Throwing Sparks

by Abdo Khal

  ‘Why is Osama wearing sunglasses at night?’ Uncle Muhammad asked.

  It went without saying that our employers paid us no heed; it was up to us to look out for one another. Uncle Muhammad’s remark shamed me. I certainly had not been paying much attention to anyone and I was generally indifferent to people’s actions. I interacted with others like a casual passer-by whose only purpose was to reach his destination. Not that I had a destination. I did not know where I was heading, but I kept going like a robot and my heart kept pumping blood through sclerotic veins, unaware of how tainted it had become.

  Osama seemed impatient for the party to end. As soon as the guests jostled to gather their belongings and bid each other goodnight, he sprang to his feet. As he passed me he whispered urgently, ‘We’re hanging out tonight.’

  It was more of a command than a suggestion. He did not wait for my response and turned to attend to his boss. He leaned down slightly to hear Nadir’s instructions and then stepped aside so that the two servants assigned to him could pick him up and carry him to his wheelchair.

  Osama did not want to stay indoors, so we stepped out together.

  The humid air of the night was somewhat relieved by the movement of the waves lapping against the earth-moving equipment parked across from the eastern wing of the Palace. There, a large sandy expanse had been levelled and planted with date and coconut palms. Spiralling beams of light bathed the tips of the trees with a glowing radiance that spread all the way to the surface of the water.

  Osama’s eyes were puffy and red, and when I asked him if he had been crying, he did not answer. He just led me by the hand and walked in silence towards the seashore, clutching a small bag against his chest.

  ‘You’re not worried about getting your clothes dirty, are you?’ Osama asked, inviting me to sit down on the ground next to him.

  Opening the bag, he reached in for a half-empty bottle of Black Label and took a swig. As he offered me some, he said almost casually, ‘They say you were the thief in Tahani’s bedroom.’

  He was looking for some certainty that would put his suspicions to rest, but I did not oblige him. ‘Who’s they?’ I countered immediately.

  ‘For the last time, I’m asking you, was it you?’

  ‘And for the last time, I’m telling you, no, it wasn’t me.’

  ‘OK,’ he said slowly. His words now came out haltingly, as if he were having trouble breathing. ‘I have been crying,’ he admitted, ‘and I’ll tell you why so that you can help me look for that bastard who took Tahani’s life and ruined mine. And then we’ll kill him together – you and me. OK?’

  I had no choice but to nod.

  He put the bottle to his mouth and gulped down enough whisky to stun a camel. He was about to hand it to me when he stopped himself. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I want you to stay awake so you can hear what I’ve been doing this past week.’ He placed the bottle back in his lap and told me of his trip to Salih Khaybari’s village and how he had sensed Tahani’s spirit in the barren wasteland that was the ‘grave of the damned’.

  When he reached the end of his story, he picked up the bottle from his lap and emptied its contents in one gulp. ‘Don’t you think that whoever destroyed her life deserves to die?’ he cried.

  I was concerned that the Master would hear us so I tried to cover his mouth and said in agreement, ‘If I get my hands on the culprit, I’ll rip him to shreds.’

  In the distance, there was a steady stream of cars coming and going, and the silhouettes of Palace servants scurried about arranging seats for a gathering not far from where we were sitting. They were rushing to prepare an impromptu barbecue in accordance with the Master’s instructions.

  Osama had begun slurring his words and was moving unsteadily. I pulled him up to a standing position and braced him against me.

  He started to chuckle loudly. ‘You know what’s funny?’ he said. ‘Here I am looking for the man who raped Tahani so that I can kill him, but I do exactly the same thing every day to other girls.’ He looked ashen and it was clear the alcohol had seeped into every neural pathway of his brain. ‘You suppose they have families and sweethearts?’

  With my arm around him, we walked slowly back to the Palace.

  Osama slapped his forehead as though struck by a revelation. ‘Guess that means one of them will want nothing better than to rip me to shreds!’

  I could not tell whether he was laughing or crying.

  I took him to his quarters, put him to bed and covered him with a blanket, hoping that neither the Master nor his brother would be needing Osama any time soon.

  Just before I turned to leave, he grabbed my arm and said drowsily, ‘I’m thinking about moving. So that I can be close to her and share her loneliness. It’s so desolate out there.’

  I patted him on the shoulder. ‘Sleep now. We’ll talk tomorrow,’ I told him.

  ‘At least if I’m there, I can water the seeds my aunt planted. Don’t you think that’s better work than the despicable things I do in this palace of the damned?’

  I quickly clamped his mouth shut to stop him from uttering another negative word about the Palace, which the cameras and bugs everywhere would relay at the speed of light.

  I reached down to kiss the top of his head.

  His eyes were shut and he was probably already half asleep when he mumbled, ‘Are you sure you’re not the bastard I’m looking for?’

  * * *

  Until her husband came to see me, my mother had been the furthest thing from my mind. As far as I was concerned, she was as good as dead once my father passed away and she moved in with another man.

  ‘Your mother wishes to see you,’ Ghayth Muhannad told me.

  ‘And how, may I ask, did she communicate her wish?’ I retorted.

  As was his wont, Ghayth remained calm and composed.

  If he had been expecting me to refer to him respectfully as ‘uncle’ or use some other kind of honorific to acknowledge his venerable status, my rudeness soon dispelled his expectation.

  ‘Please don’t forget that your mother is still alive,’ he said. ‘Showing me respect is part of respecting her.’

  ‘My mother died when she married you,’ I replied swiftly. ‘And for your information, no one in this life is worthy of my respect.’

  ‘Talking that way isn’t at all helpful. So long as she is alive, be kind towards her.’

  I was rude because I wanted to humiliate him. But his patience and generosity of spirit allowed him to let my abuse go unanswered until I had run out of nasty words. He cleared his throat and praised and blessed the Prophet as he wiped a beautifully embroidered handkerchief across his face. Ghayth noticed me staring at the handkerchief and lifted it to my face with a friendly smile.

  I immediately recognised my mother’s handiwork; her reputation as a skilled embroiderer was unequalled among the women of the neighbourhood. I knew why I felt really provoked by the handkerchief. She had always embroidered things for my father – handkerchiefs, keffiyehs, traditional loose-fitting sirwal trousers – and now this man was wiping his brow with a handkerchief she had lovingly sat and embroidered for him.

  I fought off all his efforts at weaselling his way into my heart and sent him on his way as I had greeted him: with a stream of abuse.

  He left, muttering that he had done his best and that, having washed his hands of the matter, it was now in God’s hands.

  I had never forgiven my mother for marrying Ghayth. Filling me in on some of the history, Aunt Khayriyyah had said, ‘Your mother is as slippery as a snake. Although she was betrothed to your father, she loved her maternal cousin, Ghayth.’

  At the time, I thought my aunt was simply being her usual venomous self and paid little notice. But my mother’s move to Ghayth’s household so soon after my father fell to his death came as a shock and it poisoned my feelings towards her. Offering her condolences, Ghayth’s senile mother had managed to hobble over to our home and confided that her son, the cousin my mother had been in love w
ith as a young woman, still hankered after her.

  My mother prepared for the move immediately and was betrothed while my father’s blood was still warm. I had trouble understanding how she had managed to give her consent with her severed tongue.

  I had watched her sitting night after night trying to enunciate my father’s name. Back then, she seemed to me the epitome of a woman in love with eyes only for her beloved. How rapidly those eyes had shifted their focus; my father’s grave was barely covered with earth before her love for Ghayth sprouted from its surface.

  But perhaps I had been mistaken all this time. Just maybe she had been desperately trying to pronounce her lover’s name, not her husband’s. I started to convince myself that it was indeed the case since how else could she have said it on the night of that long-postponed wedding if not through nightly practice. Perhaps, too, if my father had not got in the way, the enchantment that had bound their hearts since earliest childhood would not have been disrupted. My recollection was that she had married my father out of love and that the dark horseman of her dreams had overcome all manner of obstacles to win her heart. Which of the two men did she love? What if Tahani had also been leading the two of us on, Osama and me? Maybe there was a third or even fourth man?

  That was the way women operated, as I had learned at the Palace. I saw how fickle and inconstant they were, and how volatile. A woman would grant her body for pleasure but would deny her heart; she kept her beating heart for her children, on whom she lavished all her feelings. As for my own mother, my memories were confused. Every time I found out something new about her life, it shed a different light on what I remembered.

  I was starting to wonder whether Aunt Khayriyyah had been right all along that my grandmother’s womb had borne nothing but rotten fruit. If she was, then cutting off her tongue had been pointless, just a stupid impulse rather than the fulfilment of some preordained fate.

  I even began to worry that my punitive act against my aunt had been less about seeking retribution for my mother and more about being vengeful towards women in general. Could that explain why I had cut off my aunt’s tongue, taken Tahani’s virginity, rejected my mother and had sex with men? Was it all so that I could do away with women?

  We all fall, in one way or another, because gravity cannot be defied. Every one of us must fall, whether we like it or not. But falling is incremental: each stage in the process leads to the next one, and on down all the way to the bottom.

  Dr Bannan loved the concept of transference. One night, he overheard Joseph Essam and me having a discussion about the ephemerality of life. Not one to miss an opportunity to flaunt his knowledge, Dr Bannan lectured us at length, analysing the vagaries of our lives in the process.

  I had been feeling particularly gloomy that night. It seemed to me that I was beginning to fall apart but I consoled myself with the thought that in any case it was all beyond my control. Wanting to be supportive, Joseph Essam had taken on the role of therapist.

  He told me about the importance of confession in the process of self-purification. I tried to stay open-minded as he strove to instil in me some basic Christian notions, perhaps in the hope of converting me. He liked me because I listened and did not get combative with him, and he probably thought that I was ready to be saved.

  I became the repository of his past mistakes as he proceeded to tell me about his own troubles. There was a young woman he loved but had abandoned. He did not say anything about her appearance, concentrating instead on her character traits. She was delicate and sweet, and her love as pure as that celebrated by Solomon, whom he quoted: ‘As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat under its shadow with great delight, and its fruit was sweet to my taste.’ He needed nothing besides her sweet chastity, he said, and wanted nothing more than the purity of her soul to dissolve all that was bitter in him.

  At this he launched into a spiritual discussion of the passions and distinguished that which is sanctioned from that which is prohibited. It was the burning flame of faith that had finally led to his enlightenment and prompted him to flee the object of his love: the young girl in question was his niece, his sister’s daughter.

  We are all bound to fall at some point or other; only we know when we hit bottom. It is a gradual process and we are gripped by such emotion every step of the way that we are completely confident of our assessment of our situation. It is only when our emotions subside that our certainty falters.

  And now my mother was asking about me, as if she suddenly had remembered after all those years that a creature she had given birth to still existed.

  They say that children are the crutches for parents to lean on in old age. A childhood spent without support results in repeated stumbles; I certainly had fallen many times as a child without anyone lending me a hand.

  In the face of conflicting feelings, we discover that we are like strangers or casual bystanders standing before an incorrect road sign. We can neither go back nor continue on towards our destination.

  That is how I found myself still mired in my past, after all I had tried to put it behind me.

  * * *

  One of the Palace guards came to let me know that my half-brother, Ibrahim, was at the gate. I made my way there and saw him being subjected to a barrage of questions by the security guards.

  ‘Who knew that just coming to see you would lead to my detention,’ he exclaimed, visibly upset. ‘I’ll never do it again!’

  He had been trying to see me for three days, he explained, and then set about questioning me about Aunt Khayriyyah. ‘How is she?’

  ‘She’s fine. I’ll fill you in later with all her news.’

  ‘That’s it? Just “fine” after all this time? You have no idea how worried we’ve been.’

  ‘Let’s hold off on the blame until we’re alone,’ I told him.

  I did not have permission to let him enter the Palace and, since I was busy, I promised we would meet later at his home in the Firepit.

  It would take me several years to keep that promise. I was determined to sever all my connections to the past – whether people, places or specific times – and refused to see anyone who came looking for me.

  But Osama was the hook that snared me, drawing me back to the neighbourhood that had launched me on my journey. It was as if my attempt to make a final break with the past had left me charged like a magnetic field, subject to the forces of attraction and repulsion.

  The force of attraction was the stronger of the two. All of my memories and all the people that I had fled were being drawn back towards me, or I towards them, and the charge had me looking for an escape.

  First and foremost, there was Tahani, who was never far from my mind. Then there was my aunt who was embedded in my life like a rusty nail in a festering, stinking wound. Souad, too, with her plea to help her husband, Yasser Muft, reawakened memories of my earliest delinquency. There was Mustafa Qannas, whose masculine pride I had trampled and who left the Palace in humiliation to resume cruising the alleyways, vowing vengeance; and Osama, who watched night and day for any sign that might confirm that I was that marauder in Tahani’s bedroom. And then there was my mother, Ghayth Muhannad, Ibrahim and Issa. Damn that Issa!

  They were all embedded in my flesh and in my memory like so many hooks, each one tearing at some part of me. I was unravelling and felt myself being propelled into the abyss.

  After the encounter with Ghayth Muhannad, I resolved to call on my mother and to make good on my promise to visit Ibrahim. Day after day, however, I postponed and procrastinated to the point that a year, and then two, three and eventually seven years went by.

  At the stroke of noon on a blazing-hot day in August, Ghayth Muhannad stood at the Palace gates pleading with the guards to send for me. They denied any knowledge of my existence.

  ‘Have you no fear of God?’ Ghayth railed at them. ‘His mother has died and he must not miss the funeral.’

  I stood in the observation room and wat
ched and listened as he pleaded, begged and enumerated all the ailments that prevented him from standing there too long.

  So she had finally died and I was free of at least one commitment I had made years earlier.

  The guards seemed more upset by the news of my mother’s death than I was. One of them seemed on the point of telling Ghayth that I was there, listening to his every word, and had he not been afraid of losing his job he would have dragged me by the scruff of the neck to relieve the old man of his discomfort.

  ‘I can’t stand here for very long. I have diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease,’ said Ghayth. ‘Just tell him that his mother has died and that we will pray for her soul during evening prayers at Al-Khayr Mosque. He’ll know where that is – if he hasn’t forgotten the houses of the Lord the way he forgot his mother. If he doesn’t make it to the mosque, tell him we’ll be burying her at the Cemetery of Our Mother Eve.’

  Ghayth struggled to straighten up his back and then turned to leave.

  The senior guard offered me his condolences formally. ‘A mother’s passing is the hardest of all losses, you know. When a mother dies, God Almighty tells the angels, “Close the door we had kept open in her honour.”’

  I cut him short and told him the deceased was just my wet-nurse. Undeterred, he went on, ‘She was still your mother. May God comfort you in your loss.’

  I was sure that my absence at both the prayers and burial would be sufficient to put off anyone from trying to reach me ever again.

  Two years after my mother’s death, Ibrahim showed up one day at the gates and insisted he needed to talk to me. I am not sure why, but I agreed to see him in the main reception area. I suppose we fulfil our destiny, whether we like it or not.

  ‘Do you know what I had to go through to reach you?’ he exclaimed. ‘I need your help with something urgent.’

  I pulled out my chequebook with a flourish as I looked him up and down. ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘I don’t want your money, Tariq,’ he said crossly. ‘Foul money has a foul smell.’ He paused briefly and added more evenly, ‘I want you to help our sister.’