The commander was worried; he knew the implications of this refusal, especially coming as it did after Nadhir’s controversial marriage to Marwa. This had been the subject of discussion amongst the top brass, who said that Nadhir had crossed all boundaries and was lacking in loyalty. The commander didn’t let him finish his sentence. Nadhir handed over the key to his staff car and walked out, avoiding the troops who were shouting their allegiance to the death squad commander. They raised their fists in the air and climbed into the ten aeroplanes squatting on the runway in the growing twilight. Nadhir turned around and saw them take off in an orderly fashion. He didn’t realize that it was his tears that were blurring the narrow road through the cactus fields. He thought for a moment that maybe he had heard the orders wrong, or that the previous night had left him exhausted. He couldn’t grasp that this mad fantasy would actually murder prisoners held in an isolated jail. He thought it would be a miracle if anyone left that prison alive.
Nadhir found himself sitting in a taxi with three other passengers, who eyed his uniform warily, and couldn’t understand the presence of this officer – alone, silent and distracted – among them; he imposed a silence on them, which was a measure of their fear. The old Mercedes swayed patiently on its way to Aleppo like a sealed coffin borne aloft. Nadhir tried to sleep, but nightmares attacked him; awake, dark thoughts agitated him. He almost started to mutter to himself like a madman as he tried to imagine what was happening when, checking his watch, he calculated that the aeroplanes had landed next to the prison gate half an hour earlier. An expert in this sort of operation, he guessed that his colleagues had had more than enough time to ensure that their rifles were in order. As in some sort of perverse fairytale, their enemies, at the moment still bound in iron chains to the walls of the prison, would be transformed into live targets on an imaginary shooting range.
* * *
The following morning, a hot summer’s day, the country woke up to stories which had spread like lightning, already retold thousands of times. I understood why Nadhir stood at the door looking exhausted and broken, asking for Marwa to call him another taxi. He apologized for drinking Maryam’s coffee with a shamefaced smile, and he spoke almost incomprehensibly and with great difficulty. He said that he had resigned from the army, and that what had happened that night would never be forgotten for a thousand years. Then he left like a fugitive along with Marwa. In the taxi, she put her hand tenderly on his hair and face and whispered, ‘It’s all right, darling.’ He kissed her palm and took refuge in burning tears, not caring about the astonishment of the driver, who shook their hands. He stopped the car and got out to leave him alone with Marwa, who was almost speechless at seeing him like a small child. She pulled herself together, wiped away his tears and kissed him on the lips; then she ordered the driver to hurry: they were rushing to someone’s bedside to witness the last, warm breath of the dying man before his body turned cold and he left them for ever. Marwa thus freed Nadhir from the need for any further explanation or a response to the sympathetic glances of the driver, who now ascribed this man’s tears to the imminent loss of a loved one. He concluded this passenger was like any other person, despite the uniform he wore, which should have indicated that he was just one of those terrorizing the country and revelling in the bloodlust and the fear in people’s eyes.
Reports had spread of how the troops had calmly left their planes, gone into the cells of the desert prison, and cold-bloodedly opened fire on the prisoners, whose brains they splattered all over the walls and ceilings. The corpses were piled up in the corridors like rotten oranges thrown carelessly on to a rubbish dump. More than eight hundred prisoners had been killed in less than an hour. Later the bulldozers carried the bodies to a secret location where they were thrown into a pit whose size, shape and smell no one could possibly imagine. The accounts of the few survivors would offer yet another opportunity to examine the extraordinary resilience that humanity can show in the face of the most extreme circumstances.
All over the country, black flags were hung from balconies. Anyone entering Aleppo or Hama in the early evening of the following day might have thought a festival of weeping had begun, and that it must be the preamble to the festival that recalled the martyr Hussein, which had so often inspired artists, scholars and strangers passing through Karbala. Hajja Souad rushed towards me weeping. She hugged me before I could enter the house, and I heard her prayer for Hossam to enter Heaven. Everything I had tried so hard not to believe was embodied in front of me, like a truth which now had to be heard clearly. I couldn’t move my tongue; I felt paralysis creeping through my limbs. I shook my head unthinkingly and fled. When I eventually got back to the house I found my mother sitting in the courtyard and crying. She was kissing a picture of Hossam she held in her hands, and she stood up to trill and dance like she had gone mad. Maryam, Zahra, Omar and Radwan all formed a ring around her to prevent her from running out into the street until she fainted, and then they carried her to bed.
Before dawn the next day, we set off in Omar’s car for the desert prison. We had been preceded by groups of mothers who came from all over the country to seek out their sons. They didn’t want to believe a story they thought must have been invented. Road blocks and armed soldiers prevented the thousands of people who slept outdoors that night from reaching the prison, which was entirely quiet after the corpses had been moved and the building washed down with power hoses. It was as if the soldiers had carried out with precision a job they considered to be no more than routine, and now they were keeping aloof and distant from the inanity of the crowd milling around.
My mother was silent in the car. We remembered, halfway along the desert road, that we hadn’t exchanged greetings. We didn’t clasp hands like other mothers and daughters when they meet after a long absence; I quietly placed my hand in her open palm and she leaned slightly towards me with a strange coolness. Were it not for her eyes, which had an irresistible strength, I would have thought she was dead. I couldn’t say a word. When we got near the prison, the scene was like something from an extraordinarily vivid and life-like film. But the hell of this mass execution was beyond imagining. Women veiled in black were holding up pictures of their missing husbands, brothers and sons, kneeling in rows as if praying to a god they had believed in for a long time; the fear on their faces seemed to have been caused by the loss of His compassionate image. They persisted in their prayers and pleas to see their men, hoping against hope that the story was just a lie told in various forms; as if it were an exercise dumped on the public to train them up in creative writing, or a revival of the traditional Arabic tales which the Caliphs had once enjoyed.
‘We need Scheherazade,’ I said to myself when my mother bolted from Omar’s car as soon as it stopped. She broke through a group of women who looked just like her and rushed towards an armoured car, which belonged to the death squad soldiers who had closed the road, and started hitting it. She cursed the troops, who looked at her dumbfounded from their hiding place inside the car. They were afraid that the crowds would attack them.
Hysteria reigned among the assembled carts, cars and broken-looking people. No one noticed that the children had sand stuck to their snot-covered faces – they had been gathering rocks to build small tombstones and then they threw pebbles at them to knock them down, trying to break their intense boredom. Sandwich- and snack-vendors saw an opportunity and came rushing from the neighbouring village. They hastily set up stalls and soon there rose up the smells of cooking meat and salad which no one ate. The burning sun did not deter the women from wailing, even though their saliva dried up and their lips cracked from thirst. They punished themselves, and abstained from material comforts; they called on death to reunite them with their loved ones.
I tried to order in my mind the stories that men and women were circulating – they spoke cautiously at first, but by midday the narrators’ voices rose up and no longer bothered mentioning the sources of their information. I imagined Hossam as a cold corpse, carr
ied away like a piece of garbage by a bulldozer and thrown into some place where it might be uncovered and torn at by dogs. I felt sick when stories were told about those who had been left alive, those carrying their own guts in an attempt to cling on to life and trampling on the corpses of their brothers piled up in the narrow cells. Ten metres square had teemed with more than eighty prisoners who had for months or years outsmarted the whip, tuberculosis and scabies. But no one could save the injured after the death squads left in their aeroplanes.
A long time would pass before the full details were revealed of how the soldiers had entered the prison, and of the names of the officers who had issued the orders in cold blood. They would be pursued by the curses of the dead which did subsequently drive six of those soldiers completely mad, fleeing in perpetuity the imaginary enemies hunting them. Earlier they had returned to their homes laden with medals, conferred on them by the commander of the death squad, who had personally welcomed all the soldiers back to headquarters. He gave a speech in praise of their courage, and presented them with a small amount of money, which they then spent on falafel sandwiches before returning to their miserable rooms in the suburbs of Damascus.
As we drove back along the desert road, in the dark, we were despondent and silent. My mother was sitting on the backseat beside me, and Omar avoided looking at her in the mirror. Next to him, Maryam sat with her eyes closed, her hands on her misbaha. There was no sound other than the regular clack of the beads and the muttered prayers I couldn’t quite make out. The desert road was boring at night, and the futility of speech rendered us silent. I recalled images of the bereaved women, who were determined to remain outside the prison gates until they received their men’s bodies. It was a surreal scene, and surely one impossible ever to recreate. I suddenly felt that the confined space of the car, in the surrounding darkness, created some sort of unity between us. In the scant light, I could see my mother staring at a fixed point ahead of her. I closed my eyes. Before we reached Aleppo I realized again that I hadn’t offered her a single word of condolence. We couldn’t believe that Hossam had become just a photograph on the wall that we would look at, heartbroken and sobbing, remembering his elegance and his beautiful eyes. I thought about the fear he had shown the last time I’d seen him. I was certain now that he had known that death was his only way out, and that he wouldn’t survive if there was a delay in the victory which he had begun to understand was impossible.
I wanted to hug my mother and cry in her arms like a little child, but hatred dominated me to my very core. My extremities went cold. I felt paralysed and indifferent. I didn’t care if I ever emerged from the dark tunnel I had entered. ‘I have to control myself,’ I thought as I saw the lights of Aleppo and the statue of the goddess of fertility and beauty, which we considered heathen. I tried to look at it. It seemed beautiful, and so did the symbols of fertility and femininity she carried. For a moment I was overwhelmed by the idea of immersing myself in heathen ideas, but then I imagined Hossam in Paradise and my thoughts cooled. I reached out my hand towards my mother’s open palm and pressed her fingers gently; I felt how cold they were as she failed to respond. I used to need her support, but her coldness delighted me now. Judging by the empty streets, it was now very late. I looked at my mother and took hold of her hand again and pressed it firmly, but it remained limp. I tried yet again. I started to cry silently, and no one noticed or cared. Omar drove into our street where tanks occupied all four corners. My crying grew louder and the car stopped. Omar and Maryam were stunned when they turned towards me and saw my mother was dead.
Everything was over quickly, except for the rest of that horrific night. Omar asked Radwan to help him carry the body to Marwa’s room, and there they shrouded her on the bed by covering her with a woollen blanket. A few people arrived, among them Hajja Radia and Uncle Selim, who seemed unmoved. He sat at the head of the corpse, opened the Quran, and recited the Sura Al Baqara and some other short suur. He distributed parts of the Quran to Hajja Radia, Maryam and the neighbours who had come to extend their condolences in words that no longer meant anything to me. I stayed in my room. Zahra hugged me and we wept a little and then fell silent, only to start crying again; I hadn’t realized what a pleasure it was until now. I listened to the murmuring voices reciting the whole Quran to calm her soul. In the morning Omar brought his workmen in to help him with the preparations for the burial, which was carried out quickly; he refused to wait for my brother Humam and father to arrive from Beirut. I tried to raise the woollen blanket from her face, but couldn’t. I snatched a glance at her when Marwa arrived, accompanied only by Sheikh Abbas, her father-in-law, who sat beside Sheikh Daghstani in the house. I only noticed him after they returned from the tomb.
My mother’s death was a banal occurrence, not worthy of much notice in a city where more than three hundred mourning ceremonies were held that day alone for the victims of the desert prison. Death had lost its prestige. They buried her beside my grandmother and left an empty place in the tomb, which I guessed was for Hossam. It provoked a protest from my father when he arrived from Lebanon in the evening to receive condolences. He sat next to Omar, despite their bickering over whether or not Hossam would be buried in my father’s family tomb; Omar accused my father of neglecting his family and told him he was in no position to hand out orders. I thought it was idiotic of them to fight over an absent corpse. After the condolences were over, my father left my brother Humam with us and returned to Beirut, cursing Bakr. He held him responsible for the murder of his son and the death of his wife. My little brother didn’t understand what was happening, nor why women were hugging him, playing with his hair, declaring that he was an orphan, and teasing him about his funny Lebanese accent. He was a child of ten, mad about joining Bakr’s children in rigging up a swing in the branches of the lemon tree and flying through the air.
* * *
Everything was silent in the house and the rest of the summer passed miserably. We could no longer absorb the surprises and catastrophes raining down on our heads. It seemed absurd that I should go to sit my exams; I looked at the textbooks as if they belonged to someone else. Zahra and Maryam encouraged me to go, even if just to the first one. I thought that leaving the house might bring me some slight relief; I didn’t care about the destination. One day, after many visits to my mother’s grave, I left Maryam, Zahra and Humam to be led there by Radwan and instead went by myself to the Umayyad Mosque. I sat alone and felt a humility I had almost forgotten. I prayed without performing any ruk’at, and I wished Rabia Adawiya would return to save me from the cesspool I had been drowning in for days. I spent a long time looking at the decorations in the Umayyad Mosque and inhaling the scents of the splendid prayer mats. A woman came to pray next to me, then flung a piece of paper at me and left quickly before I could see her face. I opened up the note; the wording was short and clear, and warned me against going to the house of any woman known to belong to the group. It asked me to wait for instructions, and finished with some curt and belated words of condolence. I no longer cared that Hossam was described as a martyr. I tore up the paper, flushed it down the toilet, and left the mosque.
I dawdled in the streets and raised the cover over my face; I saw my reflection in the window of a shoe shop, and I looked worn out and depressed, lacking in either youth or vitality. I felt my body beneath my heavy coat; my breasts were shrivelled, and had lost all memory of my fingers’ caresses. I wandered back to the Armenian restaurant and collapsed, exhausted, on to the same chair where Hossam had sat with me and tried to smile without managing to. I asked for some food I then left untouched, and for a cup of tea I took two sips from. To any customers watching, I exhibited all the symptoms of a girl pining away with unrequited love. I paid the bill and ignored the sympathetic waiter who asked me if I was waiting for someone.
After the afternoon prayer I was still tired. I sat in another café and sipped a glass of juice, ignoring the laughter of the young men and women at the crowded tables. I felt unwa
nted there, but I didn’t move; I stayed, taking up two chairs, and confusing them all by ordering several glasses of juice I didn’t drink, and by the generous tip I left. I needed to be among crowds. I was surprised by my neutrality towards the young men infatuated with the flirtatious girls. I wanted to stay out of the house for as long as possible, so I walked in the park, enjoying the autumn breezes.
But when it started to get dark, I wanted to get home to bed straight away. Jalloum’s streets were deserted, even though it wasn’t yet eight o’clock. I walked faster when I sensed someone following me. I took out my key and unlocked the door. A patrol of the Mukhabarat was waiting for me just inside. Two men were holding back Radwan, Humam, Omar, Maryam and Zahra in my room. One of the Mukhabarat seized me roughly by the arms and handcuffed me, but I didn’t utter a word as I was taken away. My gaze clung to the window where they all gathered, to Omar’s familiar, quiet, beloved face, as those around him reached out their hands, willing me not to die.
THREE
In Praise of Hatred Page 24