The Aleppine world, in Khalifa’s telling, was changing. The rug business had slowed down—Persian and Kashmiri rugs were no longer coveted as they once were; and the old families were now coming into partnerships with the intelligence barons and the army officers. Those officers, now regulars in the posh restaurants, had become smugglers of electronics and foreign cigarettes. Sometimes they would feud among themselves over the distribution of the spoils, and gunshots would be heard, and then the presidential palace would intervene, and issue its binding commands. Peace would be restored, and the officers would return to the mistresses and the restaurants, marveling at the authority they had acquired. People trembled in their presence. “Thus did the city that was once a twin of Vienna become a desolate place, peopled by frightened ghosts. The sons of the old families had lost their influence and now grieved for the old world. They were forced to become in-laws of the sons of the countryside, joining them at backgammon, overlooking their crude ways.”

Intimations of the political loyalties of the narrator’s family come early in Khalifa’s story. A gathering is held in their home: there is a well-known religious preacher, and big merchants and industrialists, and a political man who had been a player in the post-independence governments, and men known for their membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, and an army officer, a Saudi, and a Yemeni in his mid-forties who sits in the middle of this gathering. The Yemeni is there for political reasons, but he is also a suitor of one of the aunts, whom he wants for his second wife, and finally he secures her hand in marriage. The Yemeni is a bottomless source of knowledge about Islamic parties, and about the martyrs who died in prisons or on the battlefield. The young narrator is hooked on his tales. She has real gifts for the sciences and was destined for medical school, but now this ruinous interest in politics and religion tugs at her. The Yemeni had been one of the leaders of the Marxists in Aden, but he had broken with his colleagues and taken to the road, and found a whole new political faith in Islam. This was the calling that had brought him to Bakr, the narrator’s devout uncle.

The Yemeni, it turns out, was bringing money to Bakr and his companions in the Muslim Brotherhood. And the narrator herself, this fine young woman, is drawn into the dark web. A girl her age with “cold eyes” is the leader of a cell that takes her in, and speaks to her of the moral corruption that has descended on the women in the city. Meanwhile, in front of the Umayyad Mosque, young men gather and head out to the forest close to the sea, as though on a picnic, to train in weapons and the martial arts. The narrator’s brother is one of these militants. In the textbooks that he passed on to her, she saw his obsessions: sketches of pistols and bombs. She ponders what he has scribbled in the margins: “spying on his dreams.” What he dreamed of was the day of retribution for the unbelievers. On the narrator’s seventeenth birthday, she thinks aloud to herself: “We need hatred to give meaning to our lives.”

Hatred is being drummed into her by the group of militants to which she belongs. One day her brother comes home with his shirt stained with blood. An air force officer with “green eyes,” a neighbor, had been killed, and her brother had committed the deed. The mukhabarat searches the neighborhood, her family home included. She contemplates her brother, once a silent boy, good at mathematics, now quietly putting his gun away and burning his bloodstained shirt. A wave of assassinations is taking place in the city, and so the commanders of the battalions of death are more careful in their movements. The narrator’s hatred momentarily lets go of her, but she is rebuked by the other girls, and reminded of the transgressions committed by the officers and their sect, who had turned the country into a big plantation of their own. And so she coldly shakes off the pity that she had felt for the murdered man and his family. Her uncle Bakr had made a fateful choice: he was the leader of a team responsible for assassinating men of the regime. He had “friends and allies in neighboring countries” who understood his cause, and wished to return the country to its “normal course,” and to punish the infidels and the ruling party who had thrown Syria into the camp of the communist powers.