In Praise of Hatred Read online

  At nine the next morning the three men were confounded. My grandfather had asked them to help him up but when they rushed over to carry him, he stopped them with a gesture. Confusion reigned over everyone as he directed them outside, and asked for Radwan to accompany him. The folk of Jalloum couldn’t believe the scene: my grandfather in the lead with Radwan beside him, smiling as if he were the only one to have understood what had happened. Leaning on his companion’s arm, my grandfather stood in front of the gate to the Citadel, contemplating the high walls and sniffing the stones as if he were settling his debt with time. He descended to the gate of the covered market and plunged into its crowds, savouring the smell of clothing, textiles and sackcloth; of gold; of the crowding of women’s bodies; of the souk, blazing with lights; of abayas embroidered with silver and gold and spread out over shop fronts; of strips of rugs and dappled carpets. He entered the customs house and stood in the entrance to his shop where Khalil got to his feet smiling, and kissed him before returning to his place. My grandfather looked for a long while at the pile of carpets in the shop. He said, in a voice barely audible to my uncles and looking at Radwan, ‘This blind man has an equal share in all your wealth. If he comes to be in need one day, you will all be held responsible before God…’

  Selim murmured and Radwan raised his head, smiling. He pressed my grandfather’s palm whose face lit up like the dawn in delight at meeting the other traders and his former clients. He opened his pores to the breezes and sounds to chase away the ignominy of previous years. My grandfather directed his footsteps home after praying in the mosque with my uncles. Radwan bore the sarcasm of his blind associates who, in a salute to their smiling friend, chanted a mawlid without taking a penny.

  That afternoon, my grandfather returned to his house in state. He briefly teased my grandmother and lavished praise on my aunts for the delicious food which had been laid out on a table near the fountain. Everyone sat down and savoured the overlapping conversations while a chaos of interweaving hands stretched out towards the lamb stuffed with almonds and laid on a mound of freekeh fried in butter. My uncles had brought their children who were longing to see their grandfather, and their wives who disbelieved the marvel which was embellished with every retelling. After washing his hands, my grandfather got up, entered his room, took off his woollen robe, lay down on the bed, and died.

  That evening, my uncles recalled that my grandfather had hobbled to the family tomb, contemplated the gravestones for a while, then pointed with his cane and said, ‘Bury me here.’ He had sketched out a rectangle, adding, ‘Here I’ll be close to my ancestors and friends.’

  Radwan disappeared for four days, during which no one laid eyes on him. It was understood that my grandfather had chosen the manner of his death, and with Radwan’s help he was able to determine precisely when would be his last moment.

  * * *

  Within this house, incomplete tales of men, women and miracles were narrated, and they fascinated me. They made me a captive of the light reflected off the water in the stone pool, the focus of the circle we formed when we gathered around it. In summer we clung to its moisture and moved all our everyday effects into the courtyard: the dinner table, the comfortable cane chairs, and the radio from which Safaa was never parted. During summer days she was a victim of bouts of deep depression, and sometimes even of a gaiety whose secret no one knew. She wore diaphanous clothes cut above the knee and hurled water over the plants and stones, which would release a fresh scent thanks to the invigorating moisture. She would bring coffee and sit on the edge of the pool, slowly and deliberately drinking from her cup in the early afternoon breezes. Maryam objected to her nakedness, her voice becoming increasingly strident with an accent of stern rebuke. The affable Safaa made no reply, other than to refute Maryam’s argument that Radwan would soon be back by saying, ‘He’s blind. He can’t see.’ When Maryam retorted that God in Heaven could see us, Safaa replied that God saw us naked, and in all forms and situations. The argument always ended when Maryam stood up from behind her Singer sewing machine and sat by the pool, quietly drinking coffee and rereading Sura Yusuf. I noticed the premature wrinkles on her forehead and the harshness in her eyes. She tried to hide her tenderness, which was noticeable only when it exploded all at once and drowned me. She had tried to kill something with her black clothes and her severity, but she couldn’t. She never spoke of her softer, affectionate side to anyone; she never allowed any trace of its existence or even attempted to make it appear, but hid it in a deep and abandoned well. I tried to question her, and gathered up my strength and the words necessary for marshalling a sentence, but I stuttered, and the words fled. She raised her eyes and fixed them on mine, waiting for me to speak; I kept quiet and looked elsewhere, wary of meeting her gaze again.

  * * *

  The Samarkandi’s son returned with his mother so he could bid my grandfather goodbye before their return to Paris, and my grandfather welcomed them as honoured guests. Maryam was afraid, foggy with the scent that had lingered since the Samarkandi’s son’s first visit. He asked everyone to pose for a souvenir picture which would make his father happy, and my grandfather agreed. Everyone gazed perplexedly at the camera shutter, holding their breath; Uncle Omar looked afraid, Maryam lost. The son of the Samarkandi took another picture of my grandfather standing alone near the lemon tree, and another of him sitting on a cane chair next to the pool, then yet another of everyone with Bint Aboud Samadi. A festive atmosphere animated everyone apart from Maryam; she was numb, and couldn’t shake off her torpor. Before mother and son left, my grandfather went into his room and came out carrying a skilfully decorated carpet, a portrait of Omar Khayyam surrounded by cupbearers and Persian phrases. The Samarkandi’s son was taken aback by this treasure, which my grandfather said was one of the original carpets he had bought from the auctions in Istanbul, and which befitted the success of his own Samarkandi son. Bursting with happiness, my grandfather led his guests to the door. When the Samarkandi’s son stood in front of Maryam and put out a hand to bid her goodbye, she had reached the end of her trance. Her lips murmured almost inaudibly, ‘You have slaughtered me…’ No one noticed the alteration in her except my grandmother, who knew that her daughter was wretched, the prisoner of a concealed adoration she could never express. There was no need to guess who the person might be; since coming of age, Maryam had seen no other eligible man’s face. My grandmother tried to get closer to her daughter to have this acknowledged, but Maryam’s silence hardened. Her secret remained confined to her sisters, who tried every means of convincing her to relinquish this hollow pride.

  Two months after this visit, a letter came from Paris bearing the signature of the Samarkandi, who called my grandfather ‘my dear father’. He thanked him for his warm hospitality to his wife and son and conveyed his inability to thank him adequately for the carpet, the significance of which he cherished. He had enclosed four cards from his son: for my grandfather, a representation of Notre-Dame; for Maryam, a view of green lawns, water fountains, and red, yellow and lilac flowers; a third for my uncles Omar and Bakr. The final card was for Radwan, who had convinced him that he was the most important purveyor of perfumes in Aleppo. To him, the Samarkandi’s son sent a general view of Paris and the addresses of several important parfumeries so that Radwan could get in touch with them. In addition to the cards, he sent the photographs he had taken, printed on postcards, which everyone passed around. Radwan touched the pictures and said that he would write to the French manufacturers to offer them his inventions and his secret blends. He searched for someone to write his letters and who wouldn’t betray his secrets. The pictures eventually came round to Maryam and everyone soon forgot about them. They never appeared again until after my grandfather had died.

  * * *

  After his death, Maryam appropriated my grandfather’s room and rearranged it. She embroidered a new bedcover with a brightly coloured peacock in the centre, restoring happiness to the wool, and spread out new azure, flower-strewn s
heets. She left other things where they were, such as the cane chair, the bedside table and the large mirror (after wiping the dust off it). She brought out the photograph in which my grandfather, mother, aunts and uncles were gathered, and placed it on a small table in front of her so she would see it every morning. Next to the picture she placed the postcard from the Samarkandi’s son. At Maryam’s insistence, Radwan had taken both the photograph and the card to a carpenter far away from Jalloum who made frames for them out of dark brown wood. I used to see Maryam dusting them carefully; Maryam who never woke up from her stupor. She exploited Radwan’s need for someone to write to the French perfume companies. Sworn to total secrecy, they conspired together without reaching any agreement. Maryam wrote a letter for him in Arabic and read it out to him while he remained silent, raising his face to the sky and shaking his head in dissatisfaction, adding a sentence here and cutting a sentence there. Then he would dictate a letter to Maryam, who wrote it down with fierce enthusiasm. Anyone watching them sitting together, arguing and raising their voices, would not have believed that this woman was Maryam and this man Radwan who shouted that this was his international career, that it was impossible to treat the letter lightly, and concluded by saying the French loved refinement in all things. Maryam tore up the paper and waited expectantly for Radwan’s next words. He calmed down, after remembering that he was the servant. He apologized and brooded for a while, then began to recite a poem from one of the mawalid still lodged in his mind; she reminded him that that wasn’t a letter to the French company. Radwan laughed and told her a story about the French man he had accompanied home in order to recite poetry to French women, as they sat half-naked on walnut sofas carved with the ninety-nine names of God. The man was open-handed and generous before returning Radwan to his bed in the Umayyad Mosque, with more than the requisite respect.

  Radwan resumed his consideration of the letter, and formulated the perfume Maryam requested of him in return. They swore an oath that his letter and her perfume would remain their greatest secret. They called on God to witness their agreement and even named it the Maryam–Radwan Accord, which Radwan shortened to the Man Accord. Maryam disliked this abbreviation, which drew attention to phrases she dreaded thinking about or referring to. She always insisted to me that the body was filthy and rebellious, and these words embedded themselves in me like an irrefutable truth. I began to guard myself against this rebellion named ‘body’; I obdurately hated my incipient breasts, their two brown nipples beginning to blossom. I hid them beneath cruel bras made for me by Maryam out of satin box-linings. Whenever my breasts broke free, I would touch them and feel their strange delectability.

  When I saw uninhibited girls undoing their bras and showing off their cleavage to the breeze and the sun in the small square, or for the titillation of the young men crowding around the entrances of the girls’ schools, I felt rage at their filth. I avoided looking at their gestures or listening to their conversations describing sexual positions both for men and women; girls would relate these tales with ardent enthusiasm, sometimes explicitly naming the body parts. Fatima was the boldest of these girls. She tried to be nice to me, but I shunned her obscene conversations and the smell of sweat emanating from her pores. I turned to the group surrounding another girl named Dalal and exchanged books with them.

  Dalal was sober and grave; she seemed, in her black clothes, to be our leader. Her orders were final, and delivered tersely and in a coarse voice. She dominated us, and we were happy to have a leader who wouldn’t hesitate to pull the hair of any girl who ridiculed our silence and our black clothes. Dalal said that women were animated dirt. Her own thoughts never came to her briefly or concisely, so she gabbled incoherently instead. I would nod, agreeing with everything in order to reach Paradise.

  * * *

  I arranged the room Maryam gave me in a style I will always try to recreate: the iron bedstead in the Mamluk style and the woollen mattress; the perfumed, snowy-white sheets; the small, ancient wooden table on which I placed an embroidered cloth to hide its battered scars; the chair carved with snakes and butterflies (I don’t know why its maker decided on such a combination). I would sit on the comfortable chair, lost in thought for hours at a time, alongside a wardrobe and a small shelf for my books. The most valuable of the furnishings was a small Persian carpet from my great-great-grandmother’s trousseau: it was my share of the valuable carpets that belonged to the women of the family. I loved the patterns on the carpet; I was so afraid of dragging my feet through it that I stretched it out and hung it on the wall. Maryam was pleased when she saw it hanging there. My room opened directly on to the courtyard and from the window I could see the radiant silver moonlight on the surface of the pool as I felt a chill seize me. I was powerfully drawn to this scene, and clung to every detail; it became my little world. I decorated the walls with the paintings I made during my period of silence, which continued until I lost any desire to speak at all.

  * * *

  After we returned from the hammam, my aunt Safaa would enter her room and bring out a bottle of perfume wrapped up in a gauzy nightshirt. She would take off her clothes, smear flowery cream all over her body and sprinkle it with perfume, before putting on the nightshirt and a Moroccan abaya over that to cover all traces of her charms, and returning to the living room. She didn’t help Maryam with dinner on Thursdays. We sat at the table in silence as Safaa got up and entered her room, not to emerge until morning. Maryam would open the Quran at Sura Yusuf and continue with her daily recitation until she rose with strict punctuality at ten o’clock and crept into bed. I never understood Safaa’s withdrawal every Thursday night until some years later, when we began to speak unreservedly about the men whom we had never seen, and the sweetness we had never tasted.

  * * *

  My grandmother abandoned the project of marrying off Maryam after she refused three suitors whose suitability and good looks my grandmother had spared no effort in talking up. Maryam would always enumerate their non-existent faults, grow resentful at these ‘suitors’ and then return to her room. As she took off her clothes a strange perfume would envelop her; the perfume which had settled in her pores. Every day, it emanated from her dreams and her body, while she lay in bed like a cold corpse waiting for salvation and the fever of a man. She tried to grasp its features in an attempt to describe the scent to Blind Radwan, who would listen in silence. He would go to his room and return bearing a blend of essences: camomile, anise, damask rose. He would mix them again the following day and present the blend to Maryam who would sniff it and then either hand it back or throw it into the bin, with no regard for his anger as he gibbered that what she had done was a denigration of his experience and perfumes. After this, recalling that she had written his letters to the French company and kept his secrets, and that she was in charge, he lowered his voice and listened to her description. Very slowly, word by word, she once again described the perfume that calmed her.

  After years of discussion and failed experiments, Maryam finally forgot about the perfume when Blind Radwan, with great daring and drawing heavily on the patience which it had taken him seven years to acquire, told her, ‘This is the scent of a man you love, not a perfume.’ Radwan also forgot about the French company after their curt reply asking him not to embarrass their public relations department, and declaring that what he had sent them was not a proper perfume at all, but a mere essence.

  Maryam read the letter out slowly and with conspicuous relish; she dwelled on certain words more than once, but she was saddened when she saw the betrayal etched on his face as if tears were about to gush from his eyes. She took his cold hand and nursed him with tactful words, trailing behind him when he went to his room, letter in hand and stumbling over the tiles, as if he had forgotten the position of the objects on the floor – his memories of a place he usually remembered by heart and in which he had never been mistaken had become confused. The letter, which no one other than Maryam read, remained as proof of the infidel West’s perfidy
with respect to genius, as Radwan angrily complained to his blind companions when he went to visit them in the Umayyad Mosque. He would bring them food and sweets which Maryam had made, walking confidently to the door of Sheikh Abdel Jaber who welcomed his friend and invited him to sit on the bed. In the courtyard of the mosque he cried out in a way that all the blind men recognized, and they all came to throng the room. They caught the scent of food and sweets, and did not mistake Radwan’s own scent – Radwan who, as a response to their singing an ode to the Prophet in welcome, thanked them for their princely reception and lauded them one after the other, replying to their sarcasm and jibes with great forbearance. They all crowded into the streets of the city, oblivious to the glances of passers-by fascinated by the scene of nine blind men whispering in eloquent Arabic, laughing loudly, or reciting love poetry and describing the faces of unknown women drawn from among the many worlds of humanity.

  * * *

  Something I didn’t know how to describe grew inside me and granted me a calm I had never known before. After paroxysms of anxiety and fears that caused me physical pain, and Maryam’s lessons about virginity and a body which must be braced for Hell on account of its sins, I felt that I was drawing ever nearer to a luminous image. Its features became clearer every day for a virgin believer who remained undefiled by any man other than the halal one who would arrive one day. I would sit by his side as an obedient servant, and acknowledge his guardianship over me. I would serve him as a slave and worship my lord so he would inspire me to be a virtuous captive. It was an image drawn for me by Maryam with painful precision as she quoted verses from the Quran, the Hadith of the Prophet and biographies of those pious Muslims whom she adored to the point of infatuation. I would sit on my chair opposite her and near the fountain once the summer evenings grew refreshingly cool, or close to her on the sofa during the winter nights, or clinging to her during Hajja Radia’s gatherings when her sweet voice responded to the beat of the tambourines and she sang about the life of Rabia Al Adawiya. Deep emotion would take hold of me and the rest of the women; tears would pour down our cheeks and we would sway like the slender branches of a poplar tree, embarking on a long journey whose roads opened up on to rivers of milk and honey, and the pleasure of absolute certainty. Hajja Radia would sing a nashid and the sound of the tambourines would embed itself in my pores.