Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Maryam almost lost the ability to speak when she saw officers and Mukhabarat climbing down from our roof into the courtyard and drawing their weapons, bursting into rooms and cellars in their search for Hossam and Bakr. They crammed us into Radwan’s room, who tried to push them as he cursed them, reminding them of my grandfather’s rank and that only women lived in this house. One of them knocked him over, and I saw him put his boot on Radwan’s neck, cursing my grandfather and his offspring and describing us as whores. More than sixty armed men were hysterically ransacking the rooms, overturning beds, opening wardrobes, smashing padlocks, scattering pictures and papers. They unrolled expensive carpets that smelled of mothballs; they didn’t have time to contemplate their designs with wonder.

I almost exploded with laughter as we were barricaded into Radwan’s room. The soldiers had turned out his boxes and poured all his perfumes on to the floor so that we almost choked. It would have been ironic for us to suffocate on perfume. Radwan cursed God and instantly implored His forgiveness, trying to convince the soldier that he was committing a mortal sin and charging him with immorality. Maryam shook him and asked him to be quiet, afraid that he would lead them to the secret cupboard where she had hidden Hossam’s gun the day he killed the pilot; later, I had begun to hide my papers and pamphlets in there, paying no attention to Zahra’s warnings.

The officer in charge called us into Maryam’s room one after another. I thought, as I looked into his eyes, that hatred would make me calm and composed, heedless of the spittle flying from his mouth as he swore to cut off my hand and gouge out my eye if I didn’t lead him to Bakr and Hossam. Zahra leaned on my chest, forgetting the coolness of our relationship in recent months. I sensed her fear, and thought, ‘They don’t know the secrets of our houses, or of the city’s entrances.’ I was the most composed of them all, as if my hatred were being put to the test. Maryam prayed for mercy on the souls of the victims; she didn’t believe that Bakr was responsible for organizing any of the increasingly frequent assassinations, and clung to the hope that it was a nightmare which would soon be driven away and we would return to the security we had lost.

The military also occupied Bakr’s half-abandoned house. Four soldiers lived there permanently, playing cards in an attempt to drive out their fear as they waited for him to enter their trap. My mother told me that they had grabbed my father by his moustache and soiled his face with their heavy boots, and that he had still not recovered his speech. His skill with fish had deserted him, and he hadn’t slept for three days. I saw him sitting on the ground in filthy clothes, and my brother Humam, afraid, was squeezed into a corner. I talked to my father, but he didn’t hear me. He was deaf, lost; he was looking for meaning in what had happened. They had taken him to their local headquarters three times; there they cursed him, and insulted his manhood; he slept on the bare ground of a damp cell and the aluminium bowl in the middle of the floor gave off a stench of excrement and urine — but he was less upset by this than by the spitting of the guard who, all night, never stopped kicking him and cursing his women. He bore the blows from the four-lashed whips, and the pulling out of his fingernails with pliers. He remembered the men he had tortured in the same way in the days of Abdel Hamid Sarraj, as if he were being liberated from his painful memories and had expiated the sins that had weighed heavily on him for years. I sat beside him like a cat wanting to lick the wounds which he hid even from my mother.

Everyone lost their equilibrium, now that it was so abundantly clear what terrible danger Bakr and Hossam were in. My aunts and my mother were immersed in prayer and recitation of the Quran. They needed Omar, who came to our house. We understood each other by looks alone. Everything entered a dark tunnel and I waited impatiently, afraid that my mother would die of heart failure. My father’s silence tortured me and I pitied him; for a moment, I almost sympathized with the murder victims. I wished that Bakr had remained a carpet trader who boasted to other families about his properties, praising his family like any man who took passing enjoyment from the absurdities of daily life.

Zahra recovered her strength all at once. She helped everyone keep faith that Hossam and Bakr and their group had been chosen by God to bring back Islam, His word and His brilliance; to bring back the story of Bilal Al Habashy, who was tortured by the Quraysh in the desert heat and never yielded to their hell. We acted out a play: Radwan considered himself Bilal Al Habashy and Maryam the Mother of Believers, Khadija Bint Khuwaylid. I loved the role of Fatima Al Zahra and reviewed her sira . I rushed into Hajja Souad’s council and asked to rearrange the prayer circles and redistribute tasks. I reproached a girl who questioned the validity of killing the sons of other sects and parties; she considered them innocent and quoted the Quran, which banned us from killing a soul whose murder God declared unlawful. The girls were astonished at the force of my expressions when I described the murdered as heretics; my voice trembled when I described our brothers as mujahideen and heroes, as if I were making a passionate speech at a ceremony. I volunteered to carry weapons and kill unbelievers, recalling the words Hossam had written in the margins of his chemistry books, and wishing him the martyrdom he wanted with everything he possessed and with all the vigour of youth. I took the largest section of the pamphlets which had to be distributed all over the city, and in which our group announced that we were at the beginning of our battle with the atheist party. People conversed with the pride appropriate for men who were committed to and believed in God. I concealed the pamphlets under my clothes and one of the sisters walked in front of me, watching the winding street as I stuffed pamphlets under the doors of strange houses. I made their inhabitants tremble, and then think that the fear they lived in was nothing but an illusion which could be removed. I wished that I could knock on doors to tell them that I was bearing the good news of the green banners sweeping the country.

It was difficult to see the city from behind the twilight of my black face-covering, and I loved it; Aleppo seemed mysterious, cruel. In my heart I threatened unveiled girls. I imagined myself passing judgement on them; I would spray acid in their faces and disfigure them without mercy, hitting their delicate fingers so they wouldn’t take hold of men’s hands and laugh while dawdling and eating ice-cream. I thought there was no doubt they went to houses with men in order to have sex and desecrate marriage and their own virtue. Officers from the death squad now filled the city. They aroused terror with their powerful bodies and their machine guns, their scorn of death, and their unexpected siege of the old, narrow quarters of the city. Orders came to us daily as we passed through alleys like the breeze. Sometimes we felt like we were flying. We entered every house, and women were praying for our men. They wept when they imagined the danger surrounding us. We gathered donations, we sent letters, we distributed pamphlets, we didn’t see the faces of those outsiders who in the quiet night came to the city in order to attack the Mukhabarat branches and the regime’s headquarters; most of them fled back to their faraway villages. Every day, we felt that we were approaching our final pilgrimage when the soul of the Prophet would come out to welcome us, blessing our strength, and with his immaculate arms he would surrender to us the keys of Paradise.

Whenever the city’s terror increased over the next few months, so did my certainty that hatred would make me into a hard woman, not the shy girl who used to stand on the doorsill afraid of loneliness and orphanhood. It was now summer, and for two unforgettable months, my vigour reached its pinnacle after a group of ‘our best young men’ were executed, as my uncle Selim described them in a prayer for the absent dead which was held for their souls. We passed on their brave words from the television coverage of their trial, when they explained their cruelty and their hardness. We envied them; they would reach Paradise before us, and their daring aroused the sympathy of the city’s inhabitants as they denounced the government’s corruption. Prayers were held in many different houses for their souls, and cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ were raised at the moment of their execution. Their corpses were buried without mourners. My mother drowned in a whirl of wails and grief when she saw Hossam’s friends, with whom she had broken Ramadan fasts and exchanged jokes, going to the gallows. She was terrified of the same fate for her baby. Nightmares stopped her from sleeping. I saw her age — she was filled with tears and incomprehensible mutterings. She didn’t have time to be happy that I was one of the ten best female students in Aleppo. I would become a doctor, she boasted to her neighbours and cousins, who didn’t dare read our pamphlets as they were already banned from praying at the mosques. One of our oldest cousins cut his hair like the singer from the Beatles and put rings in his ears to avoid the accusation of being Hossam’s relative whenever one of the patrols stopped him. I chose a strange way to celebrate my success: I founded a new prayer circle in the house of a divorced woman who taught girls sewing and embroidery. Its open windows banished suspicion about my frequent comings and goings with ‘my girls’, as I began to call them. We went to work in the morning and returned in the evening like any girls who worked and couldn’t wait to leave so they could wink at shop-owners and laundrymen, while taxi drivers and patrolling soldiers tried to harass them; they would laugh and then run away.