Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

That night, I wore the blue dress. I slipped it on carefully and kept all the buttons done up, so my breasts wouldn’t be on show to the guards. Hajja Souad didn’t object further. It was a sort of agreement between us which we tacitly respected; she sent me orders only through an intermediary and she didn’t interfere in my relationship with the criminals, who kept me so entertained with their fantastic stories which might very well have been made up, but in which I believed passionately. I laughed from my belly at their anecdotes. I still remember Sana, accused of smuggling hash across the border with Lebanon, who convinced us that she was indeed Lebanese and the only daughter of a well-known diamond seller whose surname resembled hers; he owned a string of jewellery shops, the most famous of which was on the Rue Hamra in Beirut.

‘We have to believe lies so we won’t die,’ I told myself as I watched the ceiling, which I had watched thousands of times. I couldn’t find my star which I imagined hanging from a damp spot in the ancient plaster, and I tried to convince myself that I was sleeping in the same place as had stood the bed where the Circassian, in silk garments, had given up the splendour of her white flesh and the firmness of her seductive breasts to the enamoured wali . I felt the touch of my clothes on my naked body. The dress’s fabric excited my skin. I almost went mad with lust; I imagined the faces of men I had seen, including Radwan, students from the medical college, and the warders. I wept from burning lust. How wretched I was; how wretched we all were. This spring was so slow in passing. ‘It’s difficult to kill a woman’s desire,’ I thought. I imagined Sulafa sleeping in my bed; she embraced me, and we shared Mudar. We forgave him for abandoning us. We returned to play with delicious illusions which had delighted us once, a long time ago, and which I couldn’t recall properly any more. It was as if, for the first time, I had become interested in ordering my memories of prison. Summoning them up, I was saved by remembering the faces of people it was impossible for me to reach from prison. The power of the place made us feel our weakness. Without our permission, we were colonized by hatred we couldn’t escape, and love we couldn’t live out.

Our child grew taller. He called us by our names, and we taught him to read and write, and a few words of English which we were delighted to hear him repeat. He stood in front of us gesturing like a public speaker to a non-existent crowd in an unlit hall. I was less charmed than the other prisoners by his games. I sometimes joined Suhayr in sewing clothes for him out of scraps of cloth, using tidy stitches so he wouldn’t look like a beggar, or even his true self: a fatherless child, begging for sympathy from mothers who were getting tired of him bleating like a lost lamb. We all looked for something which could save us from feeling that time lay heavily on us, that our lives were stuck in an inescapable rut. We had to appear brave, as if we weren’t afraid of the torture or the narrow, crushing walls, so we wouldn’t be destroyed by our fellow inmates’ glances, which might accuse us of weakness. These cruel looks made us wish for death. They laid bare the weakness we desperately tried to conceal. In the time which we scattered like worthless sand, I thought many things over; I thought of the executioners, whose roaring laughter we could hear as they left in the evening, carrying home vegetables and bread for their children like any normal person. I thought of the victims from both sides who had fallen so that an idea could be realized.

Dalal was a Marxist, driven away by her comrades for wearing a veil and praying humbly behind Hajja Souad as a means of atoning for her collapse during interrogation, when she had revealed the location of her Party’s files. She reminded me of a girl from my group who had tried to flee to Saudi Arabia. A quick trial was convened, without any proper defence, so that it seemed more like a bit of fun than anything else. Dalal’s trial was no different from our own trial of Suzanne, who later had thrown herself to the floor and grabbed the Mukhabarat unit leader by the feet to plead for release. She had written more than a thousand letters to the President asking him to pardon her and save her from her sentence. She wept and begged for forgiveness from our group which only increased its cruelty, and kept her from our table like she was a mangy bitch. We didn’t even let her use the communal toilet. How cruel it is, when a secure existence within a group is your only safeguard for breathing foul air inside cells whose inhabitants aren’t even allowed to lie down on the cold floor. I didn’t dare console the sweet-natured Suzanne, or approach her after all these years, or apologize for sitting in judgement next to Hajja Souad as we had coldly sentenced her to this further level of imprisonment within the prison, and prevented her from holding our child, as we had done with the informer Hoda. All this was more lies in which we believed absolutely.

Prison taught you the rules of staying alive. No one who hasn’t been in jail can understand what it is like to be deprived of looking at the sun whenever you feel like it. Habits that had been trivial outside gained new meaning in prison. In that darkness, the euphemisms which we had sheltered behind withered away. We spat on our enemies. ‘“Life” is a difficult metaphor,’ I thought, ‘like “love”, “betrayal”; even a light-hearted game in a lettuce field.’ I laughed at the memory of lettuce which I hadn’t seen for seven years. I missed its freshness; I imagined it covered in spices, crisp and delicious in my mouth.

In our house, lettuce used to be synonymous with Safaa, just as butterflies were with Marwa. Safaa would wash its succulent leaves and nibble at it with excessive relish, pretending to be a rabbit. I used to laugh when Maryam scolded her. Safaa would seek out such silliness as a means of resisting her fate, from which the only escape was into another life no less odd — from Aleppo to Saudi Arabia and finally to Afghanistan, that land which meant death or madness. The princess who had visited me in prison felt that all that was left of me was ice-cold, that I was a piece of sugar whose sweetness had faded. She had pressed my hand and gone off to an unknown destiny.

* * *

This idea of destiny obsessed me, and I felt great comfort that that mythical ship would carry me off to my fate. When our destiny is not in our control, there is nothing left but this suffocation I felt to be delicious. I pushed on more deeply into it, so I could surrender my will entirely. ‘I’m so tired, Mama, so tired,’ I said to myself. I imagined her sitting silently in front of me, smiling shyly as she skilfully cleaned a fish my father had caught and fried it for us before it went bad. My brothers and I hated fish; we constantly tried to escape from the rancid smell of my father’s hands. Hossam and I pretended to chew it like good children, but Humam ate it with a gluttony we found astonishing. I forgot to ask him about this on his first visit, when Omar brought him. I hugged Humam over-enthusiastically — I wanted to hide my astonishment at seeing him as a young man with a thin, timid moustache. He was the only presence in my life which didn’t require some sort of deceptive embellishment to give me a feeling of security, like calling Sulafa ‘my sister’, or Um Mamdouh ‘my mother’. He really was my brother; there was no illusion involved. I was allowed to keep a photo of him. The other prisoners passed it around, and I heard their comments with the glee of a sister who knew the truth about that handsome face whose narrow lips they craved.

In my eighth year, as my sentence neared its end, I thought how I would soon be leaving this place. ‘It will be difficult to go back to my room…’ I thought as I lay in bed, surrendering to the fear which grew inside me like ivy, just as they wanted. I remembered the rounds of torture in the Mukhabarat unit, and the pus, the ulcers, the lice which attacked us and which we were afraid of admitting were in our cells. I had had recurrent bouts of illness that scarred me and kept the others well away from me — but there was no time for reproaches here, just as there was no time for living. We had to keep our bodies intact, as we still might need them some day. We kept breathing to reassure ourselves of the soundness of our lungs and arteries, which still boomed with blood like the rush of a waterfall. There is nothing quite like a prisoner’s mindset; it made us perfectly capable of considering our limbs just as if they had come out of a dream.