In Praise of Hatred (34 page)

It was difficult to describe the colour of our child’s eyes. He vanquished our boredom and the endless discussions, which the shadows of that depressing place made appear more like an exchange of curses heralding an escalation in hatred. We hadn’t expected that religious opponents and ideological enemies could ever share the same space, but we were forced to share that air and pain, and break dry bread together. We belonged to Suhayr’s child the moment we all felt the futility of words and the power of life. It took only a few moments to reconsider everything. I watched myself and the hatred I had loved; I remembered my father’s agitated face, his violent words in defence of the other sect as he asked me not to hold them responsible for the persecution of our sect. He quoted dozens of examples of torturers and corrupt statesmen who belonged to our sect and, in contrast, of men from the other sect who had defended our right to speak the truth. He wanted to save me, or save the country, for which he saw no future other than one dominant ideology, be it red or green, which would extend to include everyone.

I thought about my father suddenly. I wished I could see him, if only for a moment. I hadn’t understood the meaning of his move to Beirut, or when his voice got lost among our din and the flood of our emotions. Memories submerged me and distanced me from our child who began to grow day by day. The sound of his chirping and of his first hand clap transported us into ecstasies of adoration. We kissed his feet and abandoned everything just to watch him crawl and wave his hands. We waited for any new gesture from him, in order to reward it with inexhaustible love.

Rasha returned from solitary confinement a week after his birth. Weeping, she seized the child’s tiny hands and kissed them as if we weren’t there. They allowed Suhayr half an hour in the yard a day, which she spent under the guard of corrupt soldiers to whom we paid what little money we still had so that Suhayr would have a carton of milk, costing five times its original price. In addition, the few visits allowed to the ordinary criminals passing through the prison ensured a little extra food, which we surrendered to Suhayr so she could breastfeed. Our minds devised strange means of keeping death away from our beloved baby. Thana, a girl from our group, sang ‘The Heart Loves All Beauty’ for him in a surprisingly sweet voice. We repeated it after her, though fearful that the guards would drag us once again to that terrifying room where the whips would rain down on our naked bodies. Thana was revealed to us as a singer who had memorized odes from the Jahiliyya, and now she repeated the old songs of Mohammed Khairy, Najah Salam and Um Kulthoum with a sensitivity which made us believe, just for a few moments, that we were outside these repulsive walls. Intoxicated, we formed a ring around her – she had overcome her shyness all at once and was included as another sister; we were all Um Mamdouh’s daughters, and I continued to call myself one until my release. Um Mamdouh would relate to every transient criminal the story of Hama, the city which had been destroyed and whose corpses had been thrown in the streets to rot.

We needed our child to help us endure. We discovered how wonderful it was to watch a human being grow within a prison cell with joy and defiance. Our torturers couldn’t understand it – in his first days they willed him to die, but later they just regarded him as a strange creature. They couldn’t stay silent and revealed the secret to their wives during nights full of worry, and when they tried to describe him they found that they couldn’t. I told myself, ‘It’s wonderful that this baby now has twenty-two mothers.’

*   *   *

It occurred to me in my third year to be afraid of death; I was terrified when I was laid up with a high fever. The unit doctor confirmed it wasn’t infectious, but I could feel that my cellmates were afraid even to look at me in case I passed it on to them. I pleaded with the doctor to put me into quarantine, even if it meant I had to be parted from them. He kicked me and threw me a few pills, which I refused to take in an attempt to kill myself.

With the severity of a real mother, Um Mamdouh ordered me to pull myself together. Didn’t I want to return to the medical college and wear a white coat, and enjoy the streets of Aleppo once more? I saw them in front of me again. While I was in the grip of the fever all sorts of images mixed and overlapped in my mind. I discovered the glory of surrendering to long daydreams I didn’t want to end. I wanted a child like our child. I wanted to escape from the lie that he belonged to all of us. Our child wasn’t really
our
child. Um Mamdouh, the ‘mother’ who looked at us reprovingly to make us behave more decorously whenever Sulafa pinched me and we burst into loud peals of laughter, wasn’t our mother. Mudar, Sulafa’s lover, wasn’t standing crying under my window, begging me to open it and throw myself into his arms so he could press my lips to his with a force which drove me mad.

The hatred which I had defended as the only truth was shattered entirely. The early questions surrounding the truth of belonging and existence came back to me, as I swam in confusion. My life was a collection of allegories that belonged to others. How hard it is to spend all your time believing what others want you to believe; they choose a name for you which you then have to love and defend, just as they choose the God you will worship, killing whoever opposes their version of His beauty, the people you call ‘infidels’. Then a hail of bullets is released, which makes death into fact.

*   *   *

A slow, dilapidated train was travelling over the plains. Its wheels squeaking in pain, it advanced to pick up the dead who were awaiting burial with vacant eyes, looking up at the sky as if it were a dream. All along the train’s path the dead signalled to the blind driver to stop by using their stench. The train let out a powerful whistle to greet the transient beings. The driver descended through the meadows and searched among the flowers for the bodies, piled up like forgotten sacks of lentils which had rotted in the rain. The blind driver carried the corpses lightly and skilfully and lined them up inside the cold iron carriages; the dead don’t care about the niceties of the living. He climbed up to his cab and the invisible train moved off. The expanse of the driver’s smiling face was brushed by the cool breezes and his imagination blazed. He traced pictures of the corpses piled up in the last carriage. He inveigled himself into their dreams as if he were their only guarantee that they wouldn’t be left abandoned in a cold alley like empty paper bags.

I saw the train, quiet and unnoticed as it moved through the streets of a city I recognized; I believed it to be Aleppo. It really was Aleppo – its narrow alleys and squares filled with tanks, soldiers and corpses. No one thought of stopping this dread-inducing machine from which an old, blind man descended. He took up his cargo and left silently, without uttering a single question or grumbling about the weight. Hossam’s corpse was fidgety, looking for someone to tickle him and make him laugh. The train reached another town; there were waterwheels nearby – Um Mamdouh saw them and screamed, ‘It’s Hama!’ She asked the driver to stop for a moment, so she could examine the faces of her sons and neighbours, and of whoever else had been left by the birds of prey which had scorned thousands of corpses. The blind driver halted the train and drank some tea with soldiers, who would also bid goodbye to their lives, cut down at street corners. The driver stopped for a long time: he wanted more corpses. I thought that the train had nearly reached me. I saw its yellow lights approaching; I was delighted, like anyone wanting to see the plains and inhale the clean air of Paradise, as I moved among the white lambs which guarded it. Their melodic bleating was like divine music, which polluted humankind couldn’t hope to enjoy.

I was frightened of becoming that train driver and I passed out. Multiple images clashed and my shadow laid siege to me, blinding me for a few moments. I surrendered to it totally. I asked Sulafa, ‘Where is your hand?’ She held out her hand and I pressed it for a few minutes, and a strange warmth overwhelmed me. It returned sight to me – opaque at first, then completely clear. I had been feverish for three months, and had enjoyed the delirium. I saw myself lying naked in a green meadow. I imagined passing men who raped me, or lovers who I only wished would leave me alone. I remembered Ghada, from whom I always tried to flee. I convinced myself that her grave was always decorated with narcissi.

*   *   *

The illness left its legacy on my face like one more hallmark of my time in that place. The stress we were under made us fight even over apple peel with the tenacity of normal women fighting for their lives. How much had our images of ourselves changed over the last couple of years? How much had we mocked ourselves? We carried our claims to superiority only in sanitized dreams. We wanted to remain like ripe peaches, but aridity reached our very core. When I finally got back on my feet, I was sure that my illness had been necessary to dispel the last of my illusions. I was ashamed of my face, which Sulafa tried to convince me was still beautiful and that the scars would soon fade. I thought how trivial it was to worry, in this place, of how my sunken cheeks looked. Everything inside me had become pale, and everything around me had become boring. I was possessed by everything I had fled from. I no longer watched our child or applauded warmly when he tried to stand on his own feet or waved his hands about. The air was no longer enough for me; I heard my pulse ringing in my ears like a strong hammer or the ticking of a huge clock in an abandoned city.

I was bored by the daily discussions, in which I participated only in a quiet voice, swiftly lost within the noisy uproar of others’ certainty. The only thing on which we agreed was to ignore that the other sect was the reason for the conflict. The others in my group no longer called me to account for my friendship with the Marxist Sulafa. They tried to approach her and lean on her shoulder when Thana sang the final section of Um Kalthoum’s ‘Renew Your Love For Me’, and they generously gave her some of the cold tea which they saved from the afternoon meal to have late at night.

It is difficult to be a woman in prison when all your guards are men. You listen to their footsteps in the corridor, you catch their scent, and it awakens desire; then you remember they are enemies who kick you brutally and wish you would die so they can devote themselves entirely to the card games which every soldier needs from time to time, to feel that everything is as it should be.

*   *   *

The death squad commander kicked open the door to the cabinet office, and marched in to bang his fist on the ancient walnut table and demand his portion of the country. The frightened ministers signed his orders without demur, aware that the dignity they enjoyed was dependent on his dignity; some of them identified with him publicly, while others left for quieter climes where they could write their memoirs and curse him, after yielding up more than half of the state’s funds to him. He stashed it all in European and American banks, which conspired with him in their greed for the copious amounts of money he had accumulated as the price for murdering our group members, bombing unarmed prisoners, and destroying a city which loved eating
ghazal banat
and cheese pastries more than it loved death. Myths grew up about the commander, and his supporters hung up pictures of him in which he seemed to be a powerful man who loved life, smiling and raising his fist as if he were liberating Jerusalem – rather than the gang leader who ruled through his lieutenants and milked the country, a spoiled little boy everyone avoided upsetting, so that he wouldn’t ruin the party for them all. He and his associates seemed like old childhood friends who had gathered to celebrate their reunion by murdering the headmaster and plundering all the equipment from the school sports hall.

The commander became the symbol of the death squad, and the country began to buckle under its pressure. News of his scandalous behaviour with women leaked out, as of his officers’ abduction of girls as they walked along formerly safe streets. If the gaze of one of his guards fell upon a figure graceful like a gazelle, they would drag the girl to one of his houses scattered throughout all the affluent districts of Damascus. They would hold the girls prisoner, gang-rape them, and then throw them out like dogs, leaving them to an unknown fate. Articles on the commander’s corruption were published in foreign newspapers, so foreign newspapers were banned and anyone caught reading them was punished. There were suspicious disappearances among any of his trading partners who tried to muscle in on the profits. One who had not been lucky enough to flee abroad with some money had his accounts and assets frozen and recovered, and he himself was liquidated in cold blood. Another business associate was thrown from the seventh floor on to a chilly pavement – a grand funeral was held for him the following day, and a large wreath of roses was presented in the name of the death squad commander. He offered a mourning ceremony to the man’s sons, who thanked him politely, abandoning their family honour and denying rumours that their father had been murdered; his death was transformed into a mere accident, as might befall anyone who happened to lose his balance on his seventh-floor balcony, while leaning out to look for the full moon.

*   *   *

Nadhir stood in front of the head of the death squad. He let his hands drop and steeled himself for the bullet which might come suddenly from behind the curtains of that grand office. Without looking at him, the commander asked, ‘Weren’t we in the same class once?’ Nadhir answered curtly, ‘Yes.’ The commander followed this with a question which sounded vaguely conciliatory: ‘Why did you betray me?’ Nadhir fidgeted while trying to select the appropriate words which wouldn’t anger him. ‘I didn’t betray you, sir. I tried to follow our code of honour by not attacking unarmed prisoners.’ The silence seemed very long before the commander rose from behind his desk, looking straight at him. ‘Don’t you believe they were criminals, and that they wanted to kill our sect?’ The words
our sect
rang out like a clap of thunder.