In Praise of Hatred (13 page)

His successive crises ended only when he wept in front of the Kaaba in Mecca after arriving there with Prince Shehab El Din, a childhood friend who still remembered his genius at solving geometry problems at the English School in Cairo. With the prince’s help, Abdullah was granted a pardon and royal permission to enter Mecca on the Haj and stay in the prince’s palace as a long-term guest, where he enjoyed generous hospitality. In the prince’s private quarters they would play chess and reminisce about their erstwhile companions, most of whom Abdullah met again when they passed through old friends’ houses. They went out hunting together for a few days and made plans to meet up soon in other cities.

‘I saw God in Mecca,’ said Abdullah with the faith of the ascetic; I envied him these visions that had changed his life. Zeina exulted when she saw him raving at night in prayer, beseeching for his soul to be saved, now hovering like a hawk who has been pursued by the hunters’ guns and who is, at last, exhausted, returning to his nest in the mountains. His friendship with Prince Shehab El Din opened doors to him. Zeina narrated the story of Al Zeir Salim once again, reciting his grief-stricken elegies for Kulaib bin Wael in the salon of the prince’s wife, who loved Zeina’s magic and the power of her words. The audience listened intently to her and to her wide-ranging learning, gleaned from mixing with men in various capital cities and from her uncles who were famous in the Najd for their Nabataean poetry and their cunning. Most important was her knowledge of the secrets of pleasure; she spoke fluently about horse-riding positions, glancing lewdly at the men. Zeina brought to mind the story of Scheherazade, whom I always liked to recall; I traced her image in my dreams many times, and I always drew her as a frightened woman, seeking help from words in order to be saved from tyranny. Words drew never-ending, chaotically intersecting lines that led to futility; I was frightened of becoming entangled in them, in case their shifting sands swept me away.

Abdullah met Bakr at one of Prince Shehab El Din’s councils. They became close after a long conversation in the palace garden, which began with the merits of Kashmiri carpets and ended in politics. Bakr didn’t hide his pleasure at Abdullah’s metamorphoses. He paused for a while at the point in the story where Abdullah described holding a position of authority and explained (with a great deal of verbosity and confidence) its arrangements, ambitions, secrets and connections. Then in a quiet voice Abdullah reviewed his childhood and studies at the English School as if he were throwing a heavy weight into the shadowy depths of the ocean; he joyfully recalled the Indian sailor who had led him to a fate he didn’t regret. He remembered the cruelty of those moments that had haunted him during the cold Moscow nights when he longed to run barefoot behind a herd of camels, heedless of the wild thorns.

They weren’t parted for three days. They accompanied one of the prince’s hunting expeditions into the desert, content to praise the precision of his aim and spend the rest of the time chatting. The friendship that grew between them delighted the prince. Abdullah didn’t hesitate to support Bakr in obtaining a contract to furnish the prince’s new palace with rich carpets, in order to realize the building the prince had dreamed of one night. When the dream was repeated another night, the prince considered it to be an order from the world of spirits to erect this palace to honour the memory of his mother, who was praying on a small carpet in the dream. The prince described the structure minutely and enthusiastically, and Bakr listened attentively to his account of coloured peacocks, birds of paradise and basil plants surrounding fountains, all reminiscent of the small palace of Abi Abdullah, last of the Andalusian kings. The prince, exhausted after abandoning himself to the remembrance of his dream, concluded his speech by saying briefly, ‘I want a palace which looks like my mother’s womb.’

Abdullah obtained the prince’s permission to accompany Bakr as he fulfilled the prince’s dream, which he had sworn zealously to do. They left the palace on uncharted roads, and became semi-vagrants in the alleys of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia. They used an old Jeep Bakr had chosen so as not to arouse the cupidity of the owners of what they sought – such as five-hundred-year-old carpets upon which famous globetrotters and sultans had once sat; or boxes made from rare wood and inlaid with silver, once given to women in their youth by famous men who adored them – women who, in their old age, were forced to sell them in public auctions for less money than the cost of a few glass bottles.

Bakr and Abdullah both enjoyed the subterfuge, and enjoyed discovering all these deserts, cities, villages and houses, all the while recalling in the depths of their souls the story of the Prophet, who blessed legitimately acquired profit and trade; fully and unreservedly, Bakr would praise the hidden talents of his friend Abdullah, whom he hadn’t thought possessed such ingenuity. Sixteen shipments were unloaded in the warehouses of the new palace; the six decorators and the two hundred and fifty craftsmen and labourers, who specialized in polishing antique lamps and renovating furniture, were at work for more than six consecutive months under Bakr’s supervision, who came down with a fever twice. The doctors advised him to avoid inhaling the fumes of molten gold when it was poured into the mould created by a young drug addict from Iran. He had convinced Bakr and Abdullah that it was a faithful rendition of the taps in the palace of Haroun El Rashid, over whose paving stones Abu Nuwas used to roll with his beautiful young boys. (As the price for his totally fraudulent design, he asked for no more than a small sum which would buy less than a week’s supply of heroin.) Both Abdullah and Bakr liked the strange design: a tap suspended over a butterfly which laughed and spread its wings when the water ran.

Prince Shehab El Din objected to nothing, and almost wept with joy at the strange palace when he entered it for the first time and wandered through its twenty rooms together with his brother and cousin princes. Abdullah was their guide and explained the story of each piece of furniture and the place where he had bought it, while his friend Bakr remained under his protection, anticipating the fruits of his adventures in realizing the prince’s dream. When the prince approached the outstretched carpet, he confirmed that it was the same one his mother had been praying on in the dream and whispered to Abdullah, ‘This is what I’ve been looking for.’ He commended Bakr’s genius and cursed the freeloaders who came flocking in, smiling biliously and offering a captivating Italian girl the prince had often watched in the porn films he had been addicted to, before being afflicted with longing for his mother’s womb.

*   *   *

Long before Abdullah married Safaa, he and Bakr had become friends with shared memories and ambitions; not many knew that, for a considerable period, Abdullah smuggled money to Syria for Bakr and his brotherhood so they could buy arms and plan what they had dreamed of for a long time. They calculated that the general resentment at the allocation of the principal army posts to supporters of the regime had reached such a degree that people were prepared to die for God. (I used to think: if people die as martyrs for God, how do both the killers and killed enter Paradise?) Bakr used all his wiles to convince traditional community leaders that they needed to fight. But he couldn’t counter their protests as they related the history of their struggles, reminding him that politics couldn’t be conducted on the basis of an unchanging formula, like following a fixed list of ingredients in a recipe. The nights that Bakr spent in discussion with Abdullah in the palace garden in Mecca had made him into a man who believed his own goals were clear, confirming to himself deep down that it was Abdullah who had been betrayed by his comrades in Yemen, because he had believed that words were enough to solve arguments and distribute positions of power. Abdullah directed Bakr’s reading towards Régis Debray and Che Guevara, who had dreamed of liberating an entire continent with a few men, believers in the piercing vision of the Commandante. After reading the works of Trotsky, accounts of revolutions and
The Communist Manifesto
, Bakr quietly responded, ‘Enemies always have something to teach us.’ Abdullah agreed and in his soft voice, generously endowed with his usual refinement and dignity, outlined everything he had learned from his enemies.

I was in raptures about this man who wasn’t forbidden to me, and called him my uncle. I listened to him ardently and paraded my reading material in front of him. Once, I showed him my drawings. He looked over them quickly and paused at the drawing of Ghada, who appeared as a wounded gazelle surrounded by brindled hunting dogs.

Two months after their marriage, Safaa returned to our house so that she wouldn’t be alone when Abdullah travelled to Mecca again. She was quiet and spoke with the slow deliberation of someone who knew the secrets of Bakr’s meetings with men we hadn’t seen. We felt, from their dawdling and their shouts which occasionally continued until the dawn call to prayer, that real danger was imminent. The assassinations of civil service employees continued unabated, responsibility for which was attributed to the young men whom Bakr, along with another senior member of the organization, Sheikh Abdel Jaber, had taken into the forests by the sea to be trained in marksmanship, judo and karate. We used to see them gathering in front of the Umayyad Mosque as if they were friends going on a trip, looking forward to shouting in meadows and forests.

*   *   *

Hajja Souad invited me to her house to meet a girl I had never seen before. She greeted me cordially and said, ‘I’m Alya.’ I looked at her and her cold eyes, and almost laughed out loud at her nose which resembled a goose’s beak. She added foolishly that she was to be my mentor and baffled me when she told me, passionately and precisely, that she couldn’t bear any other principles of the Quran than self-discipline and fighting the moral decay which was spreading among the daughters of Islam. I joined her cell without discussion, and she named a contact who would tell me the dates and locations of the meetings I had begun to dream of. She hinted that our group was just one of many across the city, and had links with others in the organization even as far away as Hama.

Summer came, and it was depressing. I spent some of it in my parents’ home, thus avoiding Maryam who complained of imaginary kidney ailments and neglected to drink the cold, thick liquorice Marwa made in large batches and whose taste remained on the tongue for days afterwards. Hossam was engrossed in new secrets which worried my father; I sensed his anxiety when Hossam ignored his questions about his repeated absences from the house, and added that the civil engineering college he was going to attend meant nothing to him. My mother’s dreams for Hossam went unheeded. He spent days at a time with Bakr and the rest of his companions in the Kurd-Dagh forests, where they used the North Star and compasses to orient themselves when lost in the mountains; in this way they were shaken from any monotony. After two weeks, eagerness carried them back, filled with even more ferocity, and ardently desiring the beginning of the battle. Hossam banned me from his room. I felt coldness and loneliness, which didn’t match the usual warmth of his presence; it wasn’t like us to avoid each other.

I thought how painful it was that places can settle in you and you can’t extricate yourself from them: I returned to my grandfather’s house and chose once more to be an occasional and impromptu guest at my parents’. Suddenly, without any preamble, Hossam gave me his textbooks for the baccalaureate. He wanted me to be privy to his dreams. I read his writings and saw his drawings that filled the margins with guns, hand grenades, strange, cold faces with pop-eyes and thin upper lips like Alya’s – to whom I had begun to listen anxiously during her lectures on hatred.

A girl I didn’t know led me to the first meeting of Alya’s group. She waited for me in front of a coffee stand at Bab Al Nasr, and we kissed each other like any friends who were meeting to go to the cinema without permission from their families. She smiled and informed me that the house wasn’t far. We were the last to arrive, and I sat by the door and watched the seven other girls. The only one I knew was Hiba, the daughter of the timid schoolteacher; she soon acted as a sort of secretary at our meetings. The girls listened respectfully to Alya as she urged us to hate all the other Islamic sects and praised ours for being closest to the Prophet, quoting the doctrines of certain imams and from the biographies of sheikhs and mujahideen. In another meeting, she distributed papers to us and asked us to keep them safe. I read them carefully in my room and hid them when Safaa came in to complain about her perpetual headache, and how much she missed Abdullah whose return had been delayed until the end of August. I wished he would come.

I hated the scorching summer heat which drenched me every time I walked outside in my thick black robes. ‘I wish my pores would die,’ I said to myself as beads of sweat gave off that sour smell I hated. I remembered the sunflowers Safaa had brought from a nearby village. She had picked them before sunrise so they would retain their dew. She gave them to Radwan and persuaded him that their extract, when brewed, released a scent no words could describe, adding carelessly, ‘It helps pregnant women with an easy childbirth.’ Radwan was enthusiastic; he always liked Safaa’s strange ideas, particularly when she asked him to keep their conversations to himself. It allowed him the secrecy he needed to make perfumes, which he would insist on whenever we asked him about the vials carefully arranged in rows in the wooden box tucked away in a corner of his room.

By the end of that summer, hatred had taken possession of me. I was enthused by it; I felt that it was saving me. Hatred gave me the feeling of superiority I was searching for. I carefully read the pamphlets distributed at every meeting with the other girls and memorized whole sections of them, particularly the fatwas charging other sects with heresy. I became closer to my seven companions and grew to love them. We exchanged secrets and books describing the horrific agonies of the grave. My integration with them saved me from my desires for Ghada, who had in my mind become wretched; she was still far from the power and severity I possessed when asked my opinion on punishing those who showed contempt for religion’s doctrines. I astonished them by requesting to make a list of such girls at my school and seeking permission to disfigure them with acid for wearing tight shirts that clearly showed their breasts. Alya’s eyes shone as she asked me to be patient, as if she already knew the date we would do it.