* * *
One morning, the army officer who had been a guest at Bakr’s banquet some months earlier performed his prayers carefully at the mosque and recited a sura from the Quran. That night, he asked his servant for a strong cup of coffee, drank it quietly, and left the room of the duty officer to select seventeen young men from the military college – students who were due to graduate shortly. Coolly, he lined them up against the wall and executed them using a machine gun, like someone in a film. Ghosts left their dens to fly over the city; no one knew where they would finally alight. He left the corpses to fall in their own blood, their ribs and heads spattered all over the wall. He threw away his uniform jacket, kept the copper eagle on the pocket of his khaki trousers, and then left with the associates he had selected to guard the doors of the military college during the shooting. They all reached a house on the outskirts of Aleppo, where men welcomed them with cries of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and showered blessings on them for having brought about funerals in the other sect’s houses. No one knew why those students had died after having descended from the mountains with limitless ambition and vitality; no one but me, who celebrated hatred.
* * *
Maryam almost lost the ability to speak when she saw officers and Mukhabarat climbing down from our roof into the courtyard and drawing their weapons, bursting into rooms and cellars in their search for Hossam and Bakr. They crammed us into Radwan’s room, who tried to push them as he cursed them, reminding them of my grandfather’s rank and that only women lived in this house. One of them knocked him over, and I saw him put his boot on Radwan’s neck, cursing my grandfather and his offspring and describing us as whores. More than sixty armed men were hysterically ransacking the rooms, overturning beds, opening wardrobes, smashing padlocks, scattering pictures and papers. They unrolled expensive carpets that smelled of mothballs; they didn’t have time to contemplate their designs with wonder.
I almost exploded with laughter as we were barricaded into Radwan’s room. The soldiers had turned out his boxes and poured all his perfumes on to the floor so that we almost choked. It would have been ironic for us to suffocate on perfume. Radwan cursed God and instantly implored His forgiveness, trying to convince the soldier that he was committing a mortal sin and charging him with immorality. Maryam shook him and asked him to be quiet, afraid that he would lead them to the secret cupboard where she had hidden Hossam’s gun the day he killed the pilot; later, I had begun to hide my papers and pamphlets in there, paying no attention to Zahra’s warnings.
The officer in charge called us into Maryam’s room one after another. I thought, as I looked into his eyes, that hatred would make me calm and composed, heedless of the spittle flying from his mouth as he swore to cut off my hand and gouge out my eye if I didn’t lead him to Bakr and Hossam. Zahra leaned on my chest, forgetting the coolness of our relationship in recent months. I sensed her fear, and thought, ‘They don’t know the secrets of our houses, or of the city’s entrances.’ I was the most composed of them all, as if my hatred were being put to the test. Maryam prayed for mercy on the souls of the victims; she didn’t believe that Bakr was responsible for organizing any of the increasingly frequent assassinations, and clung to the hope that it was a nightmare which would soon be driven away and we would return to the security we had lost.
The military also occupied Bakr’s half-abandoned house. Four soldiers lived there permanently, playing cards in an attempt to drive out their fear as they waited for him to enter their trap. My mother told me that they had grabbed my father by his moustache and soiled his face with their heavy boots, and that he had still not recovered his speech. His skill with fish had deserted him, and he hadn’t slept for three days. I saw him sitting on the ground in filthy clothes, and my brother Humam, afraid, was squeezed into a corner. I talked to my father, but he didn’t hear me. He was deaf, lost; he was looking for meaning in what had happened. They had taken him to their local headquarters three times; there they cursed him, and insulted his manhood; he slept on the bare ground of a damp cell and the aluminium bowl in the middle of the floor gave off a stench of excrement and urine – but he was less upset by this than by the spitting of the guard who, all night, never stopped kicking him and cursing his women. He bore the blows from the four-lashed whips, and the pulling out of his fingernails with pliers. He remembered the men he had tortured in the same way in the days of Abdel Hamid Sarraj, as if he were being liberated from his painful memories and had expiated the sins that had weighed heavily on him for years. I sat beside him like a cat wanting to lick the wounds which he hid even from my mother.
Everyone lost their equilibrium, now that it was so abundantly clear what terrible danger Bakr and Hossam were in. My aunts and my mother were immersed in prayer and recitation of the Quran. They needed Omar, who came to our house. We understood each other by looks alone. Everything entered a dark tunnel and I waited impatiently, afraid that my mother would die of heart failure. My father’s silence tortured me and I pitied him; for a moment, I almost sympathized with the murder victims. I wished that Bakr had remained a carpet trader who boasted to other families about his properties, praising his family like any man who took passing enjoyment from the absurdities of daily life.
Zahra recovered her strength all at once. She helped everyone keep faith that Hossam and Bakr and their group had been chosen by God to bring back Islam, His word and His brilliance; to bring back the story of Bilal Al Habashy, who was tortured by the Quraysh in the desert heat and never yielded to their hell. We acted out a play: Radwan considered himself Bilal Al Habashy and Maryam the Mother of Believers, Khadija Bint Khuwaylid. I loved the role of Fatima Al Zahra and reviewed her sira. I rushed into Hajja Souad’s council and asked to rearrange the prayer circles and redistribute tasks. I reproached a girl who questioned the validity of killing the sons of other sects and parties; she considered them innocent and quoted the Quran, which banned us from killing a soul whose murder God declared unlawful. The girls were astonished at the force of my expressions when I described the murdered as heretics; my voice trembled when I described our brothers as mujahideen and heroes, as if I were making a passionate speech at a ceremony. I volunteered to carry weapons and kill unbelievers, recalling the words Hossam had written in the margins of his chemistry books, and wishing him the martyrdom he wanted with everything he possessed and with all the vigour of youth. I took the largest section of the pamphlets which had to be distributed all over the city, and in which our group announced that we were at the beginning of our battle with the atheist party. People conversed with the pride appropriate for men who were committed to and believed in God. I concealed the pamphlets under my clothes and one of the sisters walked in front of me, watching the winding street as I stuffed pamphlets under the doors of strange houses. I made their inhabitants tremble, and then think that the fear they lived in was nothing but an illusion which could be removed. I wished that I could knock on doors to tell them that I was bearing the good news of the green banners sweeping the country.
It was difficult to see the city from behind the twilight of my black face-covering, and I loved it; Aleppo seemed mysterious, cruel. In my heart I threatened unveiled girls. I imagined myself passing judgement on them; I would spray acid in their faces and disfigure them without mercy, hitting their delicate fingers so they wouldn’t take hold of men’s hands and laugh while dawdling and eating ice-cream. I thought there was no doubt they went to houses with men in order to have sex and desecrate marriage and their own virtue. Officers from the death squad now filled the city. They aroused terror with their powerful bodies and their machine guns, their scorn of death, and their unexpected siege of the old, narrow quarters of the city. Orders came to us daily as we passed through alleys like the breeze. Sometimes we felt like we were flying. We entered every house, and women were praying for our men. They wept when they imagined the danger surrounding us. We gathered donations, we sent letters, we distributed pamphlets, we didn’t see the faces of those outs
iders who in the quiet night came to the city in order to attack the Mukhabarat branches and the regime’s headquarters; most of them fled back to their faraway villages. Every day, we felt that we were approaching our final pilgrimage when the soul of the Prophet would come out to welcome us, blessing our strength, and with his immaculate arms he would surrender to us the keys of Paradise.
Whenever the city’s terror increased over the next few months, so did my certainty that hatred would make me into a hard woman, not the shy girl who used to stand on the doorsill afraid of loneliness and orphanhood. It was now summer, and for two unforgettable months, my vigour reached its pinnacle after a group of ‘our best young men’ were executed, as my uncle Selim described them in a prayer for the absent dead which was held for their souls. We passed on their brave words from the television coverage of their trial, when they explained their cruelty and their hardness. We envied them; they would reach Paradise before us, and their daring aroused the sympathy of the city’s inhabitants as they denounced the government’s corruption. Prayers were held in many different houses for their souls, and cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ were raised at the moment of their execution. Their corpses were buried without mourners. My mother drowned in a whirl of wails and grief when she saw Hossam’s friends, with whom she had broken Ramadan fasts and exchanged jokes, going to the gallows. She was terrified of the same fate for her baby. Nightmares stopped her from sleeping. I saw her age – she was filled with tears and incomprehensible mutterings. She didn’t have time to be happy that I was one of the ten best female students in Aleppo. I would become a doctor, she boasted to her neighbours and cousins, who didn’t dare read our pamphlets as they were already banned from praying at the mosques. One of our oldest cousins cut his hair like the singer from the Beatles and put rings in his ears to avoid the accusation of being Hossam’s relative whenever one of the patrols stopped him. I chose a strange way to celebrate my success: I founded a new prayer circle in the house of a divorced woman who taught girls sewing and embroidery. Its open windows banished suspicion about my frequent comings and goings with ‘my girls’, as I began to call them. We went to work in the morning and returned in the evening like any girls who worked and couldn’t wait to leave so they could wink at shop-owners and laundrymen, while taxi drivers and patrolling soldiers tried to harass them; they would laugh and then run away.
In our house, I wore some white clothes which Safaa had left behind and I asked Radwan to bring some sweets. I arranged the bowls on the table as they all watched me, and Radwan sang an ode in praise of my excellent marks, suitable for a doctor. We ate the sweets and they kissed me and blessed me, and I hid my surprise. I signalled to Maryam to dismiss Radwan after he enthusiastically tried to recall that image when we were women led by a blind man, as if he missed that status now fallen to dust. Zahra served coffee after Radwan had gone to his room and I stood in the basin of the stone pool, arms open, and announced my desire to die a martyr. ‘I want martyrdom. I am an emira.’ I repeated it a few times: ‘I am an emira now.’ I stepped down and removed my underclothes as they looked at me. I walked to my room then turned towards them; there was bewilderment in their eyes. Before I left, I seemed to see them bowing as if in greeting to a princess.
TWO
Embalmed Butterflies
IT WAS butterflies that saved Marwa as she waited for Safaa, who never came. She missed Safaa especially on the nights when the death squad fell from the sky on to our plants (which occurred on an almost daily basis), showing off the skull emblems on their chests. They were disturbed by our contempt for them, for attacking a house full of women watched over by a blind man and lying in wait for the wanted men who had evaporated into the sky over the city. They tore up the rose bushes, which were Marwa’s favourite flowers; like a madwoman, she ran from room to room, choked with tears and looking for somewhere slimy to shelter in, like a large snail.
The first butterfly she caught had wings of mottled brown and honey. It reminded her of the visit to the hammam she had made before her wedding when women smothered her in bilun, henna and perfumed soap, threaded her body hair, and ran their hands over her skin to ensure its softness. She adored the lightness with which the butterfly flew, and she embalmed it with Radwan’s help; he loved the idea and laughed when she described its faded eyes and its mouth, which she likened to Safaa’s small mouth. She kissed it like a lover who could never forget that powerful pressure of the other’s lips which inflamed the pores. The insect’s body became like that of a horse which, having received a fatal blow, cranes its neck to prevent its soul from escaping only to subside, cold, in submission to death.
Maryam disapproved of pinning butterflies to wooden boards. The sight of their wings affixed and outstretched in surrender impelled us to think about death, which had become as commonplace as a crate of rotten peaches flung out on to the pavement. It had lost its dignity and been turned into a banal tale told by the storytellers, whose zeal revived in order to narrate new stories about death squads and military divisions moving their tanks from other battlefronts to surround Aleppo. The soldiers’ eyes were fearful and wandering; they felt that they were facing a pointless death because of the Party members who had fled to their homes, and certain college students who boasted of their pistols and their camouflage uniforms, after returning from camps hastily convened to train them up as paratroopers. The most indolent of them appropriated the best places in the universities, which had turned into barracks and areas for the military parades carried out by adolescent Party members; they didn’t much care about the resignations of their respected professors, whose presence had become undesirable.
Most of the professors had fled and the rest of them closed their doors in the face of the oncoming plague, content to stare at their living-room floors and remember their glorious past which, it became clear, would never return. They dispersed in the streets between the tanks and the soldiers which had inherited the city they loved, trying to convince the fighters to listen to them and searching for one of their friends, a professor of English poetry who was about seventy years old. He couldn’t bear to see one of his grandsons strutting around in his uniform like a turkey and kicking at his volumes of Shakespeare. He took down his grandfather’s picture of T. S. Eliot and in its place he hung a photo of the commander of the death squad raising his fist in the air like a highwayman. In the meantime, his other grandson, who loved chemistry and had been predicted a dazzling future, wrapped belts of explosives around his hips and went out to hunt for prey. The poetry professor searched for his grandsons in various insalubrious places. He would leave his house at six in the morning, declaiming the poetry of Ezra Pound and snippets of Oedipus’ story, a refugee from the smarter parts of the city. He aroused the pity of the policemen at the bus station where he spent the night among cardboard boxes. Whenever his students passed by, they sighed over the lost days of his brilliance when he had been the reason for their love of Shakespeare’s language, whose vowels, he taught them, had been engineered for maximum musicality. He used to quote fondly from Latin texts which had been overlooked in Cambridge libraries, and he never forgot the smell which rose from their antique yellow pages – the same shade of yellow as the butterfly Marwa caught in the pistachio fields. She loved its lassitude and assigned it a central place among the specially prepared wooden boxes resembling coffins. She embalmed it in welcome and named it the Queen, and warned Radwan not to touch it or the place she had awarded it.
Marwa became like a stranger to us, someone we hardly knew. Her oppressive placidity and cold dignity suddenly turned into a feverish playfulness and a desire for adventure. She went with Radwan to nearby streets, gardens and fields, looking for butterflies. She neglected her appearance and abandoned our family tradition of women who spoke slowly and calmly. Like a peasant, she started using profane words and cursed without guilt or shame. We watched her every day as she astonished us further. Maryam hid her dread of a scandal which no one could save us from other than Safaa, who
she knew had turned into an obedient woman without crazy dreams.
I didn’t care about Marwa. I was convinced that we would have time enough in the future to rejoice over the mundane details of everyday life, when our voices and laughter would resound throughout the high-ceilinged rooms. I grumbled over Maryam’s repeated requests to me to tell Bakr that Marwa had gone mad and that he had to intervene to save her. She believed that I could get word to the many hideouts that had made his disappearance into a legend woven throughout Aleppo. He became a terrifying ghost embedded in the wind, capable at any time of reappearing to walk the streets and greet his multitude of supporters. I nearly had a nervous breakdown because of the ceaseless demands from the district to me as its emira; they wanted me to organize yet more girls to make clothes, distribute pamphlets and gather donations. Other girls offered to blow themselves up in front of death squad officers, in revenge for the treatment of seven corpses of our brothers killed after a four-hour battle – Aleppo’s inhabitants couldn’t sleep, terrified by the scenes of soldiers’ cars dragging bodies bound up with iron chains. They turned their eyes away from the cruelty that made Alya weep. She swore on the Quran that she couldn’t bear it any longer; she wanted martyrdom and vengeance on behalf of those eyes which would sleep again one day.
In Praise of Hatred Page 13