Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

I told Sulafa that it was her turn to lead the game, and that she should wake me when she was ready to tell me its new direction. She kicked me and leaned backwards, then covered her head with a heavy rug that smelled of the farts of the conscripts and prisoners who had preceded us and about whom we knew nothing. I knew that the night was halfway over: the hour of Mudar’s arrival had come. Every night at this time, Sulafa fled to her solitude. She created a little tent from some ancient sheets, and she would leave a little gap, just as she used to leave the door of her room open for Mudar so he could slink in through the dark into her arms. She recalled her earlier life with all the conviction of a woman who couldn’t believe that the fig trees in her family home overlooking the distant sea had become but a dream and a memory. I watched Sulafa; with her I relived Mudar’s arrival, his boisterous movements and vigour, his heavy tread. Like a lookout, I monitored the others, biting my nails and softly crooning sections of the Um Kulthoum song ‘Days Have Gone By’, which I now knew by heart because it had been repeated around me so many times. What did it mean when a man divided himself between two women, a lady and a servant? Between a wife and an unseen mistress? Whenever Sulafa unrolled her tent I composed an image of Mudar. I brought him into my room in that welcoming house which had never witnessed an unmarried man sleeping with any of its women.

I laughed when I remembered Abdullah sleeping alone in a cold room, surrounded by the hospitable splendour appropriate to the reputation of our ancestors, who had left a virgin to uphold their glories. She ordered a carded-wool bed weighing fifteen ratals to be brought down and took out the best bedding, along with cushions (which reminded me of nothing more than peacocks displaying to a blind crowd) and a special satin quilt from Istanbul bought for the guests whom the family had awaited so long, and who never came. Abdullah got into bed, surrounded by this opulence, while Safaa sighed next to Marwa; she didn’t dare go to him out of fear of Maryam, who kept awake, circling around the courtyard all night like she was guarding our vaginas and very breath. Abdullah’s dignity prevented him from returning Safaa’s salacious winks. Whenever he visited Aleppo, he was forced to rent a separate house if he wanted to drown in her feminine warmth until morning. Later, he lodged at grand hotels in order not to arouse suspicion — he pretended to be like any businessman from the Gulf, laden with projects, while in fact selling Paradise to anyone who supported jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet infidels. His enthusiasm, his tender expressions, his long history of failures and successes — all of this had made me miss him that day in the prison. I imagined him as a father to me, or as a husband who remained sleepless till morning so that the night wouldn’t steal his breath from me. Now, as I guarded Sulafa’s tent, I contemplated the futility of sharing one’s memories of a man with a friend, while hiding our secrets from our surrogate mother; as we received her affectionate scolds, we would exchange glances like naughty children.

We wasted so many days. We surrendered to indolence and time stretched out, uncounted and desolate, over our bodies. One day Sulafa told me, ‘It’s raining now.’ She laughed, and concluded, ‘It must be raining now; Mudar has passed in front of my window where there’s no light on, and he’s crying.’ I loved this image of a man, a lover, crying in the rain as he waited for a light to come on in his sweetheart’s room. Sulafa and I seemed like old friends who had met by chance on a slow train journey which wasn’t anywhere near long enough for them to exchange all their news, so they rushed to the nearest coffee house so they could finish what they had started. Sulafa neatly described Mudar’s eyelashes, fluttering nervously over black eyes like swallows, and she pressed my hand when I turned my face away. I apologized tenderly and thought for a long time about the shape of those eyes which so resembled swallows. In a passionate whisper she recalled his tall frame, and how his lips tasted of strawberry and awakened in her a desire to drown in burning kisses she had thought would never end.

They had met by chance, and he entered her life when she was relatively secure. But she defended him at the trial convened by her organization to call her to account. She wouldn’t surrender to her comrades’ pleas and her girlfriends’ contempt; they were furious she had broken the vow she had sworn to the underground Marxist party. She asked them to acknowledge him and they refused, and they asked her to recruit him to their party and she was silent. Desire for him was burning her up, and every night she left her door unlocked, indifferent to the stares of the curious neighbours. He would quietly cross Bab Tuma and detour past the Al Bakry hammam, to that ancient house whose rooms were shared by four students and two nurses (who took it in turns to use their only bed). The four students kept a lookout for her, and thereby ensured Mudar’s safe passage to her room. They helped her convince the landlady that the night visitor didn’t exist, despite the recurring sounds of Sulafa’s pleasure, which she didn’t try to hide. The students reacted to it shyly at first, and then eavesdropped eagerly.

Those girls had taken turns in guarding her. Now, I guarded the illusion which we shared, just as we shared everything willingly. She bewildered me when she cheerfully told me about the moment of her birth and her mother’s joy at the arrival of a daughter after four sons. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself around Sulafa’s neck and had almost strangled her; the midwives managed to revive her only with great difficulty. After Sulafa as a toddler fell into the well and emerged from it without a scratch, her mother became still more convinced that she had been formed for life. I tried to picture my own birth, but was assailed by my mother’s dead, silent face.

* * *

The guards’ faces were no longer obscured, and they became a part of our daily life. We coveted these faces sometimes, just to feel that our lives would continue after our detention; we would meet them one day, and call them to account for their oppression. We would ask them, ‘Won’t you die like us?’ We would go out to them in their dreams; we would penetrate their memories, and corrupt moments of harmony as they tried to enjoy their peaceful old age by playing backgammon and giving piggybacks to their grandchildren who played contentedly with their beards. Sulafa and I imagined various court settings: we were wearing judicial robes and holding the gavel, and then we began to interrogate them. ‘Why do you find pleasure in masturbating over a woman when she is tied up and electrodes are burning her breasts?’ Someone, known to his associates as Abi Ali, answered, ‘I was serving my master and my homeland.’ The word ‘homeland’ made me laugh. Everyone used it with veneration and respect, from members of my group to the torturers.

I was astonished at the breadth of scope contained within such a basic concept amidst the giddiness of all its various meanings. We wanted our ‘homeland’ to be Islamic. Sulafa and her group wanted it to be Marxist. The executioners wanted it to be their own private realm, where they could carry on masturbating and hanging on to power, heedless of anyone else as long as they still had armies and prisons. When I asked Sulafa, ‘How could the country be Marxist?’ she replied, with tepid enthusiasm, ‘Red and no other colour.’ To my own question I replied, ‘We want it green.’ Everyone wanted the country to be their own particular colour, like that of those three judicial robes in front of which I stood two years after first being imprisoned. My dreams of spices had grown trivial and pointless beside those of the others, who worried about their husbands, fathers and children.