Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

I tried to order in my mind the stories that men and women were circulating — they spoke cautiously at first, but by midday the narrators’ voices rose up and no longer bothered mentioning the sources of their information. I imagined Hossam as a cold corpse, carried away like a piece of garbage by a bulldozer and thrown into some place where it might be uncovered and torn at by dogs. I felt sick when stories were told about those who had been left alive, those carrying their own guts in an attempt to cling on to life and trampling on the corpses of their brothers piled up in the narrow cells. Ten metres square had teemed with more than eighty prisoners who had for months or years outsmarted the whip, tuberculosis and scabies. But no one could save the injured after the death squads left in their aeroplanes.

A long time would pass before the full details were revealed of how the soldiers had entered the prison, and of the names of the officers who had issued the orders in cold blood. They would be pursued by the curses of the dead which did subsequently drive six of those soldiers completely mad, fleeing in perpetuity the imaginary enemies hunting them. Earlier they had returned to their homes laden with medals, conferred on them by the commander of the death squad, who had personally welcomed all the soldiers back to headquarters. He gave a speech in praise of their courage, and presented them with a small amount of money, which they then spent on falafel sandwiches before returning to their miserable rooms in the suburbs of Damascus.

As we drove back along the desert road, in the dark, we were despondent and silent. My mother was sitting on the backseat beside me, and Omar avoided looking at her in the mirror. Next to him, Maryam sat with her eyes closed, her hands on her misbaha . There was no sound other than the regular clack of the beads and the muttered prayers I couldn’t quite make out. The desert road was boring at night, and the futility of speech rendered us silent. I recalled images of the bereaved women, who were determined to remain outside the prison gates until they received their men’s bodies. It was a surreal scene, and surely one impossible ever to recreate. I suddenly felt that the confined space of the car, in the surrounding darkness, created some sort of unity between us. In the scant light, I could see my mother staring at a fixed point ahead of her. I closed my eyes. Before we reached Aleppo I realized again that I hadn’t offered her a single word of condolence. We couldn’t believe that Hossam had become just a photograph on the wall that we would look at, heartbroken and sobbing, remembering his elegance and his beautiful eyes. I thought about the fear he had shown the last time I’d seen him. I was certain now that he had known that death was his only way out, and that he wouldn’t survive if there was a delay in the victory which he had begun to understand was impossible.

I wanted to hug my mother and cry in her arms like a little child, but hatred dominated me to my very core. My extremities went cold. I felt paralysed and indifferent. I didn’t care if I ever emerged from the dark tunnel I had entered. ‘I have to control myself,’ I thought as I saw the lights of Aleppo and the statue of the goddess of fertility and beauty, which we considered heathen. I tried to look at it. It seemed beautiful, and so did the symbols of fertility and femininity she carried. For a moment I was overwhelmed by the idea of immersing myself in heathen ideas, but then I imagined Hossam in Paradise and my thoughts cooled. I reached out my hand towards my mother’s open palm and pressed her fingers gently; I felt how cold they were as she failed to respond. I used to need her support, but her coldness delighted me now. Judging by the empty streets, it was now very late. I looked at my mother and took hold of her hand again and pressed it firmly, but it remained limp. I tried yet again. I started to cry silently, and no one noticed or cared. Omar drove into our street where tanks occupied all four corners. My crying grew louder and the car stopped. Omar and Maryam were stunned when they turned towards me and saw my mother was dead.

Everything was over quickly, except for the rest of that horrific night. Omar asked Radwan to help him carry the body to Marwa’s room, and there they shrouded her on the bed by covering her with a woollen blanket. A few people arrived, among them Hajja Radia and Uncle Selim, who seemed unmoved. He sat at the head of the corpse, opened the Quran, and recited the Sura Al Baqara and some other short suur . He distributed parts of the Quran to Hajja Radia, Maryam and the neighbours who had come to extend their condolences in words that no longer meant anything to me. I stayed in my room. Zahra hugged me and we wept a little and then fell silent, only to start crying again; I hadn’t realized what a pleasure it was until now. I listened to the murmuring voices reciting the whole Quran to calm her soul. In the morning Omar brought his workmen in to help him with the preparations for the burial, which was carried out quickly; he refused to wait for my brother Humam and father to arrive from Beirut. I tried to raise the woollen blanket from her face, but couldn’t. I snatched a glance at her when Marwa arrived, accompanied only by Sheikh Abbas, her father-in-law, who sat beside Sheikh Daghstani in the house. I only noticed him after they returned from the tomb.

My mother’s death was a banal occurrence, not worthy of much notice in a city where more than three hundred mourning ceremonies were held that day alone for the victims of the desert prison. Death had lost its prestige. They buried her beside my grandmother and left an empty place in the tomb, which I guessed was for Hossam. It provoked a protest from my father when he arrived from Lebanon in the evening to receive condolences. He sat next to Omar, despite their bickering over whether or not Hossam would be buried in my father’s family tomb; Omar accused my father of neglecting his family and told him he was in no position to hand out orders. I thought it was idiotic of them to fight over an absent corpse. After the condolences were over, my father left my brother Humam with us and returned to Beirut, cursing Bakr. He held him responsible for the murder of his son and the death of his wife. My little brother didn’t understand what was happening, nor why women were hugging him, playing with his hair, declaring that he was an orphan, and teasing him about his funny Lebanese accent. He was a child of ten, mad about joining Bakr’s children in rigging up a swing in the branches of the lemon tree and flying through the air.

* * *

Everything was silent in the house and the rest of the summer passed miserably. We could no longer absorb the surprises and catastrophes raining down on our heads. It seemed absurd that I should go to sit my exams; I looked at the textbooks as if they belonged to someone else. Zahra and Maryam encouraged me to go, even if just to the first one. I thought that leaving the house might bring me some slight relief; I didn’t care about the destination. One day, after many visits to my mother’s grave, I left Maryam, Zahra and Humam to be led there by Radwan and instead went by myself to the Umayyad Mosque. I sat alone and felt a humility I had almost forgotten. I prayed without performing any ruk’at , and I wished Rabia Adawiya would return to save me from the cesspool I had been drowning in for days. I spent a long time looking at the decorations in the Umayyad Mosque and inhaling the scents of the splendid prayer mats. A woman came to pray next to me, then flung a piece of paper at me and left quickly before I could see her face. I opened up the note; the wording was short and clear, and warned me against going to the house of any woman known to belong to the group. It asked me to wait for instructions, and finished with some curt and belated words of condolence. I no longer cared that Hossam was described as a martyr. I tore up the paper, flushed it down the toilet, and left the mosque.