Khaled Khalifa - Death Is Hard Work

Bolbol felt himself become lighter and braver, his worries lifting away. He no longer cared that Hussein had completely ignored their father when Abdel Latif was in the hospital; the important thing was that Hussein wouldn’t follow this up by abandoning him now. Bolbol was confident in his brother’s ability to manage this sort of situation. Hussein had meandered around among several professions before taking a job as a minibus driver, and if nothing else this meant he’d gained considerable experience dealing with the state bureaucracy, and he had contacts all over the place. Without delay, Hussein dismantled the two seats immediately behind the driver’s and rearranged them to form a shelf for the body to lie on. He said, “We’ll lay the body here. That way there’ll be enough room for everyone else to travel comfortably.” He meant Bolbol and their sister, Fatima, but if their in-laws wanted to come along, too, well, they wouldn’t be in the way. This idea was soon rejected, though: they couldn’t imagine that anyone else would still harbor any sense of duty toward this man whose corpse would have to negotiate hundreds of miles to reach its final resting place.

By seven o’clock, Hussein had finished all the arrangements for the journey. He had brought their sister over from her house and blanked out the scrolling signs on his minibus, which he ordinarily used to work the Jaramana line. With the help of an electrician friend, he improvised an ambulance siren out of its horn. He also bought an air freshener, which he supposed would be needed on the long journey, and didn’t forget to call another one of his friends who was able to supply four large blocks of ice. Despite the difficulty of his requests, his friends all had woken before dawn, offered him their condolences, and helped Hussein to arrange everything for the journey. The only thing still left to obtain before they could be on their way was the signature of the hospital director, who wouldn’t be in before nine o’clock. They parked in front of the hospital gate to wait for him, but a morgue official asked them to remove their father’s body immediately, as the freezers already needed to be emptied out to accommodate the fresh shipment of corpses that had just arrived, now simply heaped on the floor.

Bolbol didn’t dare accompany Hussein when he went into the morgue. The corridors were full of the dark, sad faces of men and women waiting to receive the bodies of their loved ones. The orderly indicated that Hussein should search the southern side of the morgue, and Hussein almost threw up as he opened a fridge chock-full of bodies. He’d almost lost hope by the time he found his father’s body; hundreds of corpses had been lost and forgotten in this chaos. It was clear that his father hadn’t been dead for long. Hussein slipped three thousand liras to the official so that the orderly would be allowed to help him wash and shroud the body in the filthy bathroom reserved for the dead, which no one bothered to clean. The scene in the hospital was horrifying. Officers were pacing the corridors and shouting curses against the opposition fighters. Troops in full combat gear were wandering around aimlessly, smelling of battle. They had brought their friends, either wounded or killed, and dawdling there was their only way to escape or postpone returning to battle, where death would no doubt find them as well. Death always seemed near in this chaos.

Back at the van, Hussein arranged his father’s body in such a way that he wouldn’t have to see him and be distracted whenever he looked in the rearview mirror. He told Fatima to be quiet, even though she hadn’t spoken a word, but she only sobbed harder. Hussein had always enjoyed ordering her around, ever since they were children, and Fatima obeyed him without argument; complying with her brother’s demands gave her a sense of equilibrium and security. Hussein was furious at Bolbol when he noticed him leaning against a nearby wall and smoking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He slammed the door of the van and went back to the hospital gate to wait for the director, who had to sign the death certificate before the body could officially be released. It wasn’t exactly the place to make small talk, but he couldn’t help asking a woman, also waiting, if she knew when the director was expected. She shrugged and turned her face away. Hussein didn’t bother trying to speak to anyone else, although he hated waiting in silence; he believed that a little chat would have alleviated their misery. He could feel the tension and anger hidden in the eyes of the petitioners who were packed in all around them.

At nine o’clock, the director arrived and signed the certificate. Immediately, Hussein told Bolbol to get in the bus and instructed Fatima to cover the body with the blankets that he had brought from his house. And also to shut up.

Hussein informed his siblings that removing the body had cost them ten thousand liras, adding that he was recording every expense in a small ledger. Without waiting for their reaction, he began strategizing about the quickest way out of Damascus. The streets would be clogged with traffic at this time of the morning, and the many checkpoints would be jammed; it might take hours to clear the city limits. His calculations proceeded based on his experience spending whole days in traffic as a minibus driver. The road through Abbasiyin Square would be best, although the security checkpoints had a particularly bad reputation in that area. Even trying to cross Sabaa Bahrat Square in downtown would be a disaster, he told himself.

So Hussein decided to chance Abbasiyin Square and tried to follow close behind a proper ambulance. He was stopped at the first checkpoint, which wouldn’t allow him to travel along the main road, but he was still able to make some headway along an alternate route. The faux siren he’d installed in the minibus was no use whatsoever—no one made way for him. Amid the crowds and the chaos, Hussein recalled how funeral processions used to be respected back in peacetime—cars would pull over, passersby would stop and cast you genuinely sympathetic looks…

A row of additional ambulances suddenly descended on him, all heading out of the city. Inside each one were soldiers accompanying coffins; Hussein could see them through the small windows in their back doors. He tried to sneak in between two of the vehicles, but an angry yell and a cocked weapon from one of their furious occupants returned him to the line of civilian vehicles. When the last ambulance in the queue pulled up alongside the minibus, it slowed down, and a soldier leaned out of the window to spit copiously on him and berate him in the foulest possible language. Hussein looked at the spittle moistening his arm and was flooded with rage. Rage and then the desire to weep. Bolbol kept quiet and averted his eyes so as not to increase his brother’s embarrassment. Fatima, for her part, no longer felt like crying; she was surprised at how few tears she had shed, all things considered. She decided to postpone expressing the remainder of her sadness and loss until the burial, which would no doubt be the most emotional part of the farewell to her father.

Since childhood, Hussein had been in the habit of memorizing entire pages of the cheap almanacs published by Islamic philanthropic organizations, containing famous sayings, aphorisms, verses from the Qur’an, and prophetic Hadith, and he used them in everyday speech to give his audience the impression of his being well read. He used to believe that he hadn’t been created to live on the margins of life as a mere observer, but at that moment, looking at the deluge of vehicles inundating Abbasiyin Square, he felt terrifyingly powerless; he couldn’t find an appropriate aphorism to break the strident silence dominating his brother and sister, yet he wanted very much to make them forget that he had just been spat on. He tried to remember something or other about life and death but couldn’t come up with anything better than “Tend to the living—the dead are already gone.” He didn’t like it, however, because of how often the line was quoted by cowards justifying retreat. And in any case, today it might be a different matter—better to tend to the dead; after all, they now outnumbered the living. He went on to muse that they would all surely be dead in the not-too-distant future. This thought had given him exceptional courage over the previous four years. Not only had it served to increase his stoicism day by day, but he was far better able to withstand the many insults he received from checkpoint soldiers and Mukhabarat in the course of his work if he bore this thought in mind, since it allowed him to subscribe to the view that anyone who gave him a hard time would probably be dead today or tomorrow, or by next month at the latest. Not that this was a particularly pleasant notion, but it was an accurate one, and each citizen had to live under the shadow of this understanding. The inhabitants of the city regarded everyone they saw as not so much “alive” as “pre-dead.” It gave them a little relief from their frustration and anger.