Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

My mother hadn’t been able to find a better solution than death. For me, choosing death seemed the same as choosing life when the Mukhabarat men jeered at me as I staggered up the steps to their building. To Aleppans, this was a place of terror and inevitable death; even in the best-case scenario, it meant certain ruin. The commander was himself a symbol of the devastation that had settled over the country. He loved hearing about the torture of the detainees. He interfered in all matters relating to Aleppo, which had been glorious once, before he accepted it as a reward in return for betraying his fellow conspirators during an attempted coup, and sending them one by one to the basement gallows in a dank military barracks from which he alone would return. He took control of all the smuggling routes for members of his family, who abandoned goat-herding and were transformed overnight into businessmen. The sight of them in their loud suits provoked covert laughter, and pity for their utter lack of taste.

Silence was best when face to face with our enemies. My handcuffs hurt and the powerful odour of decay bored into me, overwhelming in the cell into which I was thrown by powerful, rough hands. Terrible dizziness caused me to drop to the ground. I saw the death that I had avoided contemplating when it stretched out beside me like a man whose breath I could inhale. He teased me, and I leaned away from him; he flirted with me, so I cursed him with an inner voice he nevertheless heard perfectly — but still he wouldn’t leave me. ‘I have to ask for mercy,’ I thought, and I surrendered to the protracted time I knew would pass before I could return to the possessions which I had neglected. It was strange that thoughts of them returned to me now. I was rebuked by the soft bedcover; by the tablecloth prepared specially for the medical student and Radwan’s singing companion I used to be; by my warm bed and by the small carpet hanging like an eternal icon. I pushed away these details so I wouldn’t drown in my tears in this cellar full of prison cells. Feeble voices leaked out of them, begging for air or a single drop of water.

No one spoke to me for three days; a hand of which I saw no more than the coarse fingers would occasionally toss me a bowl of mouldy, unspiced food. In that place I had nothing but my memories, but I soon avoided reviewing them: I realized that suppressing memories was the only solution to their test of my ability not to lose my mind. It was like my request that they speak to me, even that they curse me, rather than leave me to the void of my unacknowledged whimpers. How cruel do people have to be before you wish to hear the voices of your executioners, just to be sure that you are not alone? I remembered Marwa looking at us with contempt, raising her chains as proof of her love for Nadhir. At that moment, I swore to kiss her feet so she would forgive me. This vow stayed with me for a long time. I imagined the scene a thousand times; I traced it until it became something tangible, impossible to disengage from.

On the fourth day (or so I estimated) a man took me by the arm, blindfolded, to an interrogation room. After a few words I was taken to another room nearby, and I went there with the submission of a lamb to the slaughter. I lay on the ground and the whips rained down on my body. I swam in a murky kingdom where rough voices were raised, cursing a murdered woman who was my mother, and extolling the praises of their leader. The darkness intensified; Rabia Adawiya fluttered like a white bird and I clung to her. Bats surrounded me with their scythe-shaped wings. Spices floated over me but I couldn’t catch hold of them or sniff their scent. Deafness became a divine blessing. Whenever I took Rabia Adawiya’s hand, the fingernails leapt up and tore my body to shreds, which were thrown to the wolves. These wolves didn’t resemble the ones whose pointy muzzles and mean eyes I had adored. In the beginning, they only want to control your body, then they want your eyes, and finally even your breath, in that murky kingdom of darkness you have entered, where everything takes on new meaning. I lost consciousness. I couldn’t feel the feet kicking me in my side in order to set my weeping wounds on fire again. I squeezed out the pus once and tried to taste it; I had to learn to love it like I loved my pain, in order to stay alive, to hold on to the ability to regain at some point the cohesion I had surrendered for a while to the charm of dissolution.

* * *

Sulafa closed her eyes. ‘Stroke my hair; make me your toy,’ she said. Her voice rang out as if it were coming from a time before she was as good as dead, from the outside, whose existence we tried to ignore so we could erect our kingdoms on a mountain of salt and clay. I was as surprised by her request as if she had just told me what was in my endless daydreams. I knelt down and she surrendered to my fingers which soothed the dryness of her scalp. Um Mamdouh usually woke up at night. She looked for a long time at the other sleeping women who had become used to crowding their bodies into a few centimetres; to suppressing their never-ending moans, and their desire to escape to spacious beds which would allow their skin to breathe freely and quiver in the presence of a man. Um Mamdouh looked at us, smiled, and joined me in twining Sulafa’s braids to finish off the game.

In this new shared cell I had been moved to, there were several of my former associates; but I was often silent and didn’t join in with the girls who were involved in endless debates on the fatwas of prayers relevant to these circumstances, as they tried to convince girls from other political parties of the necessity of returning to God. Each side would come out with passionate speeches, but it all ended in mutual recriminations. At night they were quieter; only their whimpers rose up, along with the smell of festering wounds. I put my head on Um Mamdouh’s knee and also enjoyed being someone’s doll; Sulafa and I were both in need of a mother. We repeated the game several times, and I didn’t care about Hajja Souad’s rebukes, or her description of us as ‘abnormal’.

After the first year, the executioners no longer tortured us to the brink of death during interrogations as a matter of routine. We had confessed to everything they wanted us to; we didn’t care any more. I decided to recreate my past all over again, as if I were only now slipping from my mother’s womb and crawling over the cold ground. I decided to believe this lie so I would live with a recklessness I did not believe I possessed, with a frivolity I hadn’t known before. I regretted my excessive gravity and convinced myself that I was in this hell so I would love my aunts more. I refused the little help available from our organization conveyed to us, despite the obstacles, through visitors to the criminals who spent a few days in our midst. Prostitutes in particular created an atmosphere of intimacy with their lewd talk and relaxed tone when describing their clients. They were aware that they were only passing through and seemed sorry for us, and then they would cheerfully leave us for other parts of the prison while letting out rumbling trills, and kissing me warmly.

A lack of understanding between Hajja Souad and me led at first to a cooling in our relationship, and then to a state of total and mutual disregard. This gave me the freedom to sit with Sulafa and Um Mamdouh, whom Sulafa and I began to call mother. If someone had told me two years earlier that Sulafa would become a lifelong friend, I would have thought them deluded. Now our conversation was unceasing; we each reshaped our past so that the memories were no longer the preserve of an individual, but could belong to both of us together. Thus we shared my room and sang Radwan’s poetry, and we lit a lamp on the night of the Prophet’s mawlid . We swam naked in the sea at Latakia, and then stretched out rapturously on the white sand, drinking juice beneath the single palm on the beach at Samra. We wandered through forests and got lost on sinuous country roads. We welcomed the dawn as it touched the cacti on Mount Ben Younis, then we stood in front of my grandfather’s shops like customers looking for the carpet upon which Scheherazade had sat in order to redeem women of their gender with a thousand and one stories. What did it matter that we were stuck in a narrow cell which was no more than a hair’s breadth wider than our two bodies? I thought for a moment that everything that had happened was a game which would soon be over, and the losers would go home with a sigh, bewailing their bad luck.