Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

That same day, when I reached the house where my prayer circle was usually held, I couldn’t find anyone. I went on my way, afraid of hearing that our prayer circle had been disbanded and its members reassigned among the other circles directly subordinate to the group’s leadership. Exhausted, I went to my room, flung myself on the bed and dozed off. When I woke up at dawn, Maryam was placing compresses on my head to lighten my fever. She told me that I had been raving about people she didn’t know, as well as my father and Hossam. I got up but couldn’t find a more soothing place to sit than in front of Marwa’s butterflies. I drank a hot tisane and Maryam left me alone after covering me with a thick woollen shawl. I was curled up in the same leather chair in which Marwa sat for hours to contemplate the butterflies ranged on the wall. I gazed at them for a long time; the white butterfly speckled with black and brown made me pause. I looked for the secret of the officer’s silence to answer the questions that kept me awake: did temptation lie in the butterflies, or in Marwa’s calm smile and full lips? They were like her large bust which she no longer cared about fully covering as we did when we sewed our clothes, so we seemed like black seals which wouldn’t reveal their shame. All of our bodies were shameful — every part of us, from our toenails to our hair. The butterflies almost stripped me of my strength with their delicacy and immutability.

My monthly cycle saved me from my concerns. It came on suddenly and heavily, two days before it was due. Maryam was understanding and tolerated my nerves when I insisted on going out early that morning. I missed Hajja Souad, and I needed her strength. On my way to her house I tried to appease my fear, and I bought mamounia and warm bread like a widow buying breakfast for her children. I was astonished by Hajja Souad’s pale face and anxiety; she told me that we had lost more than ten mujahideen the previous day. The soldiers had raided a house in Hamidiyya and killed four men from the Abi Nour cell as they were preparing to leave it, having already accidentally revealed their hiding place in the Sukry quarter. They killed three of our brothers as well as destroying the entire arms cache behind the copper market. I felt terrified; she told me the names of the victims and I heard only some of them, sensing that she hadn’t told me everything. I asked her directly about Hossam and Bakr, so she told me, ‘Hossam was wounded and arrested.’ I was dizzy and collapsed on the sofa. I felt like my heart had stopped beating. Just imagining the brutal tortures that would be visited upon his skinny body drove me mad. I was so weak that a breath of wind might topple me, and I barely heard Hajja Souad’s voice demanding that I pull myself together and pray for him, and for the thousands of others squeezed into the desert jail and the putrid cellars of the Mukhabarat, oppressed by the smells of blood and excrement and anticipating a death already half-realized. She warned me about my thoughtlessness and weakness. I no longer needed to listen to anything; I said to myself I needed silence, and I was silent.

* * *

Marwa went out to meet Nadhir Mansoury, the death squad officer, and I didn’t care. Maryam was bewildered; she slapped her palms against her knees as if she expected a catastrophe. She brought Selim over and sprayed spittle and harsh words into Marwa’s face, saying she would destroy the family’s reputation. Selim prayed with his misbaha of 999 beads and asked God’s forgiveness without raising his eyes to our faces, contenting himself with repeating, ‘Do not throw away your virtue.’ Marwa’s face was rigid. Coldly she said, ‘I love him.’ Everything collapsed; our dreams fluttered apart like wisps of straw. We were as silent as if we were dead. We felt the need for a man to lead us by the hand to safety; we no longer knew who might throw us a lifeline to save us from disappearing.

* * *

Omar had by now settled in Beirut. He could no longer bear the lot of being related to Bakr, whose family name had thrown suspicion on his relatives and exacted a cruel price. Selim’s son Jalal, who was performing his compulsory military service, had his nails pulled out under interrogation and was transferred to a division close to the airport out in the desert, where scorpions climbed the tent pegs and colonized empty gun barrels. The officer in charge was half-mad and thought he was Stalin. He brought the soldiers out of their tents and asked them to lay a railway through the desert all the way to Berlin, and then laughed hysterically when he saw them looking at each other and beginning to pile up the few stones they had found on the edge of the camp when he had ordered them to look for truffles. On that occasion, they had spent three days scrutinizing the desert, rummaging for plants and looking for that delicious fruit which was ripened by thunder and grew freely in the earth — anyone who didn’t find a truffle had his backpack filled with stones. The commander gathered up these truffles and sold them in the souk Al Hal, along with the soldiers’ leave papers. Patience was the only thing that prevented them from killing him and fleeing across the border into Iraq.

After six months, Jalal returned on a short leave, utterly withered and speaking in fragments rather than fully formed sentences. He wept in his mother’s arms as he described to her how the commander had made them walk over thorns because their voices were too weak in singing the praises of the Party. In the scorching summer heat, he smeared their bodies with jam and left them stretched out beneath the sun, enjoying how they were burning and fainting; he was taking revenge in his own special way on the treachery of those who had banished him to this barren camp after an honourable military career.

Selim advised Jalal to be patient. He didn’t join him in cursing Bakr, but went to the corner of his room which he prepared for a meeting with the other dervishes, even though they no longer came to recite dhikr , afraid of being accused of terrorism. They had dispersed and now chanted dhikr on their own, after one of the most important officers from the death squad had plucked out their imam’s beard hair by hair, all the while reminding him that they wouldn’t kill him so that he would know their mercy. Most of the dervishes shaved off their beards and their faces were no longer blessed with rays of divine light.

Jalal made a decision and returned to the camp’s commander laden with alcohol. His new behaviour seemed odd at first, but before long all was settled in the colonel’s mind; Jalal told him about the fugitive Omar, the originator of many famous scandals in Aleppo, while cursing Bakr and his organization; he now abstained from the prayer he had earlier been practising in secret. Jalal admitted to himself that the taste of alcohol made the camp’s nights of hard labour seem almost delightful. He remembered Omar’s face and swore that he would relive his uncle’s life, and outdo him in shamelessness. He reassessed his life, family and religion. He withdrew from his tent mates and grew closer to the colonel, who appointed him as his orderly. Jalal prepared the colonel’s food himself, drawing on his recollections of dishes his mother excelled at, and discovered a new outdoor hobby. He turned a deaf ear the first time his friends told him about the rumours of a sexual relationship between himself and the colonel, describing his soft moans and his position in the colonel’s embrace. No one would listen to his complaints after he had been granted several spells of leave so he could bring back from Aleppo bags of pistachios, crates of excellent whisky, carpets and cured meats. He dredged up memories of his studies of the city’s markets, where he had been raised after leaving school at the age of thirteen in order to learn pragmatism and how to bow before the wind. Jalal thought that his fate was dependent on his leaving military service neither deranged nor resentful towards his future partners, of whom the colonel would be the most important. He began to tell him his story as if they were friends, on the rainy winter nights when silence settled over the camp so it seemed like the grave.