In Praise of Hatred

by Khaled Khalifa

  The prince’s eyes were fixed on me, revolving angrily in their sockets as if looking for the reason for me to utter such an accusation, unsuited as it was for a small prayer meeting of girls who should think only of implementing accepted teachings, of their faith in the magic of their leaders, and of their absolute trust in them. The prince interrupted me harshly to say that it wasn’t any business of mine to disclose the group’s secrets. He praised Bakr, described him as a great mujahid, and hinted that his departure had been at the behest of the leadership, which had charged him with tasks abroad. He rather curtly answered my last questions, about my brother Hossam. Then he rose, signalling to us to remain seated. Hajja Souad led him to the door where he once again donned his disguise, which made him look like a porter from one of the souks, with a neat moustache, long black trousers, gold-embroidered shirt, and the misbaha of large yellow beads whose clacking could be heard clearly from a distance. He spoke a few words to Hajja Souad and left without turning round as our gazes clung to him. Sighs of pleasure wafted from the girls as they prayed for his safety, and that his enemies might look away from him and from all the companions of the mujahideen.

  Hajja Souad ordered us not to leave before an hour had gone by, and suggested that we first make tabbouleh and chips before she allocated our new tasks to us. The laughter of the girls in the kitchen and Hajja Souad’s voice oppressed me and reminded me that I hadn’t acted like an emira at all. I felt that they knew the rebellion I had committed the previous night. I was dizzy, and the only person nearby was Um Ramez, the woman in her sixties who had brought me to the meeting. I saw her engrossed in telling her long beads with closed eyes; she moved with the gestures of a woman assailed by lethargy, trying to blot out her surroundings. I watched her and tried to catch her eye but she continued to mutter her incomprehensible prayers. The sound of girls’ voices didn’t suggest a covert meeting, but rather the preparations of a group of friends gathering to go to a wedding.

  I was alarmed at Layla’s snobbery when she was named emira in my place. When I told Hajja Souad that withdrawing the title from me in this way without any justification was very frustrating, she took me by the hand and we went into an opulent bedroom. She sat me down on the bed and recounted the organization’s history. She also accused me of recklessness, reminding me that I had come to her house without a proper appointment, as if I was out for a stroll. She patted my shoulder, told me that titles had no importance, and reassured me that I would soon get some pamphlets to distribute around the university during exam time. I understood that I should now leave, as she was intransigent in the face of my protests about Prince Shukry’s refusal to reassure me about Hossam. All he had said was that Hossam had been transferred to the desert prison, and that the leadership was satisfied and proud of his resilience. Hossam wouldn’t divulge the important information he had gleaned from accompanying Bakr in recent months, as he moved from one safe house to another in order to stay alive and run operations. Prince Shukry had enthusiastically asked me to be proud of what we as a family offered to the organization.

  I was the last to leave, determined as I was to see the eyes of Um Ramez – I knew that she had asked permission to kill a death squad soldier in revenge for her son whose fingers had been cut off in prison, and whose back had been broken, leaving him paralysed down one side. I couldn’t wait any longer; I was already late in leaving that flat, and it was an infringement for which I might be held to account by the organization. I wandered the streets of that neighbourhood while evening gradually fell, and it coloured the sky in a way I had never seen before: over the open ground to the west there was a translucent twilight coloured red and pink with clouds whose persistence revealed an early summer. I said to myself that being able to see such a sight might be a rare opportunity for me. I lifted my veil, and for some minutes I looked at the sky. I thought of Hossam, and how he used to lead me by the hand to our roof and point to the full moon, showing off his skill at calculating the hijri calendar which he had been occupied in chronicling since he was a young child. I missed him, and that distant childhood. I reflected that absence gave birth to illusions. An image of my mother appeared to me, with her kind face and her peaceful nature. I wished that my room had this wonderful view of open horizons, with olive and pistachio trees in the distance; the wind carried to me the unmistakable scents they released at the full moon.

  There was hardly anyone around. The area was deserted apart from some animal droppings and some late, exhausted builders trying to reach the bus stop. A layer of white dust covered their clothes, bestowing on them the fairytale colours I had seen in my dreams of crowds of people draped in white. I walked behind an old man and felt protective of him, abandoning my wish to walk in these wilds until I reached the horizon, in expectation of the rising moon. Then I was terrified by the scene of a Mukhabarat patrol scanning the faces of the people waiting for the bus. It was very late for me to be so far from home.

  It must have been about half past eight when I opened the door to the house and went inside. Radwan rushed towards me and protested at my being so late and leaving him to worry. I reassured him coolly, and heard from him that Omar and Maryam, after their visit to Marwa, had gone on to Beirut; Zahra was staying on in Damascus, and they would all return in two days’ time. I sighed angrily and wished I was with them. I flung myself on my bed and fell into the deep sleep I had been begging for for months – a sleep so deep that I didn’t hear the rain which fell later that night and soaked the woollen jumpers left on a chair by the fountain, along with the copy of Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam I had been trying to read. Its pages were wet through and it was impossible to salvage. I threw it in the bin, along with all the food Maryam had left for us, which had now spoiled.

  * * *

  Radwan was delighted the following day when I acted like a proper housewife making food for her family. I wanted to cook, and I welcomed his comments; he would ask me to add a little salt or some spices after tasting the freekeh, like a connoisseur whose opinion was much sought after. In the two days we had been on our own we had reverted to being friends who had recovered the warmth of their relationship without any reproaches. I thanked him in my heart whenever he called out my name, as it was the only means of feeling a presence within this vacuum I had begun to escape from. In turn, I suggested he use organic compounds when composing a new perfume so it would resemble the smell of old stone after rain. He smiled at the idea but kept silent.

  While we were drinking coffee in the evening beside the tub of red damask roses, I asked him to think about joining me in a play I would try to write to welcome the others home. He laughed sarcastically and, in a deep voice and with ponderous sentences, informed me that he no longer expected anything but death. I saw his face colour and he concluded his speech like an actor who is carried away by the power of his own voice and cares neither for the pleasure of the crowd nor for their applause. He gave himself up to cursing the idiots and the unjust city that had turned his dreams into piles of filth that could be purified only by fire; the ash in the rising smoke would swirl around in the atmosphere looking to join up and form the cloud that would one day rain down black on Aleppo, on its pedestrians and buildings, in revenge for the years of his alienation and their deafness.

  Radwan spoke about death like an ancient Greek warrior in mourning for his own life, now cruelly reduced and far removed from the adventures and glory of war. I was seized by dread as his voice flowed tunefully, pure and deep. It was as if I didn’t know him. None of us knew him; we didn’t perceive his pain, or pester him with questions so he would talk about himself. To us, he was a servant. He heard all our whispers, and kept all our secrets. He worried about us, our illnesses, our concerns. He had witnessed my birth and read the sacred verse to me after putting a charm round my baby neck. I wore it until my neck grew too large for it, when my mother stored it away carefully.

  Radwan started to tell me about the child he had been sixty years before. He was five w
hen he realized that he was blind and different from the sighted. His family were offended by his blindness, so they ignored him and left him to wander as a vagrant in the streets of Ain Arab, a miserable child. He would sit on the ground by the mosque and listen to the tajwid recitation of the Quran which emanated from Sheikh Bihzad’s prayer circle, although he didn’t dare intrude. When he sat under the large tree in the courtyard of the Amri mosque others tripped over him, not having noticed him there. Silence and estrangement caused him pain; he tried to demonstrate his skill and the flexibility of his young body in front of the other children, and he would leap into the air and somersault, and then land on his feet with a smile. The children clapped and cheered him, but then left him to wander further on his own. He was protected by the night guards, who took pity on him and allowed him to sleep in the door to the souk, and threw him odd bits of watermelon.

  On long winter nights Radwan would take refuge in the lonely Khan Al Duwab, where the wife of the owner took pity on him and allowed him to sleep in straw warmed by the breath of the oxen and donkeys chained to the manger. Ain Arab was familiar to him, and he was familiar to it. He would occasionally walk in front of his mother’s house and slacken his pace so she would notice him, change his coarse woollen clothes for the only other set he possessed, and then once more leave him to his fate. She was afraid of her husband’s anger; he had married her after her divorce from Radwan’s father – he had gone off to preach the Day of Resurrection in the villages and Bedouin camps, leaving her only some tattered rags, a mud hut and a decrepit donkey: a dowry for a woman doomed to be torn to pieces by men. They circled her house on cold nights and she didn’t know how to protect herself from those who had designs on her and her blind child. She didn’t prevent Radwan from leaving to live with his grandfather, which was in fact the condition laid down by the only man who had asked for her hand – as his third wife, so he would have some help with the harvest.

  Radwan was choked by the hatred for his blindness he encountered at his grandfather’s house. He ran away, and had nowhere to go other than the alleys and the open countryside. On moonlit nights, he dreamed that he was flying over the earth like a sparrowhawk. He hated the nickname of ‘Mole’, chanted by the children when they tried to hurt him. He knew the smell of each and every stone of Ain Arab, and imagined the faces of its inhabitants: using their voices and smells, he was able to draw conclusions about them and mock them. He didn’t surrender to his misery and grew addicted to solitude, despising the idiocy of the peasants. He sang in Kurdish and memorized the lengthy tales and elegies of the Bedouin. He tried to become a professional mourner but was driven out more than once for the sardonic smile which revealed his mockery of the tribesmen.

  At one stage, Radwan was struck by the idea that he might be blessed, so he prayed in front of a large gathering for the power to heal the lame. When the woman beside whom he was sitting did not get up after he had muttered his prayers over her and drawn his hand across her forehead, her seven children kicked him out into the street. He abandoned this idea, now convincing himself that abstinence from worldly enjoyment was foolish, and did not tally with his dreams of unending pleasures. In the summer, he slept in an abandoned camp and foraged for food, gathering up the ears of corn that fell from the harvest carts. He struck bargains with the women who betrayed their husbands, after he caught their lovers’ voices and the women’s entreaties through the walls of their mud huts. In the morning the women would give him eggs, milk, and wheat which he could sell, and he kept the little money he saved in a bag hanging from his neck in readiness for he knew not what.

  When a circus came to Ain Arab for a few days, Radwan was fascinated and he pleaded with its owner to try him out, to teach him to juggle and make tigers jump through a ring of fire. The Moroccan circus master liked the idea, tickled by the idea of a blind gymnast. He tried Radwan out more than once, but the elephant almost trampled him. There was also a fire-eater who cursed in German and brought forth flames from his mouth, to the astonishment of the Ain Arab folk, who sat for hours watching him. He tried to teach Radwan how to draw scarves out of his mouth, but when he jammed them in his cheeks he almost choked. After three days, he abandoned the idea.

  Radwan went back to the countryside like a hawk unsuited to a cage. He learned to sleep on tree branches, thus avoiding the perverts on the prowl for children to rape. Dreams unfolded which he couldn’t explain, and the call to travel pulled at him after he felt that the smells of Ain Arab were choking him. He cried in front of the khan owner’s wife so she would order one of the drivers, who he guessed from his calm voice wouldn’t simply abandon him in Aleppo, to allow him to bed down on the bags of barley he was transporting. She spoke with all the skill of a lady to the carriage owner and paid him a fee to take Radwan to the city’s Umayyad Mosque.

  On the way, the owner of the carriage watched Radwan as he smiled and inhaled the scents of the villages and of the river. The driver found Radwan entertaining and didn’t weary of his incessant chatter. He thought he might do him a good turn: after hearing him sing for two consecutive hours, the driver took him to the house of Hamid, a record-seller who was looking for new talent so he could form a band. Radwan leaned back in a chair and asked for a cup of water sweetened with sugar. He then sang a Kurdish song he had learned by heart and offered a confusing translation of it for Hamid. The record-seller imagined him in a band that he never managed to create, however. After six months, he was forced to turn Radwan out.

  With a smile and without regret, Radwan left – he didn’t plead to stay. He didn’t like the way Hamid’s house smelled, nor the tedium of having to listen to Hamid’s daily fights with his shrill wife, who often left Radwan without food. Radwan said to me that he could still remember sitting in that small record shop listening to Zakariya Ahmed, with whom he was infatuated. He had thought that fate had led him to this cramped place so that he could relive the tale of this great musician, who was ‘just like him’, as he would proudly repeat. Radwan knew many of his lyrics, and was determined that his own voice, husky as it was, would acquire the sweetness of Zakariya’s when the song ‘Ahl al Hawa’ inspired a painful sorrow. Radwan was carrying some of those records inside his bag when Hamid left him in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque. He breathed in deeply, yielding to the smells he loved. He felt that he had found his niche at last, and he relaxed for a few days with the blind men who welcomed him in their own sarcastic manner, trying to keep him from participating in their livelihood of reciting mawalid to the women who fulfilled their vows every Friday. Radwan liked their plotting and joined up with them. He never felt homesick when he lay down on the rich carpet in the mosque at the end of the evening and fell into a deep sleep beside his few companions who, like him, were all homeless.

  After seven years, Radwan was proud of his Aleppan credentials. He now looked for a new place to belong to, and started to make up strange stories about non-existent relatives, claiming kinship with certain ancient families whose names, works and status were well known. The city still boasted of its affiliation to these families; sanctifying them was part of the essential social mores, along with the retention of certain other conventions whose affectations seemed peculiar to Radwan. He kept silent, trying to pierce the web of secrets which the blind men had spent years quietly weaving around their world.

  One day he went out of the mosque on his own after his blind companions had left him behind, arguing that he was too young to accompany them. He went to the souk, excited by the new smells and the loud sounds there. He stopped in front of my grandfather’s shop; my grandfather sat and observed Radwan, watching as he kissed Hajj Abdel Ghany’s hand and asked him to teach him to make the perfumes he found so stimulating. Radwan was haunted by a strange feeling which almost amounted to rapture. He exhibited the originality Hajj Abdel Ghany loved. My grandfather allowed Radwan to sit in front of his shop and sing Zakariya Ahmed songs, and sometimes helped him to distinguish the smells that he then archived in his m
emory. One day, about two months later, Radwan stumbled while carrying some bottles and this made the Hajj so angry he slapped him. Crying bitterly, Radwan went back to the mosque and didn’t leave it for an entire year, only keeping alert for my grandfather whenever he came to pray so he could greet him. He spoke to him openly about his troubles and his life story. He spent a long time describing his dreams, and accepted my grandfather’s charity during the festivals: the new suit my grandfather bought him then would become one of their traditions. He liked Radwan’s joy and voluble conversation; Radwan eventually convinced my grandfather to add him to his family as a kind of servant, and not to worry about his blindness.

  Carrying his small bag, Radwan walked into my grandfather’s house, and there became such a necessity it was impossible to dispense with him. He instituted reforms which my grandmother didn’t like but agreed to so as not to anger my grandfather. Radwan reassured him and acted as his confidant during rainy nights when he felt lonely and disinclined to knock on anyone’s door. My grandfather found a haven with his servant, who became his friend.