
Death Is Hard Work

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;
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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.
Khaled Khalifa • Death Is Hard Work
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.
Khaled Khalifa • Death Is Hard Work
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
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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 alik
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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.
Khaled Khalifa • Death Is Hard Work
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.
Khaled Khalifa • Death Is Hard Work
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.
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One of his father’s neighbors’ sons—an engineering student turned combatant in the Free Syrian Army—called Bolbol and informed him that his father’s health made it very difficult for him to remain in the besieged village. Bolbol couldn’t bring himself to say anything in reply—not out of shock from hearing about his father’s deterioration, but from
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