Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

* * *

My grandmother was implacable in her hostility towards Wasal’s daughter, Zahra, whom my uncle Bakr had determined upon marrying. My grandfather was silent in the face of everyone’s supplications, in an effort to persuade his wife to renounce her oath that she would never allow her into the house, and that she would never see Bakr again as long as she lived . We all loved Zahra’s beautiful face, whose complexion changed and became luminous when evening fell. Through her asceticism and her faith, she won our hearts. She and Bakr formed a married couple whose outer quietness and timidity hid a storm of passionate adoration which they revelled in and drank of right to the dregs, wrapping their secrets within it. Many envied Bakr for his life, piety and clean house, and for the wife whose clothes did not smell of onion and fried cauliflower, and who remained patient in the face of catastrophe, which was a revelation to him. As my grandfather said, Bakr saw Zahra’s face and felt her kindness, and cast everything else aside; in this way, she resembled her mother, who had made Khalil into a man haunted by yearning. Khalil drowned in tears and nightmares, especially when the rain poured down. He spoke quickly and angrily, cursing the English, and whorish women, and debauched men. His disconnected sentences didn’t shed any light on the past; no one understood them other than my grandfather, and my uncle Bakr after he was alone with his bride. She walked like an orphan in the small procession Aunt Maryam insisted on holding so Hajja Radia wouldn’t be angry after Radia had spoken highly of Zahra and her piety.

My grandmother kept her oath, and Zahra paid no heed to the goings-on in my grandfather’s house. I became used to Bakr’s visits and my grandmother’s refusals to receive him, despite all his entreaties and intervention from my mother. She said that my grandmother loved Zahra but couldn’t find the right time to relinquish her unjustified obstinacy, especially after the death of my grandfather and in view of Zahra’s lack of defence of her own mother — it was widely said that Wasal had made a living from prostitution after she abandoned the Englishman, John.

Wasal had run away to London with John, and there she attached herself to a Pakistani man, a taxi driver who picked her up one night outside a bar when she was exhausted, fatigue and intoxication all over her face, and only half conscious. In his suburban bedsit, she gave him her body coldly in exchange for spending a night in a narrow bed and a bowl of hot soup, which reminded her of that cellar which she never yearned for, and never regretted leaving.

Wasal woke up late the next morning. All that remained in her memory of the previous night was the taste of pepper from the soup. When she found herself alone in a shabby room, she got up wearily and washed. She heard Pakistani music and snooped through the man’s pictures, which showed him with a corpulent English girl, doltish and flaccid as a dead fish. She realized that he was a strange and lonely man, for all his soft features and thick black eyebrows.

She rather enjoyed being away from John’s affectations and his calls for her to respect English traditions. She went back to sleep for a while and, on waking again, made a light dinner of wilted parsley, cabbage heads and a few morsels of potato. She spontaneously started to behave as if she were the mistress of this mean room, rearranging the sweaters and books strewn at random over the only sofa. She made the Pakistani laugh in an attempt to combat his bewilderment at the continued presence of this transient woman in his room. She surrendered to him coldly as the night elapsed, despite his attempts to get her to explain her past.

The two quickly came to an understanding. She liked his oddness, and the unambiguously dirty jokes he made when, on the third day, he took her to the apartment of a Syrian trader called Abdel Ghany Bilany, in exchange for twenty pounds. The Syrian had a predilection for visiting Madame Tussaud’s, reading biographies of famous politicians, and memorizing quotations. Abdel Ghany Bilany was an entertaining host, at first; but he was in collusion with the Pakistani, who soon left them alone. Stifling a sarcastic smile, Wasal practised the role of a professional whore, but she wasn’t vulgar. She praised his cologne and his taste in the colours of the bed linen in the spacious room. She almost expressed an opinion about Churchill and Abdel Ghany was restored to his earlier enthusiasm as he summarized the history of the man who taught politics to Europe.

Wasal conspired many times with the Pakistani, whom she began to invite to her house. She introduced him to John’s guests and laughed with him in the street. Sometimes she went to stay in his room for a day or two when she felt she was on the verge of putting poison in John’s food, leaving him to his dog whose smell got on her nerves, to his fat books and archaeological journals, to his boring conversations about digging seasons and his endless reminiscences — of diving into the dust with friends and colleagues, who boasted of being burned by the Iraqi sun, eating canned food with the Bedouin, and trying to ride horses — ‘their stupid stories about falling on to their backs’, as Wasal used to describe them.

‘This Pakistani understands me,’ she said to herself as she observed his repeated depravities, which entertained her at times and exasperated her at others. She often went to Abdel Ghany’s flat when he was in London, and after several months she convinced the Syrian to take her with him to Aleppo. She spoke captivatingly of the splendour of Palmyra, the markets in Aleppo, the gentle kindness of Syrians. She knew that she had enticed him when he took her picture next to the statue of Spartacus in the waxwork museum, and she surprised him by baring her chest, smiling with lust and thrilling ambiguity. She made an eccentric out of Abdel Ghany, a lover who expressed his innermost secrets all at once. He lunged at her and instead of catching at her breasts hanging like ripe apples, he bowed at her feet. He recited some lines by an Aleppan poet who had left behind him a diwan of poetry entitled Songs of the Dome , a huge encyclopaedia of Aleppan customs, tastes and jokes which boasted of Aleppo’s uniqueness. Abdel Ghany recited some lines, treating them like a religious singer keen on making the beauty of the vowels appear clearly.

He took her to Aleppo and she breathed deeply when she walked in the souk. She saw the domes and minarets of the mosques, and she looked for a messenger to convey a brief note to Zahra, informing her of her room number at the Baron Hotel.

Zahra was unsurprised. It was as if she had been expecting this appointment, confirming her constant feeling that Wasal would one day appear in front of her, her last friend, who had made out her mother’s story through snippets of contradictory conversations between the men she knew, and from memories fixed in her mind as a young child. Nothing remained of her image of her mother other than the features of a grumbling woman who would coquettishly flutter her reliable eyelashes when giving instructions to the reluctant latest of a long succession of unfortunate servants. Zahra kept the impressions of that meeting at the hotel to herself for a long time. She told me about it only in her darkest moments, when she was lying in her bed and death had settled over the city like a vampire we could see but couldn’t touch.

Zahra sat opposite her mother in the salon of the Baron, ignoring the courteous gestures of the foreign men who had come looking for the primitive place Agatha Christie had once passed through, leaving the dust from her shoes on the floor. Zahra raised the black veil from her glowing, pure face, her dark eyes full of forgiveness. Both of them knew that there was not enough time for long reproaches, so they made do with crying and quickly came to understand one another. They left the hotel and went out into the crowded streets, bewildered, wrapped up in their eternal kinship.