Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

* * *

Who ever really belongs to another? I thought while on my way to meet Hossam. I craved his presence; I missed him; I wanted to see the other face of my family. He took me to an Armenian restaurant and we sat together like lovers. I loved this role and my crazy infatuation with my brother, my lover, my companion, my leader. I looked deeply and passionately into his honey-coloured eyes, pressed my hand to his face, felt his skin, sensed his fear which seared me. He was distracted and didn’t listen as I told him of my regret for my father and my fear for my mother, who had been forced to close up her house and move in with us in her father’s house; it was as if we were all coming together and turning out panic and fear. Hossam was looking around cautiously and wouldn’t listen to my descriptions of our victories. He took my hand suddenly and asked me to withdraw from the group and concentrate on my studies. In a few words, he confessed his remorse at his involvement in murder. I sensed how much he longed to lean back under the lemon tree and watch my mother cutting up beans and gossiping about the neighbours. He knew so many secrets about the disputes that were taking place among the leadership over the list of planned assassinations. His hand trembled as he drank his coffee and his gaze wandered; he asked me about Humam, didn’t wait for my reply, muttered something, and left without saying goodbye — only with a few nervous words about wanting to flee to Mecca and seek forgiveness for his sins: killing innocent civilians from the other sect . This expression, which he kept repeating, frightened me. I stayed in the restaurant by myself and cried like a girl abandoned and deserving of the sympathy of the few patrons and waiters. I wasn’t embarrassed.

* * *

It is difficult suddenly to discover that you are empty; that your shadow weighs heavily on the earth; that all around you, acid submerges your dreams and you appear corroded in the eyes of others. My father’s features came back to me so clearly it made me rave at night that our family would only be saved, and Marwa’s peace of mind would only return, with a swift victory. We would be reunited once more and all sit round the table, and Maryam would set out the neglected silverware like any lady secure in the knowledge that everything was as it should be. We all needed that image of the family, finally relaxed. I felt trivial; I hated studying biochemistry, and the students’ insistence on exhibiting a precocious gravity. I asked our leaders if I could go back to my own prayer circle and be exempted from the college circle which I attended every morning. I was afraid that I would be arrested or hear that Hossam or Bakr had been killed. I thought of our destiny and, for the first time, thought that the murder victims would reach out their fingers to gouge out our eyes. Hajja Souad encouraged me to forget my fears. I couldn’t admit to anyone that Hossam’s remorse had shaken me and stranded me on an island of hatred, and I had thereby regained the dreams of a woman. I looked with clear eyes at my mother, who was in total surrender to a fate that hadn’t arrived yet — whenever she heard the sound of bullets she burst out crying and beat her breast. Maryam would calm her and recite some incantations in a soft voice which seemed weak to me. She wove ropes of hope in the air and clung to them, like a child finding a swing in a pile of rubble that used to be a house.

I became less boastful of my kinship with Hossam. I paid no attention to the shattered family photograph. My parents’ home was now occupied by soldiers; they scattered my memories, they slept on my childhood pillows, they flung sardine tins on to the floor and left them to let off a repugnant smell which mixed with that of their urine. Their shameless laughter was a necessity to them, so they could master their fear of the bullets which would come from unforeseen directions and pile them into coffins.

Bodies on both sides fell like ripened berries; the atmosphere was oppressive, saturated with the fear of nameless chaos. The state, which had expected a resolution to this battle in the most important of its cities, sought out its supporters as the situation grew ever blacker and more complex; our previous coexistence became a memory, and the subject of a cautiously exercised nostalgia — we were wildly optimistic of killing the people who were prone to such a longing. Retreat was no longer an option and hostility became like ripened grapes, dangling from a vine left to the passers-by. I would see Aleppo from beneath my black veil and it seemed like a fitting place to seek out the hatred I praised. I was hit by a delicious shiver, as if delicate hands were tickling my body and drawing me out of that state of indifference and depression endemic to the women of our household, along with their fear of the world I saw in my dreams. This world glowed as pure and bright as angels’ robes, like those of the angels I drew as warriors carrying rifles and killing the death squad troops, who were growing increasingly violent and frenzied. They seemed to be firing recklessly and indiscriminately when, most of the time, they were only shooting to make jelly out of bats.

Omar came to our house soon after returning from his travels abroad. There were half-healed bruises on his face, and there remained beneath his eyes the gloomy traces of a frustrated man. He didn’t tell us that he had been arrested and tortured for two continuous months to make him reveal Bakr’s whereabouts, which he didn’t know. He wasn’t saved by his strong relationships with certain important officers and influential traders, nor by his hard-won reputation, which he had taken pains to develop in order to appear more dissipated than necessary. ‘We all need Omar,’ I said to myself as I scrutinized his stammering lips. He assured Maryam that his bruises were the result of falling off his horse, and ordered my mother to make arrangements to travel to Beirut with my brother Humam. He wouldn’t listen to her justifications for staying — she was waiting for Hossam, my younger brother was at school — and he wouldn’t allow Maryam to back her up. He didn’t care that Marwa went outside on to the city’s streets with Radwan and tried to catch butterflies among the tanks and tents of the soldiers, who thought the pair were crazy and should be avoided. As time passed, however, the soldiers began to have conversations with Radwan. Initially they thought him strange, and then an amusing and necessary novelty; he made them forget about death, even if only for a moment. One of the officers was induced to buy a special perfume which allegedly acted as an aphrodisiac. Radwan unveiled it at a distance from Marwa who was standing and watching as if she were at the cinema. She was bewildered by the force of the fear of death, close to a desire to laugh; they overlapped to such a degree that it was difficult to establish where the separation lay between them. Radwan enumerated the merits of his perfume to the officer who appreciated his eccentricity. He paid in advance for the scent which Radwan spent all night preparing in an empty castor-oil bottle; he convinced the officer that the lingering smell was an intentional part of the perfume’s composition, before leaving quickly and dragging his ‘lady’ with him — as he described Marwa to the officer while listing the imaginary qualities of another family who worked in weaving. He was afraid they would discover that the butterfly hunter was Bakr’s sister.

Omar wouldn’t listen to the story of Radwan’s perfume. He asked us to help my mother pack her bags, and the following morning, a Lebanese taxi came to take her and Humam; it left hastily, as if protecting them from a coming disaster. Omar followed them to Beirut after a few more days, during which time we never saw him.