Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Radwan went back to the countryside like a hawk unsuited to a cage. He learned to sleep on tree branches, thus avoiding the perverts on the prowl for children to rape. Dreams unfolded which he couldn’t explain, and the call to travel pulled at him after he felt that the smells of Ain Arab were choking him. He cried in front of the khan owner’s wife so she would order one of the drivers, who he guessed from his calm voice wouldn’t simply abandon him in Aleppo, to allow him to bed down on the bags of barley he was transporting. She spoke with all the skill of a lady to the carriage owner and paid him a fee to take Radwan to the city’s Umayyad Mosque.

On the way, the owner of the carriage watched Radwan as he smiled and inhaled the scents of the villages and of the river. The driver found Radwan entertaining and didn’t weary of his incessant chatter. He thought he might do him a good turn: after hearing him sing for two consecutive hours, the driver took him to the house of Hamid, a record-seller who was looking for new talent so he could form a band. Radwan leaned back in a chair and asked for a cup of water sweetened with sugar. He then sang a Kurdish song he had learned by heart and offered a confusing translation of it for Hamid. The record-seller imagined him in a band that he never managed to create, however. After six months, he was forced to turn Radwan out.

With a smile and without regret, Radwan left — he didn’t plead to stay. He didn’t like the way Hamid’s house smelled, nor the tedium of having to listen to Hamid’s daily fights with his shrill wife, who often left Radwan without food. Radwan said to me that he could still remember sitting in that small record shop listening to Zakariya Ahmed, with whom he was infatuated. He had thought that fate had led him to this cramped place so that he could relive the tale of this great musician, who was ‘just like him’, as he would proudly repeat. Radwan knew many of his lyrics, and was determined that his own voice, husky as it was, would acquire the sweetness of Zakariya’s when the song ‘Ahl al Hawa’ inspired a painful sorrow. Radwan was carrying some of those records inside his bag when Hamid left him in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque. He breathed in deeply, yielding to the smells he loved. He felt that he had found his niche at last, and he relaxed for a few days with the blind men who welcomed him in their own sarcastic manner, trying to keep him from participating in their livelihood of reciting mawalid to the women who fulfilled their vows every Friday. Radwan liked their plotting and joined up with them. He never felt homesick when he lay down on the rich carpet in the mosque at the end of the evening and fell into a deep sleep beside his few companions who, like him, were all homeless.

After seven years, Radwan was proud of his Aleppan credentials. He now looked for a new place to belong to, and started to make up strange stories about non-existent relatives, claiming kinship with certain ancient families whose names, works and status were well known. The city still boasted of its affiliation to these families; sanctifying them was part of the essential social mores, along with the retention of certain other conventions whose affectations seemed peculiar to Radwan. He kept silent, trying to pierce the web of secrets which the blind men had spent years quietly weaving around their world.

One day he went out of the mosque on his own after his blind companions had left him behind, arguing that he was too young to accompany them. He went to the souk, excited by the new smells and the loud sounds there. He stopped in front of my grandfather’s shop; my grandfather sat and observed Radwan, watching as he kissed Hajj Abdel Ghany’s hand and asked him to teach him to make the perfumes he found so stimulating. Radwan was haunted by a strange feeling which almost amounted to rapture. He exhibited the originality Hajj Abdel Ghany loved. My grandfather allowed Radwan to sit in front of his shop and sing Zakariya Ahmed songs, and sometimes helped him to distinguish the smells that he then archived in his memory. One day, about two months later, Radwan stumbled while carrying some bottles and this made the Hajj so angry he slapped him. Crying bitterly, Radwan went back to the mosque and didn’t leave it for an entire year, only keeping alert for my grandfather whenever he came to pray so he could greet him. He spoke to him openly about his troubles and his life story. He spent a long time describing his dreams, and accepted my grandfather’s charity during the festivals: the new suit my grandfather bought him then would become one of their traditions. He liked Radwan’s joy and voluble conversation; Radwan eventually convinced my grandfather to add him to his family as a kind of servant, and not to worry about his blindness.

Carrying his small bag, Radwan walked into my grandfather’s house, and there became such a necessity it was impossible to dispense with him. He instituted reforms which my grandmother didn’t like but agreed to so as not to anger my grandfather. Radwan reassured him and acted as his confidant during rainy nights when he felt lonely and disinclined to knock on anyone’s door. My grandfather found a haven with his servant, who became his friend.

‘Maryam was five years old at the time,’ Radwan said to me and laughed, then continued to drain the mint tea which I had prepared for him as a bribe so he would finish the story I found so fabulous.

I was afflicted by desolate ideas for a moment; I looked at him as if he were about to get up from his chair, lay down on his bed and die. I was afraid for him and tried to encourage him a few times with a question, or to cajole him into sharing further details, but he now turned a deaf ear. He was drinking his tea in silence, and then he got up and walked to his room without wishing me goodnight. He walked sluggishly and dragged his feet, contrary to my expectation that he would have grown lighter after throwing off the weight of the childhood memories with which he wrestled in order to stay alive. I remembered the reply which he kept repeating when I asked if he missed my grandfather; he told me gravely, ‘His smell is still here. I loved this house, and its smell.’

* * *

Dawn crept in and I was still there, focused on the empty chair in front of me. I thought that Radwan must be in love with one of my aunts, and I guessed it must be Safaa. He had described her birth and how he looked after her when she was a child. Maryam I regarded as unlikely; I felt that he pitied her, and considered her to be wretched and to have wasted her life on delusions. She was like a silkworm which has patiently woven its cocoon when, choked by the smell of its own body, it tries to carve out a little window for some fresh air and the whole structure caves in. She could only weep among the ruins of eternal prosperity.

The rest of the night passed quietly, and I didn’t hear any shooting. I slept like the dead, devoid of the anxiety of the past days, and woke up to the clamour of the returning travellers, whose depression seemed to have been lifted by their holiday. Maryam had missed her things and, on finding them scattered about, set about rearranging them with great care: her few pictures; the clothes which aged her terribly; an antique tambourine left behind by Hajja Radia when she came to our house; her carpet. There were also two small boxes filled with obsolete accessories, as if they belonged to a woman who had fled decades earlier: copper kohl pipes engraved in Persian with the name of a princess famous for the beauty of her dark eyes; a piece of laurel soap particular to Aleppo which Maryam used very sparingly, believing it to be rare; and a circle of beads that had been briefly fashionable in the fifties among the more sophisticated class of women. Maryam still used these beads, as if she didn’t want to believe that the joy, warmth and chatter of those gatherings had disappeared.