In Praise of Hatred (7 page)

On their first night, Wasal had no regrets about forsaking the odour of other men clinging to the lentil sacks in the dark cellar, itself permeated with the smells of fried aubergines and decaying rats. She washed in the rose water which she had brought with her, and put on a wedding dress which Khalil tore off her before carrying her like a butterfly to the bed; she was insensible to the strength of his arms and the blaze of his kisses as if it were the first time she had been to bed with a man. Her voice rose without shame, and in Turkish she prattled words of surrender to a hidden fate. Afterwards, she became quiet and buried her head in his chest, savouring the scent which penetrated her heart and captivated her. She taught him to speak Turkish and clip his nails, and insisted that he wore cactus-blossom perfume which would waft from his clothes when he walked confidently through Mosul’s souk.

Khalil began to deal in cigarettes with the other traders, guiding them to the best makes, and he exchanged for coloured silks the carpets he designed and produced himself on his own loom, and which looked like icons. These astonished the people of Mosul, the passing traders and the foreign antiques collectors who all trusted Khalil’s imagination and his skill, as well as his sympathy for amateurs’ lack of knowledge in the wild and varied field of carpets.

He craved the security and protection he felt in Wasal, who gave birth to a daughter called Zahra. Zahra resembled her mother completely with the exception of her black eyes; they brought to mind a mixture of racial origins that might have been nearer to those of Nubians than Wasal and Khalil’s own particular combination.

Back in Aleppo, my grandfather touched a carpet, on which was this line of Mutanabbi’s:

Homes! There are homes for you in our hearts

    You are now deserted, yet you are inhabiting them.

He knew that Khalil had made it and included the verse on purpose: the speaker is calling out to the empty home of his beloved; although the home is now abandoned, it provides the memories that still live on in his heart. My grandfather had heard that Khalil missed Aleppo, after a trader from Mosul had discussed his skilful workmanship and the beauty of his wife, who would interfere in the colouring of the carpets. The colours seemed strange at first, although foreign clients were enticed by Abyssinian roosters, the arms of women whose swelling chests were like those of Sumerian goddesses, and winking eyes which always resembled those of a woman Khalil had once known. He was immersed in the warmth of the delights renewed every night, which seemed to the couple never-ending.

What is it worth to live through a spell of happiness, even if it will never return? The depression which had clung to Khalil throughout his life lifted completely. He became cheerful at gatherings, especially at the house of a certain Mister John, whom he used to visit every day. He would drink coffee with him, and show him paintings from the Nahda era, and even accompanied him several times to excavation sites in Babel where an archaeological mission was encamped.

What Khalil didn’t know was that Wasal was beginning to feel bored. She missed other men, and she no longer came to him wearing perfume and insisting that he washed his hands. Her days finally became dull; he was a man certain of his success, and she a woman no longer seduced by the resplendent colours of carpets. She quietly withdrew and fell silent. She didn’t care when the kitchen shelves collapsed, shattering the Kashmiri-porcelain bowls and scattering shards everywhere, and it was days before she gathered up the pieces and coldly tossed them in the dustbin. She regretted the ten years she had spent in this city invaded by mosquitoes and silence, where the smell of roasting meat seeped from every alleyway like an inescapable fate. Wasal listened, stunned, to John enlarging on vulgar descriptions of his nights out in London. She was enamoured of the sordidness in the mid-fifties bars which John felt considerable nostalgia for whenever he remembered the smell of those long nights. He saw her astonishment, listened to her never-ending questions and answered them in a low, steady voice. He complimented her taste in serving coffee; and he compared her to the princesses whose amorous exploits were sung of in the romances that had once been so popular in castles all over Europe.

‘This arrogant Englishman is making me dream,’ she said to herself as she gazed at the dawn through her bedroom window. Insomnia tyrannized her and she lost weight. She would wait for the evenings when John came round, accompanied by members of the dig, antiquities collectors both amateur and professional, spies, and horse traders passing through on their way to Bedouin camps. They would swarm all over Khalil’s house, demanding to have tea according to their own traditions and jabbering away in English, displaying their amazement at the interweaving of colours and lines in the carpets spread out before them. John moved amongst them like an expert guide and interpreter, and he laid a trap for Wasal, who immediately felt that the circular motion of her breasts had seduced him from under their veil. She enjoyed his ravenous greed at seeing them when they stood out through her abaya
for a moment, the nipples showing clearly underneath the long cotton garment. It was a game that both John and Wasal loved at the beginning, before it became a burden and the cause of sleepless nights.

Khalil wasn’t quite aware of what was going on – he was in thrall to the security of the little money he had saved and hidden inside the small ebony case at the bottom of the clothes box, and he thought fondly of his young daughter, who had begun to lisp in both Arabic and Turkish, and of his wife, Wasal. (Unnoticed by him, she now performed her duties coldly and without enthusiasm.) These blessings were all sufficient reasons to set him thinking about making a pilgrimage to Mecca, and returning from there to Aleppo to live in that city in complete bliss. His eyes shone when he told Wasal, convinced that this happy ending would delight her also. Wasal listened to him and was distracted for a long time: she didn’t know why she became jittery when Khalil enlarged on his wish that she become pregnant once more in order to have a boy, to replace the one whose body had broken out in buboes short of his second year. Before they had agreed on a name for him, he had died and they had buried him in a small grave close to their house. The two of them dreamed of different worlds, linked by a house whose future seemed only half-assured, and from which wafted the smell of beans and the sound of sad Iraqi songs. Wasal was devoted to these songs, which spoke about falling in love with young men and waxed eloquent about infatuation, but John was articulate in explaining the odes as stilted and affected. As their sessions lengthened, John realized how much he longed to be in London after being absent for so long.

Wasal’s story affected me greatly; I knew, afterwards, that she had caused my grandfather sleepless nights. When she lived at the khan in Nazdaly, she used to make him bring henna, perfumes and expensive fabrics from Aleppo, seemingly just presents from a generous friend that would not cast suspicion on him; the gifts were in exchange for special services she offered him as a regular client of an inn on a little-used road.

*   *   *

My grandmother was implacable in her hostility towards Wasal’s daughter, Zahra, whom my uncle Bakr had determined upon marrying. My grandfather was silent in the face of everyone’s supplications, in an effort to persuade his wife to renounce her oath that she would never allow
her
into the house, and that she would never see Bakr again
as long as
she lived
. We all loved Zahra’s beautiful face, whose complexion changed and became luminous when evening fell. Through her asceticism and her faith, she won our hearts. She and Bakr formed a married couple whose outer quietness and timidity hid a storm of passionate adoration which they revelled in and drank of right to the dregs, wrapping their secrets within it. Many envied Bakr for his life, piety and clean house, and for the wife whose clothes did not smell of onion and fried cauliflower, and who remained patient in the face of catastrophe, which was a revelation to him. As my grandfather said, Bakr saw Zahra’s face and felt her kindness, and cast everything else aside; in this way, she resembled her mother, who had made Khalil into a man haunted by yearning. Khalil drowned in tears and nightmares, especially when the rain poured down. He spoke quickly and angrily, cursing the English, and whorish women, and debauched men. His disconnected sentences didn’t shed any light on the past; no one understood them other than my grandfather, and my uncle Bakr after he was alone with his bride. She walked like an orphan in the small procession Aunt Maryam insisted on holding so Hajja Radia wouldn’t be angry after Radia had spoken highly of Zahra and her piety.

My grandmother kept her oath, and Zahra paid no heed to the goings-on in my grandfather’s house. I became used to Bakr’s visits and my grandmother’s refusals to receive him, despite all his entreaties and intervention from my mother. She said that my grandmother loved Zahra but couldn’t find the right time to relinquish her unjustified obstinacy, especially after the death of my grandfather and in view of Zahra’s lack of defence of her own mother – it was widely said that Wasal had made a living from prostitution after she abandoned the Englishman, John.

Wasal had run away to London with John, and there she attached herself to a Pakistani man, a taxi driver who picked her up one night outside a bar when she was exhausted, fatigue and intoxication all over her face, and only half conscious. In his suburban bedsit, she gave him her body coldly in exchange for spending a night in a narrow bed and a bowl of hot soup, which reminded her of that cellar which she never yearned for, and never regretted leaving.

Wasal woke up late the next morning. All that remained in her memory of the previous night was the taste of pepper from the soup. When she found herself alone in a shabby room, she got up wearily and washed. She heard Pakistani music and snooped through the man’s pictures, which showed him with a corpulent English girl, doltish and flaccid as a dead fish. She realized that he was a strange and lonely man, for all his soft features and thick black eyebrows.

She rather enjoyed being away from John’s affectations and his calls for her to respect English traditions. She went back to sleep for a while and, on waking again, made a light dinner of wilted parsley, cabbage heads and a few morsels of potato. She spontaneously started to behave as if she were the mistress of this mean room, rearranging the sweaters and books strewn at random over the only sofa. She made the Pakistani laugh in an attempt to combat his bewilderment at the continued presence of this transient woman in his room. She surrendered to him coldly as the night elapsed, despite his attempts to get her to explain her past.

The two quickly came to an understanding. She liked his oddness, and the unambiguously dirty jokes he made when, on the third day, he took her to the apartment of a Syrian trader called Abdel Ghany Bilany, in exchange for twenty pounds. The Syrian had a predilection for visiting Madame Tussaud’s, reading biographies of famous politicians, and memorizing quotations. Abdel Ghany Bilany was an entertaining host, at first; but he was in collusion with the Pakistani, who soon left them alone. Stifling a sarcastic smile, Wasal practised the role of a professional whore, but she wasn’t vulgar. She praised his cologne and his taste in the colours of the bed linen in the spacious room. She almost expressed an opinion about Churchill and Abdel Ghany was restored to his earlier enthusiasm as he summarized the history of the man who taught politics to Europe.

Wasal conspired many times with the Pakistani, whom she began to invite to her house. She introduced him to John’s guests and laughed with him in the street. Sometimes she went to stay in his room for a day or two when she felt she was on the verge of putting poison in John’s food, leaving him to his dog whose smell got on her nerves, to his fat books and archaeological journals, to his boring conversations about digging seasons and his endless reminiscences – of diving into the dust with friends and colleagues, who boasted of being burned by the Iraqi sun, eating canned food with the Bedouin, and trying to ride horses – ‘their stupid stories about falling on to their backs’, as Wasal used to describe them.

‘This Pakistani understands me,’ she said to herself as she observed his repeated depravities, which entertained her at times and exasperated her at others. She often went to Abdel Ghany’s flat when he was in London, and after several months she convinced the Syrian to take her with him to Aleppo. She spoke captivatingly of the splendour of Palmyra, the markets in Aleppo, the gentle kindness of Syrians. She knew that she had enticed him when he took her picture next to the statue of Spartacus in the waxwork museum, and she surprised him by baring her chest, smiling with lust and thrilling ambiguity. She made an eccentric out of Abdel Ghany, a lover who expressed his innermost secrets all at once. He lunged at her and instead of catching at her breasts hanging like ripe apples, he bowed at her feet. He recited some lines by an Aleppan poet who had left behind him a
diwan
of poetry entitled
Songs of the Dome
, a huge encyclopaedia of Aleppan customs, tastes and jokes which boasted of Aleppo’s uniqueness. Abdel Ghany recited some lines, treating them like a religious singer keen on making the beauty of the vowels appear clearly.

He took her to Aleppo and she breathed deeply when she walked in the souk. She saw the domes and minarets of the mosques, and she looked for a messenger to convey a brief note to Zahra, informing her of her room number at the Baron Hotel.

Zahra was unsurprised. It was as if she had been expecting this appointment, confirming her constant feeling that Wasal would one day appear in front of her, her last friend, who had made out her mother’s story through snippets of contradictory conversations between the men she knew, and from memories fixed in her mind as a young child. Nothing remained of her image of her mother other than the features of a grumbling woman who would coquettishly flutter her reliable eyelashes when giving instructions to the reluctant latest of a long succession of unfortunate servants. Zahra kept the impressions of that meeting at the hotel to herself for a long time. She told me about it only in her darkest moments, when she was lying in her bed and death had settled over the city like a vampire we could see but couldn’t touch.