by Abdo Khal
I slipped out of Mustafa’s grasp and picked up a good-sized stone with which to split his head open.
‘Don’t do it,’ Issa warned as he grabbed me, ‘or else he’s sure to ride your arse, sooner or later.’ He turned to Mustafa almost playfully and told him that I was his closest friend.
The tension lifted immediately.
‘The Good Lord took pity and sent you Issa,’ Mustafa said, patting my cheek.
Issa chuckled, his laughter ringing in the night. ‘If you knew the Hammer like I do,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t even have tried to have your way with him.’ He went on to regale Mustafa with tales of my voracious sexual appetite and how it stopped at nothing, whether human or beast.
Mustafa began to laugh and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You and I are kindred souls, eh?’ he said with a twinkle.
At that moment, Yasser Muft came out of the shadows and all three of us dug into him.
* * *
I was spellbound by the eyes in the niqab.
My position at the Palace prevented me from seeing women, much less mixing with them. Initially, I did not understand the reason for this total prohibition, but it became clear that it was to keep me from slackening – so that my pent-up lust would have me drooling at the prospect of riding yet another victim.
On a whim, the Master decided to create a team dedicated to humiliating his enemies. He began to plan for the venture and put me in charge of recruiting for what came to be known as the ‘Punisher Squad’.
The more sexually repressed a recruit, the better suited he would be to perform the job. That was the Master’s view and he wanted me to pick the cream of the crop.
After my designation as squad leader, Issa no longer had anything to do with this aspect of work at the Palace. But he suggested that I would be able to find the kind of men I needed at the Dreams Café behind Tahliyyah Street, where all the deviants and perverts gathered. Just one visit there made me blanch.
In the event, I recruited the squad members from the wretched and impoverished residents of the densely populated neighbourhoods of the city, where people were ready to chew on whatever fodder was thrown their way – no questions asked.
I rounded up a few contenders and told them all the activities that would get them expelled from the squad if they were caught doing them. The most important prohibitions were mixing with or even looking at women, watching television outside the approved channels, using mobiles or any other kind of telephone, bringing women’s magazines into the Palace and, finally, masturbating. The last would be enforced through spot checks, including lab tests of seminal fluid if necessary.
After everyone had agreed to these conditions, the squad was housed in a secluded area of the Palace, which the team members could leave only to perform an assignment, returning to their quarters once they had finished.
The only member of the group able to transfer to another area of the Palace was Osama. Though I had recruited him, Issa assigned him a position that he felt better suited him and that had only recently come to light. Thus, Osama was seconded from the Punisher Squad and no longer reported to me.
In any case, the squad was short-lived because the Master’s rules and regulations proved impossible for most recruits to follow. Before the squad was disbanded, all its members were subjected to the same treatment they had meted out to the Master’s adversaries, with photographic evidence as back-up. They were duly warned to forget what took place in the Palace on pains of some unspecified punishment. All understood the veiled threat and the consequences of breaking the team’s vow of silence.
Only I was retained to carry on with the punishment assignments. I was less worried about my manliness being violated than by the numerous prohibitions the Master had decreed. To ensure my unflagging performance in servicing the billy goats, I was denied access to the nanny goats.
After almost seven years of formal requests, as well as numerous pleas and entreaties, the Master eventually granted me permission to move out of the Palace. I wanted to live in a place of my own, ostensibly to take care of my aunt, who had no one left to look after her in her old age.
Of course Aunt Khayriyyah’s life was of no interest to me and I was certainly not keen to relive what I had experienced with her. But it was a valid excuse that would allow me to have at least one foot out of the Palace. The idea came to me when, after one of his nightly seduction acts to lure young women to the Palace, Osama whispered, ‘Your aunt is on the verge of starvation.’
We had just finished setting up for a party and several young women had swooped down on the Palace intent on snagging a man who would prize their beauty and shower them with gifts. The Master had recently granted permission for me to leave my quarters between assignments. Osama and I secluded ourselves at the back of the hall, watching the young women sashaying about before the predatory eyes of the Palace guests.
‘Look, over there,’ he whispered urgently. ‘It’s Tahani!’
Osama dropped the bombshell as he gestured toward one of the girls. I could practically hear my heart pounding inside my chest.
‘Where? Where is she?’ I looked around feverishly.
‘Over there – dancing.’ He pointed vaguely at a small group of young women swirling around a fat guest.
‘I don’t see her,’ I said. ‘Tell me exactly where you’re looking.’
‘The one wearing the dress with the slit in the back.’
My eyes zeroed in on the girl like an infrared missile. Could it be that she was making good on her promise? Had she finally caught up with me in the middle of all this debauchery? If so, I would have to kill her, plain and simple.
I was on the point of getting up to go towards her for a better look, but he stopped me.
‘I mean, doesn’t that girl look like Tahani?’
I broke into a cold sweat and felt faint.
Whenever the past wants to reclaim us, it lures us with its finely wrought enticements. The one thing I dreaded above all else was to find myself face to face with Tahani. I became convinced that she was concealed somewhere within the walls of the Palace. It upset me whenever I thought about it as I would imagine her standing in the punishment chamber watching me. I imagined myself justifying my abject state and the time I ravished her.
Oh, dear God, what if Tahani had landed here? Could she have come here, like the rest of us, to be immolated in this infernal paradise?
Or maybe she was exactly where I had left her, wiping away her tears and the traces of blood. Maybe a statue of her had been erected to remind passers-by of the victims created by the firestorm of love.
I was still staring at the look-alike when Osama plunged in the stake.
‘What did you do to Tahani?’
When we do not right our wrongs, we are continually haunted by regret. It is futile to feel guilty about the past because we cannot make whole that which is broken. That is why I needed to escape.
Osama launched into a long discussion of Tahani and only then did I realise the extent of the torment I had caused him. At the time, Osama’s position at the Palace allowed him to come and go as he wished and he would bring me news of the neighbourhood, inserting titbits about Tahani in the hope that I would react or come clean. He was on a mission to find out what had taken place.
When I remained mute over Tahani, Osama changed tack and hissed in my ear, ‘Didn’t you hear what I said about your aunt? She’s on the verge of starvation.’
There and then, I decided to use my aunt as a pretext to end my enforced isolation in the punishers’ quarters.
* * *
I had left the old neighbourhood in the middle of that darkest night, and I slipped back into the Firepit at night, almost seven years later. I was a changed man. I had nothing left in me. My equipment was worn and slack with overuse and my body was weary from the excesses of my depravity.
The neighbourhood had barely changed. There were still heaps of rubbish everywhere. There, too, were the familiar burnt-out street lights an
d the kids in dirty clothes, playing and cursing at each other. Women selling almonds and roasted watermelon seeds still sat listless and resigned behind their merchandise, while pedlars plied the alleyways with their trolleys of cotton candy, pulses, spices and pastries. More flies swarmed about their wares than all the neighbourhood kids put together.
The Firepit seemed less animated than I remembered it. There were no women calling on one another any more, and all the windows overlooking the streets had been sealed. Houses were more secluded, doorway curtains had disappeared, and even the newer houses that I did not recognise already seemed old and worn.
I heard the evening call to prayer and immediately recognised my half-brother’s voice – Ibrahim’s dewy call drifted in from the loudspeakers in the Salvation Mosque. Soon, the higgledy-piggledy neighbourhood settled to a tranquil calm. As the old men responded to the call, their ablutions completed and water still dripping from their full beards, I walked by quickly with my eyes fixed to the ground and the loose ends of my keffiyeh wrapped around my face.
I entered the alleyway leading to our house and glanced up at Tahani’s window. It was boarded up, with rust-encrusted nails for ever sealing the latticed shutters. I caught sight of her older brother outside their house, who initially followed me with his eyes and then turned his face the other way, pretending not to see me. I wished to ask him about Tahani, but when I looked at him again, he spat in my direction several times without ever looking me in the eye.
I looked up again at Tahani’s boarded-up shutters and realised with a sharp pang that I would never again see her at her window. I would find nothing there but seething rancour amplified many times.
My visions of Tahani were invariably mixed up with those of my mother. I felt my mother had abandoned me when she agreed to marry Ghayth Muhannad and moved out of our home. Instead of keeping the flame of maternity burning bright for me, she had betrayed it and granted the breasts that had nurtured me to another man.
Whenever I thought of him thrusting inside her, I would imagine her being stoned like a common adulteress. I pictured ever more stones being hurled at her as she cried for mercy. But the wishful thinking would collapse when I remembered that she could not plead for anything – as it was, she could barely stammer intelligibly, managing only simple grunts and moans.
Then another picture would come to mind: of Tahani, lashed to a wooden stake in the sand and surrounded by a crowd of people pelting her with stones and screaming ‘adulteress’ at her. Her clothes would be soaked in blood and, when they removed her blindfold, she would catch sight of me in the midst of the stone-throwers. The vision always ended with Tahani being led away to some jail for sexual offenders and crying in desperation, ‘Why have you forsaken me, Tariq?’
I blended visions of Tahani’s possible fate with the stories of the Palace girls. So many young women had found sanctuary in the Palace. Many had been arrested after their very first sexual adventure and had become prostitutes on being released from jail. It was their only means left to earn a living outside the rank-smelling jail where the female warders had their way with them. Some of them were able to parlay the profession into positions of influence and get their way with prominent men. I had heard of, or observed, so many young women losing their virginity and speaking about their first sexual encounter in such a nonchalant way that my feelings about the treatment of women were wrapped in a thick layer of indifference.
With a final backward glance at her window, I wondered if Tahani had followed the same path. This was why I always looked for her in the Palace – and always dreaded ever finding her there.
Reaching my destination, I knocked on the door repeatedly and waited.
‘Who is it now?’ screeched a familiar voice from inside. ‘The devil take you! You’re going to break my door if you keep knocking like that!’
When she saw me, she could not believe her eyes. She was so taken aback that she practically swallowed her words.
‘I should have known,’ she finally managed to say. ‘Nobody but you would pound on a door like that.’ Her eyes were still wide in disbelief at seeing me there after almost seven years. ‘What brings you here?’
As she stood holding on to the door, I kissed the top of her head and inhaled the familiar smell of congealed aromatic oil in her hair parting. She pushed me away and put on a show of tearfulness as she avoided my embrace and bemoaned the cruelty of an existence that had left her alone and poor, with no one to care for her.
She was even more withered than she had been and everything about her had shrunk – except, that is, for her tongue, which had lost none of its agility. Past the shock of seeing me again, a stream of the old invective burst forth once more, and my long-buried loathing was reawakened just as swiftly.
As I was reminded of my hatred, Aunt Khayriyyah dredged up her own loathing for my mother. ‘What else can a snake give birth to?’ I, too, had not seen that serpent mother of mine since she had moved out to live with Ghayth Muhannad.
‘So what brings you here?’ she asked directly.
That was the question. Standing there, I could not fathom the overwhelming urge I had to bring this woman back into my life. She was like the germ of an eradicated disease that I had locked up in the laboratory of my emotions. I was back to show her how well her scorn had borne fruit and to give her a taste of her own medicine. I asked myself the same question: was I here to give the lie to all her dire warnings or to confirm them?
She kept asking why I was there, like a broken record, and I was tempted to give up on her. I had already had enough of her and of everything I had gone through with her. But I hesitated, remembering that I needed her for two reasons: as a means to escape my quarters at the Palace and to satisfy my thirst for revenge.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ I asked her, and immediately regretted it as it gave her an opening to refuse.
What if she turned me down? Then it really would be impossible to budge her. Before she could waver, I quickly pointed out the miserable condition she was in and the decrepit state of the house. The ceiling in the living room was caving in and there were deep cracks in the walls of the courtyard. I followed her around the house where I had spent such a significant part of my life, taking in the interior doors that had come off their hinges, the carpets and curtains that had faded and the light switches that no longer worked.
For her part, Aunt Khayriyyah was taking me in, without giving voice to the questions she had for my sudden and unimagined appearance.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ I asked again.
Perhaps she had been pondering my question quietly to give me a chance to consider her own counterproposal.
‘Your mother is in greater need than I am. Why don’t you help her?’
‘Because she has a man. She doesn’t need me,’ I said pointedly. ‘I don’t have anyone in this world except for you now.’
All she needed was a little insistence on my part to wear down her pride. She had a litany of complaints: from loneliness, to the bureaucrats in the social security system procrastinating over her papers, to having to live off the charity of others. I persisted with my offer as much as I felt she needed me to, despite her graceless temporising. I promised her a comfortable existence with servants at her beck and call to take care of her.
I had to keep myself in check often in order to disguise my deep-seated loathing for her. I put my arm around her and told her that I wanted someone from my bloodline to care about me and keep me company.
‘Why aren’t you married?’ Aunt Khayriyyah asked suddenly.
She was trying my patience with endless questions I was unprepared for, but I managed to deflect her by saying, ‘Will you be the one to pick my bride?’
She laughed and I think it was the first time I ever saw her teeth. Despite the filth of her tongue, they were a brilliant white, pristine and without decay.
‘What do you think of Tahani?’ I asked her.
‘Which Tahani? Do you me
an Salih Khaybari’s daughter?’
I nodded.
‘So you’re on the lookout for a slut who is like your grandmother, Saniyya,’ she stated viciously. She paused. ‘They say Salih took her back to his village one night and married her off without a wedding.’
I was too stunned to say anything.
‘Apparently Tahani did something shameful and brought disgrace to the family. The only way her father could conceal the scandal was among his own people in his village,’ Aunt Khayriyyah said. Pulling her dishevelled braids together, she carried on, now in true form. ‘Saniyya’s blood runs in your veins, boy, that’s why you only go for whores!’
I took the double blow about Tahani and my grandmother, and swore to myself that I would silence that tongue once and for all when the time was right. I had no outlets to vent my rage and dispel my fury other than the cesspit where I had learned to swim amid streams of rubbish.
My patience reached its limits when she went to her closet to collect some tattered old clothes. I tried to stop her short by promising that we would go shopping and that she could buy whatever she needed. But she insisted on taking some of her rags, along with a small wooden jewellery chest where she stored the rings, earrings and gold chains that she had accumulated over a lifetime.
Whenever I tried to hurry her, she would remember one more thing that she needed to take along. Finally, remembering her headcovering, she went through the clothes piled up in her closet. Swearing she had not been out for over a month, she went from room to room looking for her niqab, furious that it had disappeared.
‘You don’t really need the niqab,’ I said, which immediately sparked off her hostility again.
‘The likes of you would poke their thing up a hole in a rock if they could,’ she shot back, punching me in the chest.
She was getting worked up and I feared she would change her mind. I cajoled her and pretended to be joking.
I was just about ready to strangle her when she shuffled over to the neighbours’ houses to bid the women farewell.