Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Later, when she began to send letters to her daughter, she realized she had squandered her dream of a warm home to spend her old age in, surrounded by the two clamorous grandchildren who loved her, who didn’t cry when she came near; she would pet them and wipe their noses and they would look at her in wonder. When she came to my grandfather’s house, she opened her bags and distributed presents like any grandmother returning from a trip. She needed to take out a velvety photograph album and point to pictures of her grandsons’ mother as a baby, so they would know that she was their grandmother and not some woman passing through their lives. They exchanged long glances with Zahra and after a short time rushed towards Wasal with a recklessness which delighted her. She became a horse they rode and a cat who miaowed and licked their feet. She sat them beside her at the table and taught them how to hold a knife and fork in a more elegant way and to eat sedately after the English fashion. Her insistence that they wear ties, and their swift acceptance of the ‘horse collar’ as they called it, provoked astonishment in Maryam, who was jealous of Wasal’s ability to make her grandsons sing English songs along with her like her backing vocalists. She felt the gravity of her understanding with Zahra about rescuing the children from this hell, and ensuring a future for them away from the smell of death which rained down ceaselessly over the city, and which would only stop once the city had been drowned.

Zahra was desperate. She surrendered to dreams that seduced her with a different type of recklessness. They woke the desire to arrange her life anew, away from Bakr and his ambitions. She had also believed in them once, on the day she lay next to him on their bed after making feverish love which had taken her breath away. He whispered confidently about the Islamic state which was on its way, where everything would be washed clean, radiant like crystal. Dreams appeared to them both, so close that the smell of them lingered on their fingers, as they immersed themselves in a sublimity of touching and desiring which they hoped would never end.

Because of her memories and her dreams, Zahra endured being taken to the Mukhabarat in handcuffs by Bakr’s side more than twenty times, and coped with the officials’ insults when they described her as an unfaithful, whorish wife. Later, she bore the torture of being hit with a four-ply cable until her back split open, secure in not knowing of Bakr’s new hideouts, nor the colour of his pillows and sheets; she no longer worried about these much after witnessing the cruelty and rage of the Mukhabarat at Bakr’s escape from ambushes they had set for him, like a wounded bird who had the measure of their traps. Zahra realized that quietly drinking coffee with him in the mornings was a dream that had come to an end for the time being. She explained to Maryam how much she needed Wasal, who could ensure a future for her children. Hope returned to her when one of Bakr’s associates handed her a hastily written letter: I’m abroad. I miss you and the children … She hugged the letter to herself and basked in the comfort it provided. Bakr’s arguments with the leadership had reached an impasse, and he accused everyone of abandoning Hama to pursue a holy jihad on their own. In his words she felt the unexpressed regret that oppressed him — until he remembered his position in London as a skilful political speaker, worldly-wise, endowed with the sworn allegiance of thousands of young men.

Zahra laughed as if receiving a gift from God on her final visit to the Mukhabarat. She didn’t curse them and they didn’t torture her; they made do with looking at her with contempt, and she sat calmly at the investigator’s desk as he informed her that she was subject to a travel ban. She nodded and knew from his ease that he was triumphant, no doubt aware that the battle was nearing its end. She had to reassess her daily life as a married woman whose husband had fled from certain death. Maryam marked the occasion of Bakr’s letter by bursting into noisy tears in front of a photograph of Hossam, who was drowning in the labyrinth of a desert prison. He had been led there with thousands of his comrades to be crammed into old, damp prison cells in which no one could make out the partitions, nor even the succession of night and day.

* * *

The spacious house grew cramped. I said to myself that Bakr had abandoned me, despite his urging me to go to Beirut and join my parents. My father no longer listened to the news of me which my mother would relate to him after he returned in the morning from hunting. He would ignore her as if she were a stranger, lie down in bed, and fall into a deep sleep devoid of hope. When he woke up, he dressed hastily and went out to sit in the bar which he almost never left, recalling his misspent youth when he used to laugh like a bull and compete with his companions in gulping down arrack after accompanying Abdel Hamid Sarraj on his nightly errands.

I was scared when I was in the streets and let my feet drag over the asphalt with the diffidence of the defeated. I never used to think that misfortune had this kind of taste. I no longer recognized places; I was like somebody lost who needed hatred in order to regain a little of her balance, to feel that her life was not just water, spilled on to a pavement and disappearing into steam. Marwa made me feel that I was a stranger, that I was surrendering to a fate I couldn’t grasp, blowing away like a feather which hadn’t found a wing to be part of. Her glances turned me into a plank of wood drowning in a tumultuous sea. I didn’t dare look at her chains. She didn’t encourage us to think of smashing them as she tortured us with her silence; she ate from Wasal’s hand and wiped the dust from her butterflies. She ignored Radwan’s pleas to sing along with him as before; he believed singing would save her and our house from the rot we had begun to feel in our mouths. Radwan prayed for the days of Safaa and my grandfather, who never used to leave the house without first reassuring himself of Radwan’s welfare. Now no one cared for him; Maryam no longer paid attention to his clothes and they became soiled, and he appeared more like a tramp than the servant who had once kept clean and perfumed in order to defend his masters all the more fiercely. I saw him sitting by the pool, and his blind eyes moved restlessly as he followed the twittering of the sparrows flying across the sky. He didn’t stand up, as he usually did every year, to announce the early arrival of spring — instead he restricted himself to listening to the silence which had settled before long over our gates, which no longer opened and caused a din with their eternal creak. We missed the noise — it had made us feel we weren’t living in a tomb.

Maryam asked for Wasal’s help in convincing Marwa to allow the removal of the chains which tormented her. Marwa had begun to compose a song, glorifying herself and depicting her tortures; as she wanted it to be heard, she had to relent and once more sing with Radwan, as part of an imaginary troupe, performing for an audience deaf to the tale of her epic battle. Radwan tried to regain a flavour of joy but his first notes seemed cold and sad; they left the impression that his voice was growing old, and what remained of it was insufficient for leading the women of the family. His voice was harsh and he made mistakes when reciting, but Marwa flattered him, praising him and encouraging him to continue with his composition of an epic love poem whose heroine has been chained up by her tribe; they keep her and her dreams under guard so she can’t slip through a gap in the tent and corrupt all the other daughters of the tribe.

One day Radwan left the house to look for his friends and found that most of them had shaved off their beards, like roosters whose feathers have been plucked. Most of them now wore suits and ties. The fear in their eyes and their slow movements betrayed that the mosques were no longer safe for their work, their dhikr and their improvised mawalid . A wrong turn that had resulted in three of them being killed by stray bullets had robbed them of their enjoyment of being blind. Radwan tried to convince them to return to their singing, and he listened patiently to their odes of lamentation for their friends, which opened with a verse in praise of the President and concluded in agonizing grief for the three believers, killed by infidels who had turned Islam into a religion of murder. ‘It’s all finished,’ Radwan said to himself as he left the Umayyad Mosque and passed through the main souk, stopping in front of my grandfather’s shops whose locks had lost their shine and rusted. He sat beside the shops, and perhaps he heard Khalil’s groans, Omar’s laughter, my grandfather’s footsteps. He tried to hold back his tears, but the sounds around him were a sign that everything had come to an end.