Khaled Khalifa - Death Is Hard Work

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 watching their wives whenever business took them abroad or accompanying their underage daughters on shopping trips to Beirut.

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.