In Praise of Hatred (9 page)

Hatred bewildered me, just as powerful love bewilders a lover. I would fumble for my salvation by sitting alone for hours at a time, reading my yellow books and ignoring Marwa and Safaa’s calls to join them in making stuffed vine leaves and listening to songs, and torturing Radwan with nonsensical requests. He would try to fulfil them, and then they would ignore the bags of ground bird bones and dove beaks which he had gone round several markets looking for.

‘I hate school,’ I told Hajja Radia, choking back my tears. I told her about the chemistry teacher and Nada, and Hala and her hatred for our veils and our lowered voices, and her sarcastic comments about the rulings of Islamic jurors. She listened so intently I almost told her about my friend Ghada who kept singing lewd Maha Abdel Wahhab songs quite audibly during our morning assemblies where we saluted the flag and sang the Party anthem. Then we would parade in front of Nada and the Al Futuwa leader, who would both review us as if we were a herd of donkeys.

Ghada suddenly shone in the school firmament like a star. She removed her veil and no longer shared our silent falafel sandwiches in the breaks. After the summer holiday she shook hands with us coldly; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw her dancing to Boney M, or linking arms with Nada, who had forced the teachers to disclose the answers to the exam so she would pass. The teachers were repulsed, but whenever they thought of protesting they remembered the chemistry teacher, and the skinny geography teacher who was taken from her house by a Mukhabarat patrol under the eyes of her neighbours. They tore at her clothes as her young children sobbed – all because she had given a zero to a student whose father worked as an interrogator for the military Mukhabarat. The father described the teacher as a whore and threatened her with torture and death in the darkness of the Mukhabarat detention cells. The geography teacher was silent, stupefied. Afterwards she lost the ability to look her students in the eye. Like a ghost, she drew on the blackboard and spoke distractedly about capital cities.

I couldn’t bear Ghada’s desertion of me. I couldn’t admit to myself that I loved kissing her every morning and inhaling her scent; sometimes my hand would inadvertently slip to her breast and I would press it warmly with unbounded desire. This fact alarmed me. I asked Layla insistently to try and convert her back to us, but she didn’t care very much about the matter. So I stood in the courtyard and confronted Ghada; I asked her to stop this blasphemy and to stop going around with Nada, and showed her the veil I had brought her on behalf of one of our venerable sheikhs. She took it from me and kissed me gently, and then put it in the pocket of her clean khaki shirt and said, ‘You haven’t tasted happiness yet.’ I didn’t understand what she meant. Hala interrupted and called her a bitch. I couldn’t bear her insult; before I knew what I was doing, I had lost my head. I grabbed Hala’s hair and began to hit her in the face with a strength I didn’t know was in me, repeating over and over, ‘
You’re
the bitch, not Ghada.’

Hala was shocked, but forgave me when I cried in the headmistress’s room. I couldn’t utter a single word; the scene moved Hala and we embraced and returned to class as friends. I felt suffocated. In the following days I felt everyone’s eyes boring into me: students, teachers, the headmistress, my aunts and my mother when I went to her and cried for no reason, then wiped my tears and left without saying goodbye. Ghada asked me affectionately not to defend her, adding gently that she was powerful and fully capable of burning down the school. Then she ignored me completely. I stopped going out into the schoolyard. Layla tried to convince me that no one remembered a stupid fight between classmates; anyway, the school was preoccupied with more serious matters after a blue Mercedes had begun waiting for Ghada every day – inside it was a man whom even Nada’s death squad officer was afraid of and made sure to greet when they met at the school gate. I started going back out into the yard, but I was exhausted, and inattentive in class, to the astonishment of the teachers, who knew the extent of my intelligence. Whenever I spotted Ghada climbing in beside that fifty-year-old man whom I saw as mysterious and coarse, I felt that my knees wouldn’t support me any longer.

*   *   *

Safaa ignored the incidents with Ghada, and my tears when I hugged my mother and left like a fugitive. She suggested that I help Radwan formulate a new perfume, and write the song he would sing at the Prophet’s
mawlid
in front of Bakr and the other guests who were soon to congregate at my grandfather’s house. She added, ‘Men … forbidden men will be coming to this tomb; we’ll cook for them and have a look at them through our windows.’ She was gleeful when she pronounced the word ‘men’ and she took me by the hand, trying to impose a smile on me which soon turned to brazen laughter. It disturbed Maryam who came out of her room and stood, watching us from afar.

I wrote down Radwan’s dictation. Safaa deliberately mixed the quantities wrongly but he didn’t protest, and occasionally even praised her dexterity in carrying out his instructions. He had returned to the status of a wandering poet who wrote odes in praise of the Prophet. Safaa egged me on not to stick to what he said, but to write down its opposite. I didn’t possess Safaa’s courage in teasing her servant; I considered him to be an uncle whose ancestry I had forgotten. I pretended not to notice his frequent plundering of the
Peak of Eloquence
by Ali ibn Abi Talib, his breaking of the poetic metre, and his descent into cruder regional dialect when describing his perfumes and praising my grandfather, uncles and some notable sheikhs. I laughed from my belly when he gave himself free rein and cursed French colonialism in two lines. He smiled sourly and said, ‘Write. Write! Aleppo will remember this, and the musicians will come running.’

Maryam didn’t approve of how close we were to Radwan. She sat by Marwa and the two of them began loudly discussing preparations for the party. Marwa wrote down a list of requests which they would send in the morning to my grandfather’s shops; Selim would spend three days dispatching his workers, laden with bags, to fulfil my aunts’ requests, causing the larder to overflow. Safaa was roused to anger and Maryam to contentment by this – now Maryam had the chance to declare proudly that no guest had ever gone wanting in this house; and if ever the larder were found empty, then its inhabitants would no longer have the right to hang the family tree on the wall, and its daughters would be little better than passing beggars.

At night I read over Radwan’s dictation of his ode. I was pleased with the game, and added on a couplet of beautiful love poetry which no one knew was my monologue to Ghada. I described her beautiful face and my heartbreak at her departure from me. Radwan never acknowledged that it was an addition to his ode; his
mu’allaqa
, as he termed it. I told him, ‘It will be your legacy.’ His voice rose in defence of his talents as he reminded Maryam of the odes he used to sing to my grandfather and his guests.

*   *   *

I didn’t know why Bakr summoned me urgently for a matter of the utmost importance. He came to the house late one night, spoke with Maryam for a few minutes, and then came into my room. He didn’t wait around for me to ask after his wife Zahra, but demanded to know what had happened at school. He listened intently and questioned me closely about Nada, Hala, Ghada and other girls. He reassured me and said, ‘Keep away from Ghada and don’t clash with Nada, whatever happens.’ He said this in a commanding tone, and I didn’t understand why he thought it was so necessary. He asked me to call another friend, Hana, whose authoritativeness I used to hate, despite her constant attempts to initiate conversations on purification literature and examine every detail of each school of jurisprudence. I said to Layla, ‘I don’t like her,’ and finished by saying, ‘She thinks she’s Fatima Al Zahra.’ Layla laughed, and fell silent for a few minutes. Then she changed the subject, afraid of plunging into a biography of the Prophet’s daughter.

There was a hidden rebuke in Bakr’s tone. This was no time for trivialities, he said. I felt his worry and his enthusiasm at the same time. He stopped in Marwa and Safaa’s room and drank coffee with them, listening to them as a close, beloved brother and confidant, despite his deep religious devotion. He soon began talking neutrally and eloquently on more intimate and interesting topics, but the reason for his presence at that time was a mystery to me.

*   *   *

My uncle Bakr had a scar that distinguished him from the rest of the family: it looked like a coin in the middle of his cheek. Everyone who saw it thought the plague which had struck the city had passed through him but not taken him, so they regarded him as an omen of good luck. He was always clean-shaven. He seemed destined for a greater role than that of a carpet dealer, a trade which he had inherited from his father. Whoever saw him from afar thought him to be resigned to his fate, his limited ambitions, his happiness with Zahra, an eternally contented woman. Those close to him numbered no more than a few friends whom he saw intermittently and briefly, doing no more than reassure himself of their welfare. He left all the financial and accounting details of the business to my oldest uncle, Selim. With his steadiness and patience, Uncle Selim was the image of his father. He woke early, prayed in the Ottoman Mosque, carefully ate breakfast and then went to the shop. He and Khalil drank coffee like two old men worried that the Day of Judgement would arrive too soon for them to arrange their coffins and mend the carpets in the attic of the shop. With great difficulty, Selim learned some English phrases necessary for talking tourists into buying carpets as souvenirs of the oldest Eastern cities. He left the discussions with experts and syndicate owners to my youngest uncle, Omar, who had perfected his English and French at a sharia college. Although he had chosen to attend this college wholeheartedly, he soon grew bored with the opinions of legal jurists and baulked at my grandmother’s wish that he complete his education at Al Azhar so he could return with a doctorate, qualified to dispense fatwas to the women and men who flocked to their sheikhs and broadcast their secrets with great gusto.

After Omar returned from military service he went into his room, packed his religious books in a wooden box and carried it to the cellar, resolute in his refusal to go to Al Azhar. He began to work in the business with great enthusiasm. In his house, my grandmother sat waiting for his return. She waited for two whole days, and when he finally returned and saw her sitting with Maryam and his wife, Rima, absorbed in chopping quince, he leaned over and kissed her head. He laughed as his mother told him everything she knew about the fallen women he wasted his money on, and praised the fortitude and elevated morals of his wife. She only quietened down when he swore on the Quran that he wouldn’t fall into bad company again. Before my grandmother died, Omar had timorously sworn on the Quran nine times; afterwards he returned to his hellraising as if what had been said was nothing more than a puff of air. Anyone looking into his cunning eyes and his yellow, emaciated face might have thought he had come down with jaundice. As a child he wanted to become an actor; he left school and spent most of his time in the cinema, or following news of actors and imitating their gestures and Egyptian accents in front of the large mirror.

‘He was wonderful, and so kind,’ Safaa said, recalling Omar’s never-ending attempts to be a renegade who scorned tradition. The most idiotic of his actions caused consternation in the family, which gathered a number of times to admonish him; he would listen calmly and quickly burst into remorseful tears, only to surprise them the following morning with further follies. Once, he brought a flock of geese to the house. Omar straightaway began opening the doors, upon which the geese spread out and began ravaging Maryam’s flowers. He tossed them a slice of bread and began herding them like a cowboy. He almost put my grandmother into a swoon and Maryam felt hysteria coming on when she saw her delicate plants trampled and scattered over the ground like there had been a frivolous and unexpected festival. Safaa smothered her laughter and she and Maryam confronted Omar who looked at them, perplexed, and then stormed out of the house. His dream of being a gooseherd came to an end. He herded his flock to the Bedouin, greatly enjoying the open air and the cane in his hand, which he raised to hush the beaks of his flock. My grandfather and uncles returned in the evening to turn out the remnants of this flock, which had strutted through rooms and cellars and left its excrement and footprints on bedspreads and flowered sofas. My grandfather was more tolerant of Omar’s odd jokes, and he was astounded at his son’s talent for generating profits when he began to work in the family shops, despite Selim’s fear that his flippancy would ruin everything. It was as if he had found certainty at last in the pleasure of dividends, which he used to philosophize about, explaining ideas that occasionally shook the market; they also made him into a much-sought-after partner in risk avoidance.

My grandfather and other uncles ignored Omar’s levity because of his boosting of their trade, which had become rather lacklustre at a time when Persian and Kashmiri carpets were no longer a source of pride for Syrian families. Also, there were certain telegrams that allowed Omar to put important families in touch with some powerful officers who had taken over the rule of law after the army entered Lebanon. These men were transformed from officers, warriors strutting about in their uniforms, into smugglers of ceramics and electronic equipment, and they had connections to foreign tobacco barons. They became a familiar presence in upmarket restaurants, praising Aleppan vine leaves and kebab, dividing up their profits, and raising their voices in arguments that sometimes escalated to the point where they were on the verge of ordering their own men to shoot each other. Echoes probably reached the government in the Republican Palace, which intervened with a curt judgement that everyone accepted. After that, these officers went back to taking girls to restaurants and country estates, delighting in their great power, giving themselves free rein in plundering the country’s riches, and imposing their rule on all the institutions that became their targets. The staff of these institutions trembled when they saw military vehicles stopping in front of their buildings. Soldiers in pretend uniforms would get out carrying weapons, and when they entered the premises they would be offered cold drinks and petit fours and any orders they gave were implemented immediately. The city, which used to boast of being compared to Vienna, became a ruin populated by frightened ghosts grieving for their glorious past. The great families lost their money and their sons were forced to ally themselves with farmers with whom they now played backgammon, ignoring their boorishness and praising them, even offering their daughters in marriage.