Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

It must have been about half past eight when I opened the door to the house and went inside. Radwan rushed towards me and protested at my being so late and leaving him to worry. I reassured him coolly, and heard from him that Omar and Maryam, after their visit to Marwa, had gone on to Beirut; Zahra was staying on in Damascus, and they would all return in two days’ time. I sighed angrily and wished I was with them. I flung myself on my bed and fell into the deep sleep I had been begging for for months — a sleep so deep that I didn’t hear the rain which fell later that night and soaked the woollen jumpers left on a chair by the fountain, along with the copy of Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam I had been trying to read. Its pages were wet through and it was impossible to salvage. I threw it in the bin, along with all the food Maryam had left for us, which had now spoiled.

* * *

Radwan was delighted the following day when I acted like a proper housewife making food for her family. I wanted to cook, and I welcomed his comments; he would ask me to add a little salt or some spices after tasting the freekeh , like a connoisseur whose opinion was much sought after. In the two days we had been on our own we had reverted to being friends who had recovered the warmth of their relationship without any reproaches. I thanked him in my heart whenever he called out my name, as it was the only means of feeling a presence within this vacuum I had begun to escape from. In turn, I suggested he use organic compounds when composing a new perfume so it would resemble the smell of old stone after rain. He smiled at the idea but kept silent.

While we were drinking coffee in the evening beside the tub of red damask roses, I asked him to think about joining me in a play I would try to write to welcome the others home. He laughed sarcastically and, in a deep voice and with ponderous sentences, informed me that he no longer expected anything but death. I saw his face colour and he concluded his speech like an actor who is carried away by the power of his own voice and cares neither for the pleasure of the crowd nor for their applause. He gave himself up to cursing the idiots and the unjust city that had turned his dreams into piles of filth that could be purified only by fire; the ash in the rising smoke would swirl around in the atmosphere looking to join up and form the cloud that would one day rain down black on Aleppo, on its pedestrians and buildings, in revenge for the years of his alienation and their deafness.

Radwan spoke about death like an ancient Greek warrior in mourning for his own life, now cruelly reduced and far removed from the adventures and glory of war. I was seized by dread as his voice flowed tunefully, pure and deep. It was as if I didn’t know him. None of us knew him; we didn’t perceive his pain, or pester him with questions so he would talk about himself. To us, he was a servant. He heard all our whispers, and kept all our secrets. He worried about us, our illnesses, our concerns. He had witnessed my birth and read the sacred verse to me after putting a charm round my baby neck. I wore it until my neck grew too large for it, when my mother stored it away carefully.

Radwan started to tell me about the child he had been sixty years before. He was five when he realized that he was blind and different from the sighted. His family were offended by his blindness, so they ignored him and left him to wander as a vagrant in the streets of Ain Arab, a miserable child. He would sit on the ground by the mosque and listen to the tajwid recitation of the Quran which emanated from Sheikh Bihzad’s prayer circle, although he didn’t dare intrude. When he sat under the large tree in the courtyard of the Amri mosque others tripped over him, not having noticed him there. Silence and estrangement caused him pain; he tried to demonstrate his skill and the flexibility of his young body in front of the other children, and he would leap into the air and somersault, and then land on his feet with a smile. The children clapped and cheered him, but then left him to wander further on his own. He was protected by the night guards, who took pity on him and allowed him to sleep in the door to the souk, and threw him odd bits of watermelon.

On long winter nights Radwan would take refuge in the lonely Khan Al Duwab, where the wife of the owner took pity on him and allowed him to sleep in straw warmed by the breath of the oxen and donkeys chained to the manger. Ain Arab was familiar to him, and he was familiar to it. He would occasionally walk in front of his mother’s house and slacken his pace so she would notice him, change his coarse woollen clothes for the only other set he possessed, and then once more leave him to his fate. She was afraid of her husband’s anger; he had married her after her divorce from Radwan’s father — he had gone off to preach the Day of Resurrection in the villages and Bedouin camps, leaving her only some tattered rags, a mud hut and a decrepit donkey: a dowry for a woman doomed to be torn to pieces by men. They circled her house on cold nights and she didn’t know how to protect herself from those who had designs on her and her blind child. She didn’t prevent Radwan from leaving to live with his grandfather, which was in fact the condition laid down by the only man who had asked for her hand — as his third wife, so he would have some help with the harvest.

Radwan was choked by the hatred for his blindness he encountered at his grandfather’s house. He ran away, and had nowhere to go other than the alleys and the open countryside. On moonlit nights, he dreamed that he was flying over the earth like a sparrowhawk. He hated the nickname of ‘Mole’, chanted by the children when they tried to hurt him. He knew the smell of each and every stone of Ain Arab, and imagined the faces of its inhabitants: using their voices and smells, he was able to draw conclusions about them and mock them. He didn’t surrender to his misery and grew addicted to solitude, despising the idiocy of the peasants. He sang in Kurdish and memorized the lengthy tales and elegies of the Bedouin. He tried to become a professional mourner but was driven out more than once for the sardonic smile which revealed his mockery of the tribesmen.

At one stage, Radwan was struck by the idea that he might be blessed, so he prayed in front of a large gathering for the power to heal the lame. When the woman beside whom he was sitting did not get up after he had muttered his prayers over her and drawn his hand across her forehead, her seven children kicked him out into the street. He abandoned this idea, now convincing himself that abstinence from worldly enjoyment was foolish, and did not tally with his dreams of unending pleasures. In the summer, he slept in an abandoned camp and foraged for food, gathering up the ears of corn that fell from the harvest carts. He struck bargains with the women who betrayed their husbands, after he caught their lovers’ voices and the women’s entreaties through the walls of their mud huts. In the morning the women would give him eggs, milk, and wheat which he could sell, and he kept the little money he saved in a bag hanging from his neck in readiness for he knew not what.

When a circus came to Ain Arab for a few days, Radwan was fascinated and he pleaded with its owner to try him out, to teach him to juggle and make tigers jump through a ring of fire. The Moroccan circus master liked the idea, tickled by the idea of a blind gymnast. He tried Radwan out more than once, but the elephant almost trampled him. There was also a fire-eater who cursed in German and brought forth flames from his mouth, to the astonishment of the Ain Arab folk, who sat for hours watching him. He tried to teach Radwan how to draw scarves out of his mouth, but when he jammed them in his cheeks he almost choked. After three days, he abandoned the idea.