Death Is Hard Work

On the morning of their third day in Anabiya, Bolbol decided to cross the border to Turkey. One of his cousins drove with him in case he needed any help. The crowd at the Bab al-Salamah crossing was frighteningly large; thousands of people were waiting to cross. Bolbol thought then that his desire to start a new life was basically just another lie;

Over the following days, Abdel Latif spent hours every day managing the graveyard. He traced the outlines of walkways between the graves and left plenty of space to plant trees and flowers. He wanted it to be eternal, not just a simple cemetery. He hadn’t expected that within two years it would be crowded by one thousand seven hundred graves. He ar

All he had done was observe other people’s lives and discover they were like him: a collection of walking lumps taking up space, spending their lives striving to negate death. They repeated the same actions day in, day out, and when, like him, they noticed that time was passing, they made some futile gesture toward extricating themselves from their

She sometimes wished her sons had been cowards and fled abroad as soon as possible, but at other moments she felt that everything had needed to happen as it did—that this was just another story of mass delusion. The shame and the silence they had lived through for years were exacting a price, and everyone would pay it, executioners and victims alik

It pleased Bolbol to affect a talent for reading human nature, but his lack of conviction in the truth of his intuitions always returned him to square one.

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.

They had thought they would have a long time to talk during the journey. It would have been an appropriate occasion for reminiscence; after all, during his life, their father had only been able to gather his children on just such passing occasions, when a sense of duty, rather than desire, had been sufficient to corral them into the same place. The

In this country, people like to say “The page doesn’t turn after death”; the dead pass on their actions and attributes to their children and through them to their grandchildren. Everything you do is closely observed, and your official records may as well be locked behind an iron wall: impossible for any civilian to read or alter. And in one of the

He began to understand the secret of his father’s regained strength late in life: his psychic wounds all healing at once, his attitude changing, his no longer acting like a rotten fish waiting to be thrown into the nearest gutter. His eyes got back their twinkle; his body seemed to regain its youthful elegance; he started shaving again; he wore his