Throwing Sparks

by Abdo Khal

  When he tried to enter the women’s wing, there was such a crush of women shedding their abayas in the vestibules that they blocked all access to the family quarters.

  He rapidly made a quick mental review of the women who inhabited the wing: the Master’s mother, whom he called Aunt Shahla, Mawdie of course, the Master’s wife, Nadir’s wife, their two aging aunts, and the Master’s and Nadir’s daughters. With the exception of Mawdie, none of these women and girls were of marriageable age or status.

  Had she been snatched up?

  If she had, then the race he had embarked on all those years ago had been rendered meaningless. He had hoped to be able to stand tall and firm before her brothers and win them over. Now he felt worthless. Even if the differences in their social standing had narrowed over the years, whether he was a pauper or a man of means, a rubbish collector or a PhD in law, it made not an iota of difference.

  He needed to be sure, however, and he wanted confirm­ation that she had given up on him for a rival.

  He was uninterested in mingling and kowtowing to all the VIPs, making obsequious noises and massaging egos. The only person who welcomed him was Osama, who embraced and congratulated him on the doctorate, and who sensed that Issa was reeling from the force of the blow he had just been delivered.

  Sheikh Omar, the old sea captain, came up to them in search of solace after receiving some bad news of his own. He was tearful and even though he was brushing his tears away and sniffing audibly, neither Osama nor Issa enquired why.

  ‘Uthman Kabashi has died,’ he volunteered.

  The news of the death of his old shipbuilding friend who had relocated to Port Sudan filled him with sadness and self-pity. Sheikh Omar rubbed his face with both hands now as he added, ‘Oh, it’ll be my turn next – I’m the only one left wagging his tail.’

  The three men’s grief and sorrow were drowned out by the wedding celebration, like a flash flood sweeping away dead tree limbs in its path.

  As the night took its leave of the Palace, so did Mawdie. She slid into the back of the limousine, with her new husband guiding her in gently before sitting beside her, smiling. She was looking around at all her well-wishers when Issa came into view. Mawdie had no other gesture to offer but a parting wave.

  * * *

  Issa spent that night crying, with Osama by his side.

  Osama was returning the favour from those many years ago when Issa had comforted him after the loss of Tahani.

  Issa had no one left in the world now apart from Salwa and his mother, who suffered from many ailments. Asthma was her latest affliction and Issa had hired nurses and servants to look after her when he was busy at the Palace with the Master’s wife and the other Palace women.

  His life centred on three concerns: enlarging his fortune, caring for his mother and Salwa, and discharging his responsibilities towards the Master’s family.

  He ordered his life with the precision of a Swiss watch. He was unstinting with Aunt Shahla, the Master’s mother, whom he loved almost as much as Salwa.

  Sometimes unrequited love can turn a person into a demolition machine and the rubble created is commensurate with its roar.

  When Salwa found out about Waleed Khanbashi’s marriage she flew into a rage. Her only solace was Issa. He alone could provide some redress for her husband’s crass ingratitude: after all she had done for him, lifting him up from nothing and providing him with untold riches to spend as he pleased.

  Salwa and Waleed were about the same age and by the time they were in their mid-fifties, her body was droopy and his sexual appetites for perkier pleasures had grown commensurately with his bank account balance. Salwa no longer excited him and since Waleed did not want to commit adultery, he resorted repeatedly to misyar, a part-time form of marriage considered legitimate in some interpretations of Islam.

  He never stayed long with one woman. Whenever he had an opportunity to consort with another woman, he would get rid of the previous one. He carried on in this fashion for over two years until he got to Maram. When he had approached the family as a prospect, Maram’s beauty had left him speechless and he had agreed to all their conditions for the contract, foremost among them that it not be a misyar marriage. He put on a lavish celebration and although it was sparsely attended, he did not regret the ostentation: Maram rewarded him with one of the most enjoyable nights of his life.

  Waleed could not bear the thought of leaving her and, in order to avoid being discovered, he rented a room in a cheap hotel and went there as often as he could. After he took his pleasure with her, he would go back home to his wife, around whom he was stern and irritated because of her persistent questioning.

  This went on for several months until the night Salwa showed up at the door of his hotel room, with Issa in tow, and accused him of being with a whore. Salwa was even more incensed when Waleed, trying to clear his name, told her that he had done nothing prohibited in Islam and that Maram was his legally wedded wife. When he refused to countenance the idea of divorcing Maram, Salwa vowed to teach him and ‘that whore’ a lesson they would never forget.

  In the event, it was Issa who drove that lesson home, and not Salwa. The best way to get the point across was to divest Waleed of all his worldly wealth. Initially, Issa had tried to have charges of insanity pinned on him but when that did not work, he began to obstruct his commercial dealings. Waleed’s fear of losing his money turned out to be far greater than his desire for Maram. He agreed to back down and divorce Maram. To ensure that Waleed made good on his promise, Salwa spirited Maram away to an unknown location and kept her there until the divorce went through.

  Maram, for her part, went through the bleakest days of her life. By that stage, she had given birth to a son and Issa made them go hungry. By incarcerating them, with little to eat, he gradually broke down her defences until she agreed to become a Palace whore.

  Once the Master had become infatuated with her, Issa could go ahead with the plan of stripping Waleed of his wealth. The Master agreed that Issa should take care of the bothersome fact that Maram had a husband and arrange for their divorce, unaware that Waleed and Issa were related. He gave Issa the go-ahead to do whatever was necessary and to be discreet about it.

  Within two days, Waleed was committed to a psychiatric hospital where the medical advisory described him as a dangerous individual who should not be approached. By the third day, Issa was waving the psychiatric evaluation report in court requesting a judicial order declaring his brother-in-law to be of unsound mind and placing his assets under the control of Salwa, his first and permanent wife. A copy of the same report was submitted for the divorce filing of his ward, Maram.

  Salwa was ecstatic. She embraced her suckling brother warmly and blessed his presence in her life.

  * * *

  Issa almost lost his mind.

  Breakdowns were not unfamiliar to him. Before he ended up crawling stark naked on Jeddah’s streets, he had had several temporary lapses of sanity owing to the stress that stemmed from the exacting nature of his work for the Master. Issa was never able to forget that the slightest mistake could mean the end of life as he knew it. He lived in constant dread of doing something that would unleash the Master’s devastating fury.

  One night when he had broken down and wept over Mawdie, Issa reminded himself that he had to focus on his goals: namely, building up his savings and devoting himself unstintingly to the needs of the Master’s family. Aunt Shahla, the Master’s mother, had become very dependent on him. She relied on him almost completely; it was Issa who called the doctor when she felt poorly, Issa who administered her medicines with clockwork regularity, and Issa who brought in nurses to attend to her in her private apartments.

  Issa was also the one who escorted her to perform Umrah, the lesser pilgrimage, in Mecca, and to visit the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. She trusted no one but him with distributing alms and charity on her behalf, and with supervising the charitable projects she funded. She would not countenance seeing him wronged
or belittled, and her love for him had steadily increased with the onset of old age and its ailments. He had become her favourite.

  It was during a visit to the hospital where Aunt Shahla went for specialised tests that Issa almost lost his mind. Such visits always turned the medical centre topsy-turvy as people fell over themselves to attend to her.

  Issa had left her in front of the door to the X-ray room to make a quick phone call and when he returned, she was gone without a trace. Aunt Shahla had vanished into thin air.

  None of the staff – nurses, doctors, administrators, hospital workers – had any knowledge of her whereabouts. The director of the facility was almost as distressed as Issa as they looked for her in the X-ray rooms, all the laboratories, the medical records department and emergency rooms, and each and every ward. Seeing them running through the hospital hallways and corridors, the entire staff, from the orderlies to the heads of department, set about looking for her.

  Work at the hospital ground to a halt as staff left their stations to find Aunt Shahla, and the news spread among the patients, their visitors and their attendants. When someone asked for a description of the missing person, Issa became very agitated. He could not very well stop the news from spreading but he was also afraid that it would go beyond the hospital walls and get back to the Palace.

  He almost reached the point of having to notify the Master that his mother had gone missing at the hospital. Two hours went by and no one had any idea where she was. They ruled out the possibility that she had simply walked out of the building since she was confined to a wheelchair. They wondered whether she might accidentally have been wheeled into one of the prep rooms by a nurse who might have mistaken her for an in-patient or, perhaps, that an orderly had wheeled her outside intending to help her to her car or even to the bathroom. This last possibility immediately gave rise to the hope that she would be found before the news got back to the Palace.

  Everyone made for the hospital bathrooms, and female nurses and doctors went in to search the toilet stalls. When they emerged shaking their heads, Issa snapped. He began shouting and cursing everyone at the hospital and got into such a hysterical state that two psychiatrists intervened and volunteered to go with him, as well as the director of the hospital, and break the news to the Master of his mother’s disappearance.

  Just as they were about to leave, Issa spotted her wheelchair. It was right where he had left it. Aunt Shahla was hidden from view by an old man, a patient, who was stooped over her figure, trying to settle her into the chair and to lift her feet on to the footrest. The man knocked on the door of the X-ray room impatiently; he had been waiting for his turn a long time. Issa raced towards them and she looked up at him smiling brightly.

  ‘All this time, and still no one from X-ray has turned up,’ she said with mild reproof, as the old man fussed over her again, making sure she was seated comfortably. Aunt Shahla thanked him profusely.

  She refused to say where she had been all this time.

  Some time after the incident at the hospital, Aunt Shahla said to Issa, ‘Mawdie says hello.’

  She conveyed the greeting while coughing. He had just given her the pill she took to regulate her arrhythmia.

  He had not set eyes on Mawdie since her wedding two years earlier. He was careful never to be there when she visited. Aunt Shahla waited for him to respond but when he changed the subject, she handed him her cell phone and asked him to dial Mawdie’s number because she wanted to speak to her daughter.

  She could have made the call without his help and Issa wondered whether the old woman had sensed that there had been a relationship between them, or that she had known all along and had been watching them closely.

  He called the number and after he handed back the phone to her, he slipped out of the room.

  Aunt Shahla repeated Mawdie’s greeting a month later and added, ‘Do you know that Mawdie is having problems with her husband?’

  Issa remained silent.

  ‘Her brother forced her into it, you know,’ Aunt Shahla said gently. ‘You’re aware of that, aren’t you?’

  Issa shook his head; he had not even had a chance to speak to her once since his return from Cairo.

  ‘Do you know the stories of Clever Hassan, Sindbad and the Sad Lover? Although the princess marries Clever Hassan, she cannot marry the man she loves.’ Aunt Shahla continued, ‘Son, that’s just the way it is and you have to endure the frustrations. I’ve told Mawdie the same thing.’

  Aunt Shahla was a woman who had married against her will. Her wedding to the Master’s father, Sayyid al-kabeer, had been a huge affair and she had no choice in the matter. While she had surrendered her body to her husband, in her mind she kept alive the image of the sweetheart she had been forced to give up. Now her daughter was repeating her history, almost to the letter, and all she could do about it was lighten the burden of the crossed lovers with words of comfort.

  It was Aunt Shahla who kept their hearts connected. When she learned that her daughter’s life was unhappy, she smuggled gifts and greetings from Issa and did the same for him.

  * * *

  A boy and a girl were the fruit of Mawdie’s seven years of marriage.

  Over that period, Aunt Shahla’s health, already at a low, took a turn for the worse. Issa was nearby to comfort her.

  ‘Life is passing you by, son. Shouldn’t you be thinking of marriage?’ she asked one day, taking his hand in hers.

  ‘I’m too young to marry.’ His playful response was accompanied by the laugh she so loved to hear.

  ‘Are you waiting for her?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Even if you spend your whole life waiting, you’ll never get her,’ said Aunt Shahla. ‘Find yourself another woman to care for and who’ll care for you. Let me tell you a story no one knows,’ she said suddenly. ‘Do you remember that day in the hospital five years ago when you asked me where I was?’

  Issa nodded.

  ‘Do you remember the kind man who was helping me back into the wheelchair?’

  Issa brought to mind the old patient at the hospital. ‘Yes.’

  Aunt Shahla described the events in detail. The man had bent down to kiss her hand. At first, she thought he was one of their old servants, but his kiss went on too long and he would not let go. When she pulled her hand away, he whimpered as if about to cry. ‘All I need is you,’ he said. ‘You are all I’ve ever desired, dear Shahla.’

  That was the moment Aunt Shahla recognised him: he was her sweetheart. He had aged terribly, his hair was all white and he was very thin. But his eyes, with their thick, overhanging brows that protruded like little parasols, were the same. He wheeled her into one of the inner waiting rooms and as he sat before her, all the years of separation fell away in one instant. He took her hand, looked at the wrinkles tenderly and singled out her ring finger. He told her how he used to dream of putting a wedding band on that finger and that he had waited his entire life to tell her that he had never stopped loving her. Not for a day.

  He went on to tell her how he had achieved everything he had aspired to: learning, riches, standing. But he never stopped waiting for a time to come when they could be together again and so he had never married.

  Aunt Shahla was hard on him. Time was short and she did not tell him how she, too, had suffered, how barely a day passed without her dreaming of seeing him. Just seeing him and nothing else. She said nothing, and he just wheeled her back to where she had been and left.

  He disappeared right before her eyes, just as Issa and the hospital staff gathered around her and started asking her questions. Once inside the X-ray room, Aunt Shahla learned from a nurse that he came in regularly to get chemotherapy for cancer of the spine. So she started following his news from afar. There was no time left to have even one meeting or outing.

  She had found out exactly a week ago that he had died. ‘I could swear that if anyone had been there as he took his last breaths, they’d have heard my name on his lips,’ Aunt Shahla sa
id. She looked dispassionate, as if she had recounted the story of some other woman unconnected to herself in any way. She took Issa’s hand and patted it gently. ‘If you want to continue loving Mawdie, and be her one and only love, do so from afar.’

  21

  Mawdie threw a huge party to celebrate her divorce.

  She had vowed to herself that she would marry Issa or die. Her decision convinced Issa to follow his heart fearlessly. Issa did not follow Aunt Shahla’s advice to continue loving Mawdie from a distance.

  Their resolve to get married, however, brought them on a collision course with an immovable rock. The Master’s anger awaited them, calculating and devious. He was not willing to renounce his anger as long as Issa remained at the Palace, living in the lap of luxury.

  Issa was providing him with new excitement and it brought back the almost feline pleasures he so loved: toying with his prey, pawing it, only to disembowel it later with his claws. The certainty that his dominion was not diminished in the least contributed to his euphoria.

  Issa was at a juncture in his life where he could have joined the ranks of billionaires, and the Master exploited his greed by placing a few choice temptations before him. He used the stock market to drive Issa into the ground. The bank manager, Adnan Hassoun, was tasked with luring Issa into the Master’s snare.

  Like the serpent that brought the devil into the Garden of Eden, the Master ushered Adnan into Issa’s life. The relationship was built up with demonstrations of affection, gifts and concern for Issa’s welfare in a very volatile stock market. Adnan offered to manage Issa’s portfolio in return for a percentage but Issa was reluctant to hand it over to his friend: he listened to his analysis of the market and followed his recommendations, purchasing shares in companies that were doing well. Issa’s bank balance hit the 100-million-riyal mark.

  Issa trusted Adnan to such an extent that he followed his advice to the letter and unswervingly. Adnan offered Issa a matching bank loan: these loans, offered only to the bank’s most prestigious clients, were to enhance their trading potential and basically matched the client’s balance held by the bank. What Adnan neglected to add was that the bank reserved the right to call in the loan following a fifty-percent loss in the value of the portfolio.