In Praise of Hatred (36 page)

Sulafa’s mental state worsened. She seemed vacant most of the time and took no notice when we spoke; she didn’t even hear us. I never left her side and fought everyone who tried to mock her; I defended my friend. I would take on her share of the chores we all had to do. At night I listened to her moans, her ravings about Mudar. I felt like she was my young daughter who was terrified of the outside world and yet longed for it. After three months she no longer remembered Mudar’s name, as if it were her that had left him. I drew her attention to the blossom on the peach tree, and then came the only evidence that she remembered where she was: she told me, ‘Yes, they blossomed. I told you they would.’ Then she buttoned up her woollen jacket, seeking protection from the cold spring breeze which made us all optimistic. We weren’t sure why spring should make us so optimistic; to us, it meant flowers in the prison courtyard. Each spring, we picked the peach blossoms; we couldn’t wait until they turned into fruit. We carried the branches to our dormitories and improvised vases, celebrating with flowers like any women, to prove to ourselves that we had mastered the wait.

The new prison had lost its novelty. Now we begged for images of the outside and cared for the details of the lives we had left behind, seemingly so neglected. We wanted to recover the passion which still lived inside us. We all turned back to our dreams as a means of overcoming the corruption of the security services, and to create the expectation of a pardon from the authorities and their Party. We circulated rumours that pardons surely must be inevitable. We never believed this again after they dragged Tuhama the mute out to a noose in the courtyard. They took us to see her dangling; in her eyes there was a look of reproach and apology. The scene was a shock to us and made us think about our fate again. They had demanded a retrial after accusing her of blowing up an armoured car in Hama, and a doctor ruled that she was feigning her dumbness to escape responsibility. Tuhama had shared our bed and our dreams, and her corpse, as it hung like a lamp, reminded us that she was just like us: corpses dangling in the breeze.

Tuhama had been nothing more than a girl who had lost the power of speech after carrying the corpses of her three brothers through the streets, looking for two square metres of earth to bury them in. The sight of her, as Um Mamdouh described it, was like an actress moving in an abandoned theatre. The hail of bullets that besieged her from all sides didn’t stop her from persevering and going on each errand with each corpse as if she were performing a role in a Greek tragedy. She buried the three of them on the banks of the Orontes, prayed over them, and when she tried to recite the Sura Fatiha she discovered that she had been struck dumb. It didn’t bother her; she had spent the previous two nights with her brothers’ bodies amid the sound of shooting, while helicopters hovered over the city and paratroopers sprang from them like arrogant rain.

Tuhama had become a corpse whose presence among us dazed us. Um Mamdouh tried to rush towards the gallows to hug the corpse which reminded us that the same fate was awaiting us. It was awful to see someone whom I had shared coffee with only the day before now hanging from a noose whose image would haunt us for ever. I said to Sulafa that Tuhama had been sacrificed as an example to terrify us, and she didn’t reply. She didn’t respond to the group’s prayers for Tuhama’s soul. Hajja Souad led us – we needed an imam so our prayers would be dignified, so we would appear as respectable mourners for the girl whose blankets and clothes we would now divide between us. A drug addict had left them to her after passing through our world one day.

*   *   *

Our child had long begun to walk properly. He trotted alongside Rasha who took great care of him. He lisped some prison vocabulary, and was so used to the place he could have lived out the rest of his life there without any feeling of regret. I thought that he had the advantage over us as I watched him, trying to trace any resemblance between him and Hossam or Mudar, so I could adore him like Rasha. She would chase him through the dormitories so he would not get lost, convincing herself that it was possible to lose him even in this place where yesterdays meant nothing more to us than unbearable misery. The peach tree lost its gleam; it seemed wretched and sickly. Fights among ourselves increasingly added spice to our mornings. We wanted to forget ourselves, as the best way of enduring was to forget one’s memories. ‘Leave your past at the door,’ I thought in an attempt to steel myself for the loss of Sulafa, who had been ordered to prepare for her imminent release. Everything here happened without adequate notice: death, birth, freedom, fights, tears, and the dancing which so enraptured us that we drowned in it. We began to specialize in exhibiting our charms to the rhythm of saucepans and Thana’s voice. She recreated Aleppo and the secret songs of its women, which Orientalists had tried to dig up over the centuries, and which seemed so intractable and obscure. The celebration was held for no particular reason, and remained unhampered by the protests of some prisoners from our group who were immersed again in memorizing the Quran and repeating it for the fifth time. They circulated the only book among themselves; it had been given to them by the prison governor that day, delighted at the birth of his first grandchild.

Not long after, one morning, we were ordered into the courtyard where a security man then read out a list of people who would be transferred immediately to a Mukhabarat unit to process their release. Turmoil gripped us. I thought for a moment of the order to take a look at Tuhama’s dangling body. It wasn’t like ours; despite everything, ours were still breathing and could still feel pain. The list of nine girls included three from our organization whose entire guilt consisted of being the sisters of wanted men who had been able to flee abroad. The girls who were being released started crying; my tongue went rigid and I couldn’t join in with the chorus of trills which sprang up spontaneously. The guards rushed the girls out; we couldn’t say goodbye as one should to companions who had shared such suffering and nights of torture. I embraced Sulafa without looking into her eyes, which were fixed on me like she was racked with pain. The departing girls waved; depression hovered over those left behind, something we had grown used to after any release. I tried to immerse myself in sleep; after I woke up, I was alone, and I needed sympathy.

Safaa’s sudden visit saved me from depression. A gust of perfume wafting from her took me straight back to our shared past, as she distributed money liberally to the guards so they would look the other way. Maryam sat nearby absorbed in her long
misbaha
, and I thought that she now looked like my grandmother. She wanted to remind me that I wasn’t a little child any more. Twenty-five years was long enough for me to feel my membership of the world of women, with all its joy and grief. There was no possibility of Safaa drowning in pre-destined tears; I contemplated the smoothness of her face, as serene as a queen’s from a painting of the Nahda era. Her elegance was worthy of a princess. I sat beside her, stinking of the prison; I was like an orphan servant girl she had taken off the street, not her former companion of night revels when we had enjoyed the coolness of the fountain and lying on the damp ground in the scorching heat of summer.

Safaa slipped a small piece of paper under my shirt as she showed me photos of her son Amir, standing on a chair and frowning in concentration as he aimed a toy gun at an imaginary target. Safaa stirred up an atmosphere of mirth, aiming to be my clown for a few minutes. I noticed her swift glances at my face which took note of my pallor and confusion. She convinced the guards, who had never seen such a glorious creature in all their lives, that she had indeed come from the world of
A Thousand and One Nights
and proved it by her largesse – for the cup of coffee they offered her, she paid an amount equal to the governor’s monthly salary. We spoke at length, and the private visit that I hadn’t even dreamed of stretched out for more than two hours. I could smell her perfume the entire time. The heat of her hands scorched me, and they didn’t leave mine for a moment. I reminisced about how she spoiled me when I was a child, and she said a prayer for my mother and intimated that Abdullah remembered me and prayed to God to end my captivity, as she winked and pointed to the letter she had concealed in my clothes. It was difficult for me to describe adequately the last six years in two hours. Before the end of the visit, I asked her if I could see my brother and Radwan, whom Safaa had told me was overjoyed at her presence. In a low voice, she described Maryam’s fury at their warm relationship; her suspicion increased in proportion to her loneliness. She stayed in the old house for an entire week, causing laughter and sincere tears when she said goodbye. Safaa inhaled me as if she would never see me again. She didn’t tell me that she was anxious, and that her insistence that I had only a short time left in detention was a lie to help me sleep.

I tried to speed up the time which still remained until I could return home and join in Radwan’s singing. Safaa left me money which I gave to Hajja Souad, who blessed me and lent me the Quran for an additional hour every day. That evening I made sure I was alone in the bathroom, so that I was unobserved when I opened the delicate, carefully folded letter. I began to read what Abdullah had written especially for me: ‘My dear, patient daughter, may God grant her long life. Know how proud I am when I speak about you to the councils of mujahideen. Know, my daughter, that I and the mujahideen believers in Afghanistan will avenge your pain, and the pain of all the Muslims. God bless you.’ There was no signature.

I read the message again eagerly, ignoring the increasingly violent banging on the door. I hid it in my clothes and left without realizing how pale my face was, as Hajja Souad told me when she tried to draw me into the prayer circle memorizing the Quran. I needed to be on my own to review Abdullah’s words. I didn’t understand why he had taken the risk of sending a letter to a prisoner which contained information about his activities in Afghanistan. Terrified, I claimed I had stomach cramps so I could go back to the bathroom, and the girls who were waiting let me go first. I closed the door and tore the letter up, threw it into the hole, and flushed it away. I wasn’t happy until the last scrap of paper had disappeared along with the filthy water. I felt strange that night. I reproached myself harshly for being so negligent with the words of a man as discreet as Abdullah. He hadn’t forgotten my loyalty, and was encouraging me to withstand the depression and the enormous injustice weighing down so heavily on me.

*   *   *

I thought of Abdullah, covered by the dust of Afghanistan’s mountain paths as he transported supplies on mangy mules and donkeys, moving steadily over the rugged terrain. For many years now he had been taking medicine, food and money to be distributed among the mujahideen fighting to topple the Communist government, which the Soviets kept supplied with soldiers for its defence. Abdullah had found a new project to keep him awake at nights: devising ingenious new strategies with the ‘Arab-Afghans’ who had flooded into the dusty and windswept city of Peshawar. Its people were poor, content to exist outside time, and happy with a lifestyle that allowed them to lounge around enjoying endless cups of strong tea, while the dusty tape recorder in the corner played the same tape for the thousandth time.

Everything in Peshawar had indicated that it was an ideal place to put to use the donations from Muslims who considered the Afghan issue to be their own. The words of Sheikh Nadim Al Salaty during the Hajj shook them, and the Afghan pilgrims would never in their lives forget the sight of their brothers in Mecca scrambling towards them to bless their jihad. The pilgrims threw millions of dollars into the green wooden collecting boxes. Sheikh Nadim kept back for his good causes several millions, as the fee for his influential presence at the councils of various princes – they would give him the seat of honour and accede to all his requests so that he would bless them. The money was immediately transferred to his accountants who distributed it wherever he ordered.

One autumn day some years earlier, Abdullah arrived in Peshawar from Islamabad, exhausted from the journey and a long night spent in discussions with his friend Philip Anderson. They had both quickly left off the small-talk and their conversation began to exhibit clear signs of mutual mistrust, due to the nature of their mission. This didn’t, however, prevent them from exchanging some small luxury gifts. That night was long. They had so much to discuss that they didn’t find time to eat until after the morning prayer; Abdullah performed it with great humility, which caught the notice of Anderson. He had found it difficult to answer his superiors’ questions about whether Abdullah – whose past was tainted with Marxist and Guevaran episodes and who was currently obsessed by expelling his former comrades from Kabul – was a mercenary or a special sort of Soviet agent. He was very impressive as he raised his finger to say the
shahada
; then he got up quickly, speaking in a playful tone and fluent English. He used it only rarely with Anderson, whenever he invited him to convert to Islam. They finally ate their breakfast after agreeing on the routes for the transfer of weapons to the Afghan mujahideen in the Kandahar mountains. Abdullah had bought them from American arms dealers who wandered through hotel bars in holiday wear, asking about the carpet souk and transport to Kashmir just like any other tourists. Anderson had arranged for them to complete the deals and benefit from the sizable commissions.

After their meeting, Abdullah had wandered through the markets of Islamabad before taking a taxi to Peshawar. Next to him on the back seat was a bearded young local who tried to sell him a blackbird he claimed sang in Arabic. The Yemeni liked the gestures of the cheerful young man. He inspected the blackbird, and haggled over the price – the man wanted three dollars and wouldn’t budge. Abdullah bought the blackbird and immediately released it out of the car window as it sped along the pot-holed road, much to the astonishment of the young Pakistani who told him it would die after a few metres. He told Abdullah of other blackbirds born in captivity that died as soon as tourists bought them and set them free.