Free In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa

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.
    Zahra sat opposite her mother in the salon of the Baron, ignoring the courteous gestures of the foreign men who had come looking for the primitive place Agatha Christie had once passed through, leaving the dust from her shoes on the floor. Zahra raised the black veil from her glowing, pure face, her dark eyes full of forgiveness. Both of them knew that there was not enough time for long reproaches, so they made do with crying and quickly came to understand one another. They left the hotel and went out into the crowded streets, bewildered, wrapped up in their eternal kinship.
    ‘We both needed a companion,’ Zahra explained to me, recollecting the few, tedious hours which had passed like heavy-footed ghosts on their way to the barzakh . Zahra told her mother that she was both a stranger, to the extent that she didn’t know her at all, and a close relative, to the extent that it was as if they had never been separated and the years that had passed were like a lie, a dream which had lasted only a few seconds. Any moment now Wasal would get up and go to the kitchen to add salt to the peas and then return to gather up the balls of coloured wool with which Zahra had been playing, just like any mother absorbed in her family. Dispassionately, Zahra formed cold, disciplined sentences, which she did not use to describe her sadness and excruciating pain at being a motherless child with a depressed father. She sketched for her mother a picture of Bakr as a loving husband and father. She talked at great length about my grandfather in order to defeat Wasal’s desire to see her grandchildren. She fielded questions cautiously and, before leaving her mother, she asked her to swear that she wouldn’t die in a brothel; an odd request, to which Wasal duly acceded. Zahra ended the conversation where it was supposed to begin. They exchanged addresses and hugged warmly in the manner of lovers who would never meet again.
    Wasal understood that everything between them had come to an end. A series of disclosures began across the cruel letters that Zahra would write in reply to Wasal’s repeated petitions for her to pronounce the word ‘mother’ just once, in any language she wanted. Zahra was troubled during that time. She sat beside Hajja Radia and didn’t care about the drumming tambourines, nor the religious lessons illustrating the influence of the mothers of the believers and the wisdom of the Prophet. They made us weep, amazed at Hajja Radia’s eloquence and the river of knowledge that engulfed our hearts, returning us once more to the certainty that filtered into our souls. Hajja Radia didn’t understand Zahra’s insistence on spending the equivalent value of her favourite expensive bracelet on food for poor families – until the letters started arriving punctually every Saturday. She handed them over without asking their origin after she made out the name of Zahra’s mother.
    A strange relationship had already sprung up between them. Hajja Radia was mother, sister and companion to Zahra, and their closeness frequently caused envy within their circle. This was especially true among those who considered their own powerful family connections with the most pious inhabitants of Aleppo as sufficient to warrant occupying the most exalted positions in their sessions, despite their chattering away without restraint about the price of gold, the fatwas issued by Ibn Malik, and women’s problems. The relationship between Zahra and Hajja Radia was the subject of much speculation. Khalil accepted it without objection and