Death Is Hard Work

Bolbol saw Hussein coming back, escorted by an agent waving his gun and gesturing to the rest of the family to get out of the van. Hussein stood next to Bolbol and whispered, “They’re going to arrest the body.” Bolbol assumed there must have been some mistake, but no, when the agent led them to a tiled, windowless room, opened the door, and pushed

He’d already scoured his home of everything that might have caused him harm in this situation: purging each and every suspicious belonging and even canceling all the television channels that regime supporters considered “biased,” such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, and filling his “Favorites” list with pro-regime channels: first came Al Manar and Al

If his father had died three months earlier, when he was still in the village of S, then everything would have been easy. The cemeteries there were large and plentiful, and any one of the people still living in the town could have buried him with all the consideration due to the great and illustrious ustadh, their comrade in revolution from its fir

Bolbol didn’t ask him why he didn’t go home; he was afraid of the answer. On an earlier occasion, trying to make small talk in a taxi, he had been unwise enough to ask the driver when his shift was over and he could go home, but the driver had sneered and described his house in Zamalka in detail, including the fact that it had been bombed and his w

He scrutinized the cards and then surprised them all by asking for the dead man’s identity card as well. Bolbol almost started explaining to the man that all corpses share a single name—that they slip away from their histories and families in order to affirm their membership in one family alone, the family of the dead, and that no dead person can h

Bolbol understood this desire to narrate everything all over again, to reveal a side of himself that no one had known. Abdel Latif wanted to leave his final story in Bolbol’s hands—not only his final wish.

Bolbol found it all hard to believe. He just couldn’t think of his father as a lonely, unrequited lover. At last he understood the secret of Abdel Latif’s love for Iraqi songs! For whenever Nevine abandoned something from her past, Abdel Latif reflexively picked it up and kept it, polishing it anew and storing it in some remote corner of his life.

The living have a harder task ahead of them than the dead; no one wants to see their loved ones rot. They want them to look their best in death for that final memory that can never be erased. The last expression worn by a loved one necessarily comes to epitomize them. When the facial muscles of a suffering man slacken in the midst of his pain, his

But despite the illness, Bolbol hadn’t believed his father would really die. It wasn’t credible that anyone could still die of natural causes in this day and age. Even his neighbor Um Elias had been murdered, though she was in her eighties. A young relative and his friends conspired to break into her house and force open her strongbox, which everyo