In Praise of Hatred (10 page)

Selim considered Omar’s partnership with the smugglers to be mad, stupidity that would consign the entire family and its wealth to oblivion. He didn’t expect Omar’s cold defence of this partnership, the way he reeled off the details of their father’s willingness to bend to the prevailing wind, and their grandfather before him, who delivered Sheikh Daghstani’s grandfather to the Ottomans to be summarily executed in front of Bal El Hadid. Omar reminded Selim of how the four wings of Yildiz Palace in Istanbul had been furnished with splendid carpets as the reward for his betrayal, which my grandfather tried repeatedly to rewrite to make it seem more of a coincidence than a conspiracy.

Bakr didn’t object to Omar’s strategy, and offered advice which the other two didn’t hear. Omar became like a Mafioso, totally preoccupied; he didn’t know the taste of relaxation. He no longer came to us at the end of the evening as he used to – just drunk enough to be contented and cheerful, to fight with Maryam over the principles of
fiqh
, to drink coffee with Safaa and Marwa, to joke with me and leave me a considerable amount of cash. Maryam would put it away in my special box – as if she wanted to distance me from the overpowering, disgusting smell of fish that wafted from my father’s clothes and hands, which, to her, had been transformed into putrescent gills.

Omar’s public infamy and shamelessness worried my aunts, who raced to write a charm for him, which was stitched, wrapped in elegant, colourful material, and hung around his neck as he sat between them with the meekness of a mouse. Afterwards he was struck with the idea of making copies and selling them to other dervishes.

Safaa’s eyes sparkled happily when news of his fight with an important official who raised objections to Omar’s lover was circulated around the city. She was a married woman who boasted of her relationship with Omar; she went out to restaurants with him in public, travelled with him to Beirut for a few days, and returned to show off to her friends the evidence of his generosity. After a long conversation in which Omar complained of his attachment to his lover and her exploitation of his fierce tenderness, Safaa advised him to get her divorced and then marry her, adding sarcastically that a wife was cheaper than a mistress.

We couldn’t understand Omar’s ambition, nor his anxiety and fear; we couldn’t find sufficient reason for Omar’s mad withdrawal into his pleasures and his being hell-bent on provoking scandal. Whenever Maryam looked at his sharia qualification hanging on her bedroom wall, her eyes swam with tears and she muttered a prayer – we stopped joining in after a conversation we’d had about the enormous funds he had accrued in the short months he had spent as an arms dealer. He was now devoting himself almost entirely to this trade, at the expense of the patterned carpets and the smell of silk and wool. He became wary at the growing number of assassinations of civil service employees and lower-ranking officers, lauded by most people who were astonished at the cold-blooded murders.

Rumours circulated madly that certain groups had taken it upon themselves to cleanse official circles, were organizing and arming, and were intent on targeting the most venal and corrupt. They had no compunction about using violence and some even viewed it as essential; but others feared that their actions would create a spiral of unstoppable brutality, as the government forces were sure to retaliate in kind.

Apprehensive silence began to dominate the city, along with a fear of what ruin the future might bring. Omar couldn’t easily withdraw from this business; he was trapped by his knowledge of suppliers and the names of Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi politicians embroiled in the trade, and their connections to the dried-up wells and concealed passages of houses that acted as hidden warehouses. He felt suffocated, and one night he entered Maryam’s room, took off his clothes and put on some blue silk pyjamas. He didn’t speak to us for three days; he read the Quran piously, his voice hoarse whenever he raised it to recite Sura Al Ahzab. We all felt his tiredness and his need for the old image of our family, as if he missed that awkward adolescent who had once thrown flour in the air, watching the motes land on the edges of the pool, the flowers and the branches of the trees. He had opened his arms and whirled like a dervish in a Sufi ring, wondering quite seriously why the sky didn’t rain flour.

Three days was enough for my aunts to celebrate Omar’s apparent reformation, and it was long enough for me to get closer to my uncle and draw his attention to my erudition and demonstrate my knowledge of
fiqh
. It was a festival of food the likes of which I had never witnessed before, and Maryam gave herself up to it wholeheartedly. She ordered us to clean the neglected, dusty walnut table, and took out a crimson silk cloth whose borders were decorated with pictures of Chinese musical instruments and blossoms. She unrolled it and rebuked Safaa, though quietly and tenderly, for her aversion to making stuffed
kibbeh
. She turned to me with her observations about how messy the stuffed vine leaves were, and praised Marwa, who had inherited all the Aleppan know-how in preparing food. Marwa would add her own touches, and caused disputes with other Aleppan women until they became convinced of her talent to innovate.

Radwan was one of the most enthusiastic participants in the feast, and found justification for sitting for hours by the stove, stretching his legs out on the sofa and delightedly chatting to Omar, whom he loved. He shared the same frivolous temperament and used to intercede with my grandfather to spare Omar his wrath. The array of dishes laid out in rows inspired an appetite that did not respect table manners, avenging the coldness of the table at which we women had sat in silence, eating with exaggerated etiquette. Omar insisted that Radwan should eat his meals with us, and Maryam didn’t object. His conversations and his jester’s clowning made us laugh, and we laughed without fear of uncovering our shame or being held to account for it.

In the evening, Maryam recounted stories from Omar’s childhood. Her enthusiasm astonished him, and her face appeared loving as she tried to imitate my grandmother’s desperation to reform her youngest son’s errant behaviour; for the first time, I knew that he had thought about renouncing Islam, inspiring such real panic and confusion that it almost drove my grandmother to hysteria. She pronounced him to be mad and in need of special care, cried for entire nights and took him to the sheikhs of Aleppo. Omar surrendered to their recitations and charms, which bored him in no time at all. He would open the charms and read the names of devils and symbols of entry into Paradise, and then throw them down without any semblance of reverence in front of my grandmother, who gathered them together and burned them so as not to insult the honour of the best of the Muslims.

The tales of his adolescent years affected me greatly, and I tried several times to write it down and redraw his past; he was as close to me as if he were my own son. After his departure I began to understand the secret of Safaa’s depression and Marwa’s sadness, which made them complain so much of the exhaustion of our isolation and at the requests to uphold our honour – ‘as if we walked naked through the city,’ Safaa would retort irritably. Marwa was resigned, seemingly expecting nothing other than death; she agreed with everything, lost the will to talk. Safaa would carry her pillow and come to share the bed with me, and there would follow a never-ending conversation about the families who visited us, whose receptions we attended and whose wedding invitations we accepted. In the end, her conversation always sang the praises of women’s strengths and mocked their weaknesses. She mocked Rima’s coldness and declared that Omar had to divorce her; whereas Zahra, Bakr’s wife, she described as a friend, reviewing the details of her long neck, the size of her breasts and their provocative bouncing. Safaa made me laugh. I felt her breath beside me when she dozed off, and as I looked at her face I believed she would be wretched as long as her pores were empty of the smell of men.

*   *   *

Omar left our house to wander in the mountains; he spent three weeks there alone, and his behaviour was more like that of an ascetic than a hellraiser. He slept in cheap hotels and savoured the smell of the pine trees in the Kurd-Dagh Forest. He avoided direct contact with the hotel owners, who were overwhelmed with his generosity. They thought he was on the run, or that he was cursed to silence and loneliness. He needed to reconsider everything: his relationships, funds, projects and dreams, his relationships with Rima and his friends, whom he had told he was going abroad. The pure mountain air of Salnafa and Kasab and his abstinence from alcohol brought freshness to his face and vitality to his feet. He rediscovered his connection to nature, climbing for hours in the mountains and avoiding the main roads, walking briskly through small country estates which led him to places that he thought, for the first time, were blessed. Oak branches twisted among the pine trees, and the scent of white cedar wafted from the forests after the fleeting night rains. His losses gained meaning. When the forested plains stretched out before him, it occurred to him to jump. He wished he were a paper aeroplane which could float over the country. His childhood came back to him in ever-accumulating images, the dust dislodged from them; he began to arrange them, mixing up their order and recalling their anxious taste, like a peach bitter despite its ripeness.

‘I was closer to God,’ he said to Maryam on his return, assailed by feelings of purity and lightness. Losing no time and allowing no one to venture an opinion, he informed Maryam of his decision to divorce Rima and grant her the right to live with his children in their sumptuous apartment – which was a hell to him because of the smell of pickles constantly emanating from the kitchen. His allergy to pickles made him irritable and unable to blow his nose. Quietly and as expected, their marriage came to an end, destroyed by her passion for cold meats and pickles – she would spend hours arranging the jars in the attic and on the tops of the kitchen cabinets. She had been made desperate by Omar’s strange requests, unworthy of the daughter of a sheikh whose honour and asceticism were known throughout the city. ‘He wants to turn me into a whore,’ she would wail, before getting up and going to the kitchen to put salt on the pickled beans.

Safaa sympathized with Omar and praised his divorce, cursing Rima’s idiocy and criticizing the smell of cheap talcum powder that came from her children. Maryam arranged the divorce, aided by Selim, who was forced to curse Omar more than once while at the same time blessing the memory of my grandmother, who had been the one to choose Rima over many other girls on account of her decency, her obedience and her family’s fragrant reputation.

In the following days, Omar began to take his revenge on a history of decency, obedience and fragrant reputations. After his silence and isolation (which failed to last even a month) he returned to his profligate ways, causing ever-increasing mayhem. He sought out trouble, and provoked scandals in cold blood and with the utmost confidence: he harassed married women and adolescent girls, and openly accompanied prostitutes to restaurants; he would live in their attics for days at a time without any discretion, swapping joints and obscene photographs with them. He took them to the markets and listened to what was said about him without caring. He repeated to my aunts, ‘Nothing will save me but love.’ These few words of his awoke our desire for seclusion and silence. The silent house was gloomy and abandoned; Radwan roamed around it freely, relishing the temporary absence of Maryam’s demands, Safaa’s sarcasm or my pleas.

*   *   *

‘Nothing will save any of us but love,’ Safaa said to Marwa, who had begun to design a carpet whose borders were to be decorated with images of goddesses. I was terrified when I discovered that they were pagan deities I had seen once in an illustrated book about the Ancient Greeks. Maryam sank even deeper into her isolation and moved only between her bed and the cane chair by the window. At one point she took her photograph album out of her closet drawer, drew the curtains and locked the door as if getting ready to commit a sin. She stayed lost in a few photographs, then got up suddenly. She sat on the ground and recited the Sura Al Qasar. Her voice rose as if she were singing
nashid
for a celebration, or trying to drive out the demons which would descend from the chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

On the fourth day of our festival of silence and seclusion, we all went to one of Hajja Radia’s sessions. My aunts joined in the singing of the women beseeching the Beloved Prophet. At that moment, I said to myself, ‘It is so difficult for a woman to reveal her secrets.’ I envied Omar for a moment, and then threw off my suspicion and depression. Later, on my bed, I conjured up an image of Ghada and then her scent. I pushed deeper into the daydream, and after reassuring myself of my solitude and the shadows in the room, I penetrated deeper and surrendered to my desire which plunged headlong like a train through green plains. I reached out my fingers for the buttons of her blue dress I knew so well, unfastened them and gazed at the pink bra which held her smouldering nipples and delicious breasts.

Then I got up, locked the door and drew the curtains and got completely naked in order to sink into the softness of her stomach. I panted like a dog and kissed her navel with the voracity of a woman abandoned to her own debauchery.

In the morning, I deeply regretted this. I was terrified of going to school, afraid of the familiar sounds. I hated Ghada when I saw her in the line-up, laughing with other girls and dawdling on the stairs. When I came close to her I felt as nauseous as if a corpse’s stench were wafting from her, but I missed her in the last lesson and almost left my classroom to find her. I needed to see her. I was distracted and couldn’t hear the maths teacher despite my love of equations and geometry. I looked for Ghada at the end of the day and lingered in the exit. The car of the fifty-year-old man passed in front of the school and Ghada calmly waved at me from it, in complete command of herself. I smiled at her as my agonies increased; I wished she would die along with that man.