’s, losing the body to the security forces would plunge the family into a mire from which they’d never be able to extricate themselves—a trap in which details would get so tangled they would never figure out what had happened to them. Hussein agreed to leave Bolbol to sort everything out, and although Bolbol felt entirely impotent, he was less afraid at this moment than at any other time in his life.

  An hour later, the same agent opened the door and pushed a new prisoner inside. Bolbol reminded him of their situation and their agreement, and the agent asked him to come outside. The money changed hands discreetly, after which the agent returned to the cell and pointed at Hussein and Fatima and told them to stand up and leave at once. He reminded them that they still needed to send the death certificate to the civil-records office and make sure their father was struck off the list of wanted criminals.

  A few minutes later, they were waiting outside the officer’s room. The agent who had pocketed their money opened the door for them and disappeared, leaving them to his superior, who proceeded to address them at length on the latest news of their case. He informed the family that his commanding officer had asked him to confirm the death of the criminal personally, and thereby close the file and allow his family to bury him. All three siblings stood in front of him politely and attentively as he spoke; they praised the kind heart of the commander, who had looked on their situation with a sympathetic eye and refrained from requiring that the body be sent to a medical committee to verify what was obviously true. After refusing to provide them with an official document verifying that the warrant for their father had been canceled, which would have prevented other checkpoints from holding and questioning them yet again, the officer concluded his short speech and said that their way would be clear after this checkpoint; their problems would lie with the checkpoints set up by the terrorists nearer to Aleppo. The officer said the word “terrorists” most emphatically, then indicated with a brief wave of his hand that they should leave before he changed his mind, or anyway before a telegram arrived demanding that the corpse be taken back into custody. In such a case, there would be no alternative but to obey orders. One gesture from the commander, he repeated, and their lives would once again be turned into a living hell.

  It wasn’t the first time they had been made to stand attentively in front of such exhortations, but it was certainly the first time they’d been so close to sliding into the labyrinth. Bolbol had by no means been confident of the outcome of all his negotiations, so he was overjoyed when the minibus was allowed to leave the checkpoint, and the whole complex soon lay some distance behind them. He felt he’d been very close to the ultimate moment—the moment he had avoided for four years. He had felt this same giddiness before, whenever he escaped arrest for a crime he hadn’t committed. On those occasions, his identity card with its incriminating birthplace had been the principal problem; now, the body of his father, the wanted man, had almost drowned them all.

  Evening brought back all their fear and confusion, however. Hussein was offended now that Bolbol had struck the deal alone. He considered it irresponsible for an amateur like him to have handled a case as grave as theirs—it ought to have called for his own expert negotiation and people-reading skills. He managed not to complain about it and made do with stating that they had to think of where they would spend the night, adding a casual comment that thirty thousand liras was pretty steep just to ensure safe conduct for a shipment of smuggled goods. Bolbol was afraid that Hussein would conclude by saying that their father wasn’t worth this sum when he was alive, so how could he be worth it dead? Really the price should have dropped by at least three quarters, as with selling used shoes.

  Hussein didn’t say it—but neither could he keep quiet. In fact, he soon suggested that they toss the body out on the roadside, asking his brother and sister how confident they were that they would pass other checkpoints without trouble. They would be right back where they started if the next checkpoint agents discovered that their father was a wanted man. He added that the dogs were eating plenty of bodies nowadays, so what difference did it make? Why didn’t they just leave it or bury it anywhere and go back to Damascus?

  Bolbol could tell that Hussein wasn’t joking this time; he wanted an answer, wanted his brother and sister to make a decision. Bolbol wanted to ignore him, but suddenly a great strength welled up inside him, and he declared he wouldn’t abandon his father’s body before his last wish was carried out. Fatima agreed and asked Hussein to speed up, even though it would be impossible for them to arrive at Anabiya that night in any case. The highway came to an end a few kilometers before Homs, and they would have to use the side roads, which were dangerous at night; no rational being would even consider traveling them in the company of a dead man.

  Whenever Bolbol saw trucks crossing checkpoints with ease, he wished his father’s body would turn into a sack of cumin; it was hard to see any downside to such a transformation—in fact, reaching a state of mutual understanding with a sack of cumin would be easier and far less dangerous. He deeply regretted promising his father to do as he’d asked. Forget about changing Abdel Latif into a sack of cumin—Bolbol would have been content to see himself transformed into a man with a little less sympathy.

  The night before, he had sat on the bed next to his father while Abdel Latif told him in a feeble voice that his death was very near. Bolbol tried to divert his father’s attention from these forebodings and thought briefly that his father was just having a nightmare, thanks to the death all around and the bombings that hadn’t been silent for three years—that Abdel Latif was entering one of his states of delirium, which had become more and more frequent in the past month. Of course, you didn’t have to be sick to have the same problems. Everyone suffered from insomnia and interrupted sleep these days, from panic attacks and nervous breakdowns; everyone spent entire nights discussing sleep aids, such as chamomile flowers brewed with rosemary, milk mixed with crushed garlic, or Faustan-brand sleeping pills; Bolbol, too, liked to talk over the recipes he’d tried, or to discuss with his colleagues how best to cover their windows with plastic wrap so that the glass wouldn’t become shrapnel when it shattered. Recipes and helpful hints were also frequent topics of discussion for the people stuck at checkpoints for hours in the scorching afternoons and under the pouring rain. Taking naps was good; it helped the dreary evenings pass a little more quickly. Small things like that could cheer people up … or, alternatively, could destroy their lives and drive them out into the unknown, as in the case of this corpse, which had begun to turn rotten. When they left the hospital, they hadn’t wondered what would happen to them. All three were too busy calculating how long it had been since they had last spoken to one another. Their throats were clogged with words that would rust and waste away if they weren’t finally let out. Fatima at least wanted to regain some tenderness in her relationships with her brothers, but Bolbol had no desire to concede a thing to his siblings. Certainly there had been times when he wanted to return to that old familial harmony, but usually he felt that there was simply too much distance between them now. Getting away from them was the only positive thing he’d accomplished in the last ten years, he thought sometimes. And if they were honest, his sister and brother felt the same way, painful though it would be for anyone to admit—all believed that they had already done more than their duty for the family. Now it was time to consider their own lives.

  Yes, the previous night, their father had felt keenly that he was dying. He had done everything he wanted to do in this life and had said everything he needed to say during his stay with Bolbol. But despite the illness, Bolbol hadn’t believed his father would really die. It wasn’t credible that anyone could still die of natural causes in this day and age. Even his neighbor Um Elias had been murdered, though she was in her eighties. A young relative and his friends conspired to break into her house and force open her strongbox, which everyone said contained millions of liras and several kilograms of gold. She put up a fight and recognized them, so they killed her. The police were even forced to follow it up and do a little actual police work
so the killing wouldn’t be recorded as a sectarian crime. That would have sent the Christian inhabitants of the quarter into a panic.

  Not that the neighbors were too upset about old Um Elias, who had made a living selling miserly amounts of watered-down alcohol to them, but nevertheless they came as a body and spat at the young man in question, barely twenty years old, as he was forced into a police car. The police took him to the apartment in Rukneddine where he’d hidden the stolen goods in a well next to the graveyard. His two accomplices lived in the same building, and they didn’t try to flee but surrendered and confessed in full. The following morning the three criminals were quietly brought before an examining magistrate. He was frustrated, as the crime of murder no longer called for such caution and care, and the criminals’ easy confession increased his irritation. They would all find a way to avoid prison anyhow, the easiest route being to accept a position among the murderers of the regime militias, though there was always the chance that the resistance might storm the prison, knock down the walls, and destroy their files regardless.

  In recent months, when people died, no one bothered asking after the hows and the whys. They already knew the answers all too well: bombings, torture during detention, kidnappings, a sniper’s bullet, a battle. As for dying of grief, for example, or being let down by your body, deaths like that were rare—and no one lamented a death that didn’t have any outrage attached to it.

  Before Bolbol and his siblings left Damascus, he had called his office and requested a leave of absence. He received the indifferent condolences of his colleagues over the phone and asked that no one take the trouble of condoling with him in person, or indeed trouble themselves with helping him arrange the burial. He was still feeling the same deeply rooted fury as when the young doctor on duty told him his father’s heart had stopped. If his father had died three months earlier, when he was still in the village of S, then everything would have been easy. The cemeteries there were large and plentiful, and any one of the people still living in the town could have buried him with all the consideration due to the great and illustrious ustadh, their comrade in revolution from its first day to his last. They would have considered him a martyr. Bolbol’s only responsibility would have been to hear about it—and then pass along word to Hussein and Fatima and spread the news by calling their few relatives still in Anabiya, some of whom would certainly have supported Bolbol to carry out his duty of looking mournful and organizing a small ʿaza for a few close friends. But that body lying on its hospital bed, and the glances of the on-call doctor—they only made Bolbol feel trapped. Death had become hard work. Just as hard as living, in Bolbol’s view.

  The doctor had instructed the orderlies to cover Abdel Latif’s face and carry him to the morgue, and then asked Bolbol to sign for the body and get it off the premises before the following afternoon. If not, they would be forced to deal with it themselves. Priority in the overcrowded hospital morgue was given to the bodies of soldiers.

  When he used to think about it, Bolbol hadn’t reckoned on his father’s death being such a disaster for him. He had half hoped that if Abdel Latif needed to die nearby, it would be somewhere closed off by a siege or while Bolbol was traveling far away. In such a case, he would have been absolved from the duty of arranging everything, and responsibility for his father’s last wish would have had to be shouldered by Hussein, who wouldn’t have hesitated to ignore it.

  One night, three days before Abdel Latif died, Bolbol took his father to the hospital after his pains grew worse. It was lucky they stumbled across a taxi by the all-night fuul restaurant. Finding a driver willing to cross the city from east to west, not to mention finding a vacant bed in the public hospital, was such a stroke of luck that God should have received their utmost thanks—and Bolbol really did do his best to feel grateful. He gave the taxi driver the fare he had requested plus a tip for helping his father onto a stretcher; he insisted on staying with Bolbol until he was assured that Abdel Latif wouldn’t get abandoned by the hospital staff in some corridor. Then again, the driver, too, probably preferred to be in the hospital than on the dangerous streets at night. Bolbol didn’t ask him why he didn’t go home; he was afraid of the answer. On an earlier occasion, trying to make small talk in a taxi, he had been unwise enough to ask the driver when his shift was over and he could go home, but the driver had sneered and described his house in Zamalka in detail, including the fact that it had been bombed and his wife lay dead beneath the rubble. In the end he had asked Bolbol, “So what home do you mean, sir?”

  For months, Bolbol had avoided talking to anyone he didn’t know or even leaving the house. Going outside was hard work. He was content to travel back and forth from work and read state newspapers ostentatiously on the bus. On his days off, he watched black-and-white Egyptian films on cable and grieved for this golden bygone era. He didn’t know why he put himself through this, but at least this was a pastime that no one could possibly find suspicious; everyone was mourning for the beautiful days that they’d lost. Longer holidays such as Eid he spent making different types of pickles. He liked the new strategies he’d developed in order to keep himself sane, even though they were all strictly short-term arrangements. He didn’t dare acknowledge that his life was a collection of trivial acts that would sooner or later have to come to an end.

  One day, his isolation was punctured. One of his father’s neighbors’ sons—an engineering student turned combatant in the Free Syrian Army—called Bolbol and informed him that his father’s health made it very difficult for him to remain in the besieged village. Bolbol couldn’t bring himself to say anything in reply—not out of shock from hearing about his father’s deterioration, but from fear of being arrested for speaking to a person who lived in S. The caller didn’t have a lot of time and said that they had been fortunate enough to manage to smuggle the ustadh out to the abandoned gas station at the edge of the village. He asked Bolbol to arrive at six o’clock that evening to take him away.

  The call had come at three in the afternoon. Bolbol couldn’t chance saying a word to this person calling from an unknown number. What if the line was tapped? He was absolutely certain that the regime monitored every word coming out of the village. He had to think of a way out of this terrible mistake. Suddenly one of his rare bursts of self-assurance led him to decide to resolve the matter. He thought he would call Hussein. His brother should help in a situation like this. He dialed Hussein’s number and was overcome with frustration when he heard that phone service had been temporarily interrupted. There was still time, though. Hussein would probably get back to him when he saw the missed call. Bolbol sat in a neighborhood restaurant in Saruja and asked for beans and rice. He contemplated what he was about to do to himself: his father was going to come and live with him in his small house. Well, maybe his father wouldn’t be able to endure being in a district loyal to the regime.

  Bolbol had worked hard to gain the trust of his neighborhood. The details on his identity card marked him out for suspicion; for four years now, similar details had spelled catastrophe for many others. Thousands of people disappeared without a trace, simply for being born in areas controlled by the opposition, just as many regime supporters had disappeared in those same areas. Kidnappings, ransoms, and random arrests were widespread and tit-for-tat responses meant they only escalated in frequency. People’s movements were tightly controlled. Any error could be very costly.

  Bolbol minimized his time in public. To get to work he took the special bus for public employees, and to get home in the evening he took the same route back—like so many others whose identity cards and official documents happened to list the names of various now burned-out towns under “Birthplace.” He abandoned his few remaining old habits, such as visiting a coffeehouse every Friday, or loafing around Bab Tuma. He cut short any burgeoning friendships with his colleagues; all they ever did together was repeat the same conversations about rising prices anyway … and by the time they started furtively discussing indications that they had gleaned which pointed to recent regime losses, using code words familiar to opposition sympathizers, Bolbol had already taken to ignoring them. He didn’t want to venture so much as an ambiguous comment—he simply acted as if he hadn’t heard anything at all and then returned to the subject of his pickling projects, grumbling about the rising price of eggplant.