In Praise of Hatred (25 page)

Omar went to check on his farm which had been occupied by the death squad. They had ruined everything: they went down to the cellar where expensive wines were stored and drank them down without any regard for their taste; the bedding became filthy, and the smell of fat stank out the kitchen. Omar entered the house, accompanied by a senior officer, and threw them all out. He felt frustrated when he saw what they left behind and walked out again. He lived in seclusion, and didn’t respond to his friends’ entreaties to bring a bit of the joy to their lives which had faded after so many of them had fled abroad. He couldn’t find anywhere better to rest than our house. He sat and relaxed, a man returned to the family who needed him after a long absence. In the mornings he would have coffee and ask if we needed anything. I wouldn’t have believed that Omar could concern himself with parsley and cheese and would go to the Souk Al Hal to buy them while they were fresh. Maryam didn’t discuss how long he would be staying with us. She waited every day for him to gather his clothes and his things and leave us again to our lonely fate. We endured our relationships with all these males, whose lives began with dreams of the Republican Palace, and ended in homelessness, exile and prison.

*   *   *

Whenever Hossam came to me in dreams, I felt that all was not well with him. He would call for my help and ask me about the chemistry textbook; his face looked like that of a dead fish on a distant shore, stinking as its body disintegrated and vanished. I sat on my bed and drew a palm tree on a beach. My fingers and my coloured pens failed me. All colour faded to a monochrome where nothing held meaning or distinction; it was all featureless, without structure: a face without a past, present, or future. Our loss was manifested in our disconnected conversations, in the neglect of Marwa’s butterflies whose cases became covered with dust. ‘My only connection to her is her genes,’ I told myself. I cleaned the boxes and rearranged the butterflies, carried them to my room and watched them for days in a search for the meaning inherent in them. I paired up the colours, trying to create an order with a meaning specific to me. Radwan wouldn’t help me hunt for any more. He was engrossed in Khalil, whose last days were filled with delirium. Omar didn’t care about Khalil’s final moments and was just waiting for him to die – he hated this disruption to our routine which had turned the house into a staging post for the dead.

We were pleased with Omar and the severity with which he ordered Zahra not to coddle her father, and Maryam not to let things slide. Omar saw that Maryam was exhausted, her existence was tedious, and that she was certain that nothing would go back to how it should be. She was like a woman who has always taken great pride in her possessions, and who then returns from a trip to find that her apartment has been ransacked, that little thugs have crept in through the window and smashed the fragile ornaments she had been so careful of, so that they can hear her bemoan their ignorance that she should be surrounded by objects that reminded others of her status. Omar felt that Maryam’s disconnected sentences made her crumbling world into a mirror of events to come. ‘She doesn’t believe in anything any more,’ he thought as he watched her get up suddenly, leaving him to drink his coffee alone as she carried food to Khalil.

By now Khalil was only rarely conscious, and he seemed like a different man, as if he had been sleeping after a long night spent awake. He would look around him in astonishment as if it were the first time he was seeing Radwan’s room and the damp bed smelling of sweat. Zahra made a great effort to keep this stench from spreading through the house. She was worried by Omar. She saw disapproval in his eyes; his courteous visits to Khalil when he was conscious were no consolation; nor was the fact that he paid the doctor’s bills. Zahra considered the payments as alms to the long-time companion of my grandfather, as charity from a man who wanted the city to talk about his affectionate heart. She asked Maryam for permission to move to a rented house and there look after Khalil like a dutiful daughter until his death. Then, she added, she would reassess her life as the wife of a wanted man, who had no hope of ever again sitting down to eat breakfast with her and their children. Radwan also threatened to leave with his friend.

In order to explain fully, Zahra handed Omar a letter reminding him of their long history of silent, mutual misunderstanding; she had always looked dimly on his lifestyle. She mentioned his quarrels with Bakr, which had eventually caused a near estrangement, and which were only resolved by the stern intervention of their mother. Bakr then was silent to an irritating degree. The way he jealously guarded his secrets, his harshness and his logical thinking made him my grandfather’s true heir, in direct contrast to Omar who filled places with noise, idly criticized our banal existence, and went out of his way to appear excessively frivolous. Our daily life had been ordered in a way that amply demonstrated our chastity, so that my uncles heard compliments about us when they exchanged civilities with their acquaintances; our men had only to kiss a sheikh’s hands to be granted blessings as he patted their hands like he would a pet cat. There was a hidden conflict between the brothers, in which Omar didn’t respect their age difference of ten years.

Now I saw Omar wandering alone in the courtyard, brushed by the breezes of spring, which this year we didn’t celebrate with barbecues as we usually had. Maryam used to insist on making it an occasion for a family gathering, tolerant of the younger children as they played with the flowers and roses. She would be set apart from her brothers’ wives and her sisters by virtue of being the lady of the house, striving to be a virgin grandmother. They would laugh and wink at each other with each of her ponderous movements and her increasingly grandiose speech. They all loved her in this role which she performed like an actress who had perfected it throughout her life; the audience would applaud every night with the same warmth, but then whisper in the corridors about her advancing age, and about the decline in the numbers of fans flocking backstage to have their picture taken with her.

Omar was recalling Bakr’s repeated rebukes and warnings not to interfere with the craftsmen repairing a particular Persian carpet to conceal its flaws from admiring customers; the death squads examined it more than twenty times while looking for Bakr. My grandfather used to call this carpet a rare pearl, and it spent fifty years being carried backwards and forwards between its own special place in the warehouse and the main wall in the shop, on which pictures of our ancestors were also hung. The carpet was there for no purpose other than display: my grandfather refused to sell it. He prominently exhibited a photograph of it where it was laid out in the bedroom of the Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. That carpet had ‘crept’ from the Imperial Palace clearly as a result of some conspiracy or subterfuge. My grandfather, and Bakr after him, waited for the Shah or his loving wife to send intermediaries to reclaim it, at a suitably high price. He dreamed of the arduous negotiations that would be miserable for the envoy of the emperor and empress, who would try to recall how their feet had been positioned on it when they were newly married and proud of their glory.

In one of their raids on the warehouse – in search of the weapons an informer had written were buried amongst the best of the rolled-up stock – the soldiers grabbed the carpets roughly and unrolled them on the floor. They trampled their boots all over them and threw down on to them the cigarettes Khalil had rushed to light, like a waiter in their service rather than a man who knew the true value of these gems. Khalil breathed a sigh of relief after they had left, because in the darkness of the cellar they hadn’t seen the designs of strutting peacocks, and swans swimming in small pools, surrounded by a delicate, symmetrical decoration of jasmine stems overlapping with strange flowers. My grandfather was convinced that they were wild lavender, and had once tried to persuade an American journalist to publish an article in his magazine. The man had stopped accidentally in front of the shop, as if he were lost, or a tourist who had let his feet carry him wherever they wanted. The journalist understood from my grandfather’s words that he was looking at a rare treasure, nodded, and left without caring. A rumour subsequently spread through the souk
that an American magazine had attempted to run an article on the carpet, but my grandfather refused to agree to it unless they put a picture of it on the front cover.

Hundreds of images of Bakr passed in front of Omar as he sat in our courtyard daydreaming. He was avoiding Bakr, who was trying to talk to him from London and convince him to join him there. He hadn’t forgotten Bakr’s rebukes when Omar had signed a document of disassociation from his brother, along with offering up information which helped investigators draw up a more complete portrait of Bakr. This had made disguising him very difficult: for example, Bakr’s left hand flexed involuntarily when he was at rest, and he had a very slight limp when he walked quickly. Omar thought, ‘Why does he ask us all to be like him?’ and did not regret his actions.

As we ate breakfast together the following day, he asked Zahra to consider him a guest and to act as if she were the lady of the house; he swore that if Khalil left, then he would as well. He generously suggested moving him to the room into which my grandfather used to withdraw by himself during Ramadan. He would devote himself to worship as if he were an ascetic sitting in a distant cave with his Lord and forsaking the material world. Back then, Omar would wink and say sarcastically to Maryam that their father was ‘waiting for a revelation’.

Maryam understood Zahra’s moving words of gratitude.
She was keen for Khalil to stay with us but ignored Omar’s offer to move Khalil to my grandfather’s room, aware that Omar hated it. It was also the room where Bakr used to withdraw with my grandfather when they wanted to review their accounts, or to discuss family affairs without being overheard. I saw that old, jealous gleam in Omar’s eyes after he had spent the night alone in the courtyard, his sleep disturbed by pictures of Bakr hunting him and gaining ground. He felt a particular affection for his past, as if understanding for the first time why people needed their memories so much.

That night, my dreams turned into disturbing nightmares. I saw corpses hanging from nails hammered into the sky and laughing as their teeth fell like hailstones on to the heads of naked passers-by, who disappeared inside coffin-like buildings. I woke up terrified and trembling, and I heard noises and mutterings in the courtyard. Radwan was whimpering and I saw Zahra prostrate in Maryam’s arms, who was muttering verses from the Quran. Uncle Khalil had died just after the dawn prayer. He had spent his final night raving deliriously, and Radwan knew that the end had come. He turned the pages of the Quran to the Sura Anfal and lost himself in whimpers that woke Zahra, Omar and Maryam, who pronounced the
takbir
and the
bismillah
.

Omar remained calm and insisted on holding Khalil’s mourning ceremony in our house, as if apologizing for the humble funeral which was only attended by a few of Khalil’s distant relatives. He had been buried soon after the afternoon prayer in a tomb which Zahra heard of in the overcrowded Cemetery of the Righteous, now jammed with the new graves of the dead whose mourners didn’t have the time to care for their tombstones.

The days of the mourning ceremony were laden with duty and expense. Omar didn’t discuss the details. He allowed Radwan the freedom to go out and roam the city for three days, as he wished to look for his friend’s soul and escape the smell which still filled his room. He returned in the evening, exhausted, and his clothes were filthy as if he had been sleeping on the pavement. He sat by the pool and told Maryam that she needed parsley and aubergine, which he would bring from the souk. I thought that he didn’t want to be alone; he wouldn’t enter his room until all our doors had closed, mine last. The terrifying dream returned to me in new colours; blue and black faces, and eyes which were sometimes red. The dead were walking along Telal Street, eating cake, smiling, and carrying shrouds streaked with bright colours. There were faces of people I knew, both living and dead, and faces of strangers I had seen once, but couldn’t remember where or when. I wept bitterly when I saw Amir, Safaa’s son; he took me by the hand and led me to his wide tomb, saying mockingly, ‘Look how we play when we’re dead.’

Depression settled on everyone’s faces after the hastily prepared mourning ceremony came to an end. Only the empty chairs remained, along with the yawns of the three servants in formal uniforms whom Omar had brought in from a specialist funeral service, recommended for its propriety.

On the fourth day, Zahra wrote a long letter to her mother to inform her of her father’s death. She described his final days movingly, and Wasal cried bitterly for her past and her memories. She considered herself responsible for the misery of his final days but, at the same time, felt that she had regained Zahra for ever. She replied with long letters in which she remembered Khalil charitably, and prayed for mercy on him with carefully chosen phrases from which she tried to hide the coolness of her feelings towards him. She quoted verses from the Quran and snippets of the sira
of the Prophet’s Companions. She preached to Zahra, who needed someone to wipe her eyes which gleamed with sadness, and to give back to her body the vitality of a woman who had inherited all the talents of giving and receiving pleasure.

Zahra never disclosed her secrets so she seemed, to anyone who didn’t know her, like a cold woman who was proficient only in drying figs and looking after embroidered bed sheets. Bakr alone knew the taste of the flames which his beloved Zahra appeared to keep permanently lit. His memory of her remained unextinguished despite the long nights in London, and the days spent hiding in secret houses where he never stayed long. He missed her perfume and the way she lingered over removing her clothes to unveil her firm breasts. Then she would lie down beside him: quiet, deliberate, confident, desiring, passionate. She was like a sinner whose footsteps gradually slipped until, at the same moment as she was entirely immersed in sin, Paradise took shape in front of her in all its tranquillity. Souls hovered in the skies like white, pure birds whose wings had never known the hunter’s snares. Bakr had nothing more than memories now as he sat with Wasal, looking at her for hours and waiting for her to blink her white eyelids that resembled the marble of Zahra’s face. His wife’s future appearance was already present in Wasal’s features and gestures.