by Abdo Khal
I needed a few moments to recover myself, but with the threat of being administered my own medicine by the two Africans, I quickly complied, following the directions of the cameraman who seemed experienced at filming such scenes. He asked me to repeat several moves as if he were producing a film to be entered into some competition.
That night I was overcome with disgust at what I had been doing all these years in the dark alleyways of the neighbourhood. I had abused many young boys, completely indifferent to their suffering, and here I was about to get a taste of my own medicine. Even though I had engaged in countless acts of sodomy, I felt as if it were I who was being raped – that I was the one vainly begging for mercy.
* * *
I learned that my position at the Palace was an important one and that I was replacing someone whose ‘flame’ had gone out and who had served the first Master – Sayyid al-kabeer – in the same capacity. All indications were that the old-timer, Uncle Muhammad, was the retired punisher. I yearned to verify this but it was many years before the opportunity presented itself – or, to be honest, before I summoned up the courage to ask Uncle Muhammad directly.
Life inside the high Palace walls was something else entirely. Principles and values had no place there; we espoused whatever values the moment dictated, whichever ones best suited the Master’s mood.
Whether it was an inability to say ‘no’ or inherent depravity, it took me many years to understand fully the extent of my debauchery. Worldly pleasures are worthless when we do not choose them ourselves. In my view, that is the reason for boredom. The Palace devotees thought otherwise, however. Their hedonism knew no limits and they were forever searching for some new form of gratification – turning to perversion if all else failed. Perverts and deviants are basically motivated by boredom: tired of what is socially acceptable, they seek whatever is novel or uncommon to break the monotony of routine pleasures.
The Master was so jaded that he had a special reward for anyone who could entice him with a new distraction. He had grown disconsolate about most worldly pleasures and felt there were no carnal delights left for him to experience. He enjoyed mutilating servants as much as he delighted in trading jokes with his brother or bringing in dancing-girls and singers from far-flung places. He also indulged in several marriages to celebrities, pretty news anchorwomen and the like, and frequented the world’s biggest casinos. Watching his rivals being sodomised was his latest thrill.
On my very first night at the Palace, before I had even met the Master, Uncle Muhammad had taken me aside and said, ‘Mark my words – don’t hang around here too long.’
I was sitting, waiting to be shown in, when he offered me a cup of coffee in the traditional manner: bowing, as he had done faithfully for the first Master of the Palace. He poured the coffee ceremoniously into my cup and accompanied his cascading gesture with a small torrent of words that I did not fully grasp at the time.
‘You’ll get singed,’ he warned, ‘like a moth dancing too close to a flame. To the high and mighty of these halls, we’re just a temporary convenience. Just like a tissue for a snotty nose, you’ll be discarded soon after use.’ When I responded with silence, he reminded me that money was the root of all evil.
A life of destitution is holier than anything I encountered at the Palace, where nothing was sacred and everything permissible. Without limits to freedom and nothing to push against or to hold us back, freedom is meaningless. I learned late in life that without obstacles or barriers, freedom is a mirage.
* * *
On Friday evenings, Aunt Khayriyyah would sit behind her lattice-screen window hoping for a little breeze to dry off her weekly henna application. Whenever she caught sight of me hanging around aimlessly on the street, she would launch into her usual vituperation. ‘Mind you don’t scrape that rear-end of yours sitting in the dirt!’
We thought we would die, as we had lived, drowning in rubbish. The filthy neighbourhood was a Babel of residents who hailed from every corner of the earth and who trickled into the streets every Thursday night like cheap dye that stains everything.
Only one area of the neighbourhood had retained any social cohesion and was still inhabited by the original settlers. The other districts were populated by more recent arrivals, a motley collection of people from the southern part of the country – the Ghamad, the Zahharis, the Qahtanis, the Shahranis, the ’Asiris, the Yamis, the Jazzanis – and a hodge-podge of Bedu from outlying desert areas. There were also expatriate communities of Yemenis, Levantine Arabs, Egyptians, Sudanese, Somalis and Eritreans, as well as Indians, Afghans, Indonesians, Chadians, Chinese and Kurds, and Bokhari Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz who had fled the hell-hole of the Soviet Union.
Catapulted together, this multifarious assemblage of humanity spread deep into the neighbourhood, sharing the daily grind of life all the while dreaming of escape. Soon, it was no longer enough to say that you lived in the Firepit because dozens of smaller contiguous neighbourhoods had sprung up that were named after some event or community. The Firepit had its own elusive history, one that its inhabitants had colluded in writing. Every event in that history – good or bad – could be attributed to someone who lived there.
The Hadhramis from Yemen were the most numerous and were well-regarded by the wider community. The next largest group were the Africans, mostly Somalis, Chadians and Nigerians who were known for their unflagging vigour and unrepentant licentiousness. No one, whether newcomers or long-established residents, was interested in further classifying the residents of the neighbourhood.
The award for manliness would go to whoever took on one of the Africans. If you backed down from the contest, your friends would consider you a coward and it was then best to make yourself scarce and not stray too far from home.
That was a life lesson that I learned early on. I had lain in wait for the least spirited among the African boys and assaulted him right in front of his peers. I laid into him and did not back off until I had secured my reputation as a tough guy.
We did such twisted things in the alleyways that we were often shunned and sometimes beaten by elders in the community who hoped to reform us. In their view, our actions were beyond the pale, and this only drove us to greater secretiveness.
Our depravity exposed us to imprisonment, banishment or a thrashing at the very least. It was like a red light. The opposite was true at the Palace, where no vile act committed within its towering walls would ever be exposed.
* * *
The Palace comprised two distinct wings: one for the Master’s family, including a retinue of nannies and concubines, and the other for guests. The two areas were not completely separate since various structures within the compound were common to both, notably the halls, foyers, lounges, gardens and recreational areas.
Only a handful of people ventured into the wing that housed members of the Master’s family, foremost among whom was Issa. He was responsible for seeing to the requirements and needs of the women. It was rare to have any news of that side of the Palace and no one knew exactly the connections between the Master and the various women who emerged from a door deep inside.
The women were assigned chauffeurs from a host of Islamic nations, each of them a paragon of honour, temperance and piety. The cars that conveyed the women used one of two roads: one that ran right through the middle of the compound, which was closed during celebrations and festivities, and a back road that followed the perimeter of the Palace along the seafront. This was the preferred route when there were too many visitors and during wild parties.
A luxury car glided to a stop near the family compound and a woman with bewitching eyes rolled down the window. Her niqab slipped momentarily off her face to reveal a lustrous complexion and to suggest many other charms besides those distracting eyes.
‘Isn’t Issa back from his trip yet?’ the beguiling young woman asked.
When Issa was away, everything was topsy-turvy – at least that was how it felt. I realised that the young woman was
repeating the question and that I had been staring at her the whole time. I was flummoxed.
‘Is Issa back from his trip?’ she repeated.
She was annoyed by my staring into her eyes and urged me to respond as I searched for the ineffable charms that might lurk behind that veil.
‘Lower your gaze or say goodbye to your eyesight!’ she snapped.
Coming to my senses, I mumbled a halting apology which she ignored. She raised her hand against the tinted window and the car resumed its stately passage through the compound.
When I was younger, a sure path to stealing a woman’s heart – and body – was through her eyes. The secret was to gaze into a woman’s eyes longingly and then make all the other moves to reach what lay behind them. It was a lesson I had learned from Mona. ‘Women love being looked at,’ she had told me. ‘They love feeling that you are entranced by them. It gives them a heady sense of their femininity.’
The only woman I have ever known to dislike being looked at was Aunt Khayriyyah. Finding herself being stared at was likely to bring out her most warped traits and spark uncontrolled rage. The merest glance at her would ignite whatever fire lay smouldering inside her. If you wanted to see her enraged or find out first-hand what a mean and spiteful person she was, all you had to do was stare into her eyes.
The men in the neighbourhood knew that looking her in the eye was likely to set off a torrent of obscenities and went out of their way to avoid her, stepping briskly out of view if they happened to come across her in the street. No suitor ever darkened her doorway for fear of that inextinguishable wrath.
Since she was unable to spark anyone’s interest when she was still of marriageable age, she remained a spinster. Knowing that men would always flee from her, she began pursuing women. She did this openly, but the women she approached fled her as much as any man had done and alerted all their friends to my aunt’s perversion.
After everyone was gone, only she and I were left in the house, with our grudges and watchfulness. Whenever she suspected I might uncover something she wanted kept secret, she would start gossiping about me at her women’s gatherings, excoriating me for what she described as my perversions.
My aunt had watched my every move ever since I was a child. She was responsible for running the household and my mother had no say in my upbringing.
‘Aren’t you coming home?’ she called out one day, craning her neck from the window looking out on to the back alley. I heard her but deliberately ignored her. I was chasing a boy who had snatched a wooden toy Tahani had been playing with in the alleyway next to his.
Aunt Khayriyyah resumed her conversation with the neighbour, the imam’s wife. Water levels in the storage tanks were at their lowest level and another poor rainy season was in sight. Prayers for rain had been fruitless; not a rain cloud had appeared despite the oratorical skills of the mosque’s imam.
Three whole years had gone by without a drop of rain. Whenever the imam’s wife heard him imploring the Almighty for a shower, she could not help but recall how boorish and nasty her husband was to her and thought about how mercy should begin at home. ‘The All-Merciful shows no mercy for the merciless,’ she repeated like a refrain.
Tahani was leaning against a motorcycle that had been abandoned on our street ever since its owner had been run over and died. She held out her hands, smiling, as I returned the toy to her. But she ran off as soon as she heard her mother screeching about her playing with me.
Aunt Khayriyyah began complaining to another neighbour about her hair falling out in great big clumps. She lamented the loss of the locks which, she claimed, had drawn every boy in the neighbourhood to flock under the windows of her father’s house.
‘You mean that the windows in your day had no latticework?’ the neighbour asked.
‘Just as bitchy as your mother, aren’t you?’ Aunt Khayriyyah shot back, bristling.
She went back inside the house, muttering about the curse that had been cast on her and that had resulted in a wasted life, imprisoned inside her brother’s home.
Hopping over the piles of rubbish lying in front of our house, I stepped through the rotting, termite-ridden doorway whose squeak was as shrill as my aunt’s voice. To me, she was as decrepit as the old door and I wished she would give up on her mite-ridden situation.
Aunt Khayriyyah frowned at my empty hands. ‘Didn’t I send you to fetch water?’
‘There isn’t a drop of water to be had anywhere.’
‘That’s how it is with the likes of you,’ she snapped, slapping her thighs in frustration. Then she reached over to grab my ear. ‘Now go,’ she said, pulling me down, ‘and don’t come back until you’ve got some.’
I found a water-bearer willing to deliver. Almost immediately after his donkey cart pulled up at our house with the order, there was an altercation that brought out all the neighbours.
My aunt started screaming bloody murder and hitting the water-bearer with a broom, claiming that he had been ogling her. When his screams rose to counter hers, the neighbours came running to the rescue. They burst into the house, pinned his arms behind his back and started to thrash him. As the blows rained down, the water-bearer collapsed unconscious on the floor and his attackers switched to delivering first aid instead of punches. They propped him up and splashed water on his face until he regained consciousness.
Before the poor man had even caught his breath, my aunt was inciting the neighbours to give him another thrashing. She began hollering as soon as the man was able to sit up. ‘Look at him!’ she screamed. ‘Look! He’s still making eyes at me!’ She threw the broom at him.
The crowd looked at him and realised he had a tic which made him look as if he were constantly winking. They could barely conceal their amusement and helped him out of the house, apologising for their behaviour. All the man wanted was to be gone. He struggled to his feet and jumped up on to the seat of his donkey cart with a practised hop, cursing my aunt and the men who had come to her aid.
‘By God, I wouldn’t glance at that thing if I were a donkey,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll be damned if that’s a woman.’ He was already moving away at a lively trot and had to turn his head back to deliver the parting shot: ‘That’s a woe-man!’
Unbeknownst to my aunt, the water-bearer’s name stuck. Following the incident, it gained wide currency among the women of the neighbourhood and no man ever cast the shadow of a glance at the woe-man.
10
I could not stop thinking of those bewitching eyes peering from the window of the luxury car. Eyes like those could launch a thousand ships, and it would not matter if you drowned inside them.
I had never seen a niqab that framed a more entrancing pair of eyes: wide and deep and black, bordered by thick lashes and arched brows, their gaze aloof. In the days that followed, I lay in wait for her, hoping that she would reappear in the same spot. But her passage, like life itself, was not to occur twice.
I decided to imitate the water-bearer. I began practising and people were fooled into thinking that my right eye had suddenly started to twitch and blink involuntarily. My act was so convincing that I was advised to consult an eye doctor, which I promised to do. Meanwhile, I hoped that the woman with the bewitching eyes would pass me again so that I could try my winking trick on her. But she never reappeared and I dropped the tic before it became genuine.
Whenever I thought of my aunt, I could not help but snicker at the idea of a woe-man: a male seed that had rotted during gestation. My father had been infinitely more tender-hearted and gracious than his sister, for whom I felt only the deepest hatred. My imagination often overflowed with visions of revenge: when the time came, I would reduce her to a babbling idiot who could never again raise her voice.
Only after we have lived our lives do human beings actually see clearly. The past is the record of a life and its assessment can confer wisdom. My aunt’s was a record of sharp and piercing jabs, like nails strewn on my path, and every venomous word that dripped from her lips led me
to some form of delinquency or another.
I have experienced both poverty and wealth and have concluded they are equally limiting: poverty pushes us to seek riches while wealth pulls us toward immorality. In either case, our lives are determined by our earliest actions.
Many years have passed since my early childhood, a time when the night became my constant companion.
I have been a night owl ever since I was a little boy. The neighbourhood commons was a welcoming space for children desperate to get away from their cramped and overcrowded homes. We gathered there, lining up in formation to play all sorts of games, with different teams selecting their players and passing over kids we had been warned to avoid.
Issa was one of those kids. Excluded from every group, he shunned all of them in return and took to hanging around drunks, homosexuals, sheep rustlers, chicken poachers and the petty thieves who stole bicycles and motorbikes. He acted much older than his age – just like Osama did – and he was not afraid of being jumped as he wandered around the dark alleyways with his older companions.
We became friends one dark night when I was crossing the Kuft, an alley notorious for sexual predators, where young boys were lured by fear or desire. I had gone there to meet up with a boy named Yasser Muft, who had asked me to arrive early because he had received threats for responding to my overtures.
As I waited for Yasser Muft to show up, I began pacing up and down the alley. Suddenly, a torch was trained on my face and I heard a little ditty: ‘Pretty boy’s gone away, gone, gone pretty boy.’ I recognised the voice of Mustafa Qannas.
He stopped singing and bluntly told me to undress.
In the beam of the torchlight I looked for a stone with which to crack open his head and when I sighted one and lunged for it, his blade pressed into my back and his left arm had me in a stranglehold.
‘You do as I say or you’re dead,’ he hissed.
Issa appeared out of nowhere like an angel descended from heaven. Taking in the scene, he laughed and tapped Mustafa on the shoulder, saying, ‘Couldn’t you find someone else to threaten other than the Hammer?’