In Praise of Hatred

by Khaled Khalifa

  We couldn’t understand Omar’s ambition, nor his anxiety and fear; we couldn’t find sufficient reason for Omar’s mad withdrawal into his pleasures and his being hell-bent on provoking scandal. Whenever Maryam looked at his sharia qualification hanging on her bedroom wall, her eyes swam with tears and she muttered a prayer – we stopped joining in after a conversation we’d had about the enormous funds he had accrued in the short months he had spent as an arms dealer. He was now devoting himself almost entirely to this trade, at the expense of the patterned carpets and the smell of silk and wool. He became wary at the growing number of assassinations of civil service employees and lower-ranking officers, lauded by most people who were astonished at the cold-blooded murders.

  Rumours circulated madly that certain groups had taken it upon themselves to cleanse official circles, were organizing and arming, and were intent on targeting the most venal and corrupt. They had no compunction about using violence and some even viewed it as essential; but others feared that their actions would create a spiral of unstoppable brutality, as the government forces were sure to retaliate in kind.

  Apprehensive silence began to dominate the city, along with a fear of what ruin the future might bring. Omar couldn’t easily withdraw from this business; he was trapped by his knowledge of suppliers and the names of Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi politicians embroiled in the trade, and their connections to the dried-up wells and concealed passages of houses that acted as hidden warehouses. He felt suffocated, and one night he entered Maryam’s room, took off his clothes and put on some blue silk pyjamas. He didn’t speak to us for three days; he read the Quran piously, his voice hoarse whenever he raised it to recite Sura Al Ahzab. We all felt his tiredness and his need for the old image of our family, as if he missed that awkward adolescent who had once thrown flour in the air, watching the motes land on the edges of the pool, the flowers and the branches of the trees. He had opened his arms and whirled like a dervish in a Sufi ring, wondering quite seriously why the sky didn’t rain flour.

  Three days was enough for my aunts to celebrate Omar’s apparent reformation, and it was long enough for me to get closer to my uncle and draw his attention to my erudition and demonstrate my knowledge of fiqh. It was a festival of food the likes of which I had never witnessed before, and Maryam gave herself up to it wholeheartedly. She ordered us to clean the neglected, dusty walnut table, and took out a crimson silk cloth whose borders were decorated with pictures of Chinese musical instruments and blossoms. She unrolled it and rebuked Safaa, though quietly and tenderly, for her aversion to making stuffed kibbeh. She turned to me with her observations about how messy the stuffed vine leaves were, and praised Marwa, who had inherited all the Aleppan know-how in preparing food. Marwa would add her own touches, and caused disputes with other Aleppan women until they became convinced of her talent to innovate.

  Radwan was one of the most enthusiastic participants in the feast, and found justification for sitting for hours by the stove, stretching his legs out on the sofa and delightedly chatting to Omar, whom he loved. He shared the same frivolous temperament and used to intercede with my grandfather to spare Omar his wrath. The array of dishes laid out in rows inspired an appetite that did not respect table manners, avenging the coldness of the table at which we women had sat in silence, eating with exaggerated etiquette. Omar insisted that Radwan should eat his meals with us, and Maryam didn’t object. His conversations and his jester’s clowning made us laugh, and we laughed without fear of uncovering our shame or being held to account for it.

  In the evening, Maryam recounted stories from Omar’s childhood. Her enthusiasm astonished him, and her face appeared loving as she tried to imitate my grandmother’s desperation to reform her youngest son’s errant behaviour; for the first time, I knew that he had thought about renouncing Islam, inspiring such real panic and confusion that it almost drove my grandmother to hysteria. She pronounced him to be mad and in need of special care, cried for entire nights and took him to the sheikhs of Aleppo. Omar surrendered to their recitations and charms, which bored him in no time at all. He would open the charms and read the names of devils and symbols of entry into Paradise, and then throw them down without any semblance of reverence in front of my grandmother, who gathered them together and burned them so as not to insult the honour of the best of the Muslims.

  The tales of his adolescent years affected me greatly, and I tried several times to write it down and redraw his past; he was as close to me as if he were my own son. After his departure I began to understand the secret of Safaa’s depression and Marwa’s sadness, which made them complain so much of the exhaustion of our isolation and at the requests to uphold our honour – ‘as if we walked naked through the city,’ Safaa would retort irritably. Marwa was resigned, seemingly expecting nothing other than death; she agreed with everything, lost the will to talk. Safaa would carry her pillow and come to share the bed with me, and there would follow a never-ending conversation about the families who visited us, whose receptions we attended and whose wedding invitations we accepted. In the end, her conversation always sang the praises of women’s strengths and mocked their weaknesses. She mocked Rima’s coldness and declared that Omar had to divorce her; whereas Zahra, Bakr’s wife, she described as a friend, reviewing the details of her long neck, the size of her breasts and their provocative bouncing. Safaa made me laugh. I felt her breath beside me when she dozed off, and as I looked at her face I believed she would be wretched as long as her pores were empty of the smell of men.

  * * *

  Omar left our house to wander in the mountains; he spent three weeks there alone, and his behaviour was more like that of an ascetic than a hellraiser. He slept in cheap hotels and savoured the smell of the pine trees in the Kurd-Dagh Forest. He avoided direct contact with the hotel owners, who were overwhelmed with his generosity. They thought he was on the run, or that he was cursed to silence and loneliness. He needed to reconsider everything: his relationships, funds, projects and dreams, his relationships with Rima and his friends, whom he had told he was going abroad. The pure mountain air of Salnafa and Kasab and his abstinence from alcohol brought freshness to his face and vitality to his feet. He rediscovered his connection to nature, climbing for hours in the mountains and avoiding the main roads, walking briskly through small country estates which led him to places that he thought, for the first time, were blessed. Oak branches twisted among the pine trees, and the scent of white cedar wafted from the forests after the fleeting night rains. His losses gained meaning. When the forested plains stretched out before him, it occurred to him to jump. He wished he were a paper aeroplane which could float over the country. His childhood came back to him in ever-accumulating images, the dust dislodged from them; he began to arrange them, mixing up their order and recalling their anxious taste, like a peach bitter despite its ripeness.

  ‘I was closer to God,’ he said to Maryam on his return, assailed by feelings of purity and lightness. Losing no time and allowing no one to venture an opinion, he informed Maryam of his decision to divorce Rima and grant her the right to live with his children in their sumptuous apartment – which was a hell to him because of the smell of pickles constantly emanating from the kitchen. His allergy to pickles made him irritable and unable to blow his nose. Quietly and as expected, their marriage came to an end, destroyed by her passion for cold meats and pickles – she would spend hours arranging the jars in the attic and on the tops of the kitchen cabinets. She had been made desperate by Omar’s strange requests, unworthy of the daughter of a sheikh whose honour and asceticism were known throughout the city. ‘He wants to turn me into a whore,’ she would wail, before getting up and going to the kitchen to put salt on the pickled beans.

  Safaa sympathized with Omar and praised his divorce, cursing Rima’s idiocy and criticizing the smell of cheap talcum powder that came from her children. Maryam arranged the divorce, aided by Selim, who was forced to curse Omar more than once while at the same time blessing the memory o
f my grandmother, who had been the one to choose Rima over many other girls on account of her decency, her obedience and her family’s fragrant reputation.

  In the following days, Omar began to take his revenge on a history of decency, obedience and fragrant reputations. After his silence and isolation (which failed to last even a month) he returned to his profligate ways, causing ever-increasing mayhem. He sought out trouble, and provoked scandals in cold blood and with the utmost confidence: he harassed married women and adolescent girls, and openly accompanied prostitutes to restaurants; he would live in their attics for days at a time without any discretion, swapping joints and obscene photographs with them. He took them to the markets and listened to what was said about him without caring. He repeated to my aunts, ‘Nothing will save me but love.’ These few words of his awoke our desire for seclusion and silence. The silent house was gloomy and abandoned; Radwan roamed around it freely, relishing the temporary absence of Maryam’s demands, Safaa’s sarcasm or my pleas.

  * * *

  ‘Nothing will save any of us but love,’ Safaa said to Marwa, who had begun to design a carpet whose borders were to be decorated with images of goddesses. I was terrified when I discovered that they were pagan deities I had seen once in an illustrated book about the Ancient Greeks. Maryam sank even deeper into her isolation and moved only between her bed and the cane chair by the window. At one point she took her photograph album out of her closet drawer, drew the curtains and locked the door as if getting ready to commit a sin. She stayed lost in a few photographs, then got up suddenly. She sat on the ground and recited the Sura Al Qasar. Her voice rose as if she were singing nashid for a celebration, or trying to drive out the demons which would descend from the chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

  On the fourth day of our festival of silence and seclusion, we all went to one of Hajja Radia’s sessions. My aunts joined in the singing of the women beseeching the Beloved Prophet. At that moment, I said to myself, ‘It is so difficult for a woman to reveal her secrets.’ I envied Omar for a moment, and then threw off my suspicion and depression. Later, on my bed, I conjured up an image of Ghada and then her scent. I pushed deeper into the daydream, and after reassuring myself of my solitude and the shadows in the room, I penetrated deeper and surrendered to my desire which plunged headlong like a train through green plains. I reached out my fingers for the buttons of her blue dress I knew so well, unfastened them and gazed at the pink bra which held her smouldering nipples and delicious breasts.

  Then I got up, locked the door and drew the curtains and got completely naked in order to sink into the softness of her stomach. I panted like a dog and kissed her navel with the voracity of a woman abandoned to her own debauchery.

  In the morning, I deeply regretted this. I was terrified of going to school, afraid of the familiar sounds. I hated Ghada when I saw her in the line-up, laughing with other girls and dawdling on the stairs. When I came close to her I felt as nauseous as if a corpse’s stench were wafting from her, but I missed her in the last lesson and almost left my classroom to find her. I needed to see her. I was distracted and couldn’t hear the maths teacher despite my love of equations and geometry. I looked for Ghada at the end of the day and lingered in the exit. The car of the fifty-year-old man passed in front of the school and Ghada calmly waved at me from it, in complete command of herself. I smiled at her as my agonies increased; I wished she would die along with that man.

  I said to myself that I must drown in onion fumes, piles of molokhiyya and bulgur wheat soaked in stone pots. This was the day before that offer that was to confuse Safaa and create a past impossible to erase, like a dishonour which no blood could wash away. Zahra came to the house with her two children, and she unpacked her clothes in my room. I needed someone to share the space with, to help me calm down a little. I decided to tell Zahra about Ghada and the cruelty of her abandonment, about my hatred and resentment which increased whenever I saw that middle-aged man picking her up outside school. I became completely engrossed in preparing the food for the important guests Bakr was shortly to bring to the house. I felt Maryam’s contented gaze watching me as I seasoned fish and stuffed it with pepper, tasted it, and added some sticks of parsley. Marwa encouraged my daring in breaking with long-established cooking traditions, while Safaa whispered with Zahra briefly and appeared grave and bewildered. She took on the role of mother to both Zahra’s and Omar’s children – Maryam had invited them over so they could see their grandfather’s house, which everyone felt was falling away.

  Maryam’s efforts to re-align our present according to the rhythm of the past would be of no use; it would only increase our delusions of belonging. We didn’t know how we would one day throw off its weight from our shoulders and free ourselves from the tyranny of the framed pictures of our ancestors hanging on Maryam’s wall, from the brass bedsteads and silver table service our grandparents had used, along with the ornate ancient mirrors, the walnut chests, the locked boxes and the hundreds of other fragments scattered all over a house whose sanctity increased every morning. The ropes wound around our necks and turned us all into slaves. We cleaned it all, polished it, reassured it; we didn’t dare smash so much as a vase, even accidentally.

  Maryam saw, as if for the first time, that I had grown to look like any woman who wore loose clothing and whose breasts drooped. I was no longer a little schoolgirl. I was allowed to approach Zahra, and to correct tacitly Maryam’s errors in cooking the mince or using it as stuffing for the kibbeh. In all my life I had never seen such a huge parade of food as on that day. Maryam wanted Bakr’s guests to relay their impressions to their womenfolk, so they would talk once more about our affairs and our skills as women; our absence from their gossip disturbed her as much as if we had somehow been tarnished.

  Zahra was divided between us that night; at first, in the early evening, the conversation revolved gravely between Marwa, Safaa and Zahra, whom I saw from afar talking confidently and sipping from a cup of tea. Marwa was silent, watching Safaa as she asked a question, flinging up her hand in desperation. I was absorbed in bathing; my body needed to relax and waste some time. I felt that they had chosen to exchange secrets they wanted to keep from me, leaving me with Bakr’s young son. We bathed together and I was delighted with him, and with his tears when the soap burned his eyes. I sang to him; I hadn’t realized before that I hadn’t learned anything other than Hajja Radia’s nashid, which he didn’t like. I immediately discarded the question of how boys grow up to become men. I remembered the pain of the previous night and laughed at my misgivings. I wondered how I could reduce their power and make them into a silly, transient idea which wouldn’t corrupt the innocence of the first male I had washed with, as I pelted him with hot water and laughter.

  At the end of the night, I told Zahra coldly about the perfidy of friends; about Ghada and my fear that she would get entangled in irresponsible adventures that would turn her into a woman of ill repute. I abandoned myself to describing my pain and Zahra was silent. She didn’t agree with my stern opinions, but she didn’t raise any objections to them. That was what I loved about her; she listened so intently to whoever needed it that the other half of the truth, which had always been concealed, came to light. I felt my predicament when she looked at me as if she were saying, ‘How miserable you are,’ and relief because I had let her into my stagnant world, like a lake forsaken by breezes, ducks and fishing hooks.

  My mother came the next morning, early as usual. We were woken by the clamour and uproar of the copper saucepans she and Maryam had fetched to prepare the freekeh; my mother excelled at sweetening it with saffron to give it a special, indescribable flavour. She seemed decrepit to me when she complained of my father’s indifference and extolled my brother Hossam’s superlative grades and devoutness, singing the praises of his light moustache and slender frame. She was devoted to her first-born son, and loved him to a degree approaching madness. She believed that he would pluck our family from out of its wretchedness and, like all moth
ers, she wanted him to be a doctor and a philosopher. I became like a younger sister or companion to her; after four years away from her I had grown distant. I was no longer a part of her daily vocabulary. She received my news with unconcern, afraid only that I would be afflicted with the same curse of spinsterhood as my aunts, but when she returned home she would remember that my father had sold fish at the entrance to the souk at Bab Jenein. This was enough to ensure that the door to our house would be knocked on only by a poor bridegroom, or by one of the cousins whose faces remained unclear to me even after the few times I had met them. She only stayed a few hours, and when she left I saw Maryam slip some money into her handbag which earlier she had refused to take.

  We were surprised at the group of thirty guests Bakr had invited, and I couldn’t understand the secret of my brother Hossam’s presence next to Bakr, nor his clear authority when he kissed the assembled men. I knew some of them, and Maryam pointed out who some of the others were as we sat in the kitchen. We watched them eating greedily, and Maryam was overjoyed that Sheikh Daghstani was there; for her, his acceptance of our invitation was a public exoneration of Omar. She praised his forbearance and piety; she enumerated some instances of his generosity and described him with exaggerated emphasis as a man of God. How had all these diverse people come together? I asked myself. They included important traders, manufacturers, a retired politician (who played a dubious role in independent governments), sheikhs (some of whom were involved in politics), men who were known to belong to the Muslim Brotherhood, an army officer I didn’t know, a Saudi man and a Yemeni man of about forty-five. Maryam said he was a carpet trader who was friendly with Bakr. The Yemeni sat in the middle of the gathering. From his seat he could see the window of Safaa’s room.