Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Hundreds of old images came to Nadhir’s mind: one was of two young students trying to find shelter from the heavy winter rain under a tarpaulin, laughing like any friends would when they were faced with the likelihood of ending up looking like drowned rats. It was an idealized picture which helped him to gather up his courage all at once and say clearly, ‘Where do you want to take the country?’ He followed this with a plea, addressing the commander by his first name, without his title: ‘Why do you want to destroy the sect and charge it with crimes it hasn’t committed? Do what you want, and leave the sect alone. You can still carry on your rackets, and it will be the poor who pay the heavy price.’ The commander seemed calm as he fingered his revolver, but then and there he ended the meeting, gesturing to his associates to show Nadhir out. As Nadhir was leaving the building, a young officer politely asked for the keys to his house and second car, and told him to await further instructions. Nadhir felt tense but when he opened the boot of the car to empty it, he saw, to his astonishment, that the young officer was smiling at him. Nadhir carried the cases of butterflies carefully over to the small van and driver he had hired earlier and set off for his house, which was no longer his. There he quickly reassured Marwa and gathered up a few belongings. He left behind all his uniforms, leaving a message for a childhood friend who has drowned in a lake of blood, bequeathing his family only thousands of corpses pierced with bullets whose curse would follow them for ever.

On the way to Nadhir’s village, Marwa stroked his hands in an attempt to break the heavy silence which had settled over them like a portent of misfortune. When they arrived, Sheikh Abbas and Nadhir spoke together for a short time while his sister helped Marwa unpack. Nadhir gave his father an account of his meeting; he thought that the only thing that had piqued the head of the death squad was that he wasn’t in a position to shoot Nadhir himself — he was afraid that his popularity among the troops and younger officers would make him into a martyr and a symbol for resistance. The commander was striving to avoid dissent within the sect, while he plotted to replace the president and consolidated his grip on power.

A document bearing the seal of the chiefs of staff relieved Nadhir of all his duties and allocated him a pension. It was delivered to him by a junior officer who saluted him for the last time and left quickly without answering any questions. The paper, which Nadhir promptly tore up, was enough to put an end to his dreams; all the same, he started speaking about when exactly he needed to spray the orange trees. He ate his breakfast before dawn with gusto, like a fellah with lots to do; the farm needed much work after Sheikh Abbas’s three children had left it and headed for the distant cities. When much later I saw him again, on his first visit to me with Maryam, Omar and Marwa, his appearance seemed different from that of the officer who had been imprisoned by the butterflies of the woman he loved, and who had freed her from Bakr’s chains. His laughter was kinder as he encouraged me to smile and go back to college, which I no longer thought of as being anything other than a vague dream, as if I had never started my studies. We had both lost our dreams. We had to piece them back together as if they were the threads of a carpet whose weave had come apart.

* * *

It was the fragility of dreams I was thinking about as the secure van transferred us to the central women’s prison in Damascus — after four years in the Mukhabarat cells, we were a pitiful sight. We were delighted with our new prison, where we were allowed to spend two whole hours a day outside and look at the sky: a coveted image of the salvation we were no longer preoccupied with. In our former hell we had looked for the smallest comfort, it was so much part of us that we almost jumped in terror when we heard the cars and the sirens in the streets on our journey over. Sulafa had preceded me to the new prison by two weeks. I threw myself on her chest and wept bitterly, a missing part of her soul. She was bright-faced, cleaner and happier; the place was almost spacious and we could breathe in the cells, as air circulated through the open bars; the ghost of suffocation moved away from us. We were allocated to the various dormitories. Sulafa had reserved a place for me next to her. For the first time in four years I stretched my body out fully, and had the space to turn over as many times as I liked before plunging into a deep sleep.

The place we had dreamed of was however still a prison with reinforced-steel doors and guards stationed at intervals all along its high walls. The warders showed no respect for the taste of the Ottoman wali who had had it built, in what were then peach orchards outside Damascus, as a place where he could take pleasure with his Circassian wife every Thursday night. We had heard plenty of stories about him. The wali was fearful of other men’s eyes, and jealous of the Circassian’s beauty which had already destroyed the life of the Damascene trader, Muhyi Al Din, who had married her and then almost immediately started to complain to his friend the wali about all her caprices. The wali set eyes on her for the first time when she asked to see him with a petition, like any woman who might appeal to a wali renowned for his generosity in dealing with his city’s inhabitants, for his deep-rooted lineage, and for his friendship with her husband. He didn’t listen to a word she said. His gaze clung to her delicate waist, to the breasts hidden by the fabric which reached up to her shimmering white throat. He tried to lower his eyes and listen to her request, which came out suddenly: ‘I want to divorce Muhyi Al Din.’ She added, ‘He doesn’t fulfil me, and his friend the judge won’t meet me or listen to me!’ The wali contemplated her quietly, rubbed his chin and asked her to marry him, as if they were in one of Scheherazade’s tales.

She returned to see the wali after three days which he had spent sleepless and miserable. She asked again for her divorce, and her brother, who had come from the village of Dadin, granted her the military pension arising from his service in the Topkapi Palace as her dowry. The two of them appeared to be concluding a strange sort of bargain that would eventually turn Muhyi Al Din into a brigand and an alcoholic. He swore to kill them both after the judge, under the threat of her brother’s sword, divorced them in absentia . (Muhyi Al Din eventually forgot his vow and was killed by a stray bullet on the road to his family’s plantation in Zabadany.)

Everything went off according to the wali ’s plans. He then accompanied the judge on his Hajj pilgrimage in order to atone for his sins. They stood as partners at the gates of the Kaaba to thank God for His blessings, asked for forgiveness and returned to Syria cleansed. The judge, who saw the Circassian only once during their journey, hinted to the wali that he should hide her away from the gaze of others, and acquainted him with an architect, Abu Hind, who stood in front of Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque every morning to point at the wide gates and the square minarets. He would criticize its engineer, Walid bin Abdel Malik, for the error which had made the mosque oblong-shaped, accusing him of not having read Pythagoras and enumerating the advantages of the circle as an architectural form more suited for that sacred place.

Abu Hind sat in front of the wali and without any inhibition chattered away about how awful it was architects were being deported from the Levant to Astana so that they might be kept as ignorant artisans who didn’t even know the difference between white and yellow stone. The wali listened to his ramblings, regarding this as a necessary part of the process of convincing him to design a palace for a man who loved a woman to the point of infatuation, and feared for her safety even from the summer wind. The wali did not object to the circular form so venerated by the architect, and acquiesced to all his conditions. Abu Hind worked tirelessly for three years so the wali could move there with his Circassian wife; she had awoken in him feelings of deep regret for all the years he had wasted in avoiding the pleasures of the flesh, and other material preoccupations, such as accumulating wealth or leaving a brilliant reputation as a legacy to his seven children. The serving women disclosed the secrets of the wild nights shared by the wali and the Circassian to the storytellers who wove a tale — substituting other names — about a sober man whose prestige was ruined by a Circassian woman before she committed suicide next to the garden fountain, leaving a short letter informing him that love had not taken root in her heart. She could no longer bear to lie down in that magnificent building designed by an awkward man as a prison, and not as a palace for lovers. Her blood had flowed over the edge of the fountain and mingled with its waters.