In Praise of Hatred (17 page)

It was difficult to see the city from behind the twilight of my black face-covering, and I loved it; Aleppo seemed mysterious, cruel. In my heart I threatened unveiled girls. I imagined myself passing judgement on them; I would spray acid in their faces and disfigure them without mercy, hitting their delicate fingers so they wouldn’t take hold of men’s hands and laugh while dawdling and eating ice-cream. I thought there was no doubt they went to houses with men in order to have sex and desecrate marriage and their own virtue. Officers from the death squad now filled the city. They aroused terror with their powerful bodies and their machine guns, their scorn of death, and their unexpected siege of the old, narrow quarters of the city. Orders came to us daily as we passed through alleys like the breeze. Sometimes we felt like we were flying. We entered every house, and women were praying for our men. They wept when they imagined the danger surrounding us. We gathered donations, we sent letters, we distributed pamphlets, we didn’t see the faces of those outsiders who in the quiet night came to the city in order to attack the Mukhabarat
branches and the regime’s headquarters; most of them fled back to their faraway villages. Every day, we felt that we were approaching our final pilgrimage when the soul of the Prophet would come out to welcome us, blessing our strength, and with his immaculate arms he would surrender to us the keys of Paradise.

Whenever the city’s terror increased over the next few months, so did my certainty that hatred would make me into a hard woman, not the shy girl who used to stand on the doorsill afraid of loneliness and orphanhood. It was now summer, and for two unforgettable months, my vigour reached its pinnacle after a group of ‘our best young men’ were executed, as my uncle Selim described them in a prayer for the absent dead which was held for their souls. We passed on their brave words from the television coverage of their trial, when they explained their cruelty and their hardness. We envied them; they would reach Paradise before us, and their daring aroused the sympathy of the city’s inhabitants as they denounced the government’s corruption. Prayers were held in many different houses for their souls, and cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ were raised at the moment of their execution. Their corpses were buried without mourners. My mother drowned in a whirl of wails and grief when she saw Hossam’s friends, with whom she had broken Ramadan fasts and exchanged jokes, going to the gallows. She was terrified of the same fate for her baby. Nightmares stopped her from sleeping. I saw her age – she was filled with tears and incomprehensible mutterings. She didn’t have time to be happy that I was one of the ten best female students in Aleppo. I would become a doctor, she boasted to her neighbours and cousins, who didn’t dare read our pamphlets as they were already banned from praying at the mosques. One of our oldest cousins cut his hair like the singer from the Beatles and put rings in his ears to avoid the accusation of being Hossam’s relative whenever one of the patrols stopped him. I chose a strange way to celebrate my success: I founded a new prayer circle in the house of a divorced woman who taught girls sewing and embroidery. Its open windows banished suspicion about my frequent comings and goings with ‘my girls’, as I began to call them. We went to work in the morning and returned in the evening like any girls who worked and couldn’t wait to leave so they could wink at shop-owners and laundrymen, while taxi drivers and patrolling soldiers tried to harass them; they would laugh and then run away.

In our house, I wore some white clothes which Safaa had left behind and I asked Radwan to bring some sweets. I arranged the bowls on the table as they all watched me, and Radwan sang an ode in praise of my excellent marks, suitable for a doctor. We ate the sweets and they kissed me and blessed me, and I hid my surprise. I signalled to Maryam to dismiss Radwan after he enthusiastically tried to recall that image when we were women led by a blind man, as if he missed that status now fallen to dust. Zahra served coffee after Radwan had gone to his room and I stood in the basin of the stone pool, arms open, and announced my desire to die a martyr. ‘I want martyrdom. I am an
emira
.’ I repeated it a few times: ‘I am an
emira
now.’ I stepped down and removed my underclothes as they looked at me. I walked to my room then turned towards them; there was bewilderment in their eyes. Before I left, I seemed to see them bowing as if in greeting to a princess.

TWO

Embalmed Butterflies

I
T WAS
butterflies that saved Marwa as she waited for Safaa, who never came. She missed Safaa especially on the nights when the death squad fell from the sky on to our plants (which occurred on an almost daily basis), showing off the skull emblems on their chests. They were disturbed by our contempt for them, for attacking a house full of women watched over by a blind man and lying in wait for the wanted men who had evaporated into the sky over the city. They tore up the rose bushes, which were Marwa’s favourite flowers; like a madwoman, she ran from room to room, choked with tears and looking for somewhere slimy to shelter in, like a large snail.

The first butterfly she caught had wings of mottled brown and honey. It reminded her of the visit to the hammam she had made before her wedding when women smothered her in
bilun
, henna and perfumed soap, threaded her body hair, and ran their hands over her skin to ensure its softness. She adored the lightness with which the butterfly flew, and she embalmed it with Radwan’s help; he loved the idea and laughed when she described its faded eyes and its mouth, which she likened to Safaa’s small mouth. She kissed it like a lover who could never forget that powerful pressure of the other’s lips which inflamed the pores. The insect’s body became like that of a horse which, having received a fatal blow, cranes its neck to prevent its soul from escaping only to subside, cold, in submission to death.

Maryam disapproved of pinning butterflies to wooden boards. The sight of their wings affixed and outstretched in surrender impelled us to think about death, which had become as commonplace as a crate of rotten peaches flung out on to the pavement. It had lost its dignity and been turned into a banal tale told by the storytellers, whose zeal revived in order to narrate new stories about death squads and military divisions moving their tanks from other battlefronts to surround Aleppo. The soldiers’ eyes were fearful and wandering; they felt that they were facing a pointless death because of the Party members who had fled to their homes, and certain college students who boasted of their pistols and their camouflage uniforms, after returning from camps hastily convened to train them up as paratroopers. The most indolent of them appropriated the best places in the universities, which had turned into barracks and areas for the military parades carried out by adolescent Party members; they didn’t much care about the resignations of their respected professors, whose presence had become undesirable.

Most of the professors had fled and the rest of them closed their doors in the face of the oncoming plague, content to stare at their living-room floors and remember their glorious past which, it became clear, would never return. They dispersed in the streets between the tanks and the soldiers which had inherited the city they loved, trying to convince the fighters to listen to them and searching for one of their friends, a professor of English poetry who was about seventy years old. He couldn’t bear to see one of his grandsons strutting around in his uniform like a turkey and kicking at his volumes of Shakespeare. He took down his grandfather’s picture of T. S. Eliot and in its place he hung a photo of the commander of the death squad raising his fist in the air like a highwayman. In the meantime, his other grandson, who loved chemistry and had been predicted a dazzling future, wrapped belts of explosives around his hips and went out to hunt for prey. The poetry professor searched for his grandsons in various insalubrious places. He would leave his house at six in the morning, declaiming the poetry of Ezra Pound and snippets of Oedipus’ story, a refugee from the smarter parts of the city. He aroused the pity of the policemen at the bus station where he spent the night among cardboard boxes. Whenever his students passed by, they sighed over the lost days of his brilliance when he had been the reason for their love of Shakespeare’s language, whose vowels, he taught them, had been engineered for maximum musicality. He used to quote fondly from Latin texts which had been overlooked in Cambridge libraries, and he never forgot the smell which rose from their antique yellow pages – the same shade of yellow as the butterfly Marwa caught in the pistachio fields. She loved its lassitude and assigned it a central place among the specially prepared wooden boxes resembling coffins. She embalmed it in welcome and named it the Queen, and warned Radwan not to touch it or the place she had awarded it.

Marwa became like a stranger to us, someone we hardly knew. Her oppressive placidity and cold dignity suddenly turned into a feverish playfulness and a desire for adventure. She went with Radwan to nearby streets, gardens and fields, looking for butterflies. She neglected her appearance and abandoned our family tradition of women who spoke slowly and calmly. Like a peasant, she started using profane words and cursed without guilt or shame. We watched her every day as she astonished us further. Maryam hid her dread of a scandal which no one could save us from other than Safaa, who she knew had turned into an obedient woman without crazy dreams.

I didn’t care about Marwa. I was convinced that we would have time enough in the future to rejoice over the mundane details of everyday life, when our voices and laughter would resound throughout the high-ceilinged rooms. I grumbled over Maryam’s repeated requests to me to tell Bakr that Marwa had gone mad and that he had to intervene to save her. She believed that I could get word to the many hideouts that had made his disappearance into a legend woven throughout Aleppo. He became a terrifying ghost embedded in the wind, capable at any time of reappearing to walk the streets and greet his multitude of supporters. I nearly had a nervous breakdown because of the ceaseless demands from the district to me as its
emira
; they wanted me to organize yet more girls to make clothes, distribute pamphlets and gather donations. Other girls offered to blow themselves up in front of death squad officers, in revenge for the treatment of seven corpses of our brothers killed after a four-hour battle – Aleppo’s inhabitants couldn’t sleep, terrified by the scenes of soldiers’ cars dragging bodies bound up with iron chains. They turned their eyes away from the cruelty that made Alya weep. She swore on the Quran that she couldn’t bear it any longer; she wanted martyrdom and vengeance on behalf of those eyes which would sleep again one day.

Bakr blessed our fighting spirit and refused Alya’s request. She had just decided to instruct me to organize students at the medical college that I had started at – without any accompanying trills from my mother, who had become an old woman who only ever spoke about death. She was very disturbed by nightmares in which Hossam appeared hanging from a rope, or as a body dragged over the asphalt. Sometimes he was a bridegroom wrapped in a shroud. My father’s silences lengthened, and he was increasingly weary of the repeated summons to the Mukhabarat offices so they could ask him about Hossam, the son he hadn’t seen for five months. He no longer paid attention to anything, and was no longer an ardent follower of the hatred which I displayed proudly, like a fabulous bracelet encircling my wrist. He would kiss me distractedly and mutter a few words cursing Bakr, and denouncing my sectarian fever which would lead us to disaster, he said. He would praise his friends from other sects whose elimination had become integral to our dreams; killing any individual from any other sect had become part of the plan. I no longer heard my father’s voice, and considered his speeches on the poverty and generosity of his friends from the mountains to be unbefitting in a man to whom I was related and whose name I bore. I regarded him as an unbeliever and an apostate, and I was saddened to the core when I imagined him going to Hell; he wouldn’t taste the nectar of Heaven or sleep, gratified, in its meadows. I asked for him to be forgiven, and prayed that he would be guided back to the right path. I wasn’t sad when he took out his old metal suitcase, packed a few clothes, and went to Beirut to rid himself of our madness and our
fitna
, as he stated outright. The image of his sweet-featured face was lost from my memory; he became a coward who was unfit to belong to me.

*   *   *

Who ever really belongs to another? I thought while on my way to meet Hossam. I craved his presence; I missed him; I wanted to see the other face of my family. He took me to an Armenian restaurant and we sat together like lovers. I loved this role and my crazy infatuation with my brother, my lover, my companion, my leader. I looked deeply and passionately into his honey-coloured eyes, pressed my hand to his face, felt his skin, sensed his fear which seared me. He was distracted and didn’t listen as I told him of my regret for my father and my fear for my mother, who had been forced to close up her house and move in with us in her father’s house; it was as if we were all coming together and turning out panic and fear. Hossam was looking around cautiously and wouldn’t listen to my descriptions of our victories. He took my hand suddenly and asked me to withdraw from the group and concentrate on my studies. In a few words, he confessed his remorse at his involvement in murder. I sensed how much he longed to lean back under the lemon tree and watch my mother cutting up beans and gossiping about the neighbours. He knew so many secrets about the disputes that were taking place among the leadership over the list of planned assassinations. His hand trembled as he drank his coffee and his gaze wandered; he asked me about Humam, didn’t wait for my reply, muttered something, and left without saying goodbye – only with a few nervous words about wanting to flee to Mecca and seek forgiveness for his sins:
killing innocent civilians from the other sect
. This expression, which he kept repeating, frightened me. I stayed in the restaurant by myself and cried like a girl abandoned and deserving of the sympathy of the few patrons and waiters. I wasn’t embarrassed.