In Praise of Hatred

by Khaled Khalifa

  My monthly cycle saved me from my concerns. It came on suddenly and heavily, two days before it was due. Maryam was understanding and tolerated my nerves when I insisted on going out early that morning. I missed Hajja Souad, and I needed her strength. On my way to her house I tried to appease my fear, and I bought mamounia and warm bread like a widow buying breakfast for her children. I was astonished by Hajja Souad’s pale face and anxiety; she told me that we had lost more than ten mujahideen the previous day. The soldiers had raided a house in Hamidiyya and killed four men from the Abi Nour cell as they were preparing to leave it, having already accidentally revealed their hiding place in the Sukry quarter. They killed three of our brothers as well as destroying the entire arms cache behind the copper market. I felt terrified; she told me the names of the victims and I heard only some of them, sensing that she hadn’t told me everything. I asked her directly about Hossam and Bakr, so she told me, ‘Hossam was wounded and arrested.’ I was dizzy and collapsed on the sofa. I felt like my heart had stopped beating. Just imagining the brutal tortures that would be visited upon his skinny body drove me mad. I was so weak that a breath of wind might topple me, and I barely heard Hajja Souad’s voice demanding that I pull myself together and pray for him, and for the thousands of others squeezed into the desert jail and the putrid cellars of the Mukhabarat, oppressed by the smells of blood and excrement and anticipating a death already half-realized. She warned me about my thoughtlessness and weakness. I no longer needed to listen to anything; I said to myself I needed silence, and I was silent.

  * * *

  Marwa went out to meet Nadhir Mansoury, the death squad officer, and I didn’t care. Maryam was bewildered; she slapped her palms against her knees as if she expected a catastrophe. She brought Selim over and sprayed spittle and harsh words into Marwa’s face, saying she would destroy the family’s reputation. Selim prayed with his misbaha of 999 beads and asked God’s forgiveness without raising his eyes to our faces, contenting himself with repeating, ‘Do not throw away your virtue.’ Marwa’s face was rigid. Coldly she said, ‘I love him.’ Everything collapsed; our dreams fluttered apart like wisps of straw. We were as silent as if we were dead. We felt the need for a man to lead us by the hand to safety; we no longer knew who might throw us a lifeline to save us from disappearing.

  * * *

  Omar had by now settled in Beirut. He could no longer bear the lot of being related to Bakr, whose family name had thrown suspicion on his relatives and exacted a cruel price. Selim’s son Jalal, who was performing his compulsory military service, had his nails pulled out under interrogation and was transferred to a division close to the airport out in the desert, where scorpions climbed the tent pegs and colonized empty gun barrels. The officer in charge was half-mad and thought he was Stalin. He brought the soldiers out of their tents and asked them to lay a railway through the desert all the way to Berlin, and then laughed hysterically when he saw them looking at each other and beginning to pile up the few stones they had found on the edge of the camp when he had ordered them to look for truffles. On that occasion, they had spent three days scrutinizing the desert, rummaging for plants and looking for that delicious fruit which was ripened by thunder and grew freely in the earth – anyone who didn’t find a truffle had his backpack filled with stones. The commander gathered up these truffles and sold them in the souk Al Hal, along with the soldiers’ leave papers. Patience was the only thing that prevented them from killing him and fleeing across the border into Iraq.

  After six months, Jalal returned on a short leave, utterly withered and speaking in fragments rather than fully formed sentences. He wept in his mother’s arms as he described to her how the commander had made them walk over thorns because their voices were too weak in singing the praises of the Party. In the scorching summer heat, he smeared their bodies with jam and left them stretched out beneath the sun, enjoying how they were burning and fainting; he was taking revenge in his own special way on the treachery of those who had banished him to this barren camp after an honourable military career.

  Selim advised Jalal to be patient. He didn’t join him in cursing Bakr, but went to the corner of his room which he prepared for a meeting with the other dervishes, even though they no longer came to recite dhikr, afraid of being accused of terrorism. They had dispersed and now chanted dhikr on their own, after one of the most important officers from the death squad had plucked out their imam’s beard hair by hair, all the while reminding him that they wouldn’t kill him so that he would know their mercy. Most of the dervishes shaved off their beards and their faces were no longer blessed with rays of divine light.

  Jalal made a decision and returned to the camp’s commander laden with alcohol. His new behaviour seemed odd at first, but before long all was settled in the colonel’s mind; Jalal told him about the fugitive Omar, the originator of many famous scandals in Aleppo, while cursing Bakr and his organization; he now abstained from the prayer he had earlier been practising in secret. Jalal admitted to himself that the taste of alcohol made the camp’s nights of hard labour seem almost delightful. He remembered Omar’s face and swore that he would relive his uncle’s life, and outdo him in shamelessness. He reassessed his life, family and religion. He withdrew from his tent mates and grew closer to the colonel, who appointed him as his orderly. Jalal prepared the colonel’s food himself, drawing on his recollections of dishes his mother excelled at, and discovered a new outdoor hobby. He turned a deaf ear the first time his friends told him about the rumours of a sexual relationship between himself and the colonel, describing his soft moans and his position in the colonel’s embrace. No one would listen to his complaints after he had been granted several spells of leave so he could bring back from Aleppo bags of pistachios, crates of excellent whisky, carpets and cured meats. He dredged up memories of his studies of the city’s markets, where he had been raised after leaving school at the age of thirteen in order to learn pragmatism and how to bow before the wind. Jalal thought that his fate was dependent on his leaving military service neither deranged nor resentful towards his future partners, of whom the colonel would be the most important. He began to tell him his story as if they were friends, on the rainy winter nights when silence settled over the camp so it seemed like the grave.

  * * *

  All night, I tried to rid myself of the image of Hossam at their hands, like a duckling caught in the fangs of a hungry leopard. I thought that his confession might lead to disasters for the organization that no one had yet imagined. Marwa stayed alone in the courtyard despite the biting cold, sitting on the cane chair as if waiting for her lover or considering her fate. Maryam sternly asked Radwan to watch the door, which she locked. She placed the key in her breast pocket, so she could sleep and be assured that the high walls and locked door would prevent Marwa from fleeing to him, despite Zahra’s requests to leave Marwa to her, her night-time companion and confidante. Zahra nodded off and Marwa didn’t come to bed. In the morning, we found her asleep on the abandoned cotton ottoman beside her butterflies, with her arms wrapped around herself. Her fingers were blue from cold. Radwan refused to leave his room, avoiding our anger and sudden agitation. To his blind companions, he described us as crazy women who had lost all desire to laugh. He recalled the insulting severity of my grandmother and mocked Maryam, imitating her until she seemed like a broken-jointed puppet at the hands of spoiled children. Maryam muttered angrily; she had no sympathy for Marwa, frozen with cold.

  Quietly, over the morning coffee, I told them that Hossam had been arrested. I allowed myself no opportunity to see the terror in their eyes; I left for college, where studies had been suspended for the funeral of Dr Abdel Karim Daly, considered a martyr. I walked in the funeral procession thirsting for revenge, even though his life did not really warrant it. I urgently needed to regain my hatred in the midst of these hordes who clamoured for our blood as they followed behind the coffin carried on the shoulders of students with flushed faces. They cursed the murder of the professor wh
o had left a pleasant impression on everyone he met. I tried to find a justification for his death and convince myself of our group’s statements, although I felt no compassion for him. The students insisted on his funeral cortege marching to the gates of Aleppo, and they climbed up on to both lanes of the motorway; I could see his colleagues weeping bitterly for him. Dr Daly was known for his biting speeches attacking the authorities and the death squad in particular, which he categorized as a Nazi sectarian faction. He described our group in the same terms, and didn’t conceal his resentment at the cruelty with which the city was treated by all sides.

  He had studied in Aleppo’s university at the end of the sixties, when he had arrived from his nearby mountain village and rented a cheap room in the Siryaan district. With three fellow students, he gained a distinguished reputation that tempted some Parisian scientists to take up their never-ending projects and lure them to France. Nevertheless, he preferred to return to his city with his Aleppan friend, Adham. They left their companions at work in secret Parisian laboratories, where they could become French, lisp their ‘r’s and write to their friends who had returned to Aleppo, deriding their love for the city and their stupid patriotism.

  In silence, Dr Daly stoically bore the obstructions to his scientific projects, and the pressure exerted on him to affiliate himself to the Party. His initial refusals turned to ridicule. When Aleppo began to drown in a fever of murder he announced his position publicly in front of his students, whom he spurred on to reject the tyranny of both sides, attacking the recklessness of students of the Youth Wing of the ruling Party. The university administration was forced to compromise and made exceptions for his lectures; when he refused to allow paratrooper students to enter the lecture hall dressed in military uniform and carrying weapons, they didn’t dare oppose him. He failed to hand over a student of his who was wanted for being leftist and threw the Mukhabarat out of the hall, which allowed the student to escape through a window. This tale reached near-legendary status in the university, and spread throughout the city after he turned down the protection offered to him by a Mukhabarat officer. He refused to leave the house he rented in Bab Al Hadid, a district famous for its bigotry.

  I said I needed to restrain my sympathy; hatred was our great weapon to make the majority defend their sect against the ruling minority, even though there were many officials belonging to this majority among those who had built the regime, and their hands were equally stained with blood and corruption. I didn’t approach the car on which the bier was placed. The students wept for the dead man as a father, brother and friend, recalling the wonder of his lectures which never lacked joy or freedom. He supported the lifting of the veil and rejected the sectarianism that he said was the decay that would lead to the suffocation of our souls. He praised physics which he loved and which, in his opinion, would guide us to the scientific thinking of which we were in need. It was widely known that he could be found with his students in theatres and cinemas, and after their graduation he maintained friendships with many of them. He received letters from all over the world, quoting him in matters of love or scientific research, together with wedding invitations.

  I looked at the photograph his students raised over the bier and contemplated his honey-coloured eyes. I rationed my glances so as not to fall into ardent love with yet another dead man whom I considered my enemy. I moved away from the crowd and walked on my own, weeping for Hossam and afraid of my fate. I went back to the house where my prayer circle met and found it still shut up; I was confused and quickly went on my way, afraid of revealing its purpose. I didn’t dare use my key as someone had closed the blinds – a pre-arranged signal of danger and a warning not to approach. I later said to Hajja Souad that I wanted to know the fate of that house, but she didn’t answer me. She ordered me to stay away from any activity or meeting for the time being, and relayed Bakr’s desire that I keep away from the organization, and that I travel to Beirut to be near my mother who had collapsed after seeing Hossam in a dream, strung up from a gallows and left dangling. I then found out that Hajja Souad had misled me; when she told me that my brother had been arrested, she hadn’t made it clear that this was only two days after my last meeting with him; so Hossam had been in custody much longer than I had realized. With horror, the inhabitants of the quarter of Bab Al Ahr related that four young men had prepared an ambush for the car of a senior officer in the death squad, who sometimes visited a friend in Aleppo. Their carelessness in an area they considered to be entirely loyal to them made rounding them up in the forest an easy affair. Hossam at first escaped across some roofs to the cemetery at Bab Al Hadid, but his meagre ammunition ran out after two hours and he was captured after being wounded in the chest and losing consciousness.

  I immediately ran to the cemetery which was situated nearby, looking for spots of his blood which, to me, formed mountains out of the dust. I sat at the graves of strangers as the guard described Hossam’s terror and his attempts to kill himself so he wouldn’t fall into the soldiers’ clutches, and he pointed out to me where a headstone had been chipped by a bullet close to where Hossam was captured. His blood was scattered all over one fragment; I carried it away with me as a closely guarded icon and put it on my table. I surrounded it with the reverence it deserved and everyone was wary of touching it, even without being informed that Hossam’s blood was in our house.

  Hossam lay handcuffed to a bed in the military hospital. He was guarded by four members of the Mukhabarat who kept their fingers on their triggers. He tried to kill himself again but was prevented by the doctors, who then kept him heavily sedated for seven days. His companions couldn’t reach his isolated room and they grew desperate after he was transferred to a building of the military Mukhabarat where he would be exposed to the whips and the dread of brutal torture – they would try to make him confess and reveal secrets about Bakr, arms caches, and the rebel leadership, who appeared in fuzzy pictures to be like birds, or moles digging into the earth to hide away despite their blindness.

  * * *

  The festivals of Christmas 1981 came and went. Aleppo’s Christians rang their church bells timidly and prayed silently. Aleppo became a funeral city; the smell of death had spread into every corner. There was a curfew at night and the city was under siege. No one was allowed to enter or leave for a fortnight, which was long enough to search all its houses. No drawer was left unopened, their secrets confiscated by the forty thousand troops of the death squad and the special forces, together with the military divisions that surrounded the city on all sides; the inhabitants of this fortress grew weary of the blockade imposed by the President’s unwelcome envoys. Danger drew ever nearer to the President himself, and his face on television seemed tired. He made passionate speeches every day about his grief, and asked his military leaders to resolve the conflict which no one had thought would be this acrimonious. They were terrified when other cities were set alight; the small town of Hama became an unexpected battlefield. It dreamed of recovering the leadership of the country for our sect, with the Quran raised above the sword. Its caves and old houses, its gardens and river banks were all under siege. Hama received its allocation of the dead, who would no longer walk through the forests, steppes and mountains during summer holidays.

  I told myself that the siege of our city was an opportunity to reassess our house, to contemplate my surroundings. I started to become lazy and slept until the afternoon. I thought of my mother from whom we had decided to conceal Hossam’s arrest. The soldiers searched our house three times more. On one occasion, they even insisted on opening the jars of pickles and left behind them a strong smell of vinegar, which lingered as we returned to our isolation as sad, lonely women who had lost all sense of security and pleasure in life. Our movements through the courtyard were detached, and seemed to herald even greater disasters. The mere anticipation oppressed our spirits and made us caress our wrecked bodies, which had relinquished escape, in the bathroom among the foam of the perfumed soap now grown dry and leathery. O
ne day I said to Zahra that we had become hideous but she didn’t reply, still waiting for her mother who had postponed her trip. Maryam weighed and sifted lentils, and for the umpteenth time asked Radwan to bring up another sack from the cellar store. She would weigh them and watch Marwa sitting silently in front of her butterflies.

  I went out on the tenth day of the siege and it was as if I didn’t know Aleppo. The sound of guns and mortars was uninterrupted at night, and the shelling had devastated Bab Al Nasr, Bab Al Hadid and Jalloum. I saw Hajja Souad, who urged me to go abroad and asked me to stop visiting her; things were not as they should have been. The final battle, which we had all been waiting for eagerly, had panicked our leadership and our militia was once more riven by internal conflict. I continued on my way to the college (closed since the beginning of the siege) and wondered about the fate of the corpses there – and of the frogs and laboratory rats smothered in chloroform and awaiting dissection; I thought about that sad lizard and how my hands trembled as I sliced open its stomach to take out its intestines and extinguish its life for ever. I looked for the blood that covered my recent dreams, in which Hossam came to me carrying his shroud, laughing as he waved it. I woke up afraid, took out his books and kissed them over and over again. I became absorbed in his neat handwriting and his powerful expressions in praise of the martyrs who had not been washed before their funerals so that their blood could be witnessed by the mourners.

  The dream kept returning, and my terror increased in proportion to the impossibility of knowing Hossam’s fate. The dream grew longer: now Hossam was included in a host of people, most of whom I recognized, despite their flat and featureless faces. They muttered an incomprehensible song resembling an old Syriac hymn. Any meaning in my dreams died, and they became riddles I couldn’t master. The swallows and meadows fled, and the siege of Aleppo penetrated our very skin; we could smell the soldiers as we sat beside the silent fountains and exchanged glances. We all tried to recreate dim memories, but our fear scattered them and transformed us into lizard-like beings. Feigning bravery, I left Maryam’s room to enjoy the moonlight which emerged from behind the gloomy clouds, indifferent to the silent city and nightly curfew, which a poet known for his homosexual tendencies compared to a paradise buried alive.