In Praise of Hatred (21 page)

Deep down, we each envied Safaa for escaping the depression of our house, which had begun to resemble a vial of vinegar. Marwa had resisted and I believed she would go on to smash her iron chains, but then she suddenly subsided like a lioness whose wildness has been tamed and which has now grown used to being a child’s plaything in the zoo. She refused to speak to Maryam or even respond to her morning greetings. We became non-existent for her, and I felt her contemptuous looks penetrate my body like burning arrows, confusing me as I tried to enter the circle of her dreams.

The bereaved opened the city gates three days later and, the siege being lifted, the tanks withdrew to the pistachio fields. There was grief and fear in the eyes of people who had grown used to bowing their heads, cringing like chickens who cared only about returning safely to their coop at night. The bullets’ randomness had made Aleppo’s men hollow, bereft of dreams. Our organization lost internal cohesion. The leadership’s meetings were brief, rushed and inconclusive; accusations were exchanged and no one could look into his companions’ eyes with satisfaction, as they had just a year before when they confidently approached the steps of the Republican Palace.

*   *   *

Thousands of corpses perfumed Hama’s air, saturated with the smell of the river. The lists of countless detainees which were thrown on to the table in meetings were deeply frustrating for our leaders. We heard that at one meeting Bakr stood up and announced his resignation from the leadership – and he immediately left for Jordan on a false passport, and from there to London, where he arrived at night in the middle of fog. He wanted to walk to London Bridge and cry into the River Thames. Like any man, he didn’t want to look back so he wouldn’t have to remember the hundreds of young men who had sworn on the Quran and left to seek out paths to Paradise and certain death.

*   *   *

Marwa had missed her butterflies and calmly drew them in her room. Anyone seeing her might have thought that she loved her bonds as she gleefully pestered Maryam to ask Radwan to bring her some acrylic paints. She started to draw on her shackles and colour them in, and Zahra laughed at her commentary on her pictures. They made me miss my old self, when I didn’t praise hatred and drew my dreams with only childlike malice. When Marwa came near me, I sat beside her and told her how beautiful her lips and butterflies were, and how much I missed my brothers, like any obedient girl sympathetic to her plight. I tried to break her chains, but I couldn’t. Marwa was indifferent, as if she couldn’t hear me. She finished painting a sunflower on one ankle fetter, which was resplendent in dark yellow with clumsy details like the unintentional smears of a child’s drawing.

After Hajja Souad disappeared and the existence of our cell was discovered, I began to look around me in fear whenever I walked in the streets. I approached Hana one day when I saw her outside the chemistry lab, which had now reopened, and she ignored me completely, as if saying, ‘Get away from me. I don’t know you.’ She found me later, and told me that Alya had been arrested and they were still looking for Hajja Souad. I felt the weight of handcuffs settling around my wrists; I couldn’t contact anyone to take a letter to Bakr. I was alone. I would leave the house in the morning and walk in the streets, draped in black, rejected; like a fish striving for the shore and which, having reached it, can no longer return to the safety and care of the sea. I reproached myself for disdaining the smell of the white coat that had delighted my mother and aunts when I put it on for the first time and came out of my room, spreading my arms in the guise of a doctor. I took my mother’s wrist in order to take her pulse in exaggeratedly coquettish movements which made them all laugh. We had needed my white coat, so we could believe that the future would not be as black as our clothes.

Everyone was preoccupied with Wasal, who had finally arrived in Aleppo. Zahra hugged her warmly, a daughter in need of her contrite mother. Wasal wore a long, modest dress and a hijab. She was elegant and earnest in her penitence and feverish efforts to get to Mecca. Maryam marked her arrival with gloom initially, and then with increasing enthusiasm. The soul returned to our house along with movement and laughter, and cooking aromas wafted from the kitchen. Marwa’s chains incensed Wasal; she asked for her forgiveness, which no one else had, not even Omar who dropped in like a passer-by before quickly returning to Beirut, and from there to other countries. We lost track of him as he became afraid of death. He closed the family shops, and informed us that back in Beirut my father was immersed in alcohol, fishing and silence.

Wasal was proud of Zahra; of her strength, of her deep faith that it was God who had calmed her heart and expelled the fear and night terrors from her life. The two women were at ease as they sat together, scolding and laughing and going to the markets with Maryam and Radwan, ignoring my presence and my requests not to let a dissolute woman enter our home. Marwa shouted at me to fear God and turn my gaze inwards to see the ugliness inside me. That night I felt like I was full of decay; I needed to sit by myself and cry over my broken image as a girl who had once loved life and tolerance. Maryam heard my whimpers and embraced me like a mother, and I thought of how much I needed compassion. She took me the next day to the hammam, and we left Marwa fettered without any feeling of guilt or pity; she had inquired after Nadhir from the death squad soldiers who were still periodically raiding our house, overturning our things and moving around like passengers at an abandoned train station. Marwa smiled when they told her that Nadhir hadn’t died, nor were his wounds serious. She asked them to convey the message to him that she was chained up because of their love. The young officer was enthusiastic about this, astonished by the woman surrounded by embalmed butterflies and attached to a heavy cast-iron bed which even an ox couldn’t move. Two days later, he returned with his soldiers and went directly to Marwa’s room. He gave her a sealed letter and left without repeating his usual idiotic questions about the contents of the abandoned well, which had been sealed with a metal cover to prevent scorpions and snakes crawling out of it. He looked at her respectfully and greeted her with the consideration due to the wife of a superior officer. We couldn’t take the letter off her; only Zahra knew everything and she kept her friend’s secrets, ignoring Maryam’s questioning and responding enthusiastically to the suggestion we take Wasal to the hammam.

For the first time I knew what it might be like to be considered a fallen woman – women crossed in front of our compartment to spy on Wasal’s withered breasts, imagining what they had looked like forty years earlier when they were like fruits of Paradise. Wasal rubbed down Maryam’s body with the experience of a woman who had encountered many men and who had moaned in pleasure at their hands. Maryam’s dead body woke up, and she was dreamy, as if recalling the son of the Samarkandi and desiring him. She imagined his hands and his chest and regretted a wasted youth. The hot water and the smell of the cavernous hall made Wasal recall her story; she recited some English obscenities, which I understood. I smiled in an attempt to attract her attention and get closer to Zahra again, who didn’t comment on the few spots, boils almost, scattered over my body. They stopped me from undressing in front of the other women in fear of their ridicule, despite my firm breasts whose full bloom I restricted in a bra made of a rough, coarse material which was more suitable for an old woman.

We were astonished by our liberality and avoided exchanging looks so we wouldn’t discover that our relaxation was fleeting: it would ruin our deliberately excessive laughter. We tried to forget the nightmares and recall the glories, and engage with the trivialities of life – we hadn’t realized at the time how necessary these were to help us carry on. Our career as the women led by the blind every Thursday evening was now impossible; undertaking this visit to the baths at all was a cause for celebration. Gathering in a circle around the dinner table every Friday became a miracle whose future recurrence we couldn’t count on, any more than on a night’s restful sleep in our own beds. I left our compartment in the hammam,
looking for the footsteps of the child I had been and the galleries in which she had got lost.

I didn’t notice Hana until she approached me and whispered that we had to meet; she set a precise time and place and warned me not to miss it. She left, so we seemed like two women swapping razor blades to shave our legs. I almost choked and drowned in the steam. I didn’t want anyone to see my terror of going to prison, whose rot I had already been able to feel under my tongue. I imagined the feel of handcuffs and remembered Marwa – I had spent the night beside her and she asked me resolutely to go away and leave her to her wait. I gazed at her and felt for a moment that she had become used to her chains, and that the feel of their rusty links no longer disturbed her; she walked slowly in her room and attentively watched the sky through her window. On moonlit nights, she would sit in the courtyard for hours following the path of the moon like a white ship gliding over the horizon. Her silence was an expression of her contempt for us, and we felt it even more when we heard her peal of laughter with Wasal, who loved her and shared her room. At night, Wasal would sing Frank Sinatra songs for her, and Marwa requested ‘If You Go Away’ after hearing a translation of the lyrics. Marwa paused for a long time over a section she had learned by heart, and made Wasal burst out laughing when she playfully dragged out the consonants as she sang.

Wasal was a good listener. She spoke with the politeness of a woman who wanted neither to ruin her daughter’s life nor exact a high price from us, and before long she had absorbed our dreams and desires. She began to tell Maryam her life story in an attempt to depict herself as a wronged woman, lonely but desired by thousands of men – from the Khan Cordoba to London and New York, where she had arrived on a cargo boat with one of its Spanish crew. The Spaniard’s languishing eyes made her believe that he had been waiting for her for a thousand years; the way he wept at her door and bent over her feet to kiss them awoke her wild dreams of wandering along the Atlantic shore, of living with a man who could recover the taste of her first days with Khalil. She acknowledged that she had loved Khalil and cried for him during the nights when she was deprived of Zahra.

Later, when she began to send letters to her daughter, she realized she had squandered her dream of a warm home to spend her old age in, surrounded by the two clamorous grandchildren who loved her, who didn’t cry when she came near; she would pet them and wipe their noses and they would look at her in wonder. When she came to my grandfather’s house, she opened her bags and distributed presents like any grandmother returning from a trip. She needed to take out a velvety photograph album and point to pictures of her grandsons’ mother as a baby, so they would know that she was their grandmother and not some woman passing through their lives. They exchanged long glances with Zahra and after a short time rushed towards Wasal with a recklessness which delighted her. She became a horse they rode and a cat who miaowed and licked their feet. She sat them beside her at the table and taught them how to hold a knife and fork in a more elegant way and to eat sedately after the English fashion. Her insistence that they wear ties, and their swift acceptance of the ‘horse collar’ as they called it, provoked astonishment in Maryam, who was jealous of Wasal’s ability to make her grandsons sing English songs along with her like her backing vocalists. She felt the gravity of her understanding with Zahra about rescuing the children from this hell, and ensuring a future for them away from the smell of death which rained down ceaselessly over the city, and which would only stop once the city had been drowned.

Zahra was desperate. She surrendered to dreams that seduced her with a different type of recklessness. They woke the desire to arrange her life anew, away from Bakr and his ambitions. She had also believed in them once, on the day she lay next to him on their bed after making feverish love which had taken her breath away. He whispered confidently about the Islamic state which was on its way, where everything would be washed clean, radiant like crystal. Dreams appeared to them both, so close that the smell of them lingered on their fingers, as they immersed themselves in a sublimity of touching and desiring which they hoped would never end.

Because of her memories and her dreams, Zahra endured being taken to the Mukhabarat
in handcuffs by Bakr’s side more than twenty times, and coped with the officials’ insults when they described her as an unfaithful, whorish wife. Later, she bore the torture of being hit with a four-ply cable until her back split open, secure in not knowing of Bakr’s new hideouts, nor the colour of his pillows and sheets; she no longer worried about these much after witnessing the cruelty and rage of the Mukhabarat at Bakr’s escape from ambushes they had set for him, like a wounded bird who had the measure of their traps. Zahra realized that quietly drinking coffee with him in the mornings was a dream that had come to an end for the time being. She explained to Maryam how much she needed Wasal, who could ensure a future for her children. Hope returned to her when one of Bakr’s associates handed her a hastily written letter:
I’m abroad. I miss you and the children …
She hugged the letter to herself and basked in the comfort it provided. Bakr’s arguments with the leadership had reached an impasse, and he accused everyone of abandoning Hama to pursue a holy jihad on their own. In his words she felt the unexpressed regret that oppressed him – until he remembered his position in London as a skilful political speaker, worldly-wise, endowed with the sworn allegiance of thousands of young men.

Zahra laughed as if receiving a gift from God on her final visit to the Mukhabarat. She didn’t curse them and they didn’t torture her; they made do with looking at her with contempt, and she sat calmly at the investigator’s desk as he informed her that she was subject to a travel ban. She nodded and knew from his ease that he was triumphant, no doubt aware that the battle was nearing its end. She had to reassess her daily life as a married woman whose husband had fled from certain death. Maryam marked the occasion of Bakr’s letter by bursting into noisy tears in front of a photograph of Hossam, who was drowning in the labyrinth of a desert prison. He had been led there with thousands of his comrades to be crammed into old, damp prison cells in which no one could make out the partitions, nor even the succession of night and day.