In Praise of Hatred

by Khaled Khalifa

  The poet had insisted on celebrating his sixtieth birthday on the steps of the Citadel with his friends and his lover, whom he had picked up one day at the warehouse where he was working as a porter, and publicly serenaded him with an ode full of powerful feeling. He was reviled by the city whose pain he had immortalized in a long nashid written in kamil metre, in imitation of the mu’allaqat. He prefaced it with a historical description, mourned the days of the Hamdanid dynasty, and dwelled on a description of his beloved’s broad shoulders and virility. He likened the death squads to vampires and the city to the neck of a beautiful youth fleeing the court of Haroun Al Rashid in diaphanous Abbasid clothing. The poet was most prominent and generous in gratifying his lover, who was made to forget bowls of lentil soup and being groped by men who winked at him coarsely; he revelled in a spacious house with blue windows, relaxing like a husband on a holiday from work. Lines from the ode were spread among the people, who never again hurled stones at the poet, as they had done whenever he walked in an elegant and effeminate manner past the coffee houses in Bab Al Faraj. The coffee-house patrons would wait for hours for the waiters from nearby restaurants to bring them plates of rancid meat, and they would scold them in loud voices which were silenced as soon as the foot patrols went past, the soldiers scrutinizing everyone, their fingers on their triggers in fear.

  I ignored Marwa who braided her hair with colourful butterflies, jeered at modest head coverings, smoked openly, and sat in her room beside the fountain watching the sky, expecting it to rain with butterflies like the ones covered with glass and hung on the cellar wall. They cast a shadow over her bed, which she had moved to the damp corner beside the sacks of okra, beans and dried tomatoes. Her tears dampened her woollen pillow, wrapped carefully in a case which she had embroidered in the Yazidi style.

  Marwa only smiled around Zahra, who was absorbed in her two children. They lay on the bed and ate seeds fried in spices. I wished that I could approach them and share in the chatting I missed so much. My separation from the girls in my group had increased my isolation and made me feel that my emotions were worthless. I was afraid of sleeping alone but I didn’t want to shatter my image of being a strong mujahida who didn’t care for the trivialities of life which were unbecoming to me. Hossam was present in every detail of our life: Maryam mourned him, and Marwa and Zahra wept. My tears remained concealed in my heart only to gush out once I was in my bed. I lost all desire to draw my dreams, along with many other things that used to give me happiness, such as reading and sympathizing with Radwan whenever I sensed he felt lonely and repented of acting as guardian to women who didn’t value a man possessed of strange talents and filled with joy.

  * * *

  I looked for Hajja Souad and found her after three days, trembling with fear as she sat in her prayer clothes. In February, news came from Hama that the rebellion had begun to sow fear that the small town would be utterly destroyed and its inhabitants brutally murdered. The battle approached its end, but we believed that our young men would be plunged in it for years to come, and that few families would be able to escape to the plains. The bodies of the victims were lined up in the streets of Hama but no one could be found to bury them. The presence of our militia on whom the desperate muezzins called was a confirmation of the show-down everyone had been waiting for. Trained fighters mixed with civilians who brought weapons out from abandoned wells and other hiding places to defend their lives against the insane bullets whose source no one knew any more. Thousands of soldiers read the Sura Fatiha for their souls and rushed into the small city whose narrow streets were besieged by hundreds of tanks; not even a bird could escape. Future generations would narrate the madness which could have been avoided, thus granting the chance of a life to the children who had loved jumping into the Orontes River from the wooden waterwheels. The ceaseless grinding of the waterwheels was the only reality; a voice of constant yearning, of a grief whose cause no one inquired about any more. Bereaved mothers swore they would never take off their black clothes; they would remain in perpetual mourning for the dead. Many of them ripped their clothes in a state of delirium and went out into the streets half-naked, mourning for the city of Hama and their sons with elegiac ritha which would ‘make rocks weep’, as Khadija Al Mufti told us. A member of the Hama branch of our organization, she had been able to flee with the assistance of a senior paratrooper, who later wept and trampled on his military insignia before his companions killed him; they were afraid that he would kill them at night when they returned from restocking their ammunition. Hajja Souad and I were silent as we listened to Khadija. We waited for her crying to abate, as our words of consolation couldn’t halt it. When she finally stopped, she announced she was withdrawing from the organization. In the morning, she gathered her few clothes in a bundle and disappeared like a pinch of salt thrown into a torrential river.

  Marwa wasn’t impressed by my zeal to burn down all the houses belonging to the other sect. She laughed derisively and left the house without turning around to hear Maryam’s pleas. Maryam had lost control, even over the keys. She tried to convince Radwan to guard Marwa, but then gave up and sat on the step to her room. She was silent, like an unburied mummy displayed in a glass case and reeking of embalming fluid. Marwa returned in the evening, glowing and loudly repeating a section of the song ‘You, Who Keep Me Awake’ by Um Kulthoum. She closed the door to the cellar, turned off the light, and slept beside her butterflies. Zahra convinced Maryam to wait till the morning before tackling Marwa. But the next day, Marwa went out again, leaving her door open behind her and her bed in disarray. After the evening prayer, she sat on the sofa and said quietly that she had seen her lover and they were getting married. Then she rose, turned to us, and said, ‘I am leaving the refuge of Heaven. I love Hell.’

  We were left reeling. This calamity was even greater than that borne by weak women when their men became corpses; it wasn’t very important whether they were martyrs, or just cadavers with flies swarming around their faces. For the entire night, Zahra spoke quietly with Marwa, who insisted on describing the smell of her lover’s hands and chest and, with even greater courage, lauding his virility. The affair had returned something to her body that she thought she had forgotten for ever, and now she was concerned with restoring grace to a body which had regained its vitality. Her movements in the courtyard became sensuous and coy. She walked coquettishly and looked several times at her watch as if a rendezvous were imminent. She kept going out unexpectedly, in total disregard for our fear or our reputation. The officer, Nadhir Mansoury, was waiting for her in front of the gate to the Bab Al Hadid district, and she boldly got into his car to set off for an unknown house in which a bed had been hastily prepared so they could pass a short time in fleeting pleasure.

  Zahra had been expecting this calamity and surrendered to it silently. She distracted us all by talking about her mother’s visit, which had been postponed yet again. Maryam sought help from our absent men, and her anger exploded the moment Marwa came back, shameless, half-drunk, and singing like a cheap bar-girl. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the floor. She removed her long coat and her head covering, and stood only in her flimsy dress which showed off all her features: breasts with nipples like cherry stones, rounded posterior, soft stomach, long legs hairless and gleaming – like a dancer showing off a licentiousness which bewildered us. I felt that everything was breaking down; I hated my backside; I wanted to leave this void, this vacuum within the storm, a feeling enhanced by a torrential downpour that night.

  I thought of writing to Bakr but guessed that he might be dead or in custody, and that if he was alive he would care only about hanging on to his life. (Thousands of young men had been arrested: not only members of the organization and sympathizers, but also people with no discernible relationship to them. New prisons had opened and we were regarded with suspicion; a relationship with us might cost someone their life.) Zahra intervened harshly. She slapped Marwa, then led her to her room where she embraced her
and let her cry on her chest dramatically as if both women were actresses in a movie. She listened to Marwa’s fears as she repeated that she loved him, and even if she were to be slaughtered she couldn’t be parted from him.

  That night Maryam couldn’t sleep and read the Sura Yusuf ten times. She performed the dawn prayer five times, immersed in a strange calm. She didn’t get up to welcome the three young men she saw entering behind Radwan; they checked the time, then asked to speak to Maryam alone. After a short conversation she led them to Marwa, who hadn’t woken up yet, and asked Zahra not to interfere. She knew they had been dispatched by Bakr to halt this farce which had almost destroyed our reputation. Two of the young men carried Marwa and the third stood beside the door and drew his weapon. With swift movements, they gagged her and attached her to the leg of the cast-iron bed on which my grandmother as a married woman had first enjoyed the delights of passion, before she exchanged it for a brass bed; Maryam had inherited it and marvelled at the skilful moulding of plants and the incantation ‘Ma Sha’ Allah’ in Kufic script.

  Marwa was chained to the leg of the bed by her ankles. She cursed her assailants and wept when one of them informed her that her lover, Nadhir Mansoury, had been assassinated that morning. They added that Bakr had sworn to kill anyone who attempted to free her with a thousand bullets. After one of them kissed the satisfied Maryam’s hand, they made a swift exit and left Marwa to rattle her chains in fury. Bakr had designed them so she could reach the bathroom to wash and attend to her needs, and sit beside the window like a prisoner. It occurred to me that she couldn’t see the moon from her small window, overshadowed as it was by the terrace roof which stretched along the top of the wall. The lemon tree, which we no longer expected to bear fruit for us, revealed the flightiness of happiness, which we had discovered was just a delusion. We couldn’t believe that what had just happened could earlier have been imagined, even in our wildest dreams.

  Deep down, we each envied Safaa for escaping the depression of our house, which had begun to resemble a vial of vinegar. Marwa had resisted and I believed she would go on to smash her iron chains, but then she suddenly subsided like a lioness whose wildness has been tamed and which has now grown used to being a child’s plaything in the zoo. She refused to speak to Maryam or even respond to her morning greetings. We became non-existent for her, and I felt her contemptuous looks penetrate my body like burning arrows, confusing me as I tried to enter the circle of her dreams.

  The bereaved opened the city gates three days later and, the siege being lifted, the tanks withdrew to the pistachio fields. There was grief and fear in the eyes of people who had grown used to bowing their heads, cringing like chickens who cared only about returning safely to their coop at night. The bullets’ randomness had made Aleppo’s men hollow, bereft of dreams. Our organization lost internal cohesion. The leadership’s meetings were brief, rushed and inconclusive; accusations were exchanged and no one could look into his companions’ eyes with satisfaction, as they had just a year before when they confidently approached the steps of the Republican Palace.

  * * *

  Thousands of corpses perfumed Hama’s air, saturated with the smell of the river. The lists of countless detainees which were thrown on to the table in meetings were deeply frustrating for our leaders. We heard that at one meeting Bakr stood up and announced his resignation from the leadership – and he immediately left for Jordan on a false passport, and from there to London, where he arrived at night in the middle of fog. He wanted to walk to London Bridge and cry into the River Thames. Like any man, he didn’t want to look back so he wouldn’t have to remember the hundreds of young men who had sworn on the Quran and left to seek out paths to Paradise and certain death.

  * * *

  Marwa had missed her butterflies and calmly drew them in her room. Anyone seeing her might have thought that she loved her bonds as she gleefully pestered Maryam to ask Radwan to bring her some acrylic paints. She started to draw on her shackles and colour them in, and Zahra laughed at her commentary on her pictures. They made me miss my old self, when I didn’t praise hatred and drew my dreams with only childlike malice. When Marwa came near me, I sat beside her and told her how beautiful her lips and butterflies were, and how much I missed my brothers, like any obedient girl sympathetic to her plight. I tried to break her chains, but I couldn’t. Marwa was indifferent, as if she couldn’t hear me. She finished painting a sunflower on one ankle fetter, which was resplendent in dark yellow with clumsy details like the unintentional smears of a child’s drawing.

  After Hajja Souad disappeared and the existence of our cell was discovered, I began to look around me in fear whenever I walked in the streets. I approached Hana one day when I saw her outside the chemistry lab, which had now reopened, and she ignored me completely, as if saying, ‘Get away from me. I don’t know you.’ She found me later, and told me that Alya had been arrested and they were still looking for Hajja Souad. I felt the weight of handcuffs settling around my wrists; I couldn’t contact anyone to take a letter to Bakr. I was alone. I would leave the house in the morning and walk in the streets, draped in black, rejected; like a fish striving for the shore and which, having reached it, can no longer return to the safety and care of the sea. I reproached myself for disdaining the smell of the white coat that had delighted my mother and aunts when I put it on for the first time and came out of my room, spreading my arms in the guise of a doctor. I took my mother’s wrist in order to take her pulse in exaggeratedly coquettish movements which made them all laugh. We had needed my white coat, so we could believe that the future would not be as black as our clothes.

  Everyone was preoccupied with Wasal, who had finally arrived in Aleppo. Zahra hugged her warmly, a daughter in need of her contrite mother. Wasal wore a long, modest dress and a hijab. She was elegant and earnest in her penitence and feverish efforts to get to Mecca. Maryam marked her arrival with gloom initially, and then with increasing enthusiasm. The soul returned to our house along with movement and laughter, and cooking aromas wafted from the kitchen. Marwa’s chains incensed Wasal; she asked for her forgiveness, which no one else had, not even Omar who dropped in like a passer-by before quickly returning to Beirut, and from there to other countries. We lost track of him as he became afraid of death. He closed the family shops, and informed us that back in Beirut my father was immersed in alcohol, fishing and silence.

  Wasal was proud of Zahra; of her strength, of her deep faith that it was God who had calmed her heart and expelled the fear and night terrors from her life. The two women were at ease as they sat together, scolding and laughing and going to the markets with Maryam and Radwan, ignoring my presence and my requests not to let a dissolute woman enter our home. Marwa shouted at me to fear God and turn my gaze inwards to see the ugliness inside me. That night I felt like I was full of decay; I needed to sit by myself and cry over my broken image as a girl who had once loved life and tolerance. Maryam heard my whimpers and embraced me like a mother, and I thought of how much I needed compassion. She took me the next day to the hammam, and we left Marwa fettered without any feeling of guilt or pity; she had inquired after Nadhir from the death squad soldiers who were still periodically raiding our house, overturning our things and moving around like passengers at an abandoned train station. Marwa smiled when they told her that Nadhir hadn’t died, nor were his wounds serious. She asked them to convey the message to him that she was chained up because of their love. The young officer was enthusiastic about this, astonished by the woman surrounded by embalmed butterflies and attached to a heavy cast-iron bed which even an ox couldn’t move. Two days later, he returned with his soldiers and went directly to Marwa’s room. He gave her a sealed letter and left without repeating his usual idiotic questions about the contents of the abandoned well, which had been sealed with a metal cover to prevent scorpions and snakes crawling out of it. He looked at her respectfully and greeted her with the consideration due to the wife of a superior officer. We couldn’t take the letter off
her; only Zahra knew everything and she kept her friend’s secrets, ignoring Maryam’s questioning and responding enthusiastically to the suggestion we take Wasal to the hammam.

  For the first time I knew what it might be like to be considered a fallen woman – women crossed in front of our compartment to spy on Wasal’s withered breasts, imagining what they had looked like forty years earlier when they were like fruits of Paradise. Wasal rubbed down Maryam’s body with the experience of a woman who had encountered many men and who had moaned in pleasure at their hands. Maryam’s dead body woke up, and she was dreamy, as if recalling the son of the Samarkandi and desiring him. She imagined his hands and his chest and regretted a wasted youth. The hot water and the smell of the cavernous hall made Wasal recall her story; she recited some English obscenities, which I understood. I smiled in an attempt to attract her attention and get closer to Zahra again, who didn’t comment on the few spots, boils almost, scattered over my body. They stopped me from undressing in front of the other women in fear of their ridicule, despite my firm breasts whose full bloom I restricted in a bra made of a rough, coarse material which was more suitable for an old woman.

  We were astonished by our liberality and avoided exchanging looks so we wouldn’t discover that our relaxation was fleeting: it would ruin our deliberately excessive laughter. We tried to forget the nightmares and recall the glories, and engage with the trivialities of life – we hadn’t realized at the time how necessary these were to help us carry on. Our career as the women led by the blind every Thursday evening was now impossible; undertaking this visit to the baths at all was a cause for celebration. Gathering in a circle around the dinner table every Friday became a miracle whose future recurrence we couldn’t count on, any more than on a night’s restful sleep in our own beds. I left our compartment in the hammam, looking for the footsteps of the child I had been and the galleries in which she had got lost.