Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa

Author:Khaled Khalifa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

three

BOLBOL FLYING IN A CONFINED SPACE

They left the village at dawn. The weak light revealed the extent of the devastation. It seemed as if souls were still moaning under the rubble, shreds of clothing and body parts strewn over the abandoned fields and mixing with the skeletons of their goats and mules. The dogs had scavenged what they could and left the rest for the flies. It was complete and utter ruin. They had heard about scenes like this, but here they were facing them and smelling them for the first time in person, and it was quite a different thing. Bolbol felt he should despise the foolishness of what had occurred between himself and Hussein a few hours previously, but he wasn’t ready to comment or apologize, and believed that Hussein felt the same; the grudges in their life had heaped up like worn-out clothes in a locked wardrobe.

The sky was still overcast and black. They regained the hope that the rotting body might eventually reach Anabiya. The grave, to be completed, needed a body. The shroud would give the body a new form, dignified and white. They guessed that it would take about two hours to travel the remaining distance, and then it would all be over. Their cousins would complete the task and bury their dead.

There had been no network coverage since the day before. Anyway, all their phone batteries had run out. Hussein had forgotten to bring his charger, but he hadn’t regretted this when he saw that the towers along the road were all destroyed. They had no hope of calling ahead, and even if there had been a connection, it would have been no use. There was nothing to report. They were carrying the body and they were on their way to Anabiya. It was no longer important to get there at a particular time. They had lost their awe of death, and the body no longer meant anything to them—this morning they could have offered it to that pack of hungry dogs without a second thought.

They crossed a number of checkpoints held by the Free Army without difficulty. The fighters were good-natured and sympathized with their misery. They would uncover Abdel Latif’s face and then cover it back up immediately, unable to bear the sight or stench. The siblings’ identity cards came in handy here, at last; Anabiya was an influential region, and many of its sons were fighting in the Free Army, based in the countryside north of Aleppo.

When on rare occasions one of the local soldiers insisted on uncovering the entire body, he would see the scars and the splits and the marks on its face—the result of falling from the seat when Hussein was trying to toss it in the mud—and assume Abdel Latif had been murdered under torture. No one would have believed this was the corpse of a man who had died peacefully in a hospital in the heart of the capital and that it was the neglect of his children and their utter lack of guile that had caused its current degradation.

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