Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

After Omar returned from military service he went into his room, packed his religious books in a wooden box and carried it to the cellar, resolute in his refusal to go to Al Azhar. He began to work in the business with great enthusiasm. In his house, my grandmother sat waiting for his return. She waited for two whole days, and when he finally returned and saw her sitting with Maryam and his wife, Rima, absorbed in chopping quince, he leaned over and kissed her head. He laughed as his mother told him everything she knew about the fallen women he wasted his money on, and praised the fortitude and elevated morals of his wife. She only quietened down when he swore on the Quran that he wouldn’t fall into bad company again. Before my grandmother died, Omar had timorously sworn on the Quran nine times; afterwards he returned to his hellraising as if what had been said was nothing more than a puff of air. Anyone looking into his cunning eyes and his yellow, emaciated face might have thought he had come down with jaundice. As a child he wanted to become an actor; he left school and spent most of his time in the cinema, or following news of actors and imitating their gestures and Egyptian accents in front of the large mirror.

‘He was wonderful, and so kind,’ Safaa said, recalling Omar’s never-ending attempts to be a renegade who scorned tradition. The most idiotic of his actions caused consternation in the family, which gathered a number of times to admonish him; he would listen calmly and quickly burst into remorseful tears, only to surprise them the following morning with further follies. Once, he brought a flock of geese to the house. Omar straightaway began opening the doors, upon which the geese spread out and began ravaging Maryam’s flowers. He tossed them a slice of bread and began herding them like a cowboy. He almost put my grandmother into a swoon and Maryam felt hysteria coming on when she saw her delicate plants trampled and scattered over the ground like there had been a frivolous and unexpected festival. Safaa smothered her laughter and she and Maryam confronted Omar who looked at them, perplexed, and then stormed out of the house. His dream of being a gooseherd came to an end. He herded his flock to the Bedouin, greatly enjoying the open air and the cane in his hand, which he raised to hush the beaks of his flock. My grandfather and uncles returned in the evening to turn out the remnants of this flock, which had strutted through rooms and cellars and left its excrement and footprints on bedspreads and flowered sofas. My grandfather was more tolerant of Omar’s odd jokes, and he was astounded at his son’s talent for generating profits when he began to work in the family shops, despite Selim’s fear that his flippancy would ruin everything. It was as if he had found certainty at last in the pleasure of dividends, which he used to philosophize about, explaining ideas that occasionally shook the market; they also made him into a much-sought-after partner in risk avoidance.

My grandfather and other uncles ignored Omar’s levity because of his boosting of their trade, which had become rather lacklustre at a time when Persian and Kashmiri carpets were no longer a source of pride for Syrian families. Also, there were certain telegrams that allowed Omar to put important families in touch with some powerful officers who had taken over the rule of law after the army entered Lebanon. These men were transformed from officers, warriors strutting about in their uniforms, into smugglers of ceramics and electronic equipment, and they had connections to foreign tobacco barons. They became a familiar presence in upmarket restaurants, praising Aleppan vine leaves and kebab, dividing up their profits, and raising their voices in arguments that sometimes escalated to the point where they were on the verge of ordering their own men to shoot each other. Echoes probably reached the government in the Republican Palace, which intervened with a curt judgement that everyone accepted. After that, these officers went back to taking girls to restaurants and country estates, delighting in their great power, giving themselves free rein in plundering the country’s riches, and imposing their rule on all the institutions that became their targets. The staff of these institutions trembled when they saw military vehicles stopping in front of their buildings. Soldiers in pretend uniforms would get out carrying weapons, and when they entered the premises they would be offered cold drinks and petit fours and any orders they gave were implemented immediately. The city, which used to boast of being compared to Vienna, became a ruin populated by frightened ghosts grieving for their glorious past. The great families lost their money and their sons were forced to ally themselves with farmers with whom they now played backgammon, ignoring their boorishness and praising them, even offering their daughters in marriage.

Selim considered Omar’s partnership with the smugglers to be mad, stupidity that would consign the entire family and its wealth to oblivion. He didn’t expect Omar’s cold defence of this partnership, the way he reeled off the details of their father’s willingness to bend to the prevailing wind, and their grandfather before him, who delivered Sheikh Daghstani’s grandfather to the Ottomans to be summarily executed in front of Bal El Hadid. Omar reminded Selim of how the four wings of Yildiz Palace in Istanbul had been furnished with splendid carpets as the reward for his betrayal, which my grandfather tried repeatedly to rewrite to make it seem more of a coincidence than a conspiracy.

Bakr didn’t object to Omar’s strategy, and offered advice which the other two didn’t hear. Omar became like a Mafioso, totally preoccupied; he didn’t know the taste of relaxation. He no longer came to us at the end of the evening as he used to — just drunk enough to be contented and cheerful, to fight with Maryam over the principles of fiqh , to drink coffee with Safaa and Marwa, to joke with me and leave me a considerable amount of cash. Maryam would put it away in my special box — as if she wanted to distance me from the overpowering, disgusting smell of fish that wafted from my father’s clothes and hands, which, to her, had been transformed into putrescent gills.

Omar’s public infamy and shamelessness worried my aunts, who raced to write a charm for him, which was stitched, wrapped in elegant, colourful material, and hung around his neck as he sat between them with the meekness of a mouse. Afterwards he was struck with the idea of making copies and selling them to other dervishes.

Safaa’s eyes sparkled happily when news of his fight with an important official who raised objections to Omar’s lover was circulated around the city. She was a married woman who boasted of her relationship with Omar; she went out to restaurants with him in public, travelled with him to Beirut for a few days, and returned to show off to her friends the evidence of his generosity. After a long conversation in which Omar complained of his attachment to his lover and her exploitation of his fierce tenderness, Safaa advised him to get her divorced and then marry her, adding sarcastically that a wife was cheaper than a mistress.

We couldn’t understand Omar’s ambition, nor his anxiety and fear; we couldn’t find sufficient reason for Omar’s mad withdrawal into his pleasures and his being hell-bent on provoking scandal. Whenever Maryam looked at his sharia qualification hanging on her bedroom wall, her eyes swam with tears and she muttered a prayer — we stopped joining in after a conversation we’d had about the enormous funds he had accrued in the short months he had spent as an arms dealer. He was now devoting himself almost entirely to this trade, at the expense of the patterned carpets and the smell of silk and wool. He became wary at the growing number of assassinations of civil service employees and lower-ranking officers, lauded by most people who were astonished at the cold-blooded murders.