Sublime

Bolbol had almost no money left; he blamed himself for having wasted it, for not having properly calculated the cost of their long journey: he should have divided the sum between the total number of anticipated checkpoints. They had nothing they could sell here—Bolbol’s phone was ancient and wouldn’t fetch more than a thousand liras, while Hussein

‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.’

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

copacetic