In Praise of Hatred (5 page)

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Marwa spread out her clothes and arranged her few possessions in the wardrobe, listening very quietly to Uncle Selim’s information that her husband had persevered in threatening her if she didn’t return to their house unconditionally. Marwa laughed and said that she would never return, and that she would prepare herself for life without a man. She took out her bright clothes and arranged them next to Safaa’s, the two of them immersed in endless conversations, interrupted by suppressed sobs or brazen laughter which irritated Maryam, but she concealed her ire. She raised her eyes to me, as if willing me to be deaf so I wouldn’t hear them.

I longed to join Safaa and Marwa in their nightly talks on the wide bed as they reclined in their delicate, soft, colourful night clothes. I would enter their room and Safaa would make space for me close to them, but I sat on the edge of the bed, and didn’t know what to say. I contemplated Safaa’s brown chest which looked like mine. I saw her breasts which had retained their firmness even though she was thirty. I sensed them quiver within the silkiness of the fabric; breasts deprived of pleasure.

Marwa would relax quietly, sneering at women’s perfumes or their inane conversations about their absent children. One day, Nishany’s mother had accompanied her to the hammam along with women of the extended family, who didn’t know the importance of a fleshy hip creasing slightly over a generous thigh; or of a chest with a texture like pleats of sand in the desert, untouched by the wind; nor of two breasts equal in grandeur, like tagines of polished marble. They reached out their hands for her hair and Abdullah’s sister almost tore it out by the roots. Marwa screamed, ‘These are original goods!’ Playing with the snaking locks of her hair she said to us, ‘They lose it in Nishany’s house.’ Marwa concluded her lampoon of Abdullah’s mother, whose mouth had the fragrance of sorrel, by saying, ‘I don’t know how I could bear her.’ And she added, ‘I don’t know how I bore her for three years!’ It was my grandmother who had wanted this marriage, whatever the cost.

Marwa told me that the scent of men was delicious if they were really men, but I didn’t understand what she meant. She got up slowly and went into the kitchen to prepare tea, not forgetting the sprigs of mint and the cinnamon sticks. She didn’t much care that the noise might disturb Maryam, who was fast asleep in her spacious bed. Next to the bed was a small chest of drawers, and hidden in one of the drawers were three pictures of a young man of medium height and average build, brown-skinned, with clever eyes. Other pictures smelled of the fragrance whose secrets Radwan was unable to attain. Marwa still remembered that she had heard him assert, protesting against Maryam’s yell that he was a failed perfumier, that this woman wanted to sleep with a man’s scent. Marwa came into the room carrying the silver tray with three large cups on it, and poured the tea. By the weak light, I saw her figure swaying with delicious malice. She offered me my cup lazily, with a ‘There you go, my little one.’ Safaa winked and reached a hand under the bed. She took out a box of cigarettes, which I was seeing for the first time. My aunts smoked with relish. Marwa turned towards me and, on seeing my aversion, told me, ‘It’s horrible, but it’s not
haram
.’ I was embarrassed, and felt a huge rush of love for Marwa and Safaa, whose eyes roamed over the ceiling. I would have them round to my room after Maryam fell asleep, and I clung to Marwa as her sweet voice rose in songs of the Prophet’s flight to Mecca, and occasionally the even sweeter songs of Um Kulthoum who entered the fabric of our daily lives. Marwa dusted off our asceticism with music and we withdrew from Hajja Radia’s
nashid
. Maryam never interrupted her attendance at these Friday sessions, even after Safaa stopped going, having announced that she was bored with repeating
nashid
and episodes from the Prophet’s
sira
.

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.

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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.

Suddenly, I felt very short of breath. I was afraid of my grandmother’s gaze, her body swathed in a wrapper and her hair spread out between Maryam’s hands for an application of henna. She looked like a wicked witch escaped from a story with her white hair caked in black all the way to its ends; when she removed her false teeth, it was as if she were shattering her body into pieces. Her flabby skin was repugnant … I fled from them and sat down in order to observe other compartments. Naked women were talking, others were scrubbing each other’s back. At a distance women were singing and swaying, one of them dancing with a hysteria I couldn’t understand, then. Her tongue protruded from between her lips; she winked at me and smiled. I loved the swaying of women’s bodies and the intrusion of their nakedness. The fragrance of the stone rooms enfolded me. I entered vaults although I didn’t know where they might lead. I surrendered to the labyrinth, as if the hammam were a citadel and the women who moved freely within its interior were warriors, forgotten prisoners of war with tokens of servitude dangling from their ears and their masters’ tattoos on their breasts. The labyrinth still shines in my memory whenever I go into the hammam.

In an exaggeration of femininity, I would walk quietly and remove my clothes slowly. With my aunts I wore a wrapper and never left the compartment, behaving like a respectable woman. Marwa and Safaa exchanged basins of hot water, trying to grasp the steam in order to cram it into their pores. Sometimes I would join them in their ribald jokes, but at the same time I noticed Maryam’s angry eyes roaming with silent indignation at them, and with satisfaction at my silence. She didn’t notice my smiles, which were reciprocated by Marwa, murmuring incomprehensibly to Safaa as she scrubbed her back until it was red. She would liberally spread foam from the hammam’s soap on it until it shone beneath the yellow light, ignoring the herb infusions which Maryam had given her in keeping with my grandmother’s traditions. Maryam had inherited everything from her, from her severity to her usual seat in the grandest of the compartments in the Red Door hammam.

We would leave the hammam at eight in the evening. Radwan would be standing by the door and when he heard our footsteps he would move off silently towards home, after taking the bundle from Maryam. Safaa would tease him briefly, igniting Maryam’s suppressed anger. The water made Safaa and Marwa into different women; they would chatter all the way home while Radwan followed the well-known road in silence. I would be engrossed in the black basalt-paved streets and the windows which looked like extinguished lamps from beneath my veil. I couldn’t see a thing; black shrouded all. I could only guess at the change of expression in men’s faces when they came near us and were assailed by the scent of Safaa and Marwa’s perfumed bodies. These bodies were fragrant in the narrow alleys; it was the only indulgence to which Maryam didn’t seem to object. I couldn’t have guessed how delighted she was when she saw men wheeling round to scrutinize the scene: women led by the blind, and for each of his footsteps moving according to an invisible, long-agreed order.