Throwing Sparks

by Abdo Khal

  * * *

  The year before my father’s accident had been the year of Egyptian soaps. Summer was upon us with its sticky heat and people everywhere were climbing up on to rooftops to adjust their television antennas or to wire satellite dishes. Soap operas from Egyptian channels were all the rage, and the installation of powerful receivers guaranteed improved reception. Egyptian programming was of particular interest to the neighbourhood women, who at social gatherings vied with one another to relay the latest twists and turns in the dramatic serials and to mimic the dance moves of the Egyptian celebrity, Sherihan.

  My aunt and mother were no different and decided our antenna needed adjusting. I had told them I could not do it because I was on my way to a shakshaka, where Hijazi men gathered to sing and dance. I was not inclined to waste my time on something as trivial as Egyptian television.

  On my way to the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, I heard the two of them draw straws. They both agreed that the loser would fetch the ladder, prop it up against the inner wall of the courtyard and climb up on to the roof, while the winner would stand below holding the ladder in place. Aunt Khayriyyah lost and then proceeded to contest the draw, saying that there had to be three consecutive draws and that only the third one was decisive. By the third draw, the result was reversed and all my aunt had to do now was hold the ladder.

  As I washed in the bathroom, I could hear my mother shouting down from the roof, ‘Is the picture coming in clearly now?’

  ‘No, not quite,’ Aunt Khayriyyah shouted back. ‘A little more to the left. No, no. Wait. Move it to the right.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Yes, yes, hold it there. That’s it. OK, done!’

  I stepped out of the bathroom as my mother grabbed hold of the ladder to come down from the roof. Just as her hands reached the top rung, I could swear I saw my aunt pull the ladder away from the wall. For a moment, my mother remained suspended in mid-air but by the time she fell to the ground, blood was gushing from her mouth.

  My mother had bitten her tongue so badly that a large portion of it had been sliced off.

  * * *

  Until his own fall, a year later, my father only ever came to the house to fulfil the moral and religious obligation of treating his wives equally. He typically spent his time holding forth as my mother responded with a nod or a shake of the head. I suspected that she waited until he was out of sight to open the floodgates and let flow the tears that had dammed up within.

  As soon as my father would come in, barbed words began flying out of my aunt’s mouth.

  ‘So who is going to look after the mule now?’ she asked him shortly after my mother’s accident.

  He asked whether she meant my mother or me. ‘Haven’t you done enough to her?’ he went on, his voice dropping.

  ‘Me?’ Aunt Khayriyyah was beside herself with rage at the insinuation. ‘I have done nothing to her! She fell all by herself!’

  Hoping somehow to reattach her tongue fragment, my mother stored it in the freezer. Without her knowing, I would watch her bring the mirror up close to her face and try to fasten the severed portion she held between her thumb and index finger. It invariably slithered out of her grasp. When it fell on the floor, she would snatch it up and, cradling it as if it were a nursing infant, run crying to rinse it off in the sink. She would do this over and over again, but it fell every time.

  One day, the fragment was not in its usual place: she searched for it frantically, emptying the freezer, to no avail.

  I knew it was lost for ever. Earlier in the day, I had seen Aunt Khayriyyah reaching into the freezer and tossing something at a famished cat that had wandered into the house meowing for something to eat. I had watched, transfixed, as the cat set to licking the tasty morsel and batting it between its paws.

  Having just fed it something, my aunt half-heartedly attempted to part it from its quarry. ‘Beess, beess, beess,’ she called out to it softly and the animal bolted out of the house with the morsel between its jaws.

  The cat had got her tongue.

  From then on, whenever my father was staying with one of his other wives, my mother would sit alone and practise enunciating clearly since everything she said had become mangled and unintelligible. She made valiant attempts to say my father’s name, but failed after repeated efforts. She buried her head in her pillow and sobbed with frustration.

  She avoided going out of the house and stopped calling on her neighbours. She resigned herself to doing housework – cooking, cleaning and spinning wool. Since my mother was unable to entertain her neighbours, Aunt Khayriyyah had ample opportunity to bad-mouth her; she would describe my mother as a cripple who did nothing all day but lie in bed and stammer like an imbecile.

  My aunt spent her evenings glued to the television, chuckling at her own imitation of the announcers’ Egyptian accents.

  Tahani would stand behind the latticed window, with the lights off, waiting for me. We exchanged glances and softly whispered words throughout the evening until she would let me in after her family had gone to bed. I would spend the entire time pressed up against her. If we heard a noise or the sound of footsteps in the street that we thought might awaken someone in the house, I would dash out the door as she pretended to be tossing rubbish out of her window on to the alleyway below.

  Although it is now buried in the furthest recesses of my memory, I remember that last, terrible night as if it were yesterday. It had started out quietly enough but the ogre was tired of lying in the shadows and it bolted into the light and set the universe ablaze.

  Those with a particularly sensitive disposition suffer a lifetime of torment because a star continues to burn brightly despite the ashes and smoke of its dying embers. Stars are like that: they continue to burn even after they collapse.

  Tahani would be my eternal star.

  The night I stole her virginity, the ogre stole my life. It wrenched her life away, and mine with hers.

  * * *

  The rich and powerful men who milled around the Palace were afflicted with a sickness of their own. Their clothes were spotlessly white but their blood roiled with greed and excess, and their tongues became vicious if anything got in the way of their instant gratification. Moody and capricious, they were forever seeking new thrills, which quickly bored them. They were jaded and dissolute since nothing could make them happy. They had no purpose in life and were as impulsive as they were aimless. Whenever they spoke, such jumbled nonsense would spew out of their mouths that they sounded like madmen.

  Some had grown effeminate in their search for ever more pleasure, especially if they happened to have been on the receiving end of the abuse I meted out to satisfy the Master. Instead of resenting me, they sought me out, and I could not get away from them. These were men whose virility was on the wane and who were willing to indulge in perversion to satisfy their thirst for carnal pleasure.

  During the early years at the Palace, I was like the tethered ram in Aunt Khayriyyah’s pen. But rather than slithering on ewes, my job was to service the other rams before they had a chance to wander out of the pen. My role at the Palace was to be the prized stud on call.

  Many acts of debauchery were committed on the backs of men who, outside the Palace walls, were highly regarded members of society. Some of them begged for deliverance from my rearing over their backs, but the afflicted ones sought me out afterwards so that I could minister to their shameful disease.

  Dr Bannan did not set much store by what he called ‘primary feelings’. He held that they were akin to the infantile phase of ‘discovering the world’ – when the first stirrings of desire are cloaked in the garments of the woman in our life and to whom we ascribe feelings of love.

  ‘People don’t know this,’ he declared monotonously, ‘but underneath the blazing embers, there is nothing but darkness.’ He nodded as he brought to mind a whole list of hackneyed aphorisms. ‘Life is like that – today’s brightness is yesterday’s darkness. The past is the only darkness we can traverse ungu
arded and unescorted.’

  His pronouncement was made in the course of one of the rambling monologues he launched into whenever the Master was bored with him and he had nothing better to do than coin pithy sayings that no one listened to. Whenever the Master’s attention was turned away, Dr Bannan was like a dog, lying prostrate at his owner’s feet, panting eagerly and awaiting his next command.

  But then we were all begging and panting dogs at the Palace. As soon as we had completed our respective duties, we rushed back to lie at the Master’s feet and looked up into his face adoringly, in anticipation of the next command.

  From the time he first set foot in the Palace, Issa’s role was to take care of the Master’s family affairs, while Osama and I were engaged in that other line of work, that is punishing his rivals.

  Osama and I were bound together not only by a shared youth and job at the Palace, but also by our feelings for Tahani. The hostility between us remained constant; however much our paths diverged, we were inexorably drawn back to each other by our rivalry over Tahani.

  One night, Osama was particularly disaffected with life inside the Palace and wanted to talk about our youth: the first – and less antagonistic – of the ties that bound us together. Leaning towards me, he whispered, ‘Who will give us back our innocence?’

  I lent Osama my ear but kept my eyes open for any sign or gesture from the Master.

  He kept whispering to me. ‘Aren’t you tired of all this depravity?’

  It was like a barb aimed at my heart.

  In life, the further we go, the dirtier we get. With every breach we cross, our spirit is sullied incrementally by the inherent squalor of existence. Driven by our basest instincts, we inevitably turn into a fetid pile of rubbish.

  Only the spirits of our nearest and dearest, embedded in us like a seed in soil, keep us vaguely human.

  Tahani was a seed that had divided into two: half was sown in me and, after I tended her with unholy water, she became pure spirit while I was left to wallow in her wake. The other half was sown in Osama’s soul and withered there, laying bare his venomous nature.

  8

  The play of light and shadow is life’s adroit game. There are two competing and contrasting aspects to everything, the two faces of a coin. Life goes back and forth between them, and the choices we make determine the rules of the game. The hand of fate conceals the coin and we pick either heads or tails. When the hand reveals the result of our choice, our attention is always on the coin, never on the hand that put us before the quandary in the first place.

  In that instant, our senses can feel the sweet thrill of victory or the disappointment of defeat. That is the illusion of freedom of choice: choosing, like falling, is just a momentary feeling to which we are captive. It erases nothing – on the contrary, it is part and parcel of a preordained destiny. No one journeys through life choosing his fate.

  On my first night at the Palace, the Master organised an evening worthy of an obscene wedding night. Like a butcher bleeding the animal he slaughters to safeguard his professional reputation, I had to consume vast quantities of alcohol to get through it.

  During the rainy season, the sky glinted with every shade of grey, a sure and unmistakable sign that the earth would soon receive a downpour. On that night, it never crossed my mind that I would be raining into rank and stagnant crevices for many seasons to come.

  That night, I had blood on my hands twice, and was entreated to show mercy twice. But it was the first voice that would always haunt me. Wherever I went, I heard Tahani begging, ‘Spare me, because I love you.’

  A woman never forgets the first man who treads her virgin pastures and stains her purity with the blood of her maidenhead. Men, on the other hand, are marauders who cannot even remember where they have planted their stakes. They only care to discharge their sap on to any soil that comes their way – fertile or barren – unrelentingly, persistently and incessantly.

  * * *

  Samira and Tahani were two of the neighbourhood’s loveliest young roses and they had a bevy of suitors competing for their attention. The rivalries to win their hearts sometimes led to fights and although our friends and relatives tried to find out what was fuelling our animosity, they never succeeded. Eventually Kamal Abu Aydah and I emerged the victors, as the neighbourhood would attest even to this day.

  But our victories proved pyrrhic.

  The young Samira was married off to the wretched petty thief, Abu Musharrat, even though she loved Kamal. The ‘Slasher’, as he was called, had spent a lifetime planting his manhood between the thighs of African women who were grateful for any amount of money that might relieve the daily grind of their lives.

  He was nicknamed the Slasher on account of the unsheathed blade he carried everywhere. Abu Musharrat would plunge the blade into any hapless stranger who happened to be wandering about the neighbourhood. After stripping his victims clean, he would vanish into the narrow and winding lanes.

  Abu Musharrat had spent sixty years pilfering and drifting about, and now that he was not far from the grave, he was desperate for someone to shed a few tears over his deathbed. Although Samira had always called him ‘uncle’ out of respect, her reserve and circumspection could not shield her from being shamelessly undressed by his beady old eyes. Before giving up the ghost, he wanted to feast one last time on ripe and ever so appetising fruit.

  He approached the family with an engagement proposal tailored to Samira’s father’s grasping heart and, after his offer was accepted, the news quickly spread across the neighbourhood.

  There was no one to stand in the way of Samira’s fate, especially not Kamal, who certainly could never have proposed a dowry to rival the small fortune Abu Musharrat had paid for the girl. In order to savour the pleasure of divesting Samira of her maidenhead, the Slasher had handed a lifetime of loot to her father, who then enjoined his daughter to seal the deal.

  Samira’s wedding was held at daybreak. The girl made her way to the bridal chamber, her footsteps stumbling to the beat of the drummer-women, followed raptly by the female witnesses tasked with verifying the breaking of her hymen.

  Limp as he was, the obligatory ululations of joy were far from guaranteed. One of the witnesses came to his rescue and, whispering furtively in Abu Musharrat’s ear, was presently rewarded with the child-bride’s shrieking cries for help.

  The Slasher had plunged his thumb inside her and extracted a few rosy drops of blood. In possession of the requisite blood-stained white handkerchief, the witness stepped outside holding Samira’s honour aloft and broke the silence of the gathered women with a zaghrouta.

  The women soon dispersed, satisfied. Samira’s parents celebrated their daughter’s chastity as well as their good fortune. In addition to the dowry and all the gifts for the bride’s relatives, they had received a sizeable pot of trust money. However, little could anyone suspect that the young girl’s fate had been sealed by that marauding thumb.

  Within a couple of nights, her body was racked with fever from a lingering case of leprosy that Abu Musharrat had picked up in Ethiopia. After being dutifully infected by her husband, the young bride ended her days at King Fahd General Hospital after less than a fortnight at the old man’s home.

  Since Abu Musharrat had not disclosed his infection, the attending doctor cited the cause of death as septicaemia. But the Slasher knew the truth and, shortly after Samira’s demise, he revealed the secret from his deathbed when his turn came to face his Maker. Following the disclosure, however, people could not decide whether to believe him or the doctor.

  Samira’s death provoked all sorts of talk around the neighbourhood. Some women claimed that she had never had the chance to make good on her oath to kill herself rather than be married off to Abu Musharrat; others felt that, on the contrary, she had in fact kept her word, albeit after the fact.

  Despite Abu Musharrat’s dying confession about his leprosy and infecting Samira, most of the men of the neighbourhood still chose to believe that she ha
d died from blood poisoning, overruling the women.

  However, everyone could agree on one thing at least: not a soul shed a single tear over Abu Musharrat’s deathbed.

  * * *

  I was almost nineteen and it was not clear what my future held, if even I had a future. While I had been accepted to university, I had no idea what to study. I was uncertain and felt nothing but confusion.

  In the event, the hand of fate would show me the way, would reveal the result of the tossed coin, in the shape of Issa Radini. He obliged happily when, later, I would need someone to gather up my remains, carry them to the nearest dump and dispose of them without another thought.

  Issa was visiting the Firepit as news of Samira’s death spread through the neighbourhood. His new luxury German car attracted swarms of boys who gathered in the litter-strewn, narrow lanes to admire the vehicle and marvel at the plush interior. Issa gave a boy five riyals to go and fetch me but when I arrived he held me at arm’s distance instead of reciprocating my embrace.

  His appearance had changed radically since I had last seen him. At wedding banquets when guests dress up for the occasion, Issa used to arrive wearing a garish, synthetic sarong and a sweat-soaked tank top. His scruffy appearance would be completed by a speckled shawl thrown over his shoulders, ostensibly to hide the sweat marks and dark stains around the armpits, neck and back. The shawl somehow matched the striped keffiyeh which on Issa’s head would gather into a cone lying askew. He would wear traditional Hijazi shoes, whose thick straps caused him to trip often as he waded, almost ankle-deep, through the rubbish on the streets. In those days, that was the extent of his sartorial sense.

  His appearance did not cramp his style in the least. In fact, his modest attire had endeared him to the local gangs of boys. He was like a ragged rooster flapping its wings nonchalantly as it pecked about the coop.

  After he started working at the Palace, however, he acquired a polished attire and an elegance that extended even to the way he spoke. Issa had taken on the high diction of the central region of the country, the Najd.