In Praise of Hatred (20 page)

*   *   *

The festivals of Christmas 1981 came and went. Aleppo’s Christians rang their church bells timidly and prayed silently. Aleppo became a funeral city; the smell of death had spread into every corner. There was a curfew at night and the city was under siege. No one was allowed to enter or leave for a fortnight, which was long enough to search all its houses. No drawer was left unopened, their secrets confiscated by the forty thousand troops of the death squad and the special forces, together with the military divisions that surrounded the city on all sides; the inhabitants of this fortress grew weary of the blockade imposed by the President’s unwelcome envoys. Danger drew ever nearer to the President himself, and his face on television seemed tired. He made passionate speeches every day about his grief, and asked his military leaders to resolve the conflict which no one had thought would be this acrimonious. They were terrified when other cities were set alight; the small town of Hama became an unexpected battlefield. It dreamed of recovering the leadership of the country for our sect, with the Quran raised above the sword. Its caves and old houses, its gardens and river banks were all under siege. Hama received its allocation of the dead, who would no longer walk through the forests, steppes and mountains during summer holidays.

I told myself that the siege of our city was an opportunity to reassess our house, to contemplate my surroundings. I started to become lazy and slept until the afternoon. I thought of my mother from whom we had decided to conceal Hossam’s arrest. The soldiers searched our house three times more. On one occasion, they even insisted on opening the jars of pickles and left behind them a strong smell of vinegar, which lingered as we returned to our isolation as sad, lonely women who had lost all sense of security and pleasure in life. Our movements through the courtyard were detached, and seemed to herald even greater disasters. The mere anticipation oppressed our spirits and made us caress our wrecked bodies, which had relinquished escape, in the bathroom among the foam of the perfumed soap now grown dry and leathery. One day I said to Zahra that we had become hideous but she didn’t reply, still waiting for her mother who had postponed her trip. Maryam weighed and sifted lentils, and for the umpteenth time asked Radwan to bring up another sack from the cellar store. She would weigh them and watch Marwa sitting silently in front of her butterflies.

I went out on the tenth day of the siege and it was as if I didn’t know Aleppo. The sound of guns and mortars was uninterrupted at night, and the shelling had devastated Bab Al Nasr, Bab Al Hadid and Jalloum. I saw Hajja Souad, who urged me to go abroad and asked me to stop visiting her; things were not as they should have been. The final battle, which we had all been waiting for eagerly, had panicked our leadership and our militia was once more riven by internal conflict. I continued on my way to the college (closed since the beginning of the siege) and wondered about the fate of the corpses there – and of the frogs and laboratory rats smothered in chloroform and awaiting dissection; I thought about that sad lizard and how my hands trembled as I sliced open its stomach to take out its intestines and extinguish its life for ever. I looked for the blood that covered my recent dreams, in which Hossam came to me carrying his shroud, laughing as he waved it. I woke up afraid, took out his books and kissed them over and over again. I became absorbed in his neat handwriting and his powerful expressions in praise of the martyrs who had not been washed before their funerals so that their blood could be witnessed by the mourners.

The dream kept returning, and my terror increased in proportion to the impossibility of knowing Hossam’s fate. The dream grew longer: now Hossam was included in a host of people, most of whom I recognized, despite their flat and featureless faces. They muttered an incomprehensible song resembling an old Syriac hymn. Any meaning in my dreams died, and they became riddles I couldn’t master. The swallows and meadows fled, and the siege of Aleppo penetrated our very skin; we could smell the soldiers as we sat beside the silent fountains and exchanged glances. We all tried to recreate dim memories, but our fear scattered them and transformed us into lizard-like beings. Feigning bravery, I left Maryam’s room to enjoy the moonlight which emerged from behind the gloomy clouds, indifferent to the silent city and nightly curfew, which a poet known for his homosexual tendencies compared to a paradise buried alive.

The poet had insisted on celebrating his sixtieth birthday on the steps of the Citadel with his friends and his lover, whom he had picked up one day at the warehouse where he was working as a porter, and publicly serenaded him with an ode full of powerful feeling. He was reviled by the city whose pain he had immortalized in a long
nashid
written in
kamil
metre, in imitation of the
mu’allaqat
.
He prefaced it with a historical description, mourned the days of the Hamdanid dynasty, and dwelled on a description of his beloved’s broad shoulders and virility. He likened the death squads to vampires and the city to the neck of a beautiful youth fleeing the court of Haroun Al Rashid in diaphanous Abbasid clothing. The poet was most prominent and generous in gratifying his lover, who was made to forget bowls of lentil soup and being groped by men who winked at him coarsely; he revelled in a spacious house with blue windows, relaxing like a husband on a holiday from work. Lines from the ode were spread among the people, who never again hurled stones at the poet, as they had done whenever he walked in an elegant and effeminate manner past the coffee houses in Bab Al Faraj. The coffee-house patrons would wait for hours for the waiters from nearby restaurants to bring them plates of rancid meat, and they would scold them in loud voices which were silenced as soon as the foot patrols went past, the soldiers scrutinizing everyone, their fingers on their triggers in fear.

I ignored Marwa who braided her hair with colourful butterflies, jeered at modest head coverings, smoked openly, and sat in her room beside the fountain watching the sky, expecting it to rain with butterflies like the ones covered with glass and hung on the cellar wall. They cast a shadow over her bed, which she had moved to the damp corner beside the sacks of okra, beans and dried tomatoes. Her tears dampened her woollen pillow, wrapped carefully in a case which she had embroidered in the Yazidi style.

Marwa only smiled around Zahra, who was absorbed in her two children. They lay on the bed and ate seeds fried in spices. I wished that I could approach them and share in the chatting I missed so much. My separation from the girls in my group had increased my isolation and made me feel that my emotions were worthless. I was afraid of sleeping alone but I didn’t want to shatter my image of being a strong mujahida who didn’t care for the trivialities of life which were unbecoming to me. Hossam was present in every detail of our life: Maryam mourned him, and Marwa and Zahra wept. My tears remained concealed in my heart only to gush out once I was in my bed. I lost all desire to draw my dreams, along with many other things that used to give me happiness, such as reading and sympathizing with Radwan whenever I sensed he felt lonely and repented of acting as guardian to women who didn’t value a man possessed of strange talents and filled with joy.

*   *   *

I looked for Hajja Souad and found her after three days, trembling with fear as she sat in her prayer clothes. In February, news came from Hama that the rebellion had begun to sow fear that the small town would be utterly destroyed and its inhabitants brutally murdered. The battle approached its end, but we believed that our young men would be plunged in it for years to come, and that few families would be able to escape to the plains. The bodies of the victims were lined up in the streets of Hama but no one could be found to bury them. The presence of our militia on whom the desperate muezzins called was a confirmation of the show-down everyone had been waiting for. Trained fighters mixed with civilians who brought weapons out from abandoned wells and other hiding places to defend their lives against the insane bullets whose source no one knew any more. Thousands of soldiers read the Sura Fatiha
for their souls and rushed into the small city whose narrow streets were besieged by hundreds of tanks; not even a bird could escape. Future generations would narrate the madness which could have been avoided, thus granting the chance of a life to the children who had loved jumping into the Orontes River from the wooden waterwheels. The ceaseless grinding of the waterwheels was the only reality; a voice of constant yearning, of a grief whose cause no one inquired about any more. Bereaved mothers swore they would never take off their black clothes; they would remain in perpetual mourning for the dead. Many of them ripped their clothes in a state of delirium and went out into the streets half-naked, mourning for the city of Hama and their sons with elegiac
ritha
which would ‘make rocks weep’, as Khadija Al Mufti told us. A member of the Hama branch of our organization, she had been able to flee with the assistance of a senior paratrooper, who later wept and trampled on his military insignia before his companions killed him; they were afraid that he would kill them at night when they returned from restocking their ammunition. Hajja Souad and I were silent as we listened to Khadija. We waited for her crying to abate, as our words of consolation couldn’t halt it. When she finally stopped, she announced she was withdrawing from the organization. In the morning, she gathered her few clothes in a bundle and disappeared like a pinch of salt thrown into a torrential river.

Marwa wasn’t impressed by my zeal to burn down all the houses belonging to the other sect. She laughed derisively and left the house without turning around to hear Maryam’s pleas. Maryam had lost control, even over the keys. She tried to convince Radwan to guard Marwa, but then gave up and sat on the step to her room. She was silent, like an unburied mummy displayed in a glass case and reeking of embalming fluid. Marwa returned in the evening, glowing and loudly repeating a section of the song ‘You, Who Keep Me Awake’ by Um Kulthoum. She closed the door to the cellar, turned off the light, and slept beside her butterflies. Zahra convinced Maryam to wait till the morning before tackling Marwa. But the next day, Marwa went out again, leaving her door open behind her and her bed in disarray. After the evening prayer, she sat on the sofa and said quietly that she had seen her lover and they were getting married. Then she rose, turned to us, and said, ‘I am leaving the refuge of Heaven. I love Hell.’

We were left reeling. This calamity was even greater than that borne by weak women when their men became corpses; it wasn’t very important whether they were martyrs, or just cadavers with flies swarming around their faces. For the entire night, Zahra spoke quietly with Marwa, who insisted on describing the smell of her lover’s hands and chest and, with even greater courage, lauding his virility. The affair had returned something to her body that she thought she had forgotten for ever, and now she was concerned with restoring grace to a body which had regained its vitality. Her movements in the courtyard became sensuous and coy. She walked coquettishly and looked several times at her watch as if a rendezvous were imminent. She kept going out unexpectedly, in total disregard for our fear or our reputation. The officer, Nadhir Mansoury, was waiting for her in front of the gate to the Bab Al Hadid district, and she boldly got into his car to set off for an unknown house in which a bed had been hastily prepared so they could pass a short time in fleeting pleasure.

Zahra had been expecting this calamity and surrendered to it silently. She distracted us all by talking about her mother’s visit, which had been postponed yet again. Maryam sought help from our absent men, and her anger exploded the moment Marwa came back, shameless, half-drunk, and singing like a cheap bar-girl. She took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the floor. She removed her long coat and her head covering, and stood only in her flimsy dress which showed off all her features: breasts with nipples like cherry stones, rounded posterior, soft stomach, long legs hairless and gleaming – like a dancer showing off a licentiousness which bewildered us. I felt that everything was breaking down; I hated my backside; I wanted to leave this void, this vacuum within the storm, a feeling enhanced by a torrential downpour that night.

I thought of writing to Bakr but guessed that he might be dead or in custody, and that if he was alive he would care only about hanging on to his life. (Thousands of young men had been arrested: not only members of the organization and sympathizers, but also people with no discernible relationship to them. New prisons had opened and we were regarded with suspicion; a relationship with us might cost someone their life.) Zahra intervened harshly. She slapped Marwa, then led her to her room where she embraced her and let her cry on her chest dramatically as if both women were actresses in a movie. She listened to Marwa’s fears as she repeated that she loved him, and even if she were to be slaughtered she couldn’t be parted from him.

That night Maryam couldn’t sleep and read the Sura Yusuf ten times. She performed the dawn prayer five times, immersed in a strange calm. She didn’t get up to welcome the three young men she saw entering behind Radwan; they checked the time, then asked to speak to Maryam alone. After a short conversation she led them to Marwa, who hadn’t woken up yet, and asked Zahra not to interfere. She knew they had been dispatched by Bakr to halt this farce which had almost destroyed our reputation. Two of the young men carried Marwa and the third stood beside the door and drew his weapon. With swift movements, they gagged her and attached her to the leg of the cast-iron bed on which my grandmother as a married woman had first enjoyed the delights of passion, before she exchanged it for a brass bed; Maryam had inherited it and marvelled at the skilful moulding of plants and the incantation ‘Ma Sha’ Allah’ in Kufic script.

Marwa was chained to the leg of the bed by her ankles. She cursed her assailants and wept when one of them informed her that her lover, Nadhir Mansoury, had been assassinated that morning. They added that Bakr had sworn to kill anyone who attempted to free her with a thousand bullets. After one of them kissed the satisfied Maryam’s hand, they made a swift exit and left Marwa to rattle her chains in fury. Bakr had designed them so she could reach the bathroom to wash and attend to her needs, and sit beside the window like a prisoner. It occurred to me that she couldn’t see the moon from her small window, overshadowed as it was by the terrace roof which stretched along the top of the wall. The lemon tree, which we no longer expected to bear fruit for us, revealed the flightiness of happiness, which we had discovered was just a delusion. We couldn’t believe that what had just happened could earlier have been imagined, even in our wildest dreams.