by Abdo Khal
* * *
Ibrahim and I came from the same wellspring, although we were born of two different women. While we were sown in radically different soils, we mirrored one another. From earliest childhood, the mosque had captured Ibrahim’s heart. He spent most of his time there, diligently engrossed in prayer or memorising the Qur’an, which of course won him favour in our father’s eyes. The disparity in our conduct was so great that not only was it immediately visible but it also became proverbial. One of the older men in the neighbourhood coined his own phrase to express the dramatic difference between us: ‘Tariq and Ibrahim come from the same water – one is a stinking lech and the other a paragon of virtue.’
After Ibrahim suggested I should attend a religious study group at the mosque, I readily agreed because I really did want to cleanse myself and come closer to God. We gathered in a circle around the sheikh who led the study group and who, fixing his disapproving gaze on me, preached about how homosexuality and fornication were unanimously condemned by all religious traditions. He stared into my face, enunciating his words slowly, keeping his jaws tightly clenched.
‘Only those who abandon the way of sin are truly repentant for the days they have squandered.’ He looked straight into my eyes as he added, ‘I believe some of you truly regret the grave offences you have committed and that have angered the Merciful.’ He paused for effect. ‘But not all sins are created equal. The sins of some among us today are enough to shake the very throne of the Creator. And I submit to you that a dog’s crooked tail can never be straightened.’ He paused again and then added for good measure, ‘Never – even if he enters the mosque and sits among us.’
At that point, he broke from his formal sermonising tone into a vulgar vernacular as he recounted the rumours about the three of us – Issa, Osama and me – without naming any names.
That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I started to heckle him and jeered at his vulgarity until, after several interruptions, he threw me out.
First impressions are indelible. A sinner who tries to redeem himself faces a bar that is always set that much higher, always just out of reach. I went from one study group to another and listened to a succession of speakers expounding on the nature of sin, ruminating on the subject like some pre-digested and regurgitated fodder. Like cardamom whose seeds are ground to a powder while the pod resists pulverisation, our transgressions were excoriated but we emerged unscathed.
Eager to support my search for guidance, Ibrahim accompanied me to religious lectures at various mosques. On one such occasion, the officiating imam gave a sermon after the evening prayer on the life of the Islamic scholar, Sufyan al-Thawri, a deeply flawed man who had also needed guidance. The imam focused on the error of al-Thawri’s ways but made almost no reference to his legacy.
Time and again, preachers would cite the Hadith to demonstrate that man was able to overcome sinfulness through rectitude. However, they only ever emphasised the wrongdoing and not the good deeds. Human beings, including prophets, do not appreciate being singled out only for their errors and weaknesses.
During another deadening study group, and maybe by way of providing material for gossip, the sheikh enumerated all the errors and sins of the prophets. He had found enough material for an entire series of sermons and he developed the theme at various sessions after evening prayers. I went along with this until he got to the sinfulness of the venerable prophet Jonah, at which point I decided I could not stand another minute of this stupid, bullying nonsense. I got up to leave, convinced that my struggle to turn over a new leaf was in vain; I had already started to believe that I would never be able to put my own sinfulness behind me, just as an apple could never fall upwards.
Whenever she saw me getting ready to go and attend prayers or the study groups at the mosque, Aunt Khayriyyah would mutter, ‘You won’t be doing this for long. There is a streak of wickedness in you.’
The mosque circuit did not last more than a few months, after which I was back to my old tricks. Only Ibrahim and Tahani were sorry to see me give up on the mosque.
The downturn began with a nocturnal adventure with Mona, one of the three women who had stalked me after the scandal with Souad. I was on my way to the mosque when she burst out of her house, her cleavage openly showing, and asked me to come in and repair a faulty fuse in her bedroom. Her husband was away on a mission for the health directorate to vaccinate residents of coastal villages against meningitis.
I had many subsequent opportunities to sneak in to repair her bedroom light, though the lamp remained broken long after her husband’s return.
* * *
All these decades later, I have come to feel sorry about my lapse, now that my strength has been sapped and I stagger behind Ibrahim like a stone rolling down a precipice.
My work at the Palace did not brook a moral conscience. Regardless of the job, the mere fact of working there required the suspension of any kind of moral standard. The only way to get a return on one’s investment from working inside the Palace was to disregard the values that existed on the outside. That is why I embraced every forbidden pleasure, convinced that my destiny lay in only one direction, that of hell.
I occasionally managed to shake off this despondency by bringing to mind conversations with Ibrahim.
‘What happens when you trip up?’ he once asked me. ‘Do you stay on the ground or do you get up?’ I did not feel like talking, so he answered for me. ‘You get up, dust yourself off and keep going.’ He added earnestly, ‘That’s what living is all about – you fall, you get back on your feet, you clean up and you get on with your life.’
He reminded me that God loves the return of sinners to his side, and quoted the Qur’anic verse: ‘Oh my servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of God’s mercy. God forgives all sins: He is All-Forgiving, Compassionate to each.’
Even though I often went to Mecca on work-related business, it took me thirty-one years to summon up the courage to set foot inside the Mosque of the Holy Sanctuary.
On my way into and out of the city, I would drive by the gates of the Sanctuary and pause to watch the pilgrims as they picked their way among all the cars. I envied their serene faces, subdued voices and their general air of contentment. I would look up at the lofty minarets that broadcast the call to prayer, a balm to the worshippers’ hearts that dislodged any build-up of sediment and decay corroding their spirits. The faithful responded to the call feeling as secure as the pigeons who had made the Kaaba their home.
There have been many times when I decided to return to the fold – and equally many when I recoiled from the very thought. Nothing could pull me away from the darkness that had descended on my soul so long ago.
* * *
Left to my own devices on the streets, my day would really only start at around ten o’clock in the evening. I would roam the narrow alleyways to hang out with the drunks and listen to them rant about their woes, to look for someone to play balut, and to ogle the neighbours’ daughters. (This particularly angered Tahani who got wind of what I was up to from those girls who knew about our relationship.)
I also chased the boys we all lusted after. I undertook many a crowing exploit and Lu’ayy was the exception that proved the rule. He was the little creep who nearly landed me in jail. His father showed up at the police station charging that I had molested his son. My life could have taken a dramatically different course had it not been for the apathetic officer who registered the complaint.
Seeing that the process was going nowhere, Lu’ayy’s father moved his family out of town before I could hammer his son. It was a valuable lesson for me: from that day, I realised that the children of the well-to-do were a real nuisance to those of us bent on the pursuit of cheap pleasures.
After I was done cruising, I would stop by a grocery store in one of the dodgier parts of the neighbourhood, where a solitary lamp cast a ghostly light on a deserted and narrow alley.
Mustafa Qannas would e
merge from the alleyway under the cover of darkness, trudging heavily, mumbling incoherently and humming a little ditty that seemed directed at me:
‘Pretty boy’s gone away, gone, gone pretty boy.
Kith and kin drool over him, but he’s afraid of strangers.
In her lap his mama holds him, and her heart I swear
will break.
’Cos I will hold him like lovers do, like lovers do.’
Mustafa would offer me some of his revolting moonshine and I would oblige by pretending to take a few sips. He was about ten years older than me and, in his mid-twenties, was already thinking of settling down. But his wretched state and notorious reputation barred him from every door. Consequently, he spent all his time chasing after boys whom he wooed with this kind of banter.
He took the departure of Lu’ayy very badly and channelled his longing for the boy by reciting snatches of poetry. Sometimes he accompanied the words by plucking on an Arabian lyre – a simsimiyya – whose slack strings he was forever tightening. He had made the simsimiyya himself and it simply would not stay in tune.
He held me responsible for his misery after Lu’ayy was gone from the neighbourhood. When, at the height of his intoxication, Mustafa would start to slap his head with both hands and begin to wail, I would hurry away. I knew better than to stay around after he warned me once, dead sober, ‘If I find you anywhere near me when I start crying, I’m going to kill you.’
My father criticised me endlessly for keeping the company of drunks and often came looking for me in the middle of the night. If he happened to find me, he would grab me by the hair and drag me behind him like a rag doll without uttering a word – his iron grip conveying all I needed to know about the feelings roiling inside him.
As he dragged me through the alleyways, I had visions of knives being honed and waiting to spill my blood. Every time he found me in the middle of the night, I could swear he was going to kill me. But as soon as we got home, he would fling me in my aunt’s face, muttering, ‘Tie him up somewhere near you. I’ll take care of him in the morning.’
Having been roused against his will, he would go straight back to bed and fall asleep. Since he was always out of the door at dawn, he would leave the house before making good on his threat.
* * *
The geography of our house changed radically with the sudden decline in our numbers. Soon, no one was left but the desiccated and vitriolic Aunt Khayriyyah.
To her, I was like mould encrusted in her drinking cup that she could not dislodge. She despised me and would say I was a ‘stinking egg destined for a heap of rotting rubbish’.
She would hurl insults at me whenever she ran out of patience, and justified her outbursts by claiming she was only trying to mend my wicked ways. She loudly lamented that my father’s lineage had not ended before I came on the scene.
Aunt Khayriyyah would rack her brain to find some defective strain that had entered her lineage, adamant that it was impossible I issued from the noble line of men in her family. She kept on with her insinuations until she got to my maternal grandmother’s questionable chastity. This doubt was based on a murky rumour, whispered by the women of the family, each iteration of which added a lurid detail. In the final version of the tale, my grandmother was alleged to have brought a lover into her bed during one of her husband’s absences and, by his return, her belly was already swollen from the infidelity.
Aunt Khayriyyah had no evidence for any of this, apart from the stories spread by family members. She was nevertheless convinced that my maternal grandmother Saniyya had desecrated her own, once pristine lineage. Since Saniyya’s womb was polluted by some impure sap, my parents’ marriage meant my aunt’s lineage was now tainted.
As a result, our family had split into two rival and hostile branches. According to Aunt Khayriyyah, the first, of pure lineage, was dedicated to the mercantile trades, while the other was defiled by whatever parasitic seed had stuck to and then spewed out of Saniyya’s womb.
Aunt Khayriyyah could not help yearning for her origins despite being cut off from them for all those years; she could not get over the circumstances that had compelled her to live with her only brother and his sullied wife. She claimed my father had been lured in by my mother’s scheming ways and, in marrying her, had violated the purity of stock so prized by the family.
Their union was an historic mistake and she was unable to forgive my father on two counts: first, for having forced her to leave the family, which prized purity of lineage above all else, and second, for recklessly associating with the filth that was my mother, thereby tainting his own lineage. As far as Aunt Khayriyyah was concerned, my mother followed in her own mother’s footsteps in her indiscriminate and insatiable appetite for semen.
Her suspicion that I was evidence of that rotten seed clinging to her brother was confirmed once she and I were the only two people left in the house. After my father’s death, my mother remarried, taking for a new husband her first cousin on Saniyya’s side.
As talk of family history was on everyone’s lips, I came to learn that my mother had twice stood in the way of Aunt Khayriyyah getting married, condemning her to spinsterhood for the rest of her life. Her first potential suitor had been my mother’s own brother. She managed to put him off from the start with descriptions of her sister-in-law’s fulminating mouth and rank armpits.
The second budding suitor was a man of no fixed abode who was looking for a woman to take him in. In this case and perhaps overplaying her hand, my mother had accused my father of being so insensitive as to throw his sister into the jaws of a passing stranger. So my father ended up showing him the door.
That was how Aunt Khayriyyah came to harbour the well of venom and vitriol towards my mother.
7
My father was considered one of Jeddah’s master builders. Even though he used traditional methods to calculate measurements, he rarely made mistakes. He was meticulous to a fault and would not tolerate assistants who strayed, however modestly, from his designs. He had a knack for erecting houses that were in perfect alignment and was adept at designing architectural plans that were still unknown when he was growing up in Jeddah.
He was inspired by the Hajj and Umrah pilgrims who came from foreign lands. He would ask the visitors what they did for a living and, whenever he came across fellow builders, he would sit them down and enquire about the sorts of buildings they had in their country, providing pen and paper for their architectural sketches.
Before long, he distinguished himself as a builder and his reputation grew. He had wanted me to succeed him in the trade, but I would just run off on the pretext that I had to study. When, instead, he found me wandering the alleys aimlessly, he wasted no time in telling me what I should be doing.
He had three permanent wives, in addition to several fleeting consorts, and the responsibility of generating enough income to feed all those mouths weighed heavily on him.
On the nights he was scheduled to spend with my mother, he would arrive at sunset and fall asleep at the dinner table, right in the middle of the meal. He refused to get out of his seat and go and lie down for fear that he would no longer be drowsy. So he remained wherever sleep overcame him, which meant that my mother also had to sleep wherever he happened to have drifted off. To avoid being in full view of the rest of the household while sleeping and scantily clad, my mother hit upon the strategy of ushering him into their bedroom as soon as he came home. This, of course, further fuelled Aunt Khayriyyah’s resentment and she began to accuse my mother of deliberately keeping her brother away from her and of monopolising him, body and soul.
As I grew older, I began to suspect that my father had reached the point where he could not bear to stay with us because of my aunt’s relentless screeching. She complained to him about my waywardness, about my mother’s laxity with me and about her need for more housekeeping money. She hectored him about doing more for his relatives and lectured him on ways to increase his income and take better care of her in
terests, which she accused him of neglecting. Perhaps it was this constant nagging that precipitated his drowsiness and that gave rise to his unusual sleeping habits. By daybreak, he would be gone, leaving at the crack of dawn, as might be expected of a master builder who oversaw every last detail on his work site.
However, with the advent of modern construction, my father went from being a master builder to a mere foreman. Occasionally, when the project engineer was absent, he had the audacity to alter designs as he saw fit. He lost a good deal of standing among the workers as a result because whenever the engineer returned to the site and ordered the removal of the innovations – naturally, at my father’s expense – the work had to be done all over again.
He felt diminished in this subordinate capacity and resented having to comply with engineers’ instructions.
One fateful afternoon, he thought he had discovered an error in the pillar and beam supports of a roof structure he was working on. He wanted to verify his hunch before the engineer in charge discovered the mistake and became angry with him. Using his foot as a measure, he extended his leg beyond the ledge.
At that moment he lost his balance and, before he could pull his leg back to the solid surface of the roof, he fell off the scaffolding and ended up in a pool of blood.
He would never climb another scaffolding again or have to face the consequences of tweaking engineers’ plans. For that matter, he would also never have to hear his sister’s squawking. After a month on an artificial respirator, his lungs finally collapsed and the machine released him from this life.
I did not love him, nor did I hate him. As far as I was concerned, he was a low-maintenance guest – he came home in the evening, went to sleep and left quietly at dawn.
The sum total of his worldly legacy added up to two sons and one daughter. The daughter was born to his last wife, a week before his demise, and I had never met her. The three of us were left with nothing that might remind us of our father. We had little in common with each other, did not live together and each kept to their own.