Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

The storytellers went further. They said that the Circassian was in fact in love with her husband’s son, who had seduced her at the instigation of his mother whom the wali had turned out. They also added that the wali abandoned Abu Hind’s palace, as it became known in their yellowed records which told stories about the place where even the damp made us happy. We recreated its full glory in our imaginations and became like its Circassian owner who had bequeathed it to us, and we celebrated the blessing of being saved from the moods of the commander of the Mukhabarat unit. He seemed almost in tears that we were leaving his cells still breathing. We relaxed in the first days in the Damascus prison because our guards, ordinary policemen this time rather than Mukhabarat, seemed more sympathetic to our status as women.

* * *

I couldn’t regain the power of my dreams. I used to draw them in confirmation of my passion for living, but I told Sulafa, ‘Joy has escaped me, and my dreams have paled.’ I warned her against forgetting Mudar but she shook her head and said, ‘I can’t forget him, but of course he’s forgotten me; he’s left me for another woman.’ I realized that the letters we had written on the foil of cigarette packets, and smuggled out via Sulafa’s family as soon as they were allowed to visit, had not reached him. Mudar had told her he didn’t have a proper address, that he moved about. All Sulafa had had to prop up a dream which never paled was her shabby little room, as elegant as she could make it given her modest means. She had dyed some cheap material, from which she’d made curtains and the tablecloth they used every morning as Mudar drank his coffee unhurriedly: a man worshipped by a woman who laughed from the heart, as she lay down by his side and buried her dreams in his chest.

Her family visited her often and they brought food. Despite their poverty, they bribed the guards to allow us to have cotton pyjamas; we had forgotten how soft they were against our bodies, to which we believed that a man’s touch would never return, even in our imagination. Sulafa’s sister tried to reassure her that she would soon find Mudar and bring a letter from him with her next time she came, but she was worried by Sulafa’s unceasing urgency. Eventually she had to tell her briefly and quickly that Mudar had refused Sulafa’s letters and even denied all knowledge of her. She added that he had married a Mukhabarat officer’s daughter who had pursued him and now led him off to a different destiny, as he had begun to work in the father’s smuggling operation. But Sulafa wasn’t the only forsaken woman. Thana’s husband had sent her divorce papers. He hadn’t waited for her to come out of prison, despite her lack of protest at his marriage to a woman twenty years his junior. He adorned his wife with Thana’s bracelets and expelled all sign of her from the house to which she had expected to return, as befitted a long-awaited wife.

In some ways we hated the visits which were allowed once every three months for us, and once a month for the Marxists. The outside world came back to us and removed our delusions, without granting us the luxury of absorbing ourselves in petty day-to-day worries. Maryam never missed a visit. She had grown old and exhausted; she wouldn’t explain anything, and I sensed she was making things up when she couldn’t quite carry off the deception. I needed her to reassure me about Radwan. I was surprised by the strength of his presence within me, as if he were a frivolous reflection of myself in the life I neglected. She lavished clothes on me (most of which were stolen by the warders) and food which she had spent days making, and which she flavoured with all types of spices, bringing back all my old pleasure at that sharp taste which scraped the back of my throat. I was delighted and recovered a past I didn’t want to die, so I wouldn’t feel my very real orphanhood. I reverted to my old illusions as a source of comfort, and to combat thoughts of suicide, which I resisted after Hajja Souad reminded us of the birds of paradise fluttering over our heads. I had forgotten about them; now, they found us all together with our other cellmates: Marxists and criminals, all accused of prostitution, all enjoying songs.

It was a long time before my father visited me. I had longed to see him and look boldly into his sad eyes for the first time. He smiled at me encouragingly and tried to reach my fingers to touch them and warmly extend kinship to me. I forgot everything I had wanted to tell him and which I had spent five years memorizing; I now saw again the smile which relaxed his narrow lips, and I put out of my mind how Maryam had described him as an alcoholic who wanted to marry an Armenian from Beirut. ‘And after a girl of your mother’s breeding!’ she had said disapprovingly, which made me laugh. I was astonished at my laughter, by which Maryam understood that I agreed with his new direction in life. I almost asked him about his new wife, and suggested that he bring her with him, but he never visited again, and I didn’t blame him. That night, I stayed awake till dawn and made the girls laugh as I mimicked the prison governor who called us daughters when he was in a good mood, and whores when he wasn’t, and whose face had begun to resemble a mouldy melon. Yes, I was happy with my father’s visit. I had needed to acknowledge him and my kinship with him.

Sulafa’s mental state worsened. She seemed vacant most of the time and took no notice when we spoke; she didn’t even hear us. I never left her side and fought everyone who tried to mock her; I defended my friend. I would take on her share of the chores we all had to do. At night I listened to her moans, her ravings about Mudar. I felt like she was my young daughter who was terrified of the outside world and yet longed for it. After three months she no longer remembered Mudar’s name, as if it were her that had left him. I drew her attention to the blossom on the peach tree, and then came the only evidence that she remembered where she was: she told me, ‘Yes, they blossomed. I told you they would.’ Then she buttoned up her woollen jacket, seeking protection from the cold spring breeze which made us all optimistic. We weren’t sure why spring should make us so optimistic; to us, it meant flowers in the prison courtyard. Each spring, we picked the peach blossoms; we couldn’t wait until they turned into fruit. We carried the branches to our dormitories and improvised vases, celebrating with flowers like any women, to prove to ourselves that we had mastered the wait.

The new prison had lost its novelty. Now we begged for images of the outside and cared for the details of the lives we had left behind, seemingly so neglected. We wanted to recover the passion which still lived inside us. We all turned back to our dreams as a means of overcoming the corruption of the security services, and to create the expectation of a pardon from the authorities and their Party. We circulated rumours that pardons surely must be inevitable. We never believed this again after they dragged Tuhama the mute out to a noose in the courtyard. They took us to see her dangling; in her eyes there was a look of reproach and apology. The scene was a shock to us and made us think about our fate again. They had demanded a retrial after accusing her of blowing up an armoured car in Hama, and a doctor ruled that she was feigning her dumbness to escape responsibility. Tuhama had shared our bed and our dreams, and her corpse, as it hung like a lamp, reminded us that she was just like us: corpses dangling in the breeze.

Tuhama had been nothing more than a girl who had lost the power of speech after carrying the corpses of her three brothers through the streets, looking for two square metres of earth to bury them in. The sight of her, as Um Mamdouh described it, was like an actress moving in an abandoned theatre. The hail of bullets that besieged her from all sides didn’t stop her from persevering and going on each errand with each corpse as if she were performing a role in a Greek tragedy. She buried the three of them on the banks of the Orontes, prayed over them, and when she tried to recite the Sura Fatiha she discovered that she had been struck dumb. It didn’t bother her; she had spent the previous two nights with her brothers’ bodies amid the sound of shooting, while helicopters hovered over the city and paratroopers sprang from them like arrogant rain.