Khaled Khalifa - Death Is Hard Work

Lamia didn’t take too many of the things Bolbol said seriously, but even so, she was an eager listener. He was a different man when he spoke to her; his eyes were bright, his face alive—though he was careful not to be overheard. She knew that he was polite to his brother-in-law, that he didn’t argue with his wife but gave in to all her demands. He didn’t really care if his wife loved the poetry of Riyadh al-Saleh al-Hussein or not.

Back when Zuhayr was still in prison, Lamia would visit Damascus and insist on spending a lot of time with Bolbol, listening to his complaints. It wasn’t that she was getting revenge on him by wallowing in his unhappiness; on the contrary, she sympathized deeply with her old friend. Hearing him, she thought of and enjoyed Bolbol’s image of her as an angel. As for herself, she didn’t complain: she was strong and didn’t want Zuhayr to compromise in exchange for his freedom. She summarized the difficulties caused for her by the Mukhabarat in a few sentences—how they were harassing her at work and in her social circle, which was not really so different from the world of Bolbol’s wife. Lamia didn’t tell Bolbol that she, too, repeated the same jokes told by all low-ranking public employees, that her house clothes stank of onions, and that she often helped her friends with their simple household errands; equally, she didn’t tell him it had been some time now since she last read the poetry of Riyadh al-Saleh al-Hussein, and she never took his diwan down from her bookshelf anymore.

But back when they had graduated and Lamia returned to her hometown and married Zuhayr, her visits grew more and more infrequent, and she lost all interest in those flower beds, just as Bolbol’s father lost interest in them after his wife’s death. One after another, the flowers withered and died, but Bolbol still tried to enjoy the scent of the rosebushes that Lamia had once tended.

Bolbol used to see his father looking miserably at the garden that had changed so utterly, staring with grief in his heart. For him, it had become a place that spoke only of loss, a leftover from a happier and vanished age. After his wife’s death, Abdel Latif changed considerably; he no longer cared much about little details, and the things in his life all lost their shine. He refused Fatima’s offer to clear the closet of her mother’s clothes and many belongings, and he became suspicious that she might do it in his absence. His misgivings increased dramatically whenever Fatima visited him; he would lock the door to her mother’s room and put the key in his pocket. He wouldn’t even allow anyone to clean it unless he was present, a clear sign that he wanted his memories left undisturbed, or so it seemed to everyone. He spent a lot of time reading history and sitting silently in front of the television. He wished he would die, but death wouldn’t grant his wish, no matter how much he pleaded. He spent five years in this way, longing for death as if he and his wife had made a secret pact to depart this life together, although when at last she had deserted him, he had simply let her go.

After his wife’s death, Abdel Latif rarely referred to the dear love he had just buried. He didn’t mention her much or reminisce about the details of his life with her, as if he had lost the vocabulary to speak of his happier past. No one doubted seventy-year-old Abdel Latif’s love for his wife. Everything was proof of it: the rarity of their fights, the way they clung to each other—the image of the happy family (so much like all other happy families) that they projected wherever they went. But Bolbol often thought that the true meaning of love was what he had never experienced and what was now lost to him. He was reminded of all this when he first brought his ailing father back to his house. Bolbol examined him closely; he would almost have sworn that this man wasn’t his father. Starvation had left its scars on his aged body, and his eyes had an odd gleam to them. Abdel Latif wasted no time in telling Bolbol that he had distributed his mother’s clothes to the few neighbors who had stayed behind during the siege. And, by the way, the garden had returned to its former splendor, though now all it grew was basil and wormwood, not counting the three olive trees, which he hoped would hold out for a few more years at least. He added, “Nevine and the martyrs love wormwood.” Without giving Bolbol time to ask, his father told him neutrally that he had married her, Nevine, and that she was the one who had pushed him to escape the besieged town. She had told him resolutely, “Leave this sacred ground.” His father was silent for a long time before carefully addressing Bolbol’s questions over the next few days. Bolbol was very frightened and didn’t fully grasp what his father had said that night.

The next day Bolbol had wondered about the connections between Nevine, the martyrs, and the wormwood. He told the doctor who’d accompanied him that his father was a little delirious, but the doctor discovered that his patient, although on his deathbed, was fully alert and not delirious in the least.

Of course, Bolbol understood why his father had distributed his mother’s clothing; after all, what would a man on the brink of death do with the clothes of a woman who had died several years earlier? The people under siege shared everything—food, clothes, whatever they had that would keep them alive. But his father surprised him when he added the following night that every door should be thrown open to love, that love could sweep away the past all at once, which had helped to cleanse his being and strip away the withered branches that would never put out leaves again. It was agonizing, of course, to slice off your awful past and throw it away, but it was necessary if you were to catch the bouquet of roses floating down the river and carry it safely to the other side…

Bolbol had thought his father might be raving, because he was speaking in clear but disjointed phrases, like people do when suffering from partial memory loss or maybe while sifting through a surfeit of memories, the whole tumultuous chaos of the last four years. Bolbol listened with a lump in his throat; he considered his mother’s clothes to be his father’s business, and of his own accord he relinquished his own stake in whatever other household goods could be divided up between Fatima and Hussein. Meanwhile, his memories of Lamia never left him; what remained of them would have to sustain him. He felt empty and couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of the unsent letters to Lamia he had kept. Over the following days, he began to empathize with his father for the first time—his suffering had been kept hidden for years.

Forty-five years earlier, Nevine had been a lovely woman. She entered the teacher’s lounge one day and without any ado introduced herself as the substitute art teacher. Abdel Latif stared with a passion that embarrassed her. He had been searching for love at first sight and believed he had found it at last. A few days later, Nevine opened up about her background: she was a university student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus; she was teaching art to cover her course fees. Her father was a math teacher and her mother a primary-school teacher in al-Mayadin. Her family lived in the village of Muhassan near Deir Azzour, known as Little Moscow. Nevine had chosen to live in a small house in the meadows around S. She was nice to her students. Abdel Latif would wait until she was entering or leaving the school to waylay her, inventing some excuse for conversation. He told her about the geography and history of the Euphrates, and Nevine responded politely, merely confirming that his information was correct, in much the same way she replied to the blandishments of all her male colleagues—something about her accent, from the Euphrates region, made them all try to flirt with her. But she wouldn’t allow anyone into her private life, which was much quieter than was suspected by her small-town neighbors and the bachelor teachers. Quite simply, she was a middle-class girl from an educated family, conservative in most things, despite her clothes, which spoke of a liberality and particularity that, nonetheless, no one found especially provocative. When she wandered around S, which at that time was a small town of no more than ten thousand people, she seemed the archetypal fellaha from some distant village, rather than a painter fighting against tradition.