Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Safaa reassured Maryam that she felt optimistic about her marriage to the Yemeni, and whispered companionably with Zahra, as if expressing her gratitude to her. Safaa’s new house in Jamiliyya was composed of two rooms and a living room. Maryam almost suffocated in the narrowness of the reception room, which she said resembled a tomb. For the first time, I saw Safaa’s spirit expressed in a place of her very own; she shook off her lethargy and fiercely defended her new life. The house was arranged in a manner that revealed her hatred for my grandfather’s house filled with its old furniture. There were a couple of sofas in the living room in the American style, elsewhere was a soft bed beside a gleaming black chest of drawers topped by a candlestick with three branches. There were not many pots and pans in the kitchen, as if the owners of the house were spending a short holiday there and would be leaving it soon. Safaa didn’t listen to Maryam’s suggestion to move some things from my grandfather’s house, which she offered up as if it were Safaa’s greatest right to have them. Safaa stroked her hand and informed her that her carpet would be enough, relinquishing her portion of the inheritance; it was as if she didn’t trust that this small house or the unknown places where she would join her husband were really a long-term arrangement. Marwa kept Safaa’s wardrobe filled with dresses, some of which became gifts, along with her bedding, her pillows and all her small effects. Marwa seemed unconvinced that Safaa had broken free from their fate and would not be returning to the house a lonely woman.

Our monotonous evenings began to herald a long isolation from which I didn’t know how to escape. Marwa embroidered handkerchiefs. I didn’t know who she would give them to; she piled them in her wardrobe and postponed her death a day at a time. She offered to teach me how to embroider and I told her seriously, and to her astonishment, ‘I don’t want to wait for death.’

* * *

I went to a daily meeting at Hajja Souad’s — I had recently begun to frequent her house despite the feeling of estrangement that attended me as I sat with the other girls. I had met most of them the day Hana took me there, in accordance with Bakr’s orders and his insistence that I would only understand his purpose when Hajja Souad began to divide us into smaller groups and meet us at fixed times. We spoke gravely about the group and its ideology of establishing an Islamic state, and enthusiastically conveyed news from school, and our aims to include other girls in our gatherings, which had started to expand.

Secrecy, silence and zeal were on the rise in our state, in which the knowledge of the Prophet would soon stir. ‘We will punish the blasphemies of the unbelievers,’ Hajja Souad repeated with full conviction, as if she could see that very day. We, the sisters, the believers, would sit in Paradise next to the Prophet and the mothers of the believers.

I didn’t grasp from where came the conviction that the path to Paradise was open before me. All I now wanted was to become a martyr borne up by white birds, pure, sins forgiven, to that paradise which Hajja Souad drew for us patiently and confidently. My sufferings were calmed. I found that my belief was encouraged through my relationship with Bakr who, I now saw, had been created to realize the dream of eradicating dissolution and debauchery, and to re-glorify the Islamic Caliphate.

I couldn’t find a better interlocutor than Safaa’s new husband, Abdullah, especially as Bakr was always busy; he never spent two nights in a row in his own house. Maryam didn’t object to my sitting with Abdullah for hours at a time, and we would discuss and exchange information about Islamic clans and stories of martyrs who had died in prison cells and on battlefields. Safaa was astonished by the speed at which I became involved, and my stubbornness in the face of her attempts to dissuade me from this path. She praised my femininity and my promising academic future, trying to save me from the path of destructive politics and, more particularly, from all the details of her husband’s past I could gather. I extolled the strength of conviction that had made Abdullah relinquish the path of error, and how his heart used faith to illuminate a segment of his tortuous journey which had continued for more than twenty years. He had spent them in anxiety, in a search for answers to the questions his heart had been repeating since being opened for the first time at the English School in Cairo, a building surrounded by giant cypress trees in the district of Abdeen. He had been one of its most distinguished students, and his teachers had great confidence in his subtle analyses of William Blake; the awe and accent with which he recited the verses reminded his teachers of Welsh farmers, overcome with emotion at an Eisteddfod. Abdullah would reread long sections of ‘The Tyger’ for me, which he had never forgotten, despite the years separating him from that student who had dreamed of his home in Yemen. He stood up suddenly, raised his hands and, with considerable feeling, began to recite the poem in English.

To me, he seemed like a first-rate actor, and more joyful than usual. Safaa was fixed on his gleaming eyes as if she were noticing their dark colour for the first time. I smiled shyly and laughed when I heard Radwan insist on reciting the ode that Hossam hadn’t allowed him to recite the day of Bakr’s banquet. I thought that he had forgotten about it, but he got carried away and recited it without waiting for permission. Politely, but with increasing boredom, Abdullah listened as Radwan attempted to imitate his style of recitation. We clapped for a long time, and Maryam slapped her palms together, saying, ‘You’ve all gone mad.’ Then she left us to express our need for strangers to talk to, even if only politely and shyly.

* * *

Abdullah’s father decided to send his son away from Aden on the basis of advice from an Indian sailor who entered his old shop in the souk one day. He was looking for a copper Umayyad-style lamp which he described in minute detail — a wandering Englishman he had met in Alexandria had convinced him that he would never find it anywhere but Yemen. The Indian sailor seemed bewildered as he explained this in English to a man who understood only a few words of the language. The father called over his son, Abdullah, and asked him to translate this strange foreigner’s request. The two quickly understood each other, and the Indian expressed his delight at this student who was no more than four years old and who could describe a lamp and speak about imaginary worlds that the sailor admired. Abdullah listened attentively to the Indian’s tales of adventure, and the long conversation between the boy and sailor pleased the father, who wondered about the secret behind their effusiveness, and their enjoyment of a conversation neither wanted to finish. He was proud of the eloquence of his young son, who made the sailor laugh and keep returning to the shop to teach magic tricks to Abdullah. He was a fast learner and after a week, he could produce a rose from his shirt sleeve. Before the sailor’s ship left Aden, he had bought a multitude of lamps, copper goblets and silver-plated narghiles to sell at other ports, or to give to the directors of shipping companies in Athens. The sailor advised the father that his son must complete his studies at the English School in Cairo, if he wanted him to have a different future from the rest of his generation — which wandered the streets, waiting to avenge tribal blood feuds or to carry out the whims of Imam Yahya’s men.

It was a dream that was closer to a fantasy than reality, but eventually Abdullah took his first steps into a school that made him afraid, then lonely, then a leader to his classmates, comprised of the sons of kings, petty princelings and families known for their vast wealth. ‘The stuff of legends,’ Abdullah would often say to us as he described for us his first months. The oddness of his never-ending stories always astonished us.