Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Maryam observed us silently as we all practised deceit and clung to the rituals set precisely according to the Scottish clock purchased by my grandfather from a Jewish trader. He hung it on the wall of the living room and its position never changed; nor did its ticking, which resembled frogs croaking at night in a bog. We mended the stone fountain in the pool and the sound as it scattered droplets over the expanse of calm, unmoving water stirred up those nightly rituals of ours which I will never forget.

As Marwa sang ‘First He Entangled Me’ or ‘They Reminded Me About You’, her soft, deep, melodious voice flooded me, and created openings that I found frightening. A real shudder ran through me when I heard her voice in the deep of the night. Marwa stood like a professional singer and closed her eyes, surrendering to the movements of her hands as if they were clutching something precious or beloved. Safaa, distracted, smoked silently. Radwan sat beside his room, and I heard his suppressed sighs, born out of the ecstasy we had been missing before our discovery that Marwa had such gentleness and nobility in dealing with the night. Her presence made me acknowledge that I was a young woman, groping towards new tastes. During these nights I told her the meanings of the things accumulating around me, rising up like an imaginary barrier no one could see but me, or like a snare calling me to overcome it. Marwa was deeply affected by my words. In her eyes, I read deep satisfaction accompanied by the doubt that afflicted me, and from which I fled to the deep, warm moments by Hajja Radia’s side.

Blind Radwan would arrive at Hajja Radia’s house and stand by the door without ringing the bell. He waited for us without speaking to anyone and when we came out he could sense our footsteps. He walked in front of us as if he were clearing the way, and I surrendered to Maryam who clasped my arm without uttering a word as we crossed the streets. People were used to watching us every Friday and, at the same time, didn’t care. Our footsteps were full of fear, and we slunk like silent lizards over the stones of Jalloum’s alleys. Radwan reached the door of the house and his hand did not fumble with the key. We would enter the courtyard silently and Maryam would raise her black abaya. I saw the creases in her face, and her skin appeared to be curling a little. She still retained the powerful effect which accompanied her every Friday, when she didn’t care what was happening in the house. She went to bed early: she rose from her chair without excusing herself, she entered her room, she closed the door behind her. After a little while she would put out the light. She made an effort to bring the copper brazier closer to her, to scatter the shadows with the weak light of its flames. On Fridays, Safaa’s disposition changed and she was sunken in silence, staying up late by herself. She would pay no attention to me if I brought my books and sat at the table close to her; she would offer me a cup of tea and run her fingers through my hair, stroking it tenderly, and then she would return to her chair by the radio, turning the dial to find songs she loved.

* * *

Marwa believed that the house had a soul; I didn’t understand what she meant until long afterward. My attempts to look for the soul of the place bore no fruit and I was afforded no assistance by my strong attachment to my room. The ancient cupboard hadn’t lost its shine; whenever I opened the door, there wafted the scent of old walnut. In its creak I could hear cries from a bygone era. The Persian carpet hanging on the wall seemed like the fragment of a scattered dream which craftsmen had carefully restored. I began to think: had a woman or girl made it, had a man specified the colours? Were the grandchildren of these craftsmen still reconstructing this crumbled dream, or had their descendants been annihilated? Perhaps they had died in a war, or a torrential flood had descended unexpectedly, tearing away their looms and scattering the threads and the dyes. Yes — the place had a soul. How often I searched for it, scattered between Maryam (whose silence and severity kept increasing) and Safaa and Marwa. It was as if my younger aunts were stepping in to save me, to return me to the path of a female who exposed her nipples to the licentious water, to air replete with ethereal hands which caressed and awoke them and caused them to rise, standing haughty and majestic.

I was this female in need of air and water. I felt my body to be a dark vault, damp and crawling with spiders. I would wait for Thursday, the day we went to the hammam in the souk. After Marwa joined us, the scene which I had thought was changeless became thrilling: four women wrapped in black, Radwan walking in front of them carrying a bundle on his shoulders. We crossed the same streets from Jalloum to Bab Al Ahmar and as I heard our footsteps on the pavement, I had some sympathy for Radwan’s masculinity. Before we reached the door to the hammam he held out the bundle, which Maryam took wordlessly, granting him a short break. We bent our heads to enter the low doorway. I was engrossed in the details of the stone crown painted with an eagle with wings outstretched, and underneath it were some obliterated words and a history of the flight to Mecca, which I couldn’t decipher. I would linger at the entrance and look into the eyes of the eagle which gazed with such disdain and hauteur. I was enamoured of the tales of the grandeur of my ancestors which Maryam related, and I believed them to resemble the eagle carved into the wall. The sanctity of this past kept me awake at nights.

I didn’t realize where the anxiety rising within me would lead. It began to prevent me sleeping properly. I would toss and turn in bed before taking the pillow to the windowsill and observing the silence and the expanse of calm water in the pool. Something in my chest hurt me, and the pain spread out to the ends of every limb. I could feel it in my pores, in my fingertips, and between my thighs. I didn’t dare to approach or even touch my own limbs — I would disappear silently into the darkness. I felt my shame and nakedness in front of people, their eyes goggling and their lips slackening in horror at the scene. ‘Something needs to die,’ I would repeat to myself, but I didn’t know what exactly: my sensitivity to the place and the vast expanse of my room; my body which I feared would explode like a pane of glass; or the desire of my pores. ‘Yes — desire must die.’ Desire … that word burdened with thousands of meanings had to die. It quietened down a little, allowing me to sleep as I hadn’t done for years. If I could touch it and see it and therefore determine its size, colour and smell, then I could kill desire and scatter it, disperse it in the gale.

Our entrance into the hammam was regulated according to a tacit agreement. Maryam went first, then Safaa, and then Marwa. I would dawdle behind them at the door for a few moments. Nazima usually came out from behind her reception desk to welcome Maryam and joke with us. She would conclude her short speech with an acknowledgement of the beneficence of God and the might of His majesty until she seemed to me, at that moment, to be angling for an empty role in the family’s history, fortresses and shadows: that of my grandmother, whose compartment was still reserved for us every Thursday, even if we didn’t come.

I was very young when I first went to the hammam. I saw bodies shadowed by steam, women of different ages stretching out naked on old yellow stones and releasing faint, insolent laughter, moisture infusing their pores as they opened up with a lust for water. The place choked me. I left our compartment as my aunts and my mother washed and listened to my grandmother’s voluble indignation at the early onset of flabbiness in her daughters’ bodies. She took herbal infusions out of her bag along with bilun , the special clay from Aleppo, and many other things I didn’t know the use of. After setting out some basins she distributed the oils and infusions to her daughters. Silently they reached out their hands and applied it to their bodies according to her instructions, and none of them dared to utter a single word.