Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Marwa wasn’t impressed by my zeal to burn down all the houses belonging to the other sect. She laughed derisively and left the house without turning around to hear Maryam’s pleas. Maryam had lost control, even over the keys. She tried to convince Radwan to guard Marwa, but then gave up and sat on the step to her room. She was silent, like an unburied mummy displayed in a glass case and reeking of embalming fluid. Marwa returned in the evening, glowing and loudly repeating a section of the song ‘You, Who Keep Me Awake’ by Um Kulthoum. She closed the door to the cellar, turned off the light, and slept beside her butterflies. Zahra convinced Maryam to wait till the morning before tackling Marwa. But the next day, Marwa went out again, leaving her door open behind her and her bed in disarray. After the evening prayer, she sat on the sofa and said quietly that she had seen her lover and they were getting married. Then she rose, turned to us, and said, ‘I am leaving the refuge of Heaven. I love Hell.’

We were left reeling. This calamity was even greater than that borne by weak women when their men became corpses; it wasn’t very important whether they were martyrs, or just cadavers with flies swarming around their faces. For the entire night, Zahra spoke quietly with Marwa, who insisted on describing the smell of her lover’s hands and chest and, with even greater courage, lauding his virility. The affair had returned something to her body that she thought she had forgotten for ever, and now she was concerned with restoring grace to a body which had regained its vitality. Her movements in the courtyard became sensuous and coy. She walked coquettishly and looked several times at her watch as if a rendezvous were imminent. She kept going out unexpectedly, in total disregard for our fear or our reputation. The officer, Nadhir Mansoury, was waiting for her in front of the gate to the Bab Al Hadid district, and she boldly got into his car to set off for an unknown house in which a bed had been hastily prepared so they could pass a short time in fleeting pleasure.

Zahra had been expecting this calamity and surrendered to it silently. She distracted us all by talking about her mother’s visit, which had been postponed yet again. Maryam sought help from our absent men, and her anger exploded the moment Marwa came back, shameless, half-drunk, and singing like a cheap bar-girl. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the floor. She removed her long coat and her head covering, and stood only in her flimsy dress which showed off all her features: breasts with nipples like cherry stones, rounded posterior, soft stomach, long legs hairless and gleaming — like a dancer showing off a licentiousness which bewildered us. I felt that everything was breaking down; I hated my backside; I wanted to leave this void, this vacuum within the storm, a feeling enhanced by a torrential downpour that night.

I thought of writing to Bakr but guessed that he might be dead or in custody, and that if he was alive he would care only about hanging on to his life. (Thousands of young men had been arrested: not only members of the organization and sympathizers, but also people with no discernible relationship to them. New prisons had opened and we were regarded with suspicion; a relationship with us might cost someone their life.) Zahra intervened harshly. She slapped Marwa, then led her to her room where she embraced her and let her cry on her chest dramatically as if both women were actresses in a movie. She listened to Marwa’s fears as she repeated that she loved him, and even if she were to be slaughtered she couldn’t be parted from him.

That night Maryam couldn’t sleep and read the Sura Yusuf ten times. She performed the dawn prayer five times, immersed in a strange calm. She didn’t get up to welcome the three young men she saw entering behind Radwan; they checked the time, then asked to speak to Maryam alone. After a short conversation she led them to Marwa, who hadn’t woken up yet, and asked Zahra not to interfere. She knew they had been dispatched by Bakr to halt this farce which had almost destroyed our reputation. Two of the young men carried Marwa and the third stood beside the door and drew his weapon. With swift movements, they gagged her and attached her to the leg of the cast-iron bed on which my grandmother as a married woman had first enjoyed the delights of passion, before she exchanged it for a brass bed; Maryam had inherited it and marvelled at the skilful moulding of plants and the incantation ‘Ma Sha’ Allah’ in Kufic script.

Marwa was chained to the leg of the bed by her ankles. She cursed her assailants and wept when one of them informed her that her lover, Nadhir Mansoury, had been assassinated that morning. They added that Bakr had sworn to kill anyone who attempted to free her with a thousand bullets. After one of them kissed the satisfied Maryam’s hand, they made a swift exit and left Marwa to rattle her chains in fury. Bakr had designed them so she could reach the bathroom to wash and attend to her needs, and sit beside the window like a prisoner. It occurred to me that she couldn’t see the moon from her small window, overshadowed as it was by the terrace roof which stretched along the top of the wall. The lemon tree, which we no longer expected to bear fruit for us, revealed the flightiness of happiness, which we had discovered was just a delusion. We couldn’t believe that what had just happened could earlier have been imagined, even in our wildest dreams.

Deep down, we each envied Safaa for escaping the depression of our house, which had begun to resemble a vial of vinegar. Marwa had resisted and I believed she would go on to smash her iron chains, but then she suddenly subsided like a lioness whose wildness has been tamed and which has now grown used to being a child’s plaything in the zoo. She refused to speak to Maryam or even respond to her morning greetings. We became non-existent for her, and I felt her contemptuous looks penetrate my body like burning arrows, confusing me as I tried to enter the circle of her dreams.

The bereaved opened the city gates three days later and, the siege being lifted, the tanks withdrew to the pistachio fields. There was grief and fear in the eyes of people who had grown used to bowing their heads, cringing like chickens who cared only about returning safely to their coop at night. The bullets’ randomness had made Aleppo’s men hollow, bereft of dreams. Our organization lost internal cohesion. The leadership’s meetings were brief, rushed and inconclusive; accusations were exchanged and no one could look into his companions’ eyes with satisfaction, as they had just a year before when they confidently approached the steps of the Republican Palace.

* * *

Thousands of corpses perfumed Hama’s air, saturated with the smell of the river. The lists of countless detainees which were thrown on to the table in meetings were deeply frustrating for our leaders. We heard that at one meeting Bakr stood up and announced his resignation from the leadership — and he immediately left for Jordan on a false passport, and from there to London, where he arrived at night in the middle of fog. He wanted to walk to London Bridge and cry into the River Thames. Like any man, he didn’t want to look back so he wouldn’t have to remember the hundreds of young men who had sworn on the Quran and left to seek out paths to Paradise and certain death.

* * *

Marwa had missed her butterflies and calmly drew them in her room. Anyone seeing her might have thought that she loved her bonds as she gleefully pestered Maryam to ask Radwan to bring her some acrylic paints. She started to draw on her shackles and colour them in, and Zahra laughed at her commentary on her pictures. They made me miss my old self, when I didn’t praise hatred and drew my dreams with only childlike malice. When Marwa came near me, I sat beside her and told her how beautiful her lips and butterflies were, and how much I missed my brothers, like any obedient girl sympathetic to her plight. I tried to break her chains, but I couldn’t. Marwa was indifferent, as if she couldn’t hear me. She finished painting a sunflower on one ankle fetter, which was resplendent in dark yellow with clumsy details like the unintentional smears of a child’s drawing.