This same agent came back and led Bolbol into the next room and said that it wasn’t the first time this had happened. Another corpse had been arrested the previous month and sent under armed escort to Tishreen Military Hospital, where a committee had had to look into the matter and sign off on the body’s status. The corpse wasn’t surrendered to its

The short silence that followed these pleas allowed Bolbol to hope that the officer wasn’t serious about handing the family over to the Mukhabarat … but he didn’t know how he could plead for mercy for his father’s body. The officer explained that according to their records, Bolbol’s father was still alive and still wanted.

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

On the way, Bolbol told him that they were originally from the town of S, a veiled reference to where their sympathies lay. The doctor caught it at once, and the name of the town was all it took to rouse the young doctor’s fervent respect.

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;

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.

He told her, “When your beloved goes away, they take the keys of happiness with them and throw them into that deep pit known as the grave.” His wife hadn’t left him any happiness, he said, but had taken everything with her: sleep, the secrets of cooking, their morning coffees together and evening walks through the town.

Fatima nodded without asking why this mattered. She knew how much he liked giving commands, and she generally liked to obey him. Taking up their old roles made them feel less afraid, and they would go through these motions as often during their journey as they had—without ever understanding why—during their childhood.

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