Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

My mother’s departure gave me a sense of ease. I was no longer afraid of her cowardly heart which had almost caused her to faint when she heard about the raid on the house where Hossam was staying; he had managed to escape over the roofs of the neighbouring houses, no more than two narrow streets away from us. My mother went outside to look for him and blamed herself for not sensing him when he had been so near that she could have hugged him and been cured of missing him. When she returned she was exhausted and disoriented. Fear gripped us so tightly that we lost our desire to gossip and we became strangers in one house, leading a life without structure but with one single goal: to be reassured every morning that Bakr and Hossam hadn’t been killed; and that we hadn’t had a heart attack, or succumbed to the madness which seemed even closer to us than Marwa’s butterflies. They now occupied a quarter of the cellar and made the officer in charge of the latest search think he was entering a haunted house. He couldn’t believe that this depressed woman was the same one who had gathered all these colours, mounted them in wooden boxes and covered them with expensive glass. The locks on the cases were golden, and their gleam resembled the stars and eagle on the officer’s epaulettes which brushed the skull on his uniform.

His silence and Marwa’s steadfastness in front of her butterflies agitated me. I was overcome with terror that I would discover just how much Marwa needed a man to look deeply into her eyes and set her body quaking, even if he was an enemy like this officer who was so pleasant, and who hoped that Hossam and his companions would fall from the sky so he could scatter their brains with his bullets. An idea occurred to me — that I might rip out his heart and throw it into the jar of pickled aubergines standing in a dark corner. I tried to visualize gathering the hearts of all the soldiers and pickling them. I imagined Rima exercising her passion and inventing new types of pickle and I laughed, reassured of the strength of the hatred in my heart. The officer praised Marwa and stopped his subordinates from smashing her boxes. She wouldn’t listen to my reprimands and thanked him delicately, prayed for him to have a long life and eternal youth, and shook hands with him when he left. I swore to Maryam and Zahra that he hung on to her hand and pressed her fingers longer than necessary. Zahra was greatly worried by my insistence on smashing the display cases and on preventing Marwa from going outside, and Maryam calmed me down and asked me to help her tidy the rooms the soldiers had ransacked. Due to the frequency of these visits to our and Uncle Selim’s houses, as well as to my grandfather’s shops and the homes of all his relatives, we had perfected the art of swiftly returning objects to their proper places. The officers didn’t believe that Bakr and Hossam weren’t hiding in one of the secret tunnels which, it was said, could only be reached through passages in the spacious houses owned by families who clung tenaciously to their pedigrees. Marwa closed her bedroom door in my face and I heard Zahra mutter that I had become unbearable.

* * *

Safaa and Abdullah’s letters were less frequent. We knew Abdullah had now gone to Afghanistan and was distributing donations and supporting the mujahideen on the ground. In my mind, he was almost on the same level as the Prophet’s Companions, who I drew as mighty eagles swooping down from their mountain nests to tear out and devour the livers of their enemies. Safaa and Zeina had become sisters, shadows of each other. They agreed on how to divide Abdullah up between them and abandoned their jealousy in order to go out to the markets together. Their shared laughter provoked astonishment among the women of Zeina’s social group, who listened ardently to the sira of Seif ibn dhi-Yazan as Safaa poured bitter coffee and circulated among the guests. In Safaa’s most recent letter, before the Christmas festivals, she told us her pregnancy was going well. Maryam’s eyes welled up; Zahra smiled and declared it a good omen, and then told us dispassionately that her mother was coming to Aleppo the following week, and she would have her to stay in our house. Maryam welcomed Zahra’s guest; she needed guests to return warmth to our walls and to distract us from talking about and waiting for death, but I was angry at the preparations for welcoming a woman who would sully our house.

Maryam and Zahra ignored the officer when he came back on yet another search. He came especially to watch Marwa, whose eyes shone with happiness and desire as she greeted him without any concern for my anger. He exchanged a few words with her that I didn’t hear; she nodded and he went and stood in front of her butterflies and looked particularly at the yellow one, which he asked to touch. She opened up the glass case for him and asked him to take his time. Unusually, his soldiers didn’t overturn our cupboards, or scatter the photos from our ancient albums, or mock my grandfather’s haughty looks while imitating Hitler, who was one of their greatest objects of admiration, despite his contempt for the Arabs.

I wrote a letter to Bakr, exaggerating Marwa’s relationship with the death squad officer, and asking him to intervene to save our reputation and to prevent Wasal from entering our house. I had to leave the letter near a remote water tap at Bab Al Nasr, the same place he left his instructions. The following day a young man knocked at our door and asked to see Maryam on an urgent matter. He informed her of Bakr’s decision to ban Marwa from going out of the house unaccompanied, and left quickly without answering our questions about Bakr’s health or his situation. Marwa wept and spat in my face, cursing my father; we were dumbstruck when she still insisted on going outside alone to look for butterflies. I wondered secretly if I was repugnant because I had prevented my aunt from falling in love with our enemy. Her old image returned to me: a woman dreaming, crying on Hajja Radia’s shoulder when she went to sing nashid for Rabia Adawiya who had spent the night by her lover’s side. I completely ignored Marwa when we gathered in the morning to drink coffee before I went to college — despite Maryam’s winking at Zahra, which was intended to remind me that Marwa had once been like a mother to me. I left, saddened.

The streets narrowed in front of my footsteps as I distractedly observed the tanks which I felt were pressing down on my chest, and the dense patrols on every corner. I imagined that they really were encircling the city and would no doubt seize all of our mujahideen; they would end the dream which had taken on a vivid colour and an unforgettable taste. That winter, Aleppo was weighing heavily on me, prompting me to reconsider my feelings towards our martyrs. I thought how hard it was for a woman to fall in love with men she didn’t know; men who were dead.

Not long after this, Dr Abdel Karim Daly, a physics professor at the university, was killed. I saw him laid out with his chest blasted open. It wasn’t known who had killed him; his blood could have been spilled by anyone, from us to the commander of the death squad. Our group disapproved of his murder and declared him to be innocent. That day, the paratroopers came in huge numbers and conducted rigorous searches of all the students before allowing them into their colleges. Hundreds of soldiers were crammed into the streets close by; they broke off tree branches to use as canes, stopped people, and made them stand rigid against the wall. When shooting broke out in nearby areas, it seemed as if Aleppo were burning. People were allowed to go out and I walked heedlessly, as if the sound of the bullets were music to which I was addicted. Soldiers fired into the air hysterically; they resembled frogs ensnared in a tunnel which had darkened suddenly and caused them to become disoriented.