In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa Page A

repeatedly changed their orders, enjoying the servility of the restaurant owners who complied with their requests and apologized for the bad service.
    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