Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

The commander was worried; he knew the implications of this refusal, especially coming as it did after Nadhir’s controversial marriage to Marwa. This had been the subject of discussion amongst the top brass, who said that Nadhir had crossed all boundaries and was lacking in loyalty. The commander didn’t let him finish his sentence. Nadhir handed over the key to his staff car and walked out, avoiding the troops who were shouting their allegiance to the death squad commander. They raised their fists in the air and climbed into the ten aeroplanes squatting on the runway in the growing twilight. Nadhir turned around and saw them take off in an orderly fashion. He didn’t realize that it was his tears that were blurring the narrow road through the cactus fields. He thought for a moment that maybe he had heard the orders wrong, or that the previous night had left him exhausted. He couldn’t grasp that this mad fantasy would actually murder prisoners held in an isolated jail. He thought it would be a miracle if anyone left that prison alive.

Nadhir found himself sitting in a taxi with three other passengers, who eyed his uniform warily, and couldn’t understand the presence of this officer — alone, silent and distracted — among them; he imposed a silence on them, which was a measure of their fear. The old Mercedes swayed patiently on its way to Aleppo like a sealed coffin borne aloft. Nadhir tried to sleep, but nightmares attacked him; awake, dark thoughts agitated him. He almost started to mutter to himself like a madman as he tried to imagine what was happening when, checking his watch, he calculated that the aeroplanes had landed next to the prison gate half an hour earlier. An expert in this sort of operation, he guessed that his colleagues had had more than enough time to ensure that their rifles were in order. As in some sort of perverse fairytale, their enemies, at the moment still bound in iron chains to the walls of the prison, would be transformed into live targets on an imaginary shooting range.

* * *

The following morning, a hot summer’s day, the country woke up to stories which had spread like lightning, already retold thousands of times. I understood why Nadhir stood at the door looking exhausted and broken, asking for Marwa to call him another taxi. He apologized for drinking Maryam’s coffee with a shamefaced smile, and he spoke almost incomprehensibly and with great difficulty. He said that he had resigned from the army, and that what had happened that night would never be forgotten for a thousand years. Then he left like a fugitive along with Marwa. In the taxi, she put her hand tenderly on his hair and face and whispered, ‘It’s all right, darling.’ He kissed her palm and took refuge in burning tears, not caring about the astonishment of the driver, who shook their hands. He stopped the car and got out to leave him alone with Marwa, who was almost speechless at seeing him like a small child. She pulled herself together, wiped away his tears and kissed him on the lips; then she ordered the driver to hurry: they were rushing to someone’s bedside to witness the last, warm breath of the dying man before his body turned cold and he left them for ever. Marwa thus freed Nadhir from the need for any further explanation or a response to the sympathetic glances of the driver, who now ascribed this man’s tears to the imminent loss of a loved one. He concluded this passenger was like any other person, despite the uniform he wore, which should have indicated that he was just one of those terrorizing the country and revelling in the bloodlust and the fear in people’s eyes.

Reports had spread of how the troops had calmly left their planes, gone into the cells of the desert prison, and cold-bloodedly opened fire on the prisoners, whose brains they splattered all over the walls and ceilings. The corpses were piled up in the corridors like rotten oranges thrown carelessly on to a rubbish dump. More than eight hundred prisoners had been killed in less than an hour. Later the bulldozers carried the bodies to a secret location where they were thrown into a pit whose size, shape and smell no one could possibly imagine. The accounts of the few survivors would offer yet another opportunity to examine the extraordinary resilience that humanity can show in the face of the most extreme circumstances.

All over the country, black flags were hung from balconies. Anyone entering Aleppo or Hama in the early evening of the following day might have thought a festival of weeping had begun, and that it must be the preamble to the festival that recalled the martyr Hussein, which had so often inspired artists, scholars and strangers passing through Karbala. Hajja Souad rushed towards me weeping. She hugged me before I could enter the house, and I heard her prayer for Hossam to enter Heaven. Everything I had tried so hard not to believe was embodied in front of me, like a truth which now had to be heard clearly. I couldn’t move my tongue; I felt paralysis creeping through my limbs. I shook my head unthinkingly and fled. When I eventually got back to the house I found my mother sitting in the courtyard and crying. She was kissing a picture of Hossam she held in her hands, and she stood up to trill and dance like she had gone mad. Maryam, Zahra, Omar and Radwan all formed a ring around her to prevent her from running out into the street until she fainted, and then they carried her to bed.

Before dawn the next day, we set off in Omar’s car for the desert prison. We had been preceded by groups of mothers who came from all over the country to seek out their sons. They didn’t want to believe a story they thought must have been invented. Road blocks and armed soldiers prevented the thousands of people who slept outdoors that night from reaching the prison, which was entirely quiet after the corpses had been moved and the building washed down with power hoses. It was as if the soldiers had carried out with precision a job they considered to be no more than routine, and now they were keeping aloof and distant from the inanity of the crowd milling around.

My mother was silent in the car. We remembered, halfway along the desert road, that we hadn’t exchanged greetings. We didn’t clasp hands like other mothers and daughters when they meet after a long absence; I quietly placed my hand in her open palm and she leaned slightly towards me with a strange coolness. Were it not for her eyes, which had an irresistible strength, I would have thought she was dead. I couldn’t say a word. When we got near the prison, the scene was like something from an extraordinarily vivid and life-like film. But the hell of this mass execution was beyond imagining. Women veiled in black were holding up pictures of their missing husbands, brothers and sons, kneeling in rows as if praying to a god they had believed in for a long time; the fear on their faces seemed to have been caused by the loss of His compassionate image. They persisted in their prayers and pleas to see their men, hoping against hope that the story was just a lie told in various forms; as if it were an exercise dumped on the public to train them up in creative writing, or a revival of the traditional Arabic tales which the Caliphs had once enjoyed.

‘We need Scheherazade,’ I said to myself when my mother bolted from Omar’s car as soon as it stopped. She broke through a group of women who looked just like her and rushed towards an armoured car, which belonged to the death squad soldiers who had closed the road, and started hitting it. She cursed the troops, who looked at her dumbfounded from their hiding place inside the car. They were afraid that the crowds would attack them.

Hysteria reigned among the assembled carts, cars and broken-looking people. No one noticed that the children had sand stuck to their snot-covered faces — they had been gathering rocks to build small tombstones and then they threw pebbles at them to knock them down, trying to break their intense boredom. Sandwich- and snack-vendors saw an opportunity and came rushing from the neighbouring village. They hastily set up stalls and soon there rose up the smells of cooking meat and salad which no one ate. The burning sun did not deter the women from wailing, even though their saliva dried up and their lips cracked from thirst. They punished themselves, and abstained from material comforts; they called on death to reunite them with their loved ones.