Death Is Hard Work

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.

Now his body was laid out on a metal stretcher in a public hospital. A doctor told Bolbol, “People are dying in droves every single day. Be happy he managed to reach such an old age.” Bolbol wasn’t quite able to follow the doctor’s instructions to be cheerful at his father’s death, although he could grasp what was meant. He felt as though he were s

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Our final moments in this life aren’t generally an appropriate time for clear-eyed reflection; indeed, they always find us at our most sentimental. There’s no room left in them for rational thought, because time itself has solidified and expanded inside them like water becoming ice. Peace and deliberation are required for reviewing the past and set

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