World literature is full of works about death, whether as a theme or a symbol. In the celebrated Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa's latest book, Death Is Hard Work, death is both a way to be sarcastic and a window onto oppression. While the Syrian tragedy has already made death a common, even familiar event, Khalifa manages to double the readers' awareness of death. As in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, set in Europe at the end of WWII, Khalifa uses death as a means to black comedy and a metaphor for our times. As a theme death plays the role of a flashlight, revealing new fields and spaces in Syria, depicting the ins and outs of the conflict as it points out different militias and war mongers. The novel shows how dramatically death ceremonies have changed after the war, for one thing, reduced to the bare minimum. The dead are all equal now, whether they are poor soldiers, lieutenants, fighters or people of unknown identity. Death Is Hard Work is the fifth novel by Khalifa, who was born in 1964 in Orm, a village outside Aleppo. Khalifa graduated from the Faculty of Law at Aleppo University in 1988. As well as his novels he has written nine television dramas. The first was Biography of the Jalali Family (1999), directed by Haitham Haqqi; the most recent A Relevant Quiet (2010), directed by Shawqi Al-Majri. The novel is a realistic narrative divided into three chapters, each with an eloquent title. The writer tells the story of the sudden death in Damascus of Abdellatif Assalem, father to two sons and a daughter, who are united and brought together by the event. Two hours before his death, Abdellatif asks his eldest son Bulbul to bury him in the family cemetery in his home village of Ennabiya, near Aleppo. It was the father's only will. Bulbul, who comes across as disturbed, decides to act like a brave man and promises to fulfil his father's wish which, clear and simple as it seems, is a lot of hard work. For within minutes of his father's death, Bulbul realises how impossible his mission actually is: in these times of war, the dead are buried in common graveyards regardless of hometown. Heading to his younger but more powerful brother Hussein, Bulbul thinks he will be relieved of the burden. Hussein agrees to fulfil Abdellatif's wish, but all kinds obstacles are strewn in the way. They set out with the corpse in a microbus, which turned into an ambulance. Hussein, who was not on speaking terms with his father, places the corpse at the opposite end of the vehicle next to his sister Fatma – the mild mannered mediator who attempts to infuse the family with a sense of harmony throughout – and so with ice sheets and air freshener, while Bulbul is in the front cabin, the journey from Damascus to Ennabiya begins. It's an international road and it is full of horrors, not least the checkpoints manned by Syrian Army or militias, where the siblings pay a bribe or a fee just to pass, often queueing for hours. For readers with no direct knowledge of the war, the novel is a terrifying experience. Khalifa achieves such a degree of tension he transports the reader into the midst of the atrocities that have come to define daily life in Syria. The novel is equally about Abdellatif and his three children, however, proceeding from the immediate failures they are forced to deal with. One of the funniest scenes takes place in the first chapter, “Only If You Were Bags of Cumin”, when after waiting for many hours at the first checkpoint, they are denied safe passage by the army because according to the records Abdellatif Assalem is still alive and wanted for interrogation by various intelligence branches. The officers therefore “arrest the corpse”, and the three siblings spend a horrible night in a cramped, cold cell among other detainees: people travelling from one place to another or heading to refugee camps across Syria. By morning thankfully Bulbul has managed to bribe their way out. Here as elsewhere in the book, Khalifa makes statements about death, life and love: “Death which is not accompanied by rage is worthless”; “Life is a series of trivial acts doomed to end”; and love “is to spend your old age happily with your beloved, as if the prime of your life were negligible, just time that must pass before the lover reaches the moment when all his agony is gone, starts a new life and rearranges the daydreams he has always had in his warm bed”. As often as not these statements introduce flashbacks about the characters. There is, for example, Abdellatif's love for Nivine, a Christian woman whose two sons die when they join the revolutionary Free Army, and whom he finally manages to marry after the age of 70. Bulbul too cannot marry the love of his life, Lamia, another Christian woman who is already married and supports the revolutionaries and the refugees, cooking meals for displaced families and hosting them in her house. The novel sheds light on identity issues brought about by the war. Bulbul, who used to live in neighbourhood known for its opposition to the regime, moves to a pro-regime neighbourhood where the neighbours perceive him as a terrorist; to gain their trust he puts up a picture of the president in the hall and removes all oppositional channels like Al Jazeera from his receiver. At the third checkpoint there is actual shelling within sight. The road looks gloomy. What does the corpse of a father actually mean? For them the corpse is now “a disgusting thing, something without an identity; it is neither a package nor a human. After death, humans transform to a third type, neither human nor inanimate”. After spending more than three days on a trip that should take two and half hours, crossing around 10 check points, waiting in the rain, cold, in complete terror of the militias and literally abused by the military, attacked by wild dogs and lost in dismal darkness, death has lost its holiness: Hussein starts to sing loudly, Fatma looks helplessly to Bulbul, who remains silent, avoiding a clash. Still, by the end of the second chapter, “A Bouquet of Flowers Floating on the River”, a fight does break out between the two brothers as they lose their way: Hussein tries to dump the decaying corpse in the mud and turn back, Bulbul physically stops him; they lunge at each other in the rain, only to return to the vehicle with blood all over their faces. This is a powerful climax and might have worked as the ending of the novel. The third and shortest chapter, “Bulbul Who Soars in a Narrow Place”, is an account of the last leg of the journey. It consists largely of daydreams and reminiscences about Abdellatif: how he fell out with his family and ran away to Damascus returning as a corpse; his political convictions and the slogans he has clung to; and the meaning of his life. But the mission is accomplished at last: Abdellatif is buried in the family cemetery. Fatma loses her voice due to the many shocks she has been through, but otherwise the three siblings return home safely. Bulbul makes plans to cross over into Turkey but changes his mind out of fear and returns to the slow death of his daily routine. In this sense the novel is also a subtle condemnation of what the three characters stand for, which is another aspect of death after all: their submission and weakness, the perversity of their lives. The book folds with Bulbul returning to the family home in Damascus, where the father's scent is still present. He sits down in the dark, feeling as if wild dogs were devouring his head. He feels he too is turning into a corpse. Heading to his bedroom, he feels irrelevant and useless, a large rat returning to his hole. This is Khalifa's clear condemnation of pro-regime civilians in Damascus. But by now what is going on is no longer very terrifying. Death is simpler, closer. It is easy work.
