In Praise of Hatred

by Khaled Khalifa

  My brother and Selim’s children served the guests silently and Radwan tried to convince them that dinner was the ideal time for listening to his ode in praise of the Prophet. Hossam dismissed him resolutely, upsetting Radwan, who complained to me. I was astonished at my brother’s coldness and indifference when I asked him to allow Radwan to recite; he didn’t hear me when I insisted on what this gathering meant to Radwan. I was surprised at the hidden joy on Maryam’s face when she explained at length that the family was gaining new men. We crept from the kitchen behind the curtain we had prepared so we could return to our rooms without the strangers seeing us. I went into Safaa’s room and flung myself on her bed, exhausted, and was astonished to see her wearing an embroidered Arabic abaya and a head covering. I fell asleep and when I woke up two hours later, the siege was still going on. My aunts had gathered with Zahra in Maryam’s room and although their voices were raised in excitement, they fell quiet when I entered.

  Bakr stayed on with the remaining guests; we knew there were five of them when he asked us to prepare ginger tea for six. The Saudi and the Yemeni were no longer there, and neither was Sheikh Daghstani, all of whom Safaa had seen leave. I was overjoyed that Zahra had stayed and was delighted she would be sharing my room. I felt how lonely I was, how afraid of something unknown. My dreams had transformed into nightmares in which I discerned bad omens. In my notebook I drew huge snakes devouring children, bats cooing like doves in the sky over the city, and wolves devouring a woman. ‘How hard it is to listen freely to your inner voice,’ I said to myself. I informed Zahra of my desire to swim in the sea naked. I looked at her face; she was in utter disbelief that such a desire could have taken hold of me. I laughed and reassured her that my dreams sometimes broke loose.

  Three days later, Bakr was still hosting the same five men we didn’t know. They sat in a room in the attic for hours, spreading out papers, and he left with them after whispering a little with Zahra, who nodded her head and returned to us to complete a conversation which had become tedious. We listened, distracted, as Maryam quoted what the local women had said about the food we had spent the previous Friday preparing for their men.

  Bakr was worried and confused. He suffered from insomnia, which was evident from his drooping eyelids. On the Wednesday, as usual, we prepared the light dinner and fresh berry juice he always asked for and hid in our rooms so the guests could leave at a certain time. After the evening prayer Bakr entered, and with him was the Yemeni man. In our presence, he asked Safaa to consider marrying this man, called Abdullah. He told her frankly that he was asking her to be a second wife and left her the freedom to come to a decision and become acquainted with him according to the principles of sharia. Safaa agreed without hesitation after Bakr praised his morals, with the only stipulation that the marriage should happen within days.

  Zahra was the sponsor of this marriage, which Safaa had determined upon without love. Maryam tried to defer it for a while. Safaa surprised everyone with her serious, sad tone when she shouted, ‘I want to become a woman. I don’t want to die a virgin.’ She concluded quietly, ‘I want a child.’ Maryam had no time to praise the morals, piety or wealth of her sister’s prospective Yemeni husband at any women’s gatherings. My uncles blessed the marriage as they usually did, as if our remaining without menfolk had made them expect a future scandal. Omar dismissed Maryam’s irritation and presented Safaa with a gold belt and a ring set with precious diamonds. Laughing, he informed us that he had bought it for one of his girlfriends in Beirut. Omar’s libertine words seemed alien to the dictionary of decency that Maryam was intent on reviving, reminding us of its vocabulary all the more frequently as she advanced in years.

  In hastily prepared sumptuous white clothing, and with a small trousseau filling no more than two bags, Safaa left our house as a bride to the sound of Hajja Radia’s tambourines. A few women had been invited to the mawlid which lasted no more than two hours, and their extemporizing swiftly angered Maryam, who wept as Safaa stepped outside the house to be welcomed by Abdullah. He was accompanied by four men: two Yemenis, an Aleppan trader famous for his friendships with men of religion, and Sheikh Daghstani. We closed the door and an awful silence settled as if we were at a funeral. Maryam’s tears bewildered us and made me, Marwa and Zahra cry as well, while my mother told her beads next to Hajja Radia as she gathered up her tambourines. She waited for Maryam to calm down so she could talk to her cruelly about her portion of the inheritance, and ask her to stop adhering to such stringent requirements for her own marriage, which simply wouldn’t ever take place, despite our lineage and the reputations of my grandfather and uncles. I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t seen Radwan for three days, after Maryam prevented him from leading as usual our procession to the hammam. I knocked at his door and heard the sound of sobbing. I opened the door and saw him eating dried figs and weeping for his ‘devoted friend, Safaa’ as he described her on our first visit to her new home. He gave her a bottle of perfume, with what seemed like a secret understanding. He laughed like a child when she promised to name her second son Radwan and bring him over so the original Radwan could help him memorize the Quran and teach him how to make perfumes.

  Safaa reassured Maryam that she felt optimistic about her marriage to the Yemeni, and whispered companionably with Zahra, as if expressing her gratitude to her. Safaa’s new house in Jamiliyya was composed of two rooms and a living room. Maryam almost suffocated in the narrowness of the reception room, which she said resembled a tomb. For the first time, I saw Safaa’s spirit expressed in a place of her very own; she shook off her lethargy and fiercely defended her new life. The house was arranged in a manner that revealed her hatred for my grandfather’s house filled with its old furniture. There were a couple of sofas in the living room in the American style, elsewhere was a soft bed beside a gleaming black chest of drawers topped by a candlestick with three branches. There were not many pots and pans in the kitchen, as if the owners of the house were spending a short holiday there and would be leaving it soon. Safaa didn’t listen to Maryam’s suggestion to move some things from my grandfather’s house, which she offered up as if it were Safaa’s greatest right to have them. Safaa stroked her hand and informed her that her carpet would be enough, relinquishing her portion of the inheritance; it was as if she didn’t trust that this small house or the unknown places where she would join her husband were really a long-term arrangement. Marwa kept Safaa’s wardrobe filled with dresses, some of which became gifts, along with her bedding, her pillows and all her small effects. Marwa seemed unconvinced that Safaa had broken free from their fate and would not be returning to the house a lonely woman.

  Our monotonous evenings began to herald a long isolation from which I didn’t know how to escape. Marwa embroidered handkerchiefs. I didn’t know who she would give them to; she piled them in her wardrobe and postponed her death a day at a time. She offered to teach me how to embroider and I told her seriously, and to her astonishment, ‘I don’t want to wait for death.’

  * * *

  I went to a daily meeting at Hajja Souad’s – I had recently begun to frequent her house despite the feeling of estrangement that attended me as I sat with the other girls. I had met most of them the day Hana took me there, in accordance with Bakr’s orders and his insistence that I would only understand his purpose when Hajja Souad began to divide us into smaller groups and meet us at fixed times. We spoke gravely about the group and its ideology of establishing an Islamic state, and enthusiastically conveyed news from school, and our aims to include other girls in our gatherings, which had started to expand.

  Secrecy, silence and zeal were on the rise in our state, in which the knowledge of the Prophet would soon stir. ‘We will punish the blasphemies of the unbelievers,’ Hajja Souad repeated with full conviction, as if she could see that very day. We, the sisters, the believers, would sit in Paradise next to the Prophet and the mothers of the believers.

  I didn’t grasp from where came the conviction that the path to
Paradise was open before me. All I now wanted was to become a martyr borne up by white birds, pure, sins forgiven, to that paradise which Hajja Souad drew for us patiently and confidently. My sufferings were calmed. I found that my belief was encouraged through my relationship with Bakr who, I now saw, had been created to realize the dream of eradicating dissolution and debauchery, and to re-glorify the Islamic Caliphate.

  I couldn’t find a better interlocutor than Safaa’s new husband, Abdullah, especially as Bakr was always busy; he never spent two nights in a row in his own house. Maryam didn’t object to my sitting with Abdullah for hours at a time, and we would discuss and exchange information about Islamic clans and stories of martyrs who had died in prison cells and on battlefields. Safaa was astonished by the speed at which I became involved, and my stubbornness in the face of her attempts to dissuade me from this path. She praised my femininity and my promising academic future, trying to save me from the path of destructive politics and, more particularly, from all the details of her husband’s past I could gather. I extolled the strength of conviction that had made Abdullah relinquish the path of error, and how his heart used faith to illuminate a segment of his tortuous journey which had continued for more than twenty years. He had spent them in anxiety, in a search for answers to the questions his heart had been repeating since being opened for the first time at the English School in Cairo, a building surrounded by giant cypress trees in the district of Abdeen. He had been one of its most distinguished students, and his teachers had great confidence in his subtle analyses of William Blake; the awe and accent with which he recited the verses reminded his teachers of Welsh farmers, overcome with emotion at an Eisteddfod. Abdullah would reread long sections of ‘The Tyger’ for me, which he had never forgotten, despite the years separating him from that student who had dreamed of his home in Yemen. He stood up suddenly, raised his hands and, with considerable feeling, began to recite the poem in English.

  To me, he seemed like a first-rate actor, and more joyful than usual. Safaa was fixed on his gleaming eyes as if she were noticing their dark colour for the first time. I smiled shyly and laughed when I heard Radwan insist on reciting the ode that Hossam hadn’t allowed him to recite the day of Bakr’s banquet. I thought that he had forgotten about it, but he got carried away and recited it without waiting for permission. Politely, but with increasing boredom, Abdullah listened as Radwan attempted to imitate his style of recitation. We clapped for a long time, and Maryam slapped her palms together, saying, ‘You’ve all gone mad.’ Then she left us to express our need for strangers to talk to, even if only politely and shyly.

  * * *

  Abdullah’s father decided to send his son away from Aden on the basis of advice from an Indian sailor who entered his old shop in the souk one day. He was looking for a copper Umayyad-style lamp which he described in minute detail – a wandering Englishman he had met in Alexandria had convinced him that he would never find it anywhere but Yemen. The Indian sailor seemed bewildered as he explained this in English to a man who understood only a few words of the language. The father called over his son, Abdullah, and asked him to translate this strange foreigner’s request. The two quickly understood each other, and the Indian expressed his delight at this student who was no more than four years old and who could describe a lamp and speak about imaginary worlds that the sailor admired. Abdullah listened attentively to the Indian’s tales of adventure, and the long conversation between the boy and sailor pleased the father, who wondered about the secret behind their effusiveness, and their enjoyment of a conversation neither wanted to finish. He was proud of the eloquence of his young son, who made the sailor laugh and keep returning to the shop to teach magic tricks to Abdullah. He was a fast learner and after a week, he could produce a rose from his shirt sleeve. Before the sailor’s ship left Aden, he had bought a multitude of lamps, copper goblets and silver-plated narghiles to sell at other ports, or to give to the directors of shipping companies in Athens. The sailor advised the father that his son must complete his studies at the English School in Cairo, if he wanted him to have a different future from the rest of his generation – which wandered the streets, waiting to avenge tribal blood feuds or to carry out the whims of Imam Yahya’s men.

  It was a dream that was closer to a fantasy than reality, but eventually Abdullah took his first steps into a school that made him afraid, then lonely, then a leader to his classmates, comprised of the sons of kings, petty princelings and families known for their vast wealth. ‘The stuff of legends,’ Abdullah would often say to us as he described for us his first months. The oddness of his never-ending stories always astonished us.

  In Cairo, he felt a strange taste he still yearned for. He was forced to work in a printing shop during the holidays to reduce the burden of the exorbitant fees on his father, who wasn’t a prince. His father was determined that his son should stand in graduation robes next to the sons of kings, and enumerated their names for everyone who asked him about Abdullah and his studies. He clung to this image even if it meant he might be forced to sell his shop, spend all his savings and sell what remained of his large camel herd. Whenever he saw a picture of his son with royalty, he remembered the Indian sailor and blessed him. He would, yet again, narrate the story of how the sailor had come into the shop, of his long conversation with Abdullah, and then of their friendship, which shaped and transformed the young Abdullah into a guide who led his friend through the alleys of Aden, where he had become immersed in dreams of travel and destinations which the sailor talked about simply and thrillingly. All the sons of Abdullah’s tribe came to know the story, right to its very end, and they would often repeat it – an echo of a legend that rectified much in their own fates, which were mostly left to chance.

  At the age of eighteen, in the cellar of the printing shop, Abdullah met Selim Dessouki – a genius, according to Abdullah’s affectionate description. He was a man who always lingered over choosing his words, always smiled, and who guided Abdullah to Marxism and led him by the hand through some of Cairo’s poorest districts. They visited artists and journalists who dreamed of a world ruled by justice, and hung pictures of Lenin and Marx on the wall. Abdullah smuggled the leftist books into his school and spent the night turning their pages, heedless of the danger created simply by having them in his possession. ‘I became a fanatical Marxist,’ he said bitterly as he recalled his frankly expressed atheism, when he believed that the hungry would overrun the world and institute a reign of justice.

  His father’s dreams collapsed when he received a telegram informing him that Abdullah had been arrested on the charge of being a Communist; he was expelled from Cairo after enduring the torture that left scars on his back and in his soul. He fled to Damascus and from there to Moscow with a forged Syrian passport given to him by his comrades. When he came out of Moscow airport, he breathed in deeply. He remembered the Indian sailor, and his father who had searched for him in Cairo, full of regret for the savings spent on a now fugitive son. Abdullah had left the company of princes and their retinues loaded down with gifts, and had gone instead to the mob which smelled of excrement. The school administration ignored its previously star student and now considered him non-existent, effacing his records as if ridding themselves of an oppressive nightmare.

  His father’s feet led him to Selim Dessouki, who tried to reassure him by saying that his son’s future would liberate Yemen from the Imam’s rule. His father was horrified; the coming days would destroy everything he had spent years building. He sold his shop in Aden and returned to his tribal lands, which were bound by strong alliances to the Imam’s men after years of bitter dispute.

  Abdullah spent ten years in Moscow fighting on all battlefronts and, with his few Yemeni comrades, laying the foundations of their impossible dream which they felt drew ever closer. They created a picture of their happy Yemen where children wore resplendent clothes and cheered the non-existent ‘proletarian class’. His nights of sleeplessness were over when he came off the steamer i
n Yemen with his comrades. He examined the faces of the people who were welcoming them but couldn’t find his father or any of his brothers or sisters. He returned to the tribal grounds to search for them, and found his father stretched out in a mud room surrounded by Abdullah’s seven siblings who had grown up and become shepherds and warriors cheering for the glory of the clan. He felt remorseful whenever his father looked at him. The clan told him about the days his father spent in the Imam’s prison because of him, Abdullah, after news of his preparations to oppose the Imam and end his rule had reached Yemen. ‘One of the cruellest things he bore, other than you, was the torture of being related to you.’ Time passed heavily between father and son. Abdullah tried to share breakfast with him, and reassure him that he would be compensated for all his frustrations and the dreams that had turned into a mirage.

  The politician soon became absorbed in his own dreams, dealing with delegates from Damascus, Cairo and Moscow who brought alliances which didn’t last long. Dividing the country became the only solution to stop the massacres and preserve the dreams of two sides that never met: the pan-Arabists and the Communists couldn’t even sit together on one rug to sip green tea, chew gat and take a nap in the afternoon.

  Maryam’s face changed colour when she heard Abdullah’s admission that he had been an infidel who didn’t believe in God. Despite his power as a storyteller, he narrated a strange tale we couldn’t possibly believe: his suffering, his pain, his dreams, his discoveries which opened unnamed doors. He leapt in without hesitation, always risking sudden death. Death was so close to him, he could feel it seeping from his skin.

  This path of torment and doubt brought Abdullah to a state of absolute certainty a few years before he reached forty. He entered his fortieth year cleansed of agonizing questions, never to return to insomnia or addiction to the Russian vodka brought in special boxes from Moscow which bore the signatures of senior Communist Party members. They described him as a brother in arms when he decided, along with his comrades, to divide up Yemen and ‘sit on the throne’ of Aden. His comrades’ dreams of revolution, justice and progress didn’t prevent them from strolling along Aden’s beaches like devoted citizens, accompanied by their wives and girlfriends who had removed their tribal markings, which they considered folklore from a bygone era. They dreamed of the flurry of Moscow snow, where they could wallow without fear of their cousins’ pistols.