Throwing Sparks

by Abdo Khal

  He gave up all his hobbies. He no longer cared about rabbit-hunting in the wadis and stopped singing the old shanties and playing his simsimiyya with the band. His generous gifts and donations to community endeavours like the football club ensured that all the talk never got back to him.

  Speculation that he was a drug dealer only grew after Crazy Jamal was run over by the Rolls-Royce. Issa asked me to accompany him to Crazy Jamal’s house. Knocking loudly at the door, he had called out for Jamal’s father and, once the old man appeared at the door, Issa handed him a wad of bills.

  ‘A benefactor wants Jamal to have this,’ Issa told him.

  Crazy Jamal’s father took the bundle of one-hundred-riyal notes, stared at it for a while and then flung it in Issa’s face. ‘I will not accept ill-gotten riches,’ he shouted. ‘Nor will I have them given to my children.’

  News of the substantial recompense spread throughout the neighbourhood and soon everyone became convinced that Issa was selling drugs. This was when his father, Abu Issa, notified the counter-narcotics agency, which then came and ransacked their house. They went through all of Issa’s personal effects and found nothing suspicious. Issa left home that night and only returned fleetingly, a week later, to take his mother away.

  Salwa was the only person who knew where he had gone and she told no one.

  * * *

  Issa started working at the Palace before the death of Sayyid al-kabeer. That is how he was able to provide a detailed description of him when neighbourhood locals went and stood at the street corner to catch a glimpse of the first Master driving by.

  That is also how money came to flow through Issa’s hands.

  For Sayyid al-kabeer, the incident with Crazy Jamal was a blemish on his conscience. Issa’s arrival at the Palace alleviated his burden since he was able to entrust him with 50,000 riyals to give to Jamal’s father.

  When the Palace lights went out for three whole days and the usual car did not come and collect him, Issa was bereft. I saw him on the second day of the blackout making his way to the Palace on foot. He walked all the way around the wall until he reached the main gates and entered. He was gone a long time.

  It was he who bore the news of the death of the first Master. The news was relayed from mouth to mouth without anyone ever knowing how it reached the neighbourhood.

  We all thought that Issa came to leave the neighbourhood because of the dispute with his father. In actual fact, he had accepted the new Master’s offer to move into the Palace in order to be closer to Mawdie. All he wanted was to be in her vicinity – ever since the day he had saved her brother from drowning. There was no other place on earth for him but in her bewitching eyes.

  An innocent love had blossomed between them and nothing could keep them apart. He was to her as nourishment to a plant, nudging it forth through the soil and towards the sunlight. They were enamoured of each other from the first glance. It was as if the drowning that he had spared the young Master became his own beguiling fate: she lured him into the depths of her being with eyes he could die for and, like a diver, he plumbed her depths. Issa was spellbound, but did not dare to reveal what he felt. She had eyes only for him and he remained unrivalled in her estimation.

  19

  Maram finally came through on her promise.

  Lying on the hotel bed and looking in the mirror directly across from her, she could see the curve of her hips outlined through the light bedcovers. She lifted the telephone receiver and ordered breakfast for two.

  Her languor suggested she had just emerged from a deep slumber. Her hair had danced about her collarbones and neck until late in the night, until she had finally fallen asleep, exhausted.

  She was mesmerisingly beautiful.

  Like the other girls at the Palace, Maram had not expected to become the object of a derby for thoroughbreds. She had won the ultimate prize when the Master had placed her in his sights. When she finally came to me, she was like a parched field thirsting for rain.

  ‘Slow down,’ she had teased the night before, slipping into the bathroom. She was changing and her words were muffled. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we spent the next two days at the bungalow?’

  I did not want to respond to her question so that she would not know how much the Master had me on edge: he was always around and the further I tried to get away, the closer he seemed to move. I tried going places where I thought he would not find me and spent time at different hotels along the seafront. But he always caught up with me with a phone call. ‘Where are you, scum?’ he would say.

  I emerged from every escapade thinking it would be my last, feeling my neck gingerly to make sure I was still breathing. It is true that I risked death but I was watching my step. After a quarter century of confinement, I was calling the shots.

  My reactions betrayed my anxiety. I was nervous when the receptionist asked with a knowing smile, ‘Just a room, or a suite as usual, sir?’

  He emphasised ‘as usual’ with that superciliousness that petty officials favour – it was their way of getting back at overbearing bosses who held them in their places.

  I had seen far too many receptionists looking over the women who accompanied me, barely concealing their brazen thoughts.

  ‘Are you going to spend the night in the bathroom?’ I asked her.

  She appeared in the doorway, striking a provocative pose, hands on her hips and torso thrown back. ‘Now let’s see how well you measure up to your passionate wooing,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But don’t give up that charm offensive.’

  She had me flustered. I checked that I had enough Viagra in my wallet, after I had not found any rifling through my pockets.

  It had been a rough night, which I spent trying to meet her urgent needs.

  Now morning, I watched Maram sleeping peacefully for a while and then moved to the bathroom. I really needed a warm bath to loosen my joints, which felt stiff and creaky. I stayed in the water, chewing gum to dissipate the smell of stale alcohol on my breath.

  How I wished that some medicine had been discovered that could erase one’s memory.

  Like a slideshow, all the faces from the past clicked through my mind’s eye. I saw Tahani, screaming for mercy as she squeezed her thighs together, holding her hand up to my face to show me the rosy blood that was evidence of her defilement. Aunt Khayriyyah appeared next, with her wild bush of white hair and rattling bones, shrieking hysterically despite her dwindling strength and stuttering gibberish in the torment of a never-ending life. Mustafa Qannas raised his head and roared like the grinding gears of a powerful truck engine, vowing to pound me to a pulp, dragging me stark naked through the neighbourhood’s alleyways and squeezing the last breath out of me as he sodomised me in public. That image was replaced by Osama, who trapped me in a funeral shroud and exclaimed, ‘At last, I’ve caught you, thief!’ The Master’s flushed and jowly face seeped into the picture and spread outwards like an oil slick on the surface of the sea, obliterating everything around, with his devious and cunning malice reflected in his features.

  Those who did not know the Master were charmed by his smile and convinced that he would not hurt a fly. But those whose lives were bound to him knew that meekness and humility were only a veneer – and a very thin veneer at that. No matter how hard I tried to keep him at a distance, he would surprise me, worming his way into my very soul and boring into my skull. In my mind, I could always hear him say, ‘I’ll carve out a tight space for you in Jeddah’s most pathetic cemetery.’

  It had been a long journey.

  It had taken more than a quarter of a century but I was proud of my financial success and willing to overlook the pact with the devil that it had taken to get there. With a pill to erase my memory, I could have forgotten all the unmentionable things I had been compelled to do throughout my life.

  I was brought up in a humble home with a father who came back in the evenings half dead from work. His only reaction to hearing about my childish misbehaviour was to threaten me – but his th
reats were empty. With every vain warning, I gained more wiggle room to disregard the next one and to do whatever I wished with the full knowledge that the threats would never be carried out.

  My ability to be a step ahead of him nurtured my recklessness. It never occurred to me that the strategies and escape routes that I used to get around my misconduct might one day bring on my downfall, or that I could lose my soul in the process.

  Aunt Khayriyyah was like an affliction that had wormed its way into me and contaminated me with chronic hatred. She fed me an endless diet of animosity and thanks to her relentless and hostile scrutiny, I became a master in the art of deception and evasion from a very young age.

  Once when the Master had phoned to see where I was, he had shouted, ‘I’ll send you back to the streets where you came from!’ As long as he said such things, I felt I was safe. For if he had known that I was having a relationship with Maram, no street would have been punishment enough – I would have been chopped up into mincemeat then and there.

  My love of the hunt, which I had acquired in the winding alleyways of the neighbourhood and on the reef islands strewn across our shore, had spurred me to go after his woman, even if it had not been easy to prise her from his grasp. I was able to get the better of him on one of those wild nights at the Palace, like so many others except that this playful young kitten had made that particular evening extraordinary.

  She must have been trained by a true pro to arouse such powerful and simultaneous feelings of repulsion and attraction: one instant I felt that she had eyes for no one but me and the next I felt I was being flung into the rubbish bin like a scrap of meat.

  I heard room service knocking insistently on the door of our suite. I quickly threw on a bathrobe, afraid they would barge in and feast their eyes on the charms of my reclining temptress.

  I blocked the door as I opened it and grabbed the breakfast cart from the waiter. I was flustered and inadvertently exposed myself. He was mortified and muttered repeated apologies before closing the door.

  I wheeled the cart into a corner and went to wake her up. I held her close and began nuzzling her neck as I considered how she too was risking so much to be with me. She shifted about, hoping to get a few more minutes of sleep, and I gave up trying to wake her.

  I seated myself before the enticing smells wafting off the artfully plated breakfast and picked up a copy of Okaz, the local newspaper, that had been placed alongside. The first thing my eyes fell on was a photo of his jowly face under a banner headline. I paid no attention to the story and was fixated on the face staring out at me menacingly. I was shocked at feeling undone merely by contemplating his photo.

  I looked into his eyes defiantly and before I could stare them down my cell phone began to vibrate. It was a text message from him. A wave of anxiety flooded over me. I read: ‘Son of a bitch, you’re not answering. Where are you?’

  I jumped up and went out to call him from the balcony – if she said anything, he would surely recognise her voice. I was rehearsing all the excuses I would dole out but he did not give me the chance.

  ‘Get over here, now,’ he barked.

  I shook her awake and told her we needed to leave.

  ‘Didn’t you say we were spending the day together?’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you later,’ I promised her.

  * * *

  Osama’s nightly sorties were anything but disappointing.

  He was dashingly handsome and bold. Backed by the Master’s protection and influence, it was not too difficult being bold. In any case, those two attributes greatly facilitated his job. All he had to do was wander about the souks and other recreational areas in search of attractive girls and then start flirting with them. If a girl did not respond to his overtures immediately, he would brazenly stuff his phone number into her handbag or hand it to her. He could be very forward when it came to doing his job.

  I was worried that some day Maram and I would run into him at one of the places we liked going to. We had just started seeing each other in secret, stealing moments here and there, and she had begun telling me some of her story. It turned out that what I had on her in my file of Palace girls was inaccurate.

  ‘Do you like Osama?’ I asked her on one such occasion.

  She bit on her lower lip, trying to recall who he was. ‘Osama? Who’s Osama?’

  ‘You know, Osama,’ I explained. ‘He’s the guy who brought you to the Palace.’

  She burst out laughing at the suggestion and said she would tell me her story some other time when she felt more inclined.

  I was pleased by that as it held the prospect of more surreptitious meetings.

  We did the rounds of Jeddah’s hotels, restaurants and beachfront bungalows for several months. We would steal out of the Palace once or twice a month after silently communicating our desire without ever looking each other in the eye.

  ‘I feel so happy with you,’ she once cooed with delight. ‘Every cell in my body speaks of you, reminds me you are there. I can feel your fire even when you’re gone.’

  The imperious demeanour Maram maintained at the Palace completely vanished between the sheets. She became a sweet girl who craved affection and thirsted for any word that conveyed warmth. She loved it when I put my mouth over her ear and whispered my passion and longing for her, and she became wildly aroused and moaned urgently when I ran my tongue over her collarbone.

  Once, in the Palace, she got up from her seat beside the Master and went to fill her glass. As she passed me, I whispered very quietly that I missed her. She was so disarmed, she practically fell into my lap, and began coming and going in the hope of hearing me repeat the words. She would sit down beside him and then spill her drink, or say that she got the wrong thing, or that she forgot the ice-cubes. I really thought she was going to give us away that evening. I kept my gaze averted but could sense her darting eyes looking for me around the room.

  ‘I feel safe with you,’ Maram said, quivering in my embrace when we were finally alone again. I buried my head into her neck, inhaling her fragrance, and started to kiss her. Moving up to the top of her head, I planted my lips on her eyebrows and began kissing her eyes. She moaned and I took her into my arms.

  ‘I’ve never known such tenderness my whole life,’ she confided. Putting her arms about my neck, she looked deep into my eyes and asked, ‘Would you like to hear my story?’

  ‘Yes.’ I pulled her head in close and ran my fingers through her thick hair.

  She sat up, gave me a kiss, took a long sip from her glass of Chivas and began her story, with a distant and sad look on her face.

  Maram told me how her father had died before she had laid eyes on him, which for her proved that her birth had been inauspicious. Her parents had only been married for a year and a half and her mother had been optimistic about the future when, out of the blue, her father dropped dead and they were left high and dry.

  Maram’s mother thought she had left poverty behind for ever after she had found a man willing to take her on and deliver her from the humiliation of being shunted around between her brothers. They had tossed her around like a ball, letting her spend a week here, a week there, and she was beholden to them. She wanted to settle down, and accepted Maram’s father when he asked her to be his third or maybe his fourth wife. He was older than she was but she needed a way out of her predicament.

  Not only did the marriage prove short-lived, but it took three months for her mother to find out about his death. She did not know his family or where he lived. He had set her up in a home of her own, that was what mattered, and he would come by and check on her periodically. Maram said her half-brothers – the sons by the other wives – had expressed no concern for them and withheld her share of the inheritance.

  So now, they were two stray balls instead of one, and the last thing Maram’s mother wanted was to be bounced back and forth between her brothers again. So she sold all her gold – the jewellery from her dowry – and bought a sewing machine. She opened her d
oors for business, making dresses, gowns and abayas for the women of the neighbourhood, charging them whatever they could afford.

  Those were dark days. Maram was at school and looked forward to securing some kind of qualification that would land her a job and help her mother out. But as she approached her sixteenth birthday, suitors had started banging at the door. Her mother’s stringent requirement was for a groom to be financially reliable and she settled eventually on a man who promised a villa, a car and a bank account in exchange for Maram’s hand.

  Her mother was overjoyed at the prospect and the marriage was arranged without Maram having any say in the matter. He was a stubborn and cantankerous man and, as it would soon transpire, also a swindler. He had informed them that he was a widower who had lost his wife a year earlier. Maram’s uncles drew up the betrothal agreement in accordance with her mother’s stipulations, the most important of which was that the dowry had to be sufficient for Maram’s upkeep for life and that the deed to the house would be in her name.

  The groom promptly wrote out a post-dated cheque for 200,000 riyals and promised that the title deed would be in his bride’s hands as soon as she moved in to the villa. Even though the cheque was post-dated, Maram’s mother and uncles were satisfied and the deal was sealed.

  However, no sooner was the marriage concluded than he cancelled the cheque and Maram became his lawfully wedded wife with no dowry to her name.

  On her wedding night, he took her to a cheap hotel and left her there. He would disappear for a whole day and come back the next, have his way with her and leave again before she could ask him where he was headed.