Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

‘We need hatred to give our lives meaning,’ I thought as I celebrated my seventeenth birthday alone. It is hard when no one celebrates with you, or gives you flowers and presents. Safaa returned to her house with Abdullah for a while, after which they would be leaving for Saudi Arabia. Marwa packed a small bag and went to stay with Zahra. Maryam considered birthdays to be a foreign heresy whose merrymaking was not appropriate for the daughters of the family God had settled within the corners of our house. I sat alone and stretched my feet along the edge of the pool. I relaxed and enjoyed the September breezes. While I drank juice, I began to anticipate the next school year and my revenge on the girls who had made me feel that I was gloomy, unsuited for such relaxation in the sunlight. I loved how the spray coming off the sleepy fountain tickled my feet and my soft fingers. I needed hatred to reach love, to leave behind all the ashes, the twilight of objects and faces.

I read the margins of Hossam’s textbooks and inspected the drawings scrawled over the chemistry volume; I burst out laughing at the picture of a donkey with a Roman letter ‘N’ on it. (I guessed that it was meant to be Najwa, our neighbour’s daughter — she had married a wood merchant and had never noticed Hossam’s confusion. He loved her and would write her love poetry praising her chastity and virtue.) All this was a letter Hossam had written to me, replacing the years of silence and estrangement with confidences as between friends. He had left me his notes so I could read them and know how tormented he was; how he longed to achieve martyrdom in God’s service; how his skinny body could no longer contain his soul, hidden behind fiery words and pledges to the infidels that their Day of Judgement was near. There were also nashid I had never heard before, which incited mujahideen to the death. I missed him; we were as harsh to each other as if we were strangers. When we passed each other, neither of us lingered to exchange a confidence, or relate some trivial moment which was given value by being shared. I missed him, but didn’t seek him out.

I observed him silently the day when he rushed into my grandfather’s house, all agitated, with a black-speckled shawl on his shoulders. There were bloodstains on his shirt, and Maryam didn’t believe that they came from a sacrifice a friend of Hossam had made to his mother’s memory. My brother entered the cellar and I saw him hide a gun in a sack of bulgur wheat. I knew that he had killed our neighbour Abbas, a pilot whose green eyes Safaa used to be infatuated with. Hossam washed and assured us that everything would be fine. He sipped his coffee in silence and avoided looking at me; he wanted everything to seem normal. I left silently for school and saw people crowding around the pilot’s body, now covered with a woollen blanket. I didn’t stop, but I glimpsed his huge corpse’s hand lying there limply, between the armed men who were surrounding the body and closing off the street. I felt nauseous and dizzy in the second class of the day. Ghada brought me a cup of tea and put her hand on my forehead, reviving all my desires for her. I cried, and as I told her I’d just seen someone murdered, Hiba and Hana moved away from me. They observed me, and there was contempt in their eyes for my weakness. I was allowed to go home, accompanied by Ghada who squeezed my arm affectionately as I cried in silence.

Members of the Mukhabarat were searching houses in the alley, ours among them, after having carried the body away and cleaned up the blood. The corpse evaporated: his smile no longer beamed. I fell asleep and was haunted by nightmares. I saw his smiling face. In the early evening, I heard Bakr whispering as he listened to Maryam describe how the Mukhabarat had searched the house and rummaged through the sacks of bulgur wheat, adding that she had taken the precaution of hiding Hossam’s gun in the hole where my grandfather used to hide his money and his rifle, and thanking God that Hossam had left a few minutes before.

Bakr’s face was exhausted and worried, showing everything he couldn’t speak about, and he stayed in bed for three days. Different images merged and all my memories of Hossam caved in all at once, from when he was a silent child, skinny and mad about mathematics. No one then could have predicted his future; he was silent and distracted for hours at a time, oblivious to the din surrounding him — we thought he was going to become a poet. His odd ideas had reminded my mother and aunts of Omar’s strange and contradictory childhood. When we were young children, Hossam would prepare a seat on the branches of the only tree in our courtyard and stay there for hours. When he was a teenager, he never went to the cinema with schoolfriends, or chased cheerfully after girls with the idiocy typical of that age; he hid and suppressed his violent feelings. I used to see him get up from his bed during the night, sit on the step to his room, and cry unrestrainedly. I didn’t know why he would pace around like a madman in the Sufi circles Bakr took him to, without even listening to the rhythm. Bakr effectively adopted him, and assessed the fullest extent of his intelligence. Hatred and cruelty slept in his nephew’s heart. Finally, Hossam saw a light in the shadowy tunnel of his life. He spent a long time with Bakr, until he became almost like a secretary or bodyguard to him. He joined a gym and his body began to develop. His muscles grew and his movements quickened, like those of a runner training for a marathon.

Hossam and I didn’t talk properly like siblings, or conspire together; moving to my grandfather’s house made me a stranger to him. My infrequent visits to my parents’ house made his image fade in my mind. When I saw him, I felt he was a stranger at first, but I loved him, and objected to his constant observations that made me out to be a woman who must be controlled, and who must obey the orders she’s given. My father had initially blessed his son’s relationship with Bakr, reassured that the smell of fish would never emanate from his clothes. For a short time, he wanted Hossam to become a carpet trader, while my mother wanted her precious boy to be a doctor and reminded us that his soft fingers and piercing eyes would suit a skilled surgeon. His image as the murderer of our neighbour the pilot held sway over me: the coldness as he hid the gun after throwing his bloodstained shirt in the bathroom stove, his quiet slumber — it all made me wonder about the power of the hatred in his heart. I liked it, setting aside the moments of sympathy that had afflicted me when I’d seen the dead body.

While I was off school, Ghada visited me and brought me flowers. We spoke like close friends; I loved her sympathy for me, and I sensed her worry when she spoke to me about her relationship with the fifty-year-old man. We no longer saw him as much, as he was overworked and had grown wary in his movements following the assassinations. They seemed to herald a serious confrontation that would drag the country into a cycle of violence, and no one knew how it would end. Ghada told me of her difficulties with her family who refused to acknowledge the relationship but kept silent out of fear of violent recrimination from her lover, over thirty years her senior. She denied that he brutally tortured prisoners, describing him as a magnificent man.

Her lips were full, like ripe figs which dripped honey as they were devoured. I briefly envied her her daring and asked her forgiveness. Haunted with longing for her, I sank wearily into her arms and wept. I felt wonder as her fingers combed through my hair like a plough through earth; the air she breathed out had a smell of decay which clung to my black hair, which I didn’t look after any more, and to the malbad under my thick hijab, which I rarely took off even in my own room. I was afraid of being spied on by the unfamiliar men I saw in dreams.