In Praise of Hatred (18 page)

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It is difficult suddenly to discover that you are empty; that your shadow weighs heavily on the earth; that all around you, acid submerges your dreams and you appear corroded in the eyes of others. My father’s features came back to me so clearly it made me rave at night that our family would only be saved, and Marwa’s peace of mind would only return, with a swift victory. We would be reunited once more and all sit round the table, and Maryam would set out the neglected silverware like any lady secure in the knowledge that everything was as it should be. We all needed that image of the family, finally relaxed. I felt trivial; I hated studying biochemistry, and the students’ insistence on exhibiting a precocious gravity. I asked our leaders if I could go back to my own prayer circle and be exempted from the college circle which I attended every morning. I was afraid that I would be arrested or hear that Hossam or Bakr had been killed. I thought of our destiny and, for the first time, thought that the murder victims would reach out their fingers to gouge out our eyes. Hajja Souad encouraged me to forget my fears. I couldn’t admit to anyone that Hossam’s remorse had shaken me and stranded me on an island of hatred, and I had thereby regained the dreams of a woman. I looked with clear eyes at my mother, who was in total surrender to a fate that hadn’t arrived yet – whenever she heard the sound of bullets she burst out crying and beat her breast. Maryam would calm her and recite some incantations in a soft voice which seemed weak to me. She wove ropes of hope in the air and clung to them, like a child finding a swing in a pile of rubble that used to be a house.

I became less boastful of my kinship with Hossam. I paid no attention to the shattered family photograph. My parents’ home was now occupied by soldiers; they scattered my memories, they slept on my childhood pillows, they flung sardine tins on to the floor and left them to let off a repugnant smell which mixed with that of their urine. Their shameless laughter was a necessity to them, so they could master their fear of the bullets which would come from unforeseen directions and pile them into coffins.

Bodies on both sides fell like ripened berries; the atmosphere was oppressive, saturated with the fear of nameless chaos. The state, which had expected a resolution to this battle in the most important of its cities, sought out its supporters as the situation grew ever blacker and more complex; our previous coexistence became a memory, and the subject of a cautiously exercised nostalgia – we were wildly optimistic of killing the people who were prone to such a longing. Retreat was no longer an option and hostility became like ripened grapes, dangling from a vine left to the passers-by. I would see Aleppo from beneath my black veil and it seemed like a fitting place to seek out the hatred I praised. I was hit by a delicious shiver, as if delicate hands were tickling my body and drawing me out of that state of indifference and depression endemic to the women of our household, along with their fear of the world I saw in my dreams. This world glowed as pure and bright as angels’ robes, like those of the angels I drew as warriors carrying rifles and killing the death squad troops, who were growing increasingly violent and frenzied. They seemed to be firing recklessly and indiscriminately when, most of the time, they were only shooting to make jelly out of bats.

Omar came to our house soon after returning from his travels abroad. There were half-healed bruises on his face, and there remained beneath his eyes the gloomy traces of a frustrated man. He didn’t tell us that he had been arrested and tortured for two continuous months to make him reveal Bakr’s whereabouts, which he didn’t know. He wasn’t saved by his strong relationships with certain important officers and influential traders, nor by his hard-won reputation, which he had taken pains to develop in order to appear more dissipated than necessary. ‘We all need Omar,’ I said to myself as I scrutinized his stammering lips. He assured Maryam that his bruises were the result of falling off his horse, and ordered my mother to make arrangements to travel to Beirut with my brother Humam. He wouldn’t listen to her justifications for staying – she was waiting for Hossam, my younger brother was at school – and he wouldn’t allow Maryam to back her up. He didn’t care that Marwa went outside on to the city’s streets with Radwan and tried to catch butterflies among the tanks and tents of the soldiers, who thought the pair were crazy and should be avoided. As time passed, however, the soldiers began to have conversations with Radwan. Initially they thought him strange, and then an amusing and necessary novelty; he made them forget about death, even if only for a moment. One of the officers was induced to buy a special perfume which allegedly acted as an aphrodisiac. Radwan unveiled it at a distance from Marwa who was standing and watching as if she were at the cinema. She was bewildered by the force of the fear of death, close to a desire to laugh; they overlapped to such a degree that it was difficult to establish where the separation lay between them. Radwan enumerated the merits of his perfume to the officer who appreciated his eccentricity. He paid in advance for the scent which Radwan spent all night preparing in an empty castor-oil bottle; he convinced the officer that the lingering smell was an intentional part of the perfume’s composition, before leaving quickly and dragging his ‘lady’ with him – as he described Marwa to the officer while listing the imaginary qualities of another family who worked in weaving. He was afraid they would discover that the butterfly hunter was Bakr’s sister.

Omar wouldn’t listen to the story of Radwan’s perfume. He asked us to help my mother pack her bags, and the following morning, a Lebanese taxi came to take her and Humam; it left hastily, as if protecting them from a coming disaster. Omar followed them to Beirut after a few more days, during which time we never saw him.

My mother’s departure gave me a sense of ease. I was no longer afraid of her cowardly heart which had almost caused her to faint when she heard about the raid on the house where Hossam was staying; he had managed to escape over the roofs of the neighbouring houses, no more than two narrow streets away from us. My mother went outside to look for him and blamed herself for not sensing him when he had been so near that she could have hugged him and been cured of missing him. When she returned she was exhausted and disoriented. Fear gripped us so tightly that we lost our desire to gossip and we became strangers in one house, leading a life without structure but with one single goal: to be reassured every morning that Bakr and Hossam hadn’t been killed; and that we hadn’t had a heart attack, or succumbed to the madness which seemed even closer to us than Marwa’s butterflies. They now occupied a quarter of the cellar and made the officer in charge of the latest search think he was entering a haunted house. He couldn’t believe that this depressed woman was the same one who had gathered all these colours, mounted them in wooden boxes and covered them with expensive glass. The locks on the cases were golden, and their gleam resembled the stars and eagle on the officer’s epaulettes which brushed the skull on his uniform.

His silence and Marwa’s steadfastness in front of her butterflies agitated me. I was overcome with terror that I would discover just how much Marwa needed a man to look deeply into her eyes and set her body quaking, even if he was an enemy like this officer who was so pleasant, and who hoped that Hossam and his companions would fall from the sky so he could scatter their brains with his bullets. An idea occurred to me – that I might rip out his heart and throw it into the jar of pickled aubergines standing in a dark corner. I tried to visualize gathering the hearts of all the soldiers and pickling them. I imagined Rima exercising her passion and inventing new types of pickle and I laughed, reassured of the strength of the hatred in my heart. The officer praised Marwa and stopped his subordinates from smashing her boxes. She wouldn’t listen to my reprimands and thanked him delicately, prayed for him to have a long life and eternal youth, and shook hands with him when he left. I swore to Maryam and Zahra that he hung on to her hand and pressed her fingers longer than necessary. Zahra was greatly worried by my insistence on smashing the display cases and on preventing Marwa from going outside, and Maryam calmed me down and asked me to help her tidy the rooms the soldiers had ransacked. Due to the frequency of these visits to our and Uncle Selim’s houses, as well as to my grandfather’s shops and the homes of all his relatives, we had perfected the art of swiftly returning objects to their proper places. The officers didn’t believe that Bakr and Hossam weren’t hiding in one of the secret tunnels which, it was said, could only be reached through passages in the spacious houses owned by families who clung tenaciously to their pedigrees. Marwa closed her bedroom door in my face and I heard Zahra mutter that I had become unbearable.

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Safaa and Abdullah’s letters were less frequent. We knew Abdullah had now gone to Afghanistan and was distributing donations and supporting the mujahideen on the ground. In my mind, he was almost on the same level as the Prophet’s Companions, who I drew as mighty eagles swooping down from their mountain nests to tear out and devour the livers of their enemies. Safaa and Zeina had become sisters, shadows of each other. They agreed on how to divide Abdullah up between them and abandoned their jealousy in order to go out to the markets together. Their shared laughter provoked astonishment among the women of Zeina’s social group, who listened ardently to the
sira
of Seif ibn dhi-Yazan as Safaa poured bitter coffee and circulated among the guests. In Safaa’s most recent letter, before the Christmas festivals, she told us her pregnancy was going well. Maryam’s eyes welled up; Zahra smiled and declared it a good omen, and then told us dispassionately that her mother was coming to Aleppo the following week, and she would have her to stay in our house. Maryam welcomed Zahra’s guest; she needed guests to return warmth to our walls and to distract us from talking about and waiting for death, but I was angry at the preparations for welcoming a woman who would sully our house.

Maryam and Zahra ignored the officer when he came back on yet another search. He came especially to watch Marwa, whose eyes shone with happiness and desire as she greeted him without any concern for my anger. He exchanged a few words with her that I didn’t hear; she nodded and he went and stood in front of her butterflies and looked particularly at the yellow one, which he asked to touch. She opened up the glass case for him and asked him to take his time. Unusually, his soldiers didn’t overturn our cupboards, or scatter the photos from our ancient albums, or mock my grandfather’s haughty looks while imitating Hitler, who was one of their greatest objects of admiration, despite his contempt for the Arabs.

I wrote a letter to Bakr, exaggerating Marwa’s relationship with the death squad officer, and asking him to intervene to save our reputation and to prevent Wasal from entering our house. I had to leave the letter near a remote water tap at Bab Al Nasr, the same place he left his instructions. The following day a young man knocked at our door and asked to see Maryam on an urgent matter. He informed her of Bakr’s decision to ban Marwa from going out of the house unaccompanied, and left quickly without answering our questions about Bakr’s health or his situation. Marwa wept and spat in my face, cursing my father; we were dumbstruck when she still insisted on going outside alone to look for butterflies. I wondered secretly if I was repugnant because I had prevented my aunt from falling in love with our enemy. Her old image returned to me: a woman dreaming, crying on Hajja Radia’s shoulder when she went to sing
nashid
for Rabia Adawiya who had spent the night by her lover’s side. I completely ignored Marwa when we gathered in the morning to drink coffee before I went to college – despite Maryam’s winking at Zahra, which was intended to remind me that Marwa had once been like a mother to me. I left, saddened.

The streets narrowed in front of my footsteps as I distractedly observed the tanks which I felt were pressing down on my chest, and the dense patrols on every corner. I imagined that they really were encircling the city and would no doubt seize all of our mujahideen; they would end the dream which had taken on a vivid colour and an unforgettable taste. That winter, Aleppo was weighing heavily on me, prompting me to reconsider my feelings towards our martyrs. I thought how hard it was for a woman to fall in love with men she didn’t know; men who were dead.

Not long after this, Dr Abdel Karim Daly, a physics professor at the university, was killed. I saw him laid out with his chest blasted open. It wasn’t known who had killed him; his blood could have been spilled by anyone, from us to the commander of the death squad. Our group disapproved of his murder and declared him to be innocent. That day, the paratroopers came in huge numbers and conducted rigorous searches of all the students before allowing them into their colleges. Hundreds of soldiers were crammed into the streets close by; they broke off tree branches to use as canes, stopped people, and made them stand rigid against the wall. When shooting broke out in nearby areas, it seemed as if Aleppo were burning. People were allowed to go out and I walked heedlessly, as if the sound of the bullets were music to which I was addicted. Soldiers fired into the air hysterically; they resembled frogs ensnared in a tunnel which had darkened suddenly and caused them to become disoriented.

That same day, when I reached the house where my prayer circle was usually held, I couldn’t find anyone. I went on my way, afraid of hearing that our prayer circle had been disbanded and its members reassigned among the other circles directly subordinate to the group’s leadership. Exhausted, I went to my room, flung myself on the bed and dozed off. When I woke up at dawn, Maryam was placing compresses on my head to lighten my fever. She told me that I had been raving about people she didn’t know, as well as my father and Hossam. I got up but couldn’t find a more soothing place to sit than in front of Marwa’s butterflies. I drank a hot tisane and Maryam left me alone after covering me with a thick woollen shawl. I was curled up in the same leather chair in which Marwa sat for hours to contemplate the butterflies ranged on the wall. I gazed at them for a long time; the white butterfly speckled with black and brown made me pause. I looked for the secret of the officer’s silence to answer the questions that kept me awake: did temptation lie in the butterflies, or in Marwa’s calm smile and full lips? They were like her large bust which she no longer cared about fully covering as we did when we sewed our clothes, so we seemed like black seals which wouldn’t reveal their shame. All of our bodies were shameful – every part of us, from our toenails to our hair. The butterflies almost stripped me of my strength with their delicacy and immutability.