Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Two months after this visit, a letter came from Paris bearing the signature of the Samarkandi, who called my grandfather ‘my dear father’. He thanked him for his warm hospitality to his wife and son and conveyed his inability to thank him adequately for the carpet, the significance of which he cherished. He had enclosed four cards from his son: for my grandfather, a representation of Notre-Dame; for Maryam, a view of green lawns, water fountains, and red, yellow and lilac flowers; a third for my uncles Omar and Bakr. The final card was for Radwan, who had convinced him that he was the most important purveyor of perfumes in Aleppo. To him, the Samarkandi’s son sent a general view of Paris and the addresses of several important parfumeries so that Radwan could get in touch with them. In addition to the cards, he sent the photographs he had taken, printed on postcards, which everyone passed around. Radwan touched the pictures and said that he would write to the French manufacturers to offer them his inventions and his secret blends. He searched for someone to write his letters and who wouldn’t betray his secrets. The pictures eventually came round to Maryam and everyone soon forgot about them. They never appeared again until after my grandfather had died.

* * *

After his death, Maryam appropriated my grandfather’s room and rearranged it. She embroidered a new bedcover with a brightly coloured peacock in the centre, restoring happiness to the wool, and spread out new azure, flower-strewn sheets. She left other things where they were, such as the cane chair, the bedside table and the large mirror (after wiping the dust off it). She brought out the photograph in which my grandfather, mother, aunts and uncles were gathered, and placed it on a small table in front of her so she would see it every morning. Next to the picture she placed the postcard from the Samarkandi’s son. At Maryam’s insistence, Radwan had taken both the photograph and the card to a carpenter far away from Jalloum who made frames for them out of dark brown wood. I used to see Maryam dusting them carefully; Maryam who never woke up from her stupor. She exploited Radwan’s need for someone to write to the French perfume companies. Sworn to total secrecy, they conspired together without reaching any agreement. Maryam wrote a letter for him in Arabic and read it out to him while he remained silent, raising his face to the sky and shaking his head in dissatisfaction, adding a sentence here and cutting a sentence there. Then he would dictate a letter to Maryam, who wrote it down with fierce enthusiasm. Anyone watching them sitting together, arguing and raising their voices, would not have believed that this woman was Maryam and this man Radwan who shouted that this was his international career, that it was impossible to treat the letter lightly, and concluded by saying the French loved refinement in all things. Maryam tore up the paper and waited expectantly for Radwan’s next words. He calmed down, after remembering that he was the servant. He apologized and brooded for a while, then began to recite a poem from one of the mawalid still lodged in his mind; she reminded him that that wasn’t a letter to the French company. Radwan laughed and told her a story about the French man he had accompanied home in order to recite poetry to French women, as they sat half-naked on walnut sofas carved with the ninety-nine names of God. The man was open-handed and generous before returning Radwan to his bed in the Umayyad Mosque, with more than the requisite respect.

Radwan resumed his consideration of the letter, and formulated the perfume Maryam requested of him in return. They swore an oath that his letter and her perfume would remain their greatest secret. They called on God to witness their agreement and even named it the Maryam — Radwan Accord, which Radwan shortened to the Man Accord. Maryam disliked this abbreviation, which drew attention to phrases she dreaded thinking about or referring to. She always insisted to me that the body was filthy and rebellious, and these words embedded themselves in me like an irrefutable truth. I began to guard myself against this rebellion named ‘body’; I obdurately hated my incipient breasts, their two brown nipples beginning to blossom. I hid them beneath cruel bras made for me by Maryam out of satin box-linings. Whenever my breasts broke free, I would touch them and feel their strange delectability.

When I saw uninhibited girls undoing their bras and showing off their cleavage to the breeze and the sun in the small square, or for the titillation of the young men crowding around the entrances of the girls’ schools, I felt rage at their filth. I avoided looking at their gestures or listening to their conversations describing sexual positions both for men and women; girls would relate these tales with ardent enthusiasm, sometimes explicitly naming the body parts. Fatima was the boldest of these girls. She tried to be nice to me, but I shunned her obscene conversations and the smell of sweat emanating from her pores. I turned to the group surrounding another girl named Dalal and exchanged books with them.

Dalal was sober and grave; she seemed, in her black clothes, to be our leader. Her orders were final, and delivered tersely and in a coarse voice. She dominated us, and we were happy to have a leader who wouldn’t hesitate to pull the hair of any girl who ridiculed our silence and our black clothes. Dalal said that women were animated dirt. Her own thoughts never came to her briefly or concisely, so she gabbled incoherently instead. I would nod, agreeing with everything in order to reach Paradise.

* * *

I arranged the room Maryam gave me in a style I will always try to recreate: the iron bedstead in the Mamluk style and the woollen mattress; the perfumed, snowy-white sheets; the small, ancient wooden table on which I placed an embroidered cloth to hide its battered scars; the chair carved with snakes and butterflies (I don’t know why its maker decided on such a combination). I would sit on the comfortable chair, lost in thought for hours at a time, alongside a wardrobe and a small shelf for my books. The most valuable of the furnishings was a small Persian carpet from my great-great-grandmother’s trousseau: it was my share of the valuable carpets that belonged to the women of the family. I loved the patterns on the carpet; I was so afraid of dragging my feet through it that I stretched it out and hung it on the wall. Maryam was pleased when she saw it hanging there. My room opened directly on to the courtyard and from the window I could see the radiant silver moonlight on the surface of the pool as I felt a chill seize me. I was powerfully drawn to this scene, and clung to every detail; it became my little world. I decorated the walls with the paintings I made during my period of silence, which continued until I lost any desire to speak at all.

* * *

After we returned from the hammam, my aunt Safaa would enter her room and bring out a bottle of perfume wrapped up in a gauzy nightshirt. She would take off her clothes, smear flowery cream all over her body and sprinkle it with perfume, before putting on the nightshirt and a Moroccan abaya over that to cover all traces of her charms, and returning to the living room. She didn’t help Maryam with dinner on Thursdays. We sat at the table in silence as Safaa got up and entered her room, not to emerge until morning. Maryam would open the Quran at Sura Yusuf and continue with her daily recitation until she rose with strict punctuality at ten o’clock and crept into bed. I never understood Safaa’s withdrawal every Thursday night until some years later, when we began to speak unreservedly about the men whom we had never seen, and the sweetness we had never tasted.

* * *

My grandmother abandoned the project of marrying off Maryam after she refused three suitors whose suitability and good looks my grandmother had spared no effort in talking up. Maryam would always enumerate their non-existent faults, grow resentful at these ‘suitors’ and then return to her room. As she took off her clothes a strange perfume would envelop her; the perfume which had settled in her pores. Every day, it emanated from her dreams and her body, while she lay in bed like a cold corpse waiting for salvation and the fever of a man. She tried to grasp its features in an attempt to describe the scent to Blind Radwan, who would listen in silence. He would go to his room and return bearing a blend of essences: camomile, anise, damask rose. He would mix them again the following day and present the blend to Maryam who would sniff it and then either hand it back or throw it into the bin, with no regard for his anger as he gibbered that what she had done was a denigration of his experience and perfumes. After this, recalling that she had written his letters to the French company and kept his secrets, and that she was in charge, he lowered his voice and listened to her description. Very slowly, word by word, she once again described the perfume that calmed her.