Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

‘We both needed a companion,’ Zahra explained to me, recollecting the few, tedious hours which had passed like heavy-footed ghosts on their way to the barzakh . Zahra told her mother that she was both a stranger, to the extent that she didn’t know her at all, and a close relative, to the extent that it was as if they had never been separated and the years that had passed were like a lie, a dream which had lasted only a few seconds. Any moment now Wasal would get up and go to the kitchen to add salt to the peas and then return to gather up the balls of coloured wool with which Zahra had been playing, just like any mother absorbed in her family. Dispassionately, Zahra formed cold, disciplined sentences, which she did not use to describe her sadness and excruciating pain at being a motherless child with a depressed father. She sketched for her mother a picture of Bakr as a loving husband and father. She talked at great length about my grandfather in order to defeat Wasal’s desire to see her grandchildren. She fielded questions cautiously and, before leaving her mother, she asked her to swear that she wouldn’t die in a brothel; an odd request, to which Wasal duly acceded. Zahra ended the conversation where it was supposed to begin. They exchanged addresses and hugged warmly in the manner of lovers who would never meet again.

Wasal understood that everything between them had come to an end. A series of disclosures began across the cruel letters that Zahra would write in reply to Wasal’s repeated petitions for her to pronounce the word ‘mother’ just once, in any language she wanted. Zahra was troubled during that time. She sat beside Hajja Radia and didn’t care about the drumming tambourines, nor the religious lessons illustrating the influence of the mothers of the believers and the wisdom of the Prophet. They made us weep, amazed at Hajja Radia’s eloquence and the river of knowledge that engulfed our hearts, returning us once more to the certainty that filtered into our souls. Hajja Radia didn’t understand Zahra’s insistence on spending the equivalent value of her favourite expensive bracelet on food for poor families — until the letters started arriving punctually every Saturday. She handed them over without asking their origin after she made out the name of Zahra’s mother.

A strange relationship had already sprung up between them. Hajja Radia was mother, sister and companion to Zahra, and their closeness frequently caused envy within their circle. This was especially true among those who considered their own powerful family connections with the most pious inhabitants of Aleppo as sufficient to warrant occupying the most exalted positions in their sessions, despite their chattering away without restraint about the price of gold, the fatwas issued by Ibn Malik, and women’s problems. The relationship between Zahra and Hajja Radia was the subject of much speculation. Khalil accepted it without objection and Bakr sanctioned it, especially as he had started staying abroad for weeks at a time.

Zahra was forbidden from entering my grandfather’s house. She was marked by the sins of her mother — these the envious tackled first, before accusing Zahra of having a sexual relationship with Hajja Radia, who had a well-known penchant for beautiful women and their perfumes. This penchant stopped at passionately smelling those women’s necks, praising their soft skin and pinching them, as they generally let out an ‘Aah…’ tinged with hidden lust.

Zahra memorized the Quran, the principles of its recitation, and the tambourine beats in Hajja Radia’s house; the latter did not hide her pleasure at Zahra’s long face, with its complexion tending towards fair, and her slender body which grew before her eyes. She watched its transformation as Zahra fled from the chaos of banging crockery and children’s runny noses in Khalil’s house to the calm of Hajja Radia’s house, which was respected by all the families of Aleppo. The silence, the clean smell wafting from sofas and pillows, the incense, all enveloped Zahra and she fell into a trance, unaware of why the afternoon breezes affected her so. She stretched her legs out into a pool and relaxed under the pampering of Hajja Radia, who was looking for a daughter whose fingers tasted of ghariba . Khalil’s refusal did not last long in the face of Hajja Radia’s insistence on sharing Zahra’s upbringing between them. As a motherless child, Zahra found a new mother who, during two consecutive marriages over four years, had given birth to two sons. The elder was a drug addict; the second was mad and tried to swallow his nose and his toes, roaming through alleyways covered in their grime, his body lined with poison. Two husbands, two sons — but it was as if they had never existed in her life; as if they were lies, or a pot of ink spilled on to a dusty pavement. Hajja Radia took a job singing nashid at mawalid and weddings, and giving recitations of Rabia Adawiya, trying to forget her past all in one go. I asked her once what men tasted like, and without any hesitation she replied, ‘Just like shit.’

* * *

My grandmother died and Zahra entered my grandfather’s house for the first time, accompanied by Hajja Radia, who had insisted on preparing my grandmother for burial herself, and mourning her with dignity. The two of them had shared a lifetime of frying spices, eating apricot jam, gossiping, singing and going to the resplendent hammams, where they fell asleep together in a private compartment. She bantered with the body and teased it about the years of estrangement due to Bakr’s marriage to Zahra, which my grandmother had believed to be Zahra’s plan all along. We stood in the courtyard and waited for the body as Zahra wandered through the house, examining paintings and doorways. She smiled at me and hugged me, then quickly reached a state of harmony with my aunts. Hajja Radia came outside and asked us to clear the way so the men could carry my grandmother’s body to the grave. Her sharp gaze couldn’t prevent the sound of weeping from breaking out. Men buried the dead woman and the women wailed and waved at a distance from the coffin.

I once asked Hajja Radia, ‘Why don’t women bury the dead?’ She seemed distracted, as if she were remembering that all the squalor of the world, and all its purity, could be found within us. I told her once, ‘I dream sometimes that I am burying a dead person.’ I carried on, ‘I didn’t recognize his face, but he looked like a lot of men I know.’ She hung my hijab over my face and ordered me to recite the Sura Al Baqara ten times. I was happy with my veil and closed my eyes, recited the Sura Al Anfal and Sura Yusuf from memory, and never told anyone my strange dreams ever again. I was no longer afraid of the scenes in my dreams of the pilgrims circling the Kaaba, nor the scenes of women carrying biers, praying and then burying them with laughter and drinking iced berry juice. One of them looked like Maryam, dancing to the rhythm of a strange love song which resembled Syriac music I had heard once as I was passing in front of a record shop. I had steeled myself, gone in, and bought a cassette. I convinced Safaa that we should listen to it together, taking advantage of her gaiety one evening.

I tried to capture whatever I could remember, and having decided to write it down, I bought a pink notebook and coloured pens. The writing changed into drawings. I found the pictures to be a way of confessing what no one could unravel, even when the notebook fell into my aunts’ hands. The most beautiful of these dreams I had drawn as a tree with a squirrel standing on one of its branches, laughing as it looked at the clouds. It was a dream that a man ripped off Fatima’s bra and was raping her in the school courtyard under the gaze of her schoolmates who were clapping with glee. It was the revenge of the companions in black for her immorality and her shamelessness in using obscene words only spoken by criminals. I didn’t want to wonder if the man’s member was visible or hidden in the dream, afraid of touching upon an image I didn’t know anything about. It was a major source of confusion in my life; I imagined it to look like a corncob, which was how Fatima had described it to her friends as I listened in astonishment at her daring in recounting an entire porn film, as unconcerned as if she were peeling an apple. In another picture, I drew a cornfield and then blotted it out with black, afraid that desire might possess me and destroy my dignity, blowing me away like grains of sand from the steps of an ancient house.