Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

As we ate breakfast together the following day, he asked Zahra to consider him a guest and to act as if she were the lady of the house; he swore that if Khalil left, then he would as well. He generously suggested moving him to the room into which my grandfather used to withdraw by himself during Ramadan. He would devote himself to worship as if he were an ascetic sitting in a distant cave with his Lord and forsaking the material world. Back then, Omar would wink and say sarcastically to Maryam that their father was ‘waiting for a revelation’.

Maryam understood Zahra’s moving words of gratitude. She was keen for Khalil to stay with us but ignored Omar’s offer to move Khalil to my grandfather’s room, aware that Omar hated it. It was also the room where Bakr used to withdraw with my grandfather when they wanted to review their accounts, or to discuss family affairs without being overheard. I saw that old, jealous gleam in Omar’s eyes after he had spent the night alone in the courtyard, his sleep disturbed by pictures of Bakr hunting him and gaining ground. He felt a particular affection for his past, as if understanding for the first time why people needed their memories so much.

That night, my dreams turned into disturbing nightmares. I saw corpses hanging from nails hammered into the sky and laughing as their teeth fell like hailstones on to the heads of naked passers-by, who disappeared inside coffin-like buildings. I woke up terrified and trembling, and I heard noises and mutterings in the courtyard. Radwan was whimpering and I saw Zahra prostrate in Maryam’s arms, who was muttering verses from the Quran. Uncle Khalil had died just after the dawn prayer. He had spent his final night raving deliriously, and Radwan knew that the end had come. He turned the pages of the Quran to the Sura Anfal and lost himself in whimpers that woke Zahra, Omar and Maryam, who pronounced the takbir and the bismillah .

Omar remained calm and insisted on holding Khalil’s mourning ceremony in our house, as if apologizing for the humble funeral which was only attended by a few of Khalil’s distant relatives. He had been buried soon after the afternoon prayer in a tomb which Zahra heard of in the overcrowded Cemetery of the Righteous, now jammed with the new graves of the dead whose mourners didn’t have the time to care for their tombstones.

The days of the mourning ceremony were laden with duty and expense. Omar didn’t discuss the details. He allowed Radwan the freedom to go out and roam the city for three days, as he wished to look for his friend’s soul and escape the smell which still filled his room. He returned in the evening, exhausted, and his clothes were filthy as if he had been sleeping on the pavement. He sat by the pool and told Maryam that she needed parsley and aubergine, which he would bring from the souk. I thought that he didn’t want to be alone; he wouldn’t enter his room until all our doors had closed, mine last. The terrifying dream returned to me in new colours; blue and black faces, and eyes which were sometimes red. The dead were walking along Telal Street, eating cake, smiling, and carrying shrouds streaked with bright colours. There were faces of people I knew, both living and dead, and faces of strangers I had seen once, but couldn’t remember where or when. I wept bitterly when I saw Amir, Safaa’s son; he took me by the hand and led me to his wide tomb, saying mockingly, ‘Look how we play when we’re dead.’

Depression settled on everyone’s faces after the hastily prepared mourning ceremony came to an end. Only the empty chairs remained, along with the yawns of the three servants in formal uniforms whom Omar had brought in from a specialist funeral service, recommended for its propriety.

On the fourth day, Zahra wrote a long letter to her mother to inform her of her father’s death. She described his final days movingly, and Wasal cried bitterly for her past and her memories. She considered herself responsible for the misery of his final days but, at the same time, felt that she had regained Zahra for ever. She replied with long letters in which she remembered Khalil charitably, and prayed for mercy on him with carefully chosen phrases from which she tried to hide the coolness of her feelings towards him. She quoted verses from the Quran and snippets of the sira of the Prophet’s Companions. She preached to Zahra, who needed someone to wipe her eyes which gleamed with sadness, and to give back to her body the vitality of a woman who had inherited all the talents of giving and receiving pleasure.

Zahra never disclosed her secrets so she seemed, to anyone who didn’t know her, like a cold woman who was proficient only in drying figs and looking after embroidered bed sheets. Bakr alone knew the taste of the flames which his beloved Zahra appeared to keep permanently lit. His memory of her remained unextinguished despite the long nights in London, and the days spent hiding in secret houses where he never stayed long. He missed her perfume and the way she lingered over removing her clothes to unveil her firm breasts. Then she would lie down beside him: quiet, deliberate, confident, desiring, passionate. She was like a sinner whose footsteps gradually slipped until, at the same moment as she was entirely immersed in sin, Paradise took shape in front of her in all its tranquillity. Souls hovered in the skies like white, pure birds whose wings had never known the hunter’s snares. Bakr had nothing more than memories now as he sat with Wasal, looking at her for hours and waiting for her to blink her white eyelids that resembled the marble of Zahra’s face. His wife’s future appearance was already present in Wasal’s features and gestures.

Both Bakr and Wasal were apprehensive at first of the forced relationship between mother- and son-in-law; he still had a lot of unanswered questions about her past — thrilling, vague and morally unacceptable in his view. He was tense during his first visit to her, but surprised by the care she took of him, and even considered her overt generosity to be excessive. Bakr, according to Wasal, was a fundamental part of her picture of the family that would ensure she spent her final days enjoying a feeling of deep contentment. She listened to him and was astonished by his desire to talk, as he abandoned himself to describing his situation, his homesickness, his worries about the coldness of the English and how much he missed Zahra. Wasal concealed nothing, and repentance lent her the ferocity of conviction. She knew that the misgivings roaming through Bakr’s head had to be eliminated if she was to enter his house and wander freely with him through the streets and suburbs of London on Sundays, like an old woman spoiling a younger lover. She spoke dispassionately about her husbands, from Esmat Ajqabash to Khalil and John, disregarding the scores of lovers whom she had left longing for another taste of her kiss; she did this whenever she wanted to leave an ineradicable impression on a man, whether she hated or loved him. The worst men, for her, were those who aroused neither rage nor longing; she would turn her back on them with no regret for their vague, insipid image.

They announced a truce with Zahra’s blessing, who had begun to behave like an orphan. She was lonely, and weary of the probability that she would remain alone without a man for a long time. Forbidden to travel, she withdrew into her own house and paid the price of Bakr’s dreams, which had once been her dreams too. She freed herself from the oppression of her hatred for the other sect, blessed Marwa’s marriage and tried to convince Maryam to come and visit her, which was no longer so difficult.

The streets were still unsafe, and murder became the only outlet for the soldiers and the men of our organization, who were stumbling blindly through their latest operations. The leadership had failed to re-establish communications with the warriors equipped to blow themselves up in revenge for companions who had had their faith mocked openly. Mukhabarat officers treated those they arrested like redundant humanity. If one of their prisoners died under torture, because of the beatings or electric shocks, it meant nothing and it would never cause any disciplinary action; but it did invite some irritation over the dilemma posed by the corpse. Delivery of the body to its family seemed pointless to them, so it would instead be thrown hastily into any available hole and dirt piled up on top of it; the decay of a cadaver aroused boredom and disgust. It restored to death its true nature. Sudden absence and the earth’s gravity returned the bodies to their point of origin, which was a complete fusion with natural elements. The living became more engrossed in retaining their lives than venerating the dead, in a city which death surrounded with exaggerated respect.