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;

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

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.

In the end, though, war is war, and it wouldn’t be over easily or quickly. It carried its stench with it wherever it reached, wafting over everyone, leaving nothing as it had been. It altered souls, thoughts, dreams; it tested everyone’s capacity for endurance.

The corpse swaying to and fro in the minibus was the only truth he had left. He still thought of it as a real person, a collection of tangible, worldly sensations: it could do things; it wasn’t just a gelatinous lump. It had a family, and that family still had a long way to go, and on the journey maybe they might even talk like real siblings again.

Everyone wanted to smash their mirrors. It was hard enough looking at other people’s faces without feeling miserable, let alone one’s own. They had heard about starvation from books and fairy tales, but now they were experiencing it for themselves, along with selfishness and a new lust for survival. People fought fiercely over a handful of herbs

He asked a girl who took care of donated goods to cart everything away, and he cleared the house of his wife’s clothes at last. Later he decided that this wasn’t enough; he asked a group of young men to take the whole wardrobe out of the house and dispose of it; some nails in the wall would be enough to hang his few clothes on. If you want to expel