* * *
A slow, dilapidated train was travelling over the plains. Its wheels squeaking in pain, it advanced to pick up the dead who were awaiting burial with vacant eyes, looking up at the sky as if it were a dream. All along the train’s path the dead signalled to the blind driver to stop by using their stench. The train let out a powerful whistle to greet the transient beings. The driver descended through the meadows and searched among the flowers for the bodies, piled up like forgotten sacks of lentils which had rotted in the rain. The blind driver carried the corpses lightly and skilfully and lined them up inside the cold iron carriages; the dead don’t care about the niceties of the living. He climbed up to his cab and the invisible train moved off. The expanse of the driver’s smiling face was brushed by the cool breezes and his imagination blazed. He traced pictures of the corpses piled up in the last carriage. He inveigled himself into their dreams as if he were their only guarantee that they wouldn’t be left abandoned in a cold alley like empty paper bags.
I saw the train, quiet and unnoticed as it moved through the streets of a city I recognized; I believed it to be Aleppo. It really was Aleppo – its narrow alleys and squares filled with tanks, soldiers and corpses. No one thought of stopping this dread-inducing machine from which an old, blind man descended. He took up his cargo and left silently, without uttering a single question or grumbling about the weight. Hossam’s corpse was fidgety, looking for someone to tickle him and make him laugh. The train reached another town; there were waterwheels nearby – Um Mamdouh saw them and screamed, ‘It’s Hama!’ She asked the driver to stop for a moment, so she could examine the faces of her sons and neighbours, and of whoever else had been left by the birds of prey which had scorned thousands of corpses. The blind driver halted the train and drank some tea with soldiers, who would also bid goodbye to their lives, cut down at street corners. The driver stopped for a long time: he wanted more corpses. I thought that the train had nearly reached me. I saw its yellow lights approaching; I was delighted, like anyone wanting to see the plains and inhale the clean air of Paradise, as I moved among the white lambs which guarded it. Their melodic bleating was like divine music, which polluted humankind couldn’t hope to enjoy.
I was frightened of becoming that train driver and I passed out. Multiple images clashed and my shadow laid siege to me, blinding me for a few moments. I surrendered to it totally. I asked Sulafa, ‘Where is your hand?’ She held out her hand and I pressed it for a few minutes, and a strange warmth overwhelmed me. It returned sight to me – opaque at first, then completely clear. I had been feverish for three months, and had enjoyed the delirium. I saw myself lying naked in a green meadow. I imagined passing men who raped me, or lovers who I only wished would leave me alone. I remembered Ghada, from whom I always tried to flee. I convinced myself that her grave was always decorated with narcissi.
* * *
The illness left its legacy on my face like one more hallmark of my time in that place. The stress we were under made us fight even over apple peel with the tenacity of normal women fighting for their lives. How much had our images of ourselves changed over the last couple of years? How much had we mocked ourselves? We carried our claims to superiority only in sanitized dreams. We wanted to remain like ripe peaches, but aridity reached our very core. When I finally got back on my feet, I was sure that my illness had been necessary to dispel the last of my illusions. I was ashamed of my face, which Sulafa tried to convince me was still beautiful and that the scars would soon fade. I thought how trivial it was to worry, in this place, of how my sunken cheeks looked. Everything inside me had become pale, and everything around me had become boring. I was possessed by everything I had fled from. I no longer watched our child or applauded warmly when he tried to stand on his own feet or waved his hands about. The air was no longer enough for me; I heard my pulse ringing in my ears like a strong hammer or the ticking of a huge clock in an abandoned city.
I was bored by the daily discussions, in which I participated only in a quiet voice, swiftly lost within the noisy uproar of others’ certainty. The only thing on which we agreed was to ignore that the other sect was the reason for the conflict. The others in my group no longer called me to account for my friendship with the Marxist Sulafa. They tried to approach her and lean on her shoulder when Thana sang the final section of Um Kalthoum’s ‘Renew Your Love For Me’, and they generously gave her some of the cold tea which they saved from the afternoon meal to have late at night.
It is difficult to be a woman in prison when all your guards are men. You listen to their footsteps in the corridor, you catch their scent, and it awakens desire; then you remember they are enemies who kick you brutally and wish you would die so they can devote themselves entirely to the card games which every soldier needs from time to time, to feel that everything is as it should be.
* * *
The death squad commander kicked open the door to the cabinet office, and marched in to bang his fist on the ancient walnut table and demand his portion of the country. The frightened ministers signed his orders without demur, aware that the dignity they enjoyed was dependent on his dignity; some of them identified with him publicly, while others left for quieter climes where they could write their memoirs and curse him, after yielding up more than half of the state’s funds to him. He stashed it all in European and American banks, which conspired with him in their greed for the copious amounts of money he had accumulated as the price for murdering our group members, bombing unarmed prisoners, and destroying a city which loved eating ghazal banat and cheese pastries more than it loved death. Myths grew up about the commander, and his supporters hung up pictures of him in which he seemed to be a powerful man who loved life, smiling and raising his fist as if he were liberating Jerusalem – rather than the gang leader who ruled through his lieutenants and milked the country, a spoiled little boy everyone avoided upsetting, so that he wouldn’t ruin the party for them all. He and his associates seemed like old childhood friends who had gathered to celebrate their reunion by murdering the headmaster and plundering all the equipment from the school sports hall.
The commander became the symbol of the death squad, and the country began to buckle under its pressure. News of his scandalous behaviour with women leaked out, as of his officers’ abduction of girls as they walked along formerly safe streets. If the gaze of one of his guards fell upon a figure graceful like a gazelle, they would drag the girl to one of his houses scattered throughout all the affluent districts of Damascus. They would hold the girls prisoner, gang-rape them, and then throw them out like dogs, leaving them to an unknown fate. Articles on the commander’s corruption were published in foreign newspapers, so foreign newspapers were banned and anyone caught reading them was punished. There were suspicious disappearances among any of his trading partners who tried to muscle in on the profits. One who had not been lucky enough to flee abroad with some money had his accounts and assets frozen and recovered, and he himself was liquidated in cold blood. Another business associate was thrown from the seventh floor on to a chilly pavement – a grand funeral was held for him the following day, and a large wreath of roses was presented in the name of the death squad commander. He offered a mourning ceremony to the man’s sons, who thanked him politely, abandoning their family honour and denying rumours that their father had been murdered; his death was transformed into a mere accident, as might befall anyone who happened to lose his balance on his seventh-floor balcony, while leaning out to look for the full moon.
* * *
Nadhir stood in front of the head of the death squad. He let his hands drop and steeled himself for the bullet which might come suddenly from behind the curtains of that grand office. Without looking at him, the commander asked, ‘Weren’t we in the same class once?’ Nadhir answered curtly, ‘Yes.’ The commander followed this with a question which sounded vaguely conciliatory: ‘Why did you betray me?’ Nadhir fidgeted while trying to select the appropriate words which wouldn’t anger him. ‘I didn’t
betray you, sir. I tried to follow our code of honour by not attacking unarmed prisoners.’ The silence seemed very long before the commander rose from behind his desk, looking straight at him. ‘Don’t you believe they were criminals, and that they wanted to kill our sect?’ The words our sect rang out like a clap of thunder.
Hundreds of old images came to Nadhir’s mind: one was of two young students trying to find shelter from the heavy winter rain under a tarpaulin, laughing like any friends would when they were faced with the likelihood of ending up looking like drowned rats. It was an idealized picture which helped him to gather up his courage all at once and say clearly, ‘Where do you want to take the country?’ He followed this with a plea, addressing the commander by his first name, without his title: ‘Why do you want to destroy the sect and charge it with crimes it hasn’t committed? Do what you want, and leave the sect alone. You can still carry on your rackets, and it will be the poor who pay the heavy price.’ The commander seemed calm as he fingered his revolver, but then and there he ended the meeting, gesturing to his associates to show Nadhir out. As Nadhir was leaving the building, a young officer politely asked for the keys to his house and second car, and told him to await further instructions. Nadhir felt tense but when he opened the boot of the car to empty it, he saw, to his astonishment, that the young officer was smiling at him. Nadhir carried the cases of butterflies carefully over to the small van and driver he had hired earlier and set off for his house, which was no longer his. There he quickly reassured Marwa and gathered up a few belongings. He left behind all his uniforms, leaving a message for a childhood friend who has drowned in a lake of blood, bequeathing his family only thousands of corpses pierced with bullets whose curse would follow them for ever.
On the way to Nadhir’s village, Marwa stroked his hands in an attempt to break the heavy silence which had settled over them like a portent of misfortune. When they arrived, Sheikh Abbas and Nadhir spoke together for a short time while his sister helped Marwa unpack. Nadhir gave his father an account of his meeting; he thought that the only thing that had piqued the head of the death squad was that he wasn’t in a position to shoot Nadhir himself – he was afraid that his popularity among the troops and younger officers would make him into a martyr and a symbol for resistance. The commander was striving to avoid dissent within the sect, while he plotted to replace the president and consolidated his grip on power.
A document bearing the seal of the chiefs of staff relieved Nadhir of all his duties and allocated him a pension. It was delivered to him by a junior officer who saluted him for the last time and left quickly without answering any questions. The paper, which Nadhir promptly tore up, was enough to put an end to his dreams; all the same, he started speaking about when exactly he needed to spray the orange trees. He ate his breakfast before dawn with gusto, like a fellah with lots to do; the farm needed much work after Sheikh Abbas’s three children had left it and headed for the distant cities. When much later I saw him again, on his first visit to me with Maryam, Omar and Marwa, his appearance seemed different from that of the officer who had been imprisoned by the butterflies of the woman he loved, and who had freed her from Bakr’s chains. His laughter was kinder as he encouraged me to smile and go back to college, which I no longer thought of as being anything other than a vague dream, as if I had never started my studies. We had both lost our dreams. We had to piece them back together as if they were the threads of a carpet whose weave had come apart.
* * *
It was the fragility of dreams I was thinking about as the secure van transferred us to the central women’s prison in Damascus – after four years in the Mukhabarat cells, we were a pitiful sight. We were delighted with our new prison, where we were allowed to spend two whole hours a day outside and look at the sky: a coveted image of the salvation we were no longer preoccupied with. In our former hell we had looked for the smallest comfort, it was so much part of us that we almost jumped in terror when we heard the cars and the sirens in the streets on our journey over. Sulafa had preceded me to the new prison by two weeks. I threw myself on her chest and wept bitterly, a missing part of her soul. She was bright-faced, cleaner and happier; the place was almost spacious and we could breathe in the cells, as air circulated through the open bars; the ghost of suffocation moved away from us. We were allocated to the various dormitories. Sulafa had reserved a place for me next to her. For the first time in four years I stretched my body out fully, and had the space to turn over as many times as I liked before plunging into a deep sleep.
The place we had dreamed of was however still a prison with reinforced-steel doors and guards stationed at intervals all along its high walls. The warders showed no respect for the taste of the Ottoman wali who had had it built, in what were then peach orchards outside Damascus, as a place where he could take pleasure with his Circassian wife every Thursday night. We had heard plenty of stories about him. The wali was fearful of other men’s eyes, and jealous of the Circassian’s beauty which had already destroyed the life of the Damascene trader, Muhyi Al Din, who had married her and then almost immediately started to complain to his friend the wali about all her caprices. The wali set eyes on her for the first time when she asked to see him with a petition, like any woman who might appeal to a wali renowned for his generosity in dealing with his city’s inhabitants, for his deep-rooted lineage, and for his friendship with her husband. He didn’t listen to a word she said. His gaze clung to her delicate waist, to the breasts hidden by the fabric which reached up to her shimmering white throat. He tried to lower his eyes and listen to her request, which came out suddenly: ‘I want to divorce Muhyi Al Din.’ She added, ‘He doesn’t fulfil me, and his friend the judge won’t meet me or listen to me!’ The wali contemplated her quietly, rubbed his chin and asked her to marry him, as if they were in one of Scheherazade’s tales.
She returned to see the wali after three days which he had spent sleepless and miserable. She asked again for her divorce, and her brother, who had come from the village of Dadin, granted her the military pension arising from his service in the Topkapi Palace as her dowry. The two of them appeared to be concluding a strange sort of bargain that would eventually turn Muhyi Al Din into a brigand and an alcoholic. He swore to kill them both after the judge, under the threat of her brother’s sword, divorced them in absentia. (Muhyi Al Din eventually forgot his vow and was killed by a stray bullet on the road to his family’s plantation in Zabadany.)
Everything went off according to the wali’s plans. He then accompanied the judge on his Hajj pilgrimage in order to atone for his sins. They stood as partners at the gates of the Kaaba to thank God for His blessings, asked for forgiveness and returned to Syria cleansed. The judge, who saw the Circassian only once during their journey, hinted to the wali that he should hide her away from the gaze of others, and acquainted him with an architect, Abu Hind, who stood in front of Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque every morning to point at the wide gates and the square minarets. He would criticize its engineer, Walid bin Abdel Malik, for the error which had made the mosque oblong-shaped, accusing him of not having read Pythagoras and enumerating the advantages of the circle as an architectural form more suited for that sacred place.
Abu Hind sat in front of the wali and without any inhibition chattered away about how awful it was architects were being deported from the Levant to Astana so that they might be kept as ignorant artisans who didn’t even know the difference between white and yellow stone. The wali listened to his ramblings, regarding this as a necessary part of the process of convincing him to design a palace for a man who loved a woman to the point of infatuation, and feared for her safety even from the summer wind. The wali did not object to the circular form so venerated by the architect, and acquiesced to all his conditions. Abu Hind worked tirelessly for three years so the wali could move there with his Circassian wife; she had awoken in him feelings of deep regret for all the years he had wasted in avoiding the pleasures of the flesh, and other material preoccupations, such as a
ccumulating wealth or leaving a brilliant reputation as a legacy to his seven children. The serving women disclosed the secrets of the wild nights shared by the wali and the Circassian to the storytellers who wove a tale – substituting other names – about a sober man whose prestige was ruined by a Circassian woman before she committed suicide next to the garden fountain, leaving a short letter informing him that love had not taken root in her heart. She could no longer bear to lie down in that magnificent building designed by an awkward man as a prison, and not as a palace for lovers. Her blood had flowed over the edge of the fountain and mingled with its waters.
The storytellers went further. They said that the Circassian was in fact in love with her husband’s son, who had seduced her at the instigation of his mother whom the wali had turned out. They also added that the wali abandoned Abu Hind’s palace, as it became known in their yellowed records which told stories about the place where even the damp made us happy. We recreated its full glory in our imaginations and became like its Circassian owner who had bequeathed it to us, and we celebrated the blessing of being saved from the moods of the commander of the Mukhabarat unit. He seemed almost in tears that we were leaving his cells still breathing. We relaxed in the first days in the Damascus prison because our guards, ordinary policemen this time rather than Mukhabarat, seemed more sympathetic to our status as women.
* * *
I couldn’t regain the power of my dreams. I used to draw them in confirmation of my passion for living, but I told Sulafa, ‘Joy has escaped me, and my dreams have paled.’ I warned her against forgetting Mudar but she shook her head and said, ‘I can’t forget him, but of course he’s forgotten me; he’s left me for another woman.’ I realized that the letters we had written on the foil of cigarette packets, and smuggled out via Sulafa’s family as soon as they were allowed to visit, had not reached him. Mudar had told her he didn’t have a proper address, that he moved about. All Sulafa had had to prop up a dream which never paled was her shabby little room, as elegant as she could make it given her modest means. She had dyed some cheap material, from which she’d made curtains and the tablecloth they used every morning as Mudar drank his coffee unhurriedly: a man worshipped by a woman who laughed from the heart, as she lay down by his side and buried her dreams in his chest.
In Praise of Hatred Page 27