In Praise of Hatred (38 page)

Our child grew taller. He called us by our names, and we taught him to read and write, and a few words of English which we were delighted to hear him repeat. He stood in front of us gesturing like a public speaker to a non-existent crowd in an unlit hall. I was less charmed than the other prisoners by his games. I sometimes joined Suhayr in sewing clothes for him out of scraps of cloth, using tidy stitches so he wouldn’t look like a beggar, or even his true self: a fatherless child, begging for sympathy from mothers who were getting tired of him bleating like a lost lamb. We all looked for something which could save us from feeling that time lay heavily on us, that our lives were stuck in an inescapable rut. We had to appear brave, as if we weren’t afraid of the torture or the narrow, crushing walls, so we wouldn’t be destroyed by our fellow inmates’ glances, which might accuse us of weakness. These cruel looks made us wish for death. They laid bare the weakness we desperately tried to conceal. In the time which we scattered like worthless sand, I thought many things over; I thought of the executioners, whose roaring laughter we could hear as they left in the evening, carrying home vegetables and bread for their children like any normal person. I thought of the victims from both sides who had fallen so that an idea could be realized.

Dalal was a Marxist, driven away by her comrades for wearing a veil and praying humbly behind Hajja Souad as a means of atoning for her collapse during interrogation, when she had revealed the location of her Party’s files. She reminded me of a girl from my group who had tried to flee to Saudi Arabia. A quick trial was convened, without any proper defence, so that it seemed more like a bit of fun than anything else. Dalal’s trial was no different from our own trial of Suzanne, who later had thrown herself to the floor and grabbed the Mukhabarat unit leader by the feet to plead for release. She had written more than a thousand letters to the President asking him to pardon her and save her from her sentence. She wept and begged for forgiveness from our group which only increased its cruelty, and kept her from our table like she was a mangy bitch. We didn’t even let her use the communal toilet. How cruel it is, when a secure existence within a group is your only safeguard for breathing foul air inside cells whose inhabitants aren’t even allowed to lie down on the cold floor. I didn’t dare console the sweet-natured Suzanne, or approach her after all these years, or apologize for sitting in judgement next to Hajja Souad as we had coldly sentenced her to this further level of imprisonment within the prison, and prevented her from holding our child, as we had done with the informer Hoda. All this was more lies in which we believed absolutely.

Prison taught you the rules of staying alive. No one who hasn’t been in jail can understand what it is like to be deprived of looking at the sun whenever you feel like it. Habits that had been trivial outside gained new meaning in prison. In that darkness, the euphemisms which we had sheltered behind withered away. We spat on our enemies. ‘“Life” is a difficult metaphor,’ I thought, ‘like “love”, “betrayal”; even a light-hearted game in a lettuce field.’ I laughed at the memory of lettuce which I hadn’t seen for seven years. I missed its freshness; I imagined it covered in spices, crisp and delicious in my mouth.

In our house, lettuce used to be synonymous with Safaa, just as butterflies were with Marwa. Safaa would wash its succulent leaves and nibble at it with excessive relish, pretending to be a rabbit. I used to laugh when Maryam scolded her. Safaa would seek out such silliness as a means of resisting her fate, from which the only escape was into another life no less odd – from Aleppo to Saudi Arabia and finally to Afghanistan, that land which meant death or madness. The princess who had visited me in prison felt that all that was left of me was ice-cold, that I was a piece of sugar whose sweetness had faded. She had pressed my hand and gone off to an unknown destiny.

*   *   *

This idea of destiny obsessed me, and I felt great comfort that that mythical ship would carry me off to my fate. When our destiny is not in our control, there is nothing left but this suffocation I felt to be delicious. I pushed on more deeply into it, so I could surrender my will entirely. ‘I’m so tired, Mama, so tired,’ I said to myself. I imagined her sitting silently in front of me, smiling shyly as she skilfully cleaned a fish my father had caught and fried it for us before it went bad. My brothers and I hated fish; we constantly tried to escape from the rancid smell of my father’s hands. Hossam and I pretended to chew it like good children, but Humam ate it with a gluttony we found astonishing. I forgot to ask him about this on his first visit, when Omar brought him. I hugged Humam over-enthusiastically – I wanted to hide my astonishment at seeing him as a young man with a thin, timid moustache. He was the only presence in my life which didn’t require some sort of deceptive embellishment to give me a feeling of security, like calling Sulafa ‘my sister’, or Um Mamdouh ‘my mother’. He really was my brother; there was no illusion involved. I was allowed to keep a photo of him. The other prisoners passed it around, and I heard their comments with the glee of a sister who knew the truth about that handsome face whose narrow lips they craved.

In my eighth year, as my sentence neared its end, I thought how I would soon be leaving this place. ‘It will be difficult to go back to my room…’ I thought as I lay in bed, surrendering to the fear which grew inside me like ivy, just as they wanted. I remembered the rounds of torture in the Mukhabarat
unit, and the pus, the ulcers, the lice which attacked us and which we were afraid of admitting were in our cells. I had had recurrent bouts of illness that scarred me and kept the others well away from me – but there was no time for reproaches here, just as there was no time for living. We had to keep our bodies intact, as we still might need them some day. We kept breathing to reassure ourselves of the soundness of our lungs and arteries, which still boomed with blood like the rush of a waterfall. There is nothing quite like a prisoner’s mindset; it made us perfectly capable of considering our limbs just as if they had come out of a dream.

Our craving for compassion made us praise those warders who overlooked little misdemeanours, such as dawdling on the way to the dormitories, or laughing too loudly. It made us tolerant of everything we used to condemn in our enemies, when we were on the outside. This enmity began to seem worthless; we remembered it, and thanked prison which made images of our old life beautiful. I looked for a sympathetic prisoner so I could tell her all about the dreams I had once drawn in the notebooks now taken from me, along with sheets of paper on which I had copied Prophetic
ahadith
and excerpts from books by Sayyid Qutb, Al Ghazali, and the fatwas of Ibn Baz; I had believed them all, just as I had believed the lie of hatred and praised it.

*   *   *

The daily inspections were the most futile acts in this forsaken place, given that we were surrounded by guards and iron doors. They counted us, sometimes making do with us calling out our numbers, at other times requiring us to stand up so they could confirm our presence. One by one we would slink to the other wall where we waited for the warders’ moods to be revealed – we never knew where they would lead us. The governor walked in front of us, proud of his virility and his carefully clipped moustache. He strutted in front of women whose desires had died and whose skins bloomed with poison. His deputy would spend hours ‘inspecting the inspection’, which was repeated as if they too were afraid of being alone and needed us to entertain them with what remained of the pertness of our breasts and our dishevelled hair. The deputy-deputy never wasted an opportunity to speak to us about morals, just like a preacher. He would curse us and then describe us as
whores
, all as if he were addressing crowds hanging on his every word. In a quiet voice, he praised himself, his leader, his Party and his Islam, and then began to give us advice, his words growing increasingly tender as he called us his
sisters
and
daughters
. He drew on examples of moral rectitude taken from his own respectable household and his method of bringing up his four daughters. We began to know their names and the names of their husbands, the colour of their hair, the smell of the perfume they loved. Once Sulafa kicked me to get my attention and whispered sarcastically, ‘Ask him about his daughter Mona.’ I just laughed inwardly as I stared at his paunch and his feeble attempts to hide his repulsive baldness.

How many of those men came to us in our cells without asking our leave, when it used to be so difficult for anyone to enter a woman’s bedroom without permission? We were so humiliated; repressed conscripts spied on us, and we could hear them masturbating on the other side of the doors to the cells. The fear of being raped made us cautious all the time, even when we were in the toilet. This fear clung to us for a long time; we wished that we could close up our vaginas and padlock them to keep the little that was still ours.

*   *   *

Buthayna’s leg was broken twice, they plucked out an eye, and they cut off a finger, but still she didn’t reveal the hiding place of the printing press she ran for our Party. During the three years she spent in solitary confinement near to us, we could hear her voice raised in cursing them. Her presence so close to us was vital in making us feel, in the first days, that our pain was meaningless. We heard her moaning like a wounded lioness, screaming after the numbness went from her limbs and she regained consciousness after the torture sessions we couldn’t keep count of. They put her in with us after we’d been two years in the women’s prison; we welcomed her with kisses, trills and the song ‘The White Moon Rose Over Us’. She smiled, exhausted, grateful to the Marxists who cherished her courage and sang our hymns with us. We echoed the beauty of their compassion when we were joined by Helena, one of their girls, who had the slight build and face of a rabbit. The Mukhabarat unit let her be transferred only in the hope of breaking the knot in her tongue which wouldn’t stop screaming at them, ‘Dogs and traitors!’ The woman’s resilience oppressed the torturers, and they credited her with their own masculinity. They called Helena by a man’s name and avoided her, even though she was in a cage. The strength of the malevolence in her heart terrified them, and made them regret that they hadn’t included her in the earlier execution sprees which had harvested thousands of men and women. No one knew where these corpses had gone.

Helena and Buthayna were both sentenced to twenty years in prison. They relaxed when sitting together, and they chose a corner where they could sleep next to each other after fighting about God, Marx, Lenin, sex, children and songs. They celebrated their differences of opinion. Their long isolation in solitary confinement had made them hard, and they were dismissive of our transient pain; we didn’t defend ourselves against their attacks of ‘how spoiled’ we were, nor their derision at our wish to return to our homes, and our defence of those who couldn’t withstand the torture and revealed everything they knew. Isn’t cruelty measureless, when someone asks you to be heroic, but the only resource you have to draw on is deference to the opinion of other prisoners that you are, indeed, a heroine? At first I was close to Buthayna, but I grew to hate her. I couldn’t bear how she slandered Bakr and described him as a traitor. I respected her for tormenting our captors, but hated her overbearing behaviour, and the fact that Hajja Souad was afraid of her. I could hear Buthayna snoring in her troubled sleep as she tried to expel an insect from her nose. She tossed and turned like any worried woman. When she had been in solitary confinement, away from us, she was a legend. Myths grew up about her daring during battle; moving tributes circulated among members of our group who raised her to the status of a blessed female saint. But it is hard to come face to face with your heroine, breathing like any other woman, fighting for an additional slice of bread and a little of the bean soup brimming with dead flies. Insults created a being of hatred and let it out to play.

*   *   *

Ten days before my release, I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday without much fuss. The girls who knew the date stayed close to me with the affection of friends who were to bid me goodbye soon. They hastily prepared the candle hidden away for such occasions, which had fallen into their hands two years earlier, when Rasha insisted on it to mark our child’s fourth birthday. She had a cake smuggled in and we greedily gobbled small slices of it as we sang for him and helped him to blow out his candle; he looked at us, astonished at discovering that the act of blowing out a candle necessitated all this uproar. Rasha had since left but her candle stayed behind as a memory for us. We would light it for a few seconds so it could be blown out by a woman who needed to feel that she was a year older. We wished out loud for our freedom – what else would a prisoner wish for? I blew out the candle in turn and some of the girls clapped and kissed me. Um Mamdouh hugged me and cried: I was her daughter, who would no longer sit and eat with her after Buthayna and I had fought over whose turn it was for the bathroom. I kissed her hand and assured her that I wouldn’t leave her side during the remaining ten days, and I would return to being her daughter.

In that time, I vowed to fast and perform fifteen
ruk’at
every day. The girls from my group were surprised at this humility, as I had left off praying three years earlier. Um Mamdouh defended me when Buthayna commented that God didn’t accept the prayers of infidels. ‘I can be silent for ten days,’ I thought, worried that they would change their minds and continue to hold me in the Mukhabarat unit, as had happened with many girls who had returned to hell and were still waiting for their release from day to day. I left it to God, and observed the prisoners who had accompanied me on this hellish journey. Hajja Souad had invented a unique way of keeping track of time. Every day, she sewed a stitch of black thread in her only shirt, which she only took off to wash every three months. She counted the stitches every day; the girls laughed when one of them tried to help her and reduced the total by two or three days. Hajja Souad recounted them as if she were mocking the time that hung on the edge of her blouse, a stitch of black thread acting as witness to her misery and the curtailment of her passion for beautiful fabrics. A woman who had loved elegance and cleanliness, her surrender to filthy clothes affected us; it gave us to understand that she had surrendered to death, and believed it inevitable.