Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

After Hajja Souad disappeared and the existence of our cell was discovered, I began to look around me in fear whenever I walked in the streets. I approached Hana one day when I saw her outside the chemistry lab, which had now reopened, and she ignored me completely, as if saying, ‘Get away from me. I don’t know you.’ She found me later, and told me that Alya had been arrested and they were still looking for Hajja Souad. I felt the weight of handcuffs settling around my wrists; I couldn’t contact anyone to take a letter to Bakr. I was alone. I would leave the house in the morning and walk in the streets, draped in black, rejected; like a fish striving for the shore and which, having reached it, can no longer return to the safety and care of the sea. I reproached myself for disdaining the smell of the white coat that had delighted my mother and aunts when I put it on for the first time and came out of my room, spreading my arms in the guise of a doctor. I took my mother’s wrist in order to take her pulse in exaggeratedly coquettish movements which made them all laugh. We had needed my white coat, so we could believe that the future would not be as black as our clothes.

Everyone was preoccupied with Wasal, who had finally arrived in Aleppo. Zahra hugged her warmly, a daughter in need of her contrite mother. Wasal wore a long, modest dress and a hijab. She was elegant and earnest in her penitence and feverish efforts to get to Mecca. Maryam marked her arrival with gloom initially, and then with increasing enthusiasm. The soul returned to our house along with movement and laughter, and cooking aromas wafted from the kitchen. Marwa’s chains incensed Wasal; she asked for her forgiveness, which no one else had, not even Omar who dropped in like a passer-by before quickly returning to Beirut, and from there to other countries. We lost track of him as he became afraid of death. He closed the family shops, and informed us that back in Beirut my father was immersed in alcohol, fishing and silence.

Wasal was proud of Zahra; of her strength, of her deep faith that it was God who had calmed her heart and expelled the fear and night terrors from her life. The two women were at ease as they sat together, scolding and laughing and going to the markets with Maryam and Radwan, ignoring my presence and my requests not to let a dissolute woman enter our home. Marwa shouted at me to fear God and turn my gaze inwards to see the ugliness inside me. That night I felt like I was full of decay; I needed to sit by myself and cry over my broken image as a girl who had once loved life and tolerance. Maryam heard my whimpers and embraced me like a mother, and I thought of how much I needed compassion. She took me the next day to the hammam, and we left Marwa fettered without any feeling of guilt or pity; she had inquired after Nadhir from the death squad soldiers who were still periodically raiding our house, overturning our things and moving around like passengers at an abandoned train station. Marwa smiled when they told her that Nadhir hadn’t died, nor were his wounds serious. She asked them to convey the message to him that she was chained up because of their love. The young officer was enthusiastic about this, astonished by the woman surrounded by embalmed butterflies and attached to a heavy cast-iron bed which even an ox couldn’t move. Two days later, he returned with his soldiers and went directly to Marwa’s room. He gave her a sealed letter and left without repeating his usual idiotic questions about the contents of the abandoned well, which had been sealed with a metal cover to prevent scorpions and snakes crawling out of it. He looked at her respectfully and greeted her with the consideration due to the wife of a superior officer. We couldn’t take the letter off her; only Zahra knew everything and she kept her friend’s secrets, ignoring Maryam’s questioning and responding enthusiastically to the suggestion we take Wasal to the hammam.

For the first time I knew what it might be like to be considered a fallen woman — women crossed in front of our compartment to spy on Wasal’s withered breasts, imagining what they had looked like forty years earlier when they were like fruits of Paradise. Wasal rubbed down Maryam’s body with the experience of a woman who had encountered many men and who had moaned in pleasure at their hands. Maryam’s dead body woke up, and she was dreamy, as if recalling the son of the Samarkandi and desiring him. She imagined his hands and his chest and regretted a wasted youth. The hot water and the smell of the cavernous hall made Wasal recall her story; she recited some English obscenities, which I understood. I smiled in an attempt to attract her attention and get closer to Zahra again, who didn’t comment on the few spots, boils almost, scattered over my body. They stopped me from undressing in front of the other women in fear of their ridicule, despite my firm breasts whose full bloom I restricted in a bra made of a rough, coarse material which was more suitable for an old woman.

We were astonished by our liberality and avoided exchanging looks so we wouldn’t discover that our relaxation was fleeting: it would ruin our deliberately excessive laughter. We tried to forget the nightmares and recall the glories, and engage with the trivialities of life — we hadn’t realized at the time how necessary these were to help us carry on. Our career as the women led by the blind every Thursday evening was now impossible; undertaking this visit to the baths at all was a cause for celebration. Gathering in a circle around the dinner table every Friday became a miracle whose future recurrence we couldn’t count on, any more than on a night’s restful sleep in our own beds. I left our compartment in the hammam, looking for the footsteps of the child I had been and the galleries in which she had got lost.

I didn’t notice Hana until she approached me and whispered that we had to meet; she set a precise time and place and warned me not to miss it. She left, so we seemed like two women swapping razor blades to shave our legs. I almost choked and drowned in the steam. I didn’t want anyone to see my terror of going to prison, whose rot I had already been able to feel under my tongue. I imagined the feel of handcuffs and remembered Marwa — I had spent the night beside her and she asked me resolutely to go away and leave her to her wait. I gazed at her and felt for a moment that she had become used to her chains, and that the feel of their rusty links no longer disturbed her; she walked slowly in her room and attentively watched the sky through her window. On moonlit nights, she would sit in the courtyard for hours following the path of the moon like a white ship gliding over the horizon. Her silence was an expression of her contempt for us, and we felt it even more when we heard her peal of laughter with Wasal, who loved her and shared her room. At night, Wasal would sing Frank Sinatra songs for her, and Marwa requested ‘If You Go Away’ after hearing a translation of the lyrics. Marwa paused for a long time over a section she had learned by heart, and made Wasal burst out laughing when she playfully dragged out the consonants as she sang.

Wasal was a good listener. She spoke with the politeness of a woman who wanted neither to ruin her daughter’s life nor exact a high price from us, and before long she had absorbed our dreams and desires. She began to tell Maryam her life story in an attempt to depict herself as a wronged woman, lonely but desired by thousands of men — from the Khan Cordoba to London and New York, where she had arrived on a cargo boat with one of its Spanish crew. The Spaniard’s languishing eyes made her believe that he had been waiting for her for a thousand years; the way he wept at her door and bent over her feet to kiss them awoke her wild dreams of wandering along the Atlantic shore, of living with a man who could recover the taste of her first days with Khalil. She acknowledged that she had loved Khalil and cried for him during the nights when she was deprived of Zahra.