In Praise of Hatred (29 page)

With a smile and without regret, Radwan left – he didn’t plead to stay. He didn’t like the way Hamid’s house smelled, nor the tedium of having to listen to Hamid’s daily fights with his shrill wife, who often left Radwan without food. Radwan said to me that he could still remember sitting in that small record shop listening to Zakariya Ahmed, with whom he was infatuated. He had thought that fate had led him to this cramped place so that he could relive the tale of this great musician, who was ‘just like him’, as he would proudly repeat. Radwan knew many of his lyrics, and was determined that his own voice, husky as it was, would acquire the sweetness of Zakariya’s when the song ‘Ahl al Hawa’ inspired a painful sorrow. Radwan was carrying some of those records inside his bag when Hamid left him in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque. He breathed in deeply, yielding to the smells he loved. He felt that he had found his niche at last, and he relaxed for a few days with the blind men who welcomed him in their own sarcastic manner, trying to keep him from participating in their livelihood of reciting
mawalid
to the women who fulfilled their vows every Friday. Radwan liked their plotting and joined up with them. He never felt homesick when he lay down on the rich carpet in the mosque at the end of the evening and fell into a deep sleep beside his few companions who, like him, were all homeless.

After seven years, Radwan was proud of his Aleppan credentials. He now looked for a new place to belong to, and started to make up strange stories about non-existent relatives, claiming kinship with certain ancient families whose names, works and status were well known. The city still boasted of its affiliation to these families; sanctifying them was part of the essential social mores, along with the retention of certain other conventions whose affectations seemed peculiar to Radwan. He kept silent, trying to pierce the web of secrets which the blind men had spent years quietly weaving around their world.

One day he went out of the mosque on his own after his blind companions had left him behind, arguing that he was too young to accompany them. He went to the souk,
excited by the new smells and the loud sounds there. He stopped in front of my grandfather’s shop; my grandfather sat and observed Radwan, watching as he kissed Hajj Abdel Ghany’s hand and asked him to teach him to make the perfumes he found so stimulating. Radwan was haunted by a strange feeling which almost amounted to rapture. He exhibited the originality Hajj Abdel Ghany loved. My grandfather allowed Radwan to sit in front of his shop and sing Zakariya Ahmed songs, and sometimes helped him to distinguish the smells that he then archived in his memory. One day, about two months later, Radwan stumbled while carrying some bottles and this made the Hajj so angry he slapped him. Crying bitterly, Radwan went back to the mosque and didn’t leave it for an entire year, only keeping alert for my grandfather whenever he came to pray so he could greet him. He spoke to him openly about his troubles and his life story. He spent a long time describing his dreams, and accepted my grandfather’s charity during the festivals: the new suit my grandfather bought him then would become one of their traditions. He liked Radwan’s joy and voluble conversation; Radwan eventually convinced my grandfather to add him to his family as a kind of servant, and not to worry about his blindness.

Carrying his small bag, Radwan walked into my grandfather’s house, and there became such a necessity it was impossible to dispense with him. He instituted reforms which my grandmother didn’t like but agreed to so as not to anger my grandfather. Radwan reassured him and acted as his confidant during rainy nights when he felt lonely and disinclined to knock on anyone’s door. My grandfather found a haven with his servant, who became his friend.

‘Maryam was five years old at the time,’ Radwan said to me and laughed, then continued to drain the mint tea which I had prepared for him as a bribe so he would finish the story I found so fabulous.

I was afflicted by desolate ideas for a moment; I looked at him as if he were about to get up from his chair, lay down on his bed and die. I was afraid for him and tried to encourage him a few times with a question, or to cajole him into sharing further details, but he now turned a deaf ear. He was drinking his tea in silence, and then he got up and walked to his room without wishing me goodnight. He walked sluggishly and dragged his feet, contrary to my expectation that he would have grown lighter after throwing off the weight of the childhood memories with which he wrestled in order to stay alive. I remembered the reply which he kept repeating when I asked if he missed my grandfather; he told me gravely, ‘His smell is still here. I loved this house, and its smell.’

*   *   *

Dawn crept in and I was still there, focused on the empty chair in front of me. I thought that Radwan must be in love with one of my aunts, and I guessed it must be Safaa. He had described her birth and how he looked after her when she was a child. Maryam I regarded as unlikely; I felt that he pitied her, and considered her to be wretched and to have wasted her life on delusions. She was like a silkworm which has patiently woven its cocoon when, choked by the smell of its own body, it tries to carve out a little window for some fresh air and the whole structure caves in. She could only weep among the ruins of eternal prosperity.

The rest of the night passed quietly, and I didn’t hear any shooting. I slept like the dead, devoid of the anxiety of the past days, and woke up to the clamour of the returning travellers, whose depression seemed to have been lifted by their holiday. Maryam had missed her things and, on finding them scattered about, set about rearranging them with great care: her few pictures; the clothes which aged her terribly; an antique tambourine left behind by Hajja Radia when she came to our house; her carpet. There were also two small boxes filled with obsolete accessories, as if they belonged to a woman who had fled decades earlier: copper kohl pipes engraved in Persian with the name of a princess famous for the beauty of her dark eyes; a piece of laurel soap particular to Aleppo which Maryam used very sparingly, believing it to be rare; and a circle of beads that had been briefly fashionable in the fifties among the more sophisticated class of women. Maryam still used these beads, as if she didn’t want to believe that the joy, warmth and chatter of those gatherings had disappeared.

My aunt told me at great length about my father, mother and brother Humam in Beirut, and smothered me in reassurance. At first she sounded indulgent even towards Marwa, but in subsequent days all her anger came out: she spoke disparagingly of Marwa’s removal of her veil; and of my father’s alcoholism, and the fact that he cursed my mother and Bakr and our group, and praised the other sect. He still had many friends who belonged to it; back in the late fifties and the days of the United Arab Republic, they had accompanied him to Alexandria and taught him to fish. ‘Like he was angry and didn’t want to see us,’ Maryam said as she waved her hand, trying to drive away the image of her journey, and burdened with the disgrace of the picture she drew of her sisters and her brothers-in-law.

*   *   *

Tedium soon returned to our house. We seemed to be waiting for a miracle to save us from our monotony and fear, which only escalated again after the violent clashes that took place in Jalloum and reached all the way to Jamiliyya. We all hunched up in the cellar, silent amidst the smell of the lentil soup which Maryam had begun cooking, trying to affect indifference to the events taking place less than two hundred metres away from our house. Then she burst out crying, expressing her annoyance at the curfew, at all the killing, and at the searches that revealed her secrets to strangers.

Her weeping frightened me. And all my anxiety came back, some time later, when Omar told me about another letter from Bakr asking me to withdraw from the organization, as I was under surveillance. Omar couldn’t bear taking on this role of ‘man of the house’, when it was a house inhabited by cranks who opposed him in everything and didn’t respond to life’s opportunities. He had reverted to his former scandalous behaviour, but Aleppo no longer cared about this in the midst of the ruins and the mothers wearing mourning for the sons lost to them in prisons and tombs. It is difficult to remain objective when your life is threatened, and I thought for a moment that I had no choice but to walk to the end of the road I had chosen. I had been avoiding college, as it had become a place where I was informed of my tasks for the coming days. They would leave me pamphlets in one of the bins, or a woman would stuff them under my coat when I sat on the bus. She didn’t even have time to press my hand in solidarity.

Fear drew me to pleasure and irreverence. All I could think of was how hard it was to be under constant surveillance, when someone counts your breaths and your steps, trying to get inside your mind to review your memories and the pictures you love. I was terrified by the idea that they might be able to spy on my dreams. I went cold when I felt that I was really being watched, and by several men at that. I wandered in their chains, under siege from their gaze. I tried to look into their eyes in defiance, so I wouldn’t fall down in a faint in the middle of the street. I focused on the middle-aged milk vendor who had settled at the corner of our road two months earlier. I wasn’t duped by his candour or his quiet voice when I approached him to examine his cart, and ended up buying milk which we didn’t drink. I began to hate him and looked at him spitefully, hoping he would die. I wrote a report and dispatched it to the leadership of the group in which I cursed him and asked for him to be liquidated. I waited for his death (which seemed to be running behind schedule) and I began to think of him as a man who was running out of time to put his affairs in order for his family. I dumped some of the pamphlets in a narrow, empty alley, ashamed of carrying them. I tore up the rest, threw them in a dustbin and fled after I saw a young man who I felt was tailing me, but I regretted it when I saw him go into his house.

Omar’s words about Bakr’s letter had robbed me of courage and left me as brittle as blotting paper. I swallowed hard whenever a passer-by looked at me; my dreams died in silence and the city started to resemble a large tomb. I thought of fleeing and living with my mother again, and that trying to reconnect with my father might save me from this maelstrom. I looked for Omar so I could tell him my decision and sat on the steps to his house for hours, in defiance of the neighbours’ looks which condemned his immorality. I went to my grandfather’s shops and asked the new craftsmen about Omar. I couldn’t find him, even though I left word for him at every place he might be. I felt lost without him. He was the only one who could save me. I needed someone who could end my turmoil and return tranquillity to me, so I could stand still and watch the flowers wither at the end of spring, and praise the laziness of a late-blooming rose.

Omar’s shamelessness grew increasingly worse with his new friends. They were traders who had suddenly acquired influence in the souk
after carefully ensuring a monopoly in smuggling goods from state warehouses; they dealt in household utensils, cigarettes, and so-called ‘intermediaries’ – aimed at mothers who were pining for their sons in prison and craved to hear any reassuring news. They sold their jewellery and bedroom suites in exchange for a snippet of paper which assured them that their sons were alive. Trade was brisk, and partnerships with death squad and Mukhabarat officers much in demand.

*   *   *

What little hope remained dwindled still further, and the city was left to instinct and hatred. But at the beginning of that summer of 1982, the sounds of tambourines were once more heard, along with voices raised in supplication to God. Everyone climbed on to their roofs to see the lunar eclipse, which granted the people a rare opportunity to shout and drive out the decay which now penetrated each moment. The city re-enacted the rituals which had fallen into disuse because of all the suffering which had stifled them, and because of Aleppo’s massive expansion to accommodate hundreds of thousands of migrants from the countryside who came in search of work. Native Aleppans remembered the last time they had gone out of the city, to climb Mount Ansari to pray for the rains, which had been late that year. Since that distant occasion, no one had heard the sound of tambourines or voices pleading for rain and mercy; but now they begged fervently for the withdrawal of the death squad. Most of its soldiers had never witnessed such a display in praise of God and Heaven; nor the tears of the mothers whose deep emotion swelled until they tore at their clothes. The women’s wails rose above the sound of the tambourines and the chanting of the singers whose throats were regaining warmth from reciting religious poetry.

Maryam had spent all day enthusiastically adorning herself, and now she went up on to the roof with her tambourine so she could sing, despite her tears which rained down at the cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’. The tambourines all around fell into one quick rhythm. The eclipse began; the colours of the moon changed and merged, and the city was covered by a ruddy glow almost orange; it was a magical scene that pulled me for a few moments out of my anxiety and made me believe in the awesome power of nature. These rituals continued until a little after midnight, and a truce was adhered to by both sides out of respect for the crowd, which was so burdened by its loss of the tolerance Aleppo had once been famed for, when its population had been distinguished by the intermingling of all its languages and customs.

Maryam came down from the roof a different woman, still carrying her tambourine, which she kept on banging. Even in the darkness I could see that her face was agitated. She concluded her singing with a lament for my grandfather, the city, her body, our family; she summoned them all up with moving expressions, calling on them to see the devastation which had settled on our house. Zahra was trying to calm Maryam and stop her from going inside in this hysterical state, but she began to dance in the courtyard and, in a loud voice, to curse the era which had made her into a woman to be overlooked. She called on Bakr to come, describing him as her beloved; she called on Selim to wake up from his sleep; she called on Omar to join her in the courtyard, which had missed all of their footsteps. I didn’t approach her; I was powerless to help her as she fainted. We put her to bed. I couldn’t hold back my tears – I kept thinking about dying. I imagined that my body was extricated from its density, and that the blood in my veins was solidifying and losing its heat. I held Maryam’s trembling hand as she seemed to surrender to an uncertain fate. She slowly relaxed; weariness appeared on her face and her body twitched as she fell into a sound sleep.