In Praise of Hatred (30 page)

In the morning, Maryam couldn’t get up. Her voice was weak, her eyes sad. She needed all of us; she wanted to forget how she had been possessed the night before, and how she had disgraced herself. She was like a woman bitterly bidding goodbye to her girlhood and who now regretted having kept her body and soul pure. We sat around her for three days, telling her stories; she wasn’t cheered by Zahra’s and my praise of her voice and lithe body; she turned her face away from us and looked at the wall for hours at a time. She focused her gaze unflinchingly on a single point, as if trying to bore through the wall and see beyond it; it was an indication of her dismissal of us, despite the gratitude we heard in her quiet, affectionate voice.

Some days later, Omar arrived early in the morning, exhausted after a long night out and smelling strongly of alcohol. He didn’t seem to care that there were lipstick marks on his shirt. He drank his coffee in a rush, listening to us distractedly, and missing half of what we said. Maryam didn’t care that he was there; we had expected his visit would lift her depression. He briefly encouraged me to go to Beirut if I could, but added that I was forbidden to travel abroad. He gave us a considerable sum of money, shared a joke with Radwan, and then left; everything was done at top speed, as if we were a plague he had to stay away from.

*   *   *

How cruel we are, when we act carelessly with others’ dearest possessions. We leave them to their fate, unheeding of what they mean to someone else. Marwa’s butterflies no longer provoked anyone’s interest, and I had thrown her boxes in a corner of my room (which had begun to look like a junk warehouse offering shelter to a vagrant each night). Marwa cried bitterly when she saw our neglect of them. She kneeled down to wipe the dust away with the hem of her clothes, calling each butterfly by its pet name, which she still remembered.

I had believed that Marwa had been definitively expelled from our house; in time, we would forget her and turn her out of our memories, trying to ignore the pain she had caused by departing from our sect’s traditions, and in the company of an officer, who had once threatened to kill us and shatter our unity. I hadn’t taken Maryam, Omar, Safaa and Zahra’s visit to her in Damascus very seriously; I didn’t believe that she would ever return to her old home, or feel comfortable there with her husband.

She came back without asking permission. One day, she just opened the door with her key, and Nadhir followed her in, carrying her bag. He was shy, but Maryam’s warm welcome of them both broke the ice. They stretched out on her bed at night as if they were returning from a short holiday. Marwa said she forgave me, but I couldn’t ignore her blue clothes which showed her knees, nor her uncovered and subtly made-up face; this all made her a stranger to me. I didn’t understand where she had hidden all that confidence before – her new freedom revealed her as a tolerant and intelligent woman. She pitied our life beneath the veil. Our souls were weighed down and we walked in fear, ponderously. Her graceful footsteps in the courtyard and her laughter reminded us of Safaa. She began to resemble her so much that I thought they might have exchanged dreams, as if they were playing merrily with their destinies.

*   *   *

When Nadhir received news of an assassination attempt on the President, he kissed Marwa on the cheek, and went off quickly, in a state of great tension. Anxiety tore at him as he made his way to Damascus; the old itch on his neck returned, which always heralded danger. It had saved him from a certain death during the October War, when his battalion’s position was bombed only a few minutes after he and his troops had withdrawn. He summoned up other memories which he feared had long faded, and which led him to look back on his early life. He thought about his father, Sheikh Abbas, who had taught him the tolerance that had cost him dearly. Sheikh Abbas had relinquished his position to other imams, who expounded on hatred, the necessity of maintaining solidarity within their own sect against all others, and the strict retention of political posts in order to guarantee that authority remained in their hands. There were lots of whispered rumours about secret debates where Sheikh Abbas argued in defence of tolerance as the only solution to protect the sect and keep it unsullied. He would quote the words and deeds of the great historical imams, displaying his wide knowledge of the Quran and the Hadith, as well as making use of his dignity and popularity; his family’s power prevented the other sheikhs from attacking him publicly, despite what they said quietly amongst themselves about his determined inattention to the cruel injustices propounded by the other sects.

Fear didn’t push Sheikh Abbas into a bickering match with the others; that had been the aim of one of the sheikhs, in order to diminish his prestige. Instead, Sheikh Abbas sought seclusion in his home which overlooked pine forests and orange groves, and remained there to this day. He was aware that what was coming would be even greater, and he couldn’t prevent it if the people were tempted by the fatwas of Sheikh Mudar to kill others merely because of their membership of another sect.

Nadhir tried to recall an image of his father, but it was blurred. The smile which never left him gave his son the strength to quash his worries. Nadhir said to himself, ‘The President wasn’t harmed at all. As for the President’s associate who threw himself on to the bomb and was blown up, his family will receive an appropriate sum and influence as a reward for his devotion.’ He arrived at the government building in the evening and realized from the faces of the guards who greeted him that something was seriously amiss. He climbed the steps calmly and sat in the room of the commander’s secretary, turning over the pages of a calendar in a bored manner for over an hour, waiting for the summons whose origins he had tried to trace in his mind several times. The gestures of the guards, secretaries and officers in the building communicated a general nervousness.

At exactly eight o’clock, Nadhir entered the room where four officers he knew well were already waiting. As he greeted them he noticed they were acting coolly towards him; they didn’t kiss him, as they usually would have done after a long absence. The secretary opened the door and gestured to them to go into an inner office. The commander of the death squad was waiting for them quietly, and the traces of exhaustion around his eyes showed that he hadn’t slept well for some time. It was well known that he was a pleasure-seeker, so his state wasn’t in itself indicative of anything exceptional, given his frivolous disposition and his utter disregard for the consequences of his actions. The commander motioned for them to sit and directed his curt words to the highest-ranking officer. He explained the details of the assassination attempt and, without a pause, added coldly, ‘We’re carrying out a strike on the desert prison tonight.’ Then he banged the table with his fist. ‘Don’t leave a single one of them alive to see the sun rise.’ He handed round the files, labelled
Operation Sleeping Butterfly
in an inappropriately ornate script, to each of the five officers. He bid them an authoritative goodbye, and left his office through a concealed door.

Nadhir felt dizzy at this knee-jerk reaction; this meant the murder of vast numbers of political prisoners, attacking them when they were trapped like dogs in a cage. All as casually as if one were swatting flies. The scene he imagined made him nauseous; his stomach heaved and his knees buckled. He didn’t think he could walk. He inhaled the air of the Al Mazza quarter and tightened his grip around the folder with his orders, aware that time was racing away. In less than an hour, the aeroplanes would be on their way to the desert, carrying heavily armed soldiers that might have been simply on a hunting expedition to the plains for wild ducks or gazelles. Nadhir drove to the airport where the head of the operation had preceded him. The commander was a very distant relative of his, and Nadhir greeted him and asked to speak to him alone for a few moments. He informed him that he would not be able to carry out his orders, then he reached for his military insignia and removed them from his uniform. He spread his arms wide, as if accepting the court martial that would sentence him to death for his refusal. He announced his readiness to go to any Israeli position they named to destroy it in a suicide operation.

The commander was worried; he knew the implications of this refusal, especially coming as it did after Nadhir’s controversial marriage to Marwa. This had been the subject of discussion amongst the top brass, who said that Nadhir had crossed all boundaries and was lacking in loyalty. The commander didn’t let him finish his sentence. Nadhir handed over the key to his staff car and walked out, avoiding the troops who were shouting their allegiance to the death squad commander. They raised their fists in the air and climbed into the ten aeroplanes squatting on the runway in the growing twilight. Nadhir turned around and saw them take off in an orderly fashion. He didn’t realize that it was his tears that were blurring the narrow road through the cactus fields. He thought for a moment that maybe he had heard the orders wrong, or that the previous night had left him exhausted. He couldn’t grasp that this mad fantasy would actually murder prisoners held in an isolated jail. He thought it would be a miracle if anyone left that prison alive.

Nadhir found himself sitting in a taxi with three other passengers, who eyed his uniform warily, and couldn’t understand the presence of this officer – alone, silent and distracted – among them; he imposed a silence on them, which was a measure of their fear. The old Mercedes swayed patiently on its way to Aleppo like a sealed coffin borne aloft. Nadhir tried to sleep, but nightmares attacked him; awake, dark thoughts agitated him. He almost started to mutter to himself like a madman as he tried to imagine what was happening when, checking his watch, he calculated that the aeroplanes had landed next to the prison gate half an hour earlier. An expert in this sort of operation, he guessed that his colleagues had had more than enough time to ensure that their rifles were in order. As in some sort of perverse fairytale, their enemies, at the moment still bound in iron chains to the walls of the prison, would be transformed into live targets on an imaginary shooting range.

*   *   *

The following morning, a hot summer’s day, the country woke up to stories which had spread like lightning, already retold thousands of times. I understood why Nadhir stood at the door looking exhausted and broken, asking for Marwa to call him another taxi. He apologized for drinking Maryam’s coffee with a shamefaced smile, and he spoke almost incomprehensibly and with great difficulty. He said that he had resigned from the army, and that what had happened that night would never be forgotten for a thousand years. Then he left like a fugitive along with Marwa. In the taxi, she put her hand tenderly on his hair and face and whispered, ‘It’s all right, darling.’ He kissed her palm and took refuge in burning tears, not caring about the astonishment of the driver, who shook their hands. He stopped the car and got out to leave him alone with Marwa, who was almost speechless at seeing him like a small child. She pulled herself together, wiped away his tears and kissed him on the lips; then she ordered the driver to hurry: they were rushing to someone’s bedside to witness the last, warm breath of the dying man before his body turned cold and he left them for ever. Marwa thus freed Nadhir from the need for any further explanation or a response to the sympathetic glances of the driver, who now ascribed this man’s tears to the imminent loss of a loved one. He concluded this passenger was like any other person, despite the uniform he wore, which should have indicated that he was just one of those terrorizing the country and revelling in the bloodlust and the fear in people’s eyes.

Reports had spread of how the troops had calmly left their planes, gone into the cells of the desert prison, and cold-bloodedly opened fire on the prisoners, whose brains they splattered all over the walls and ceilings. The corpses were piled up in the corridors like rotten oranges thrown carelessly on to a rubbish dump. More than eight hundred prisoners had been killed in less than an hour. Later the bulldozers carried the bodies to a secret location where they were thrown into a pit whose size, shape and smell no one could possibly imagine. The accounts of the few survivors would offer yet another opportunity to examine the extraordinary resilience that humanity can show in the face of the most extreme circumstances.

All over the country, black flags were hung from balconies. Anyone entering Aleppo or Hama in the early evening of the following day might have thought a festival of weeping had begun, and that it must be the preamble to the festival that recalled the martyr Hussein, which had so often inspired artists, scholars and strangers passing through Karbala. Hajja Souad rushed towards me weeping. She hugged me before I could enter the house, and I heard her prayer for Hossam to enter Heaven. Everything I had tried so hard not to believe was embodied in front of me, like a truth which now had to be heard clearly. I couldn’t move my tongue; I felt paralysis creeping through my limbs. I shook my head unthinkingly and fled. When I eventually got back to the house I found my mother sitting in the courtyard and crying. She was kissing a picture of Hossam she held in her hands, and she stood up to trill and dance like she had gone mad. Maryam, Zahra, Omar and Radwan all formed a ring around her to prevent her from running out into the street until she fainted, and then they carried her to bed.

Before dawn the next day, we set off in Omar’s car for the desert prison. We had been preceded by groups of mothers who came from all over the country to seek out their sons. They didn’t want to believe a story they thought must have been invented. Road blocks and armed soldiers prevented the thousands of people who slept outdoors that night from reaching the prison, which was entirely quiet after the corpses had been moved and the building washed down with power hoses. It was as if the soldiers had carried out with precision a job they considered to be no more than routine, and now they were keeping aloof and distant from the inanity of the crowd milling around.