Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

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Whenever Hossam came to me in dreams, I felt that all was not well with him. He would call for my help and ask me about the chemistry textbook; his face looked like that of a dead fish on a distant shore, stinking as its body disintegrated and vanished. I sat on my bed and drew a palm tree on a beach. My fingers and my coloured pens failed me. All colour faded to a monochrome where nothing held meaning or distinction; it was all featureless, without structure: a face without a past, present, or future. Our loss was manifested in our disconnected conversations, in the neglect of Marwa’s butterflies whose cases became covered with dust. ‘My only connection to her is her genes,’ I told myself. I cleaned the boxes and rearranged the butterflies, carried them to my room and watched them for days in a search for the meaning inherent in them. I paired up the colours, trying to create an order with a meaning specific to me. Radwan wouldn’t help me hunt for any more. He was engrossed in Khalil, whose last days were filled with delirium. Omar didn’t care about Khalil’s final moments and was just waiting for him to die — he hated this disruption to our routine which had turned the house into a staging post for the dead.

We were pleased with Omar and the severity with which he ordered Zahra not to coddle her father, and Maryam not to let things slide. Omar saw that Maryam was exhausted, her existence was tedious, and that she was certain that nothing would go back to how it should be. She was like a woman who has always taken great pride in her possessions, and who then returns from a trip to find that her apartment has been ransacked, that little thugs have crept in through the window and smashed the fragile ornaments she had been so careful of, so that they can hear her bemoan their ignorance that she should be surrounded by objects that reminded others of her status. Omar felt that Maryam’s disconnected sentences made her crumbling world into a mirror of events to come. ‘She doesn’t believe in anything any more,’ he thought as he watched her get up suddenly, leaving him to drink his coffee alone as she carried food to Khalil.

By now Khalil was only rarely conscious, and he seemed like a different man, as if he had been sleeping after a long night spent awake. He would look around him in astonishment as if it were the first time he was seeing Radwan’s room and the damp bed smelling of sweat. Zahra made a great effort to keep this stench from spreading through the house. She was worried by Omar. She saw disapproval in his eyes; his courteous visits to Khalil when he was conscious were no consolation; nor was the fact that he paid the doctor’s bills. Zahra considered the payments as alms to the long-time companion of my grandfather, as charity from a man who wanted the city to talk about his affectionate heart. She asked Maryam for permission to move to a rented house and there look after Khalil like a dutiful daughter until his death. Then, she added, she would reassess her life as the wife of a wanted man, who had no hope of ever again sitting down to eat breakfast with her and their children. Radwan also threatened to leave with his friend.

In order to explain fully, Zahra handed Omar a letter reminding him of their long history of silent, mutual misunderstanding; she had always looked dimly on his lifestyle. She mentioned his quarrels with Bakr, which had eventually caused a near estrangement, and which were only resolved by the stern intervention of their mother. Bakr then was silent to an irritating degree. The way he jealously guarded his secrets, his harshness and his logical thinking made him my grandfather’s true heir, in direct contrast to Omar who filled places with noise, idly criticized our banal existence, and went out of his way to appear excessively frivolous. Our daily life had been ordered in a way that amply demonstrated our chastity, so that my uncles heard compliments about us when they exchanged civilities with their acquaintances; our men had only to kiss a sheikh’s hands to be granted blessings as he patted their hands like he would a pet cat. There was a hidden conflict between the brothers, in which Omar didn’t respect their age difference of ten years.

Now I saw Omar wandering alone in the courtyard, brushed by the breezes of spring, which this year we didn’t celebrate with barbecues as we usually had. Maryam used to insist on making it an occasion for a family gathering, tolerant of the younger children as they played with the flowers and roses. She would be set apart from her brothers’ wives and her sisters by virtue of being the lady of the house, striving to be a virgin grandmother. They would laugh and wink at each other with each of her ponderous movements and her increasingly grandiose speech. They all loved her in this role which she performed like an actress who had perfected it throughout her life; the audience would applaud every night with the same warmth, but then whisper in the corridors about her advancing age, and about the decline in the numbers of fans flocking backstage to have their picture taken with her.

Omar was recalling Bakr’s repeated rebukes and warnings not to interfere with the craftsmen repairing a particular Persian carpet to conceal its flaws from admiring customers; the death squads examined it more than twenty times while looking for Bakr. My grandfather used to call this carpet a rare pearl, and it spent fifty years being carried backwards and forwards between its own special place in the warehouse and the main wall in the shop, on which pictures of our ancestors were also hung. The carpet was there for no purpose other than display: my grandfather refused to sell it. He prominently exhibited a photograph of it where it was laid out in the bedroom of the Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. That carpet had ‘crept’ from the Imperial Palace clearly as a result of some conspiracy or subterfuge. My grandfather, and Bakr after him, waited for the Shah or his loving wife to send intermediaries to reclaim it, at a suitably high price. He dreamed of the arduous negotiations that would be miserable for the envoy of the emperor and empress, who would try to recall how their feet had been positioned on it when they were newly married and proud of their glory.

In one of their raids on the warehouse — in search of the weapons an informer had written were buried amongst the best of the rolled-up stock — the soldiers grabbed the carpets roughly and unrolled them on the floor. They trampled their boots all over them and threw down on to them the cigarettes Khalil had rushed to light, like a waiter in their service rather than a man who knew the true value of these gems. Khalil breathed a sigh of relief after they had left, because in the darkness of the cellar they hadn’t seen the designs of strutting peacocks, and swans swimming in small pools, surrounded by a delicate, symmetrical decoration of jasmine stems overlapping with strange flowers. My grandfather was convinced that they were wild lavender, and had once tried to persuade an American journalist to publish an article in his magazine. The man had stopped accidentally in front of the shop, as if he were lost, or a tourist who had let his feet carry him wherever they wanted. The journalist understood from my grandfather’s words that he was looking at a rare treasure, nodded, and left without caring. A rumour subsequently spread through the souk that an American magazine had attempted to run an article on the carpet, but my grandfather refused to agree to it unless they put a picture of it on the front cover.

Hundreds of images of Bakr passed in front of Omar as he sat in our courtyard daydreaming. He was avoiding Bakr, who was trying to talk to him from London and convince him to join him there. He hadn’t forgotten Bakr’s rebukes when Omar had signed a document of disassociation from his brother, along with offering up information which helped investigators draw up a more complete portrait of Bakr. This had made disguising him very difficult: for example, Bakr’s left hand flexed involuntarily when he was at rest, and he had a very slight limp when he walked quickly. Omar thought, ‘Why does he ask us all to be like him?’ and did not regret his actions.