by Abdo Khal
Issa showed up at the bank to complete the loan process and was shocked by the number of customers on the bank floor all trying to sign up for similar loans. These were people who had no other work besides trading. Construction projects were at a standstill and investors were opting to get into the stock market, adhering to the prevailing dictum that if you could not make it rich in days like these, you would never make it.
The bank was thronged with borrowers, investors and brokers glued to trading screens. They were all worried they might miss the gravy train. Issa pushed his way through the crowd and past groups of noisy men heading towards Adnan’s office. He repeatedly apologised as he asked to be let through.
Adnan emerged from his office and came towards him, chuckling. ‘As you can see, they all want loans,’ he said.
‘And does the bank have enough money for all these borrowers?’ asked Issa.
‘The bank is like a fountain, my friend,’ replied Adnan. ‘While funds allocated to credit may be fixed, they are distributed here and there and in the end, they all come back to the bank. Not a single piastre ever leaves the vault.’
‘But at the end of the day those people’s bank accounts are growing.’
‘Yes, but that’s just what shows up on the screens. This is a rare opportunity for all our people to strike it rich and it will never recur. In boom times, you have to grab what you can while the going is good. It’s like running a marathon – you’ve got to have good lungs.’
‘That’s what everyone is saying,’ said Issa, nodding.
‘That’s because it’s the truth, and everyone can see it. Look around. They’re all government employees, either borrowing or trading, that is, buying and selling. Everyone believes that the index will go up to 30,000 points,’ he said. ‘That’s a five- to ten-fold growth in profits.’
Inside the office, Issa relaxed while two of Adnan’s staff completed the paperwork for the loan. As the signature process began, Adnan held forth on the guaranteed profits that would accrue to Issa’s portfolio and reminded him to be diligent about repaying the loan as soon as he had doubled his investment.
‘The Master controls dozens of companies, so if you want the best yields, my advice is that you invest in those companies. Wherever he puts his money, just follow suit, eyes closed.’
This counsel bore fruit and Issa’s profits were mind-boggling. His bank balance jumped to 250 million riyals – an astonishing return that he reaped in only four days of trading. Thus assured that Adnan was truly a reliable and sound source of advice, he finally entrusted him with managing his portfolio and just followed the progress of his fortunes. These soared day after day.
Issa’s ambition had grown in line with his wealth and he would have taken over the country if he could have. He was willing to grovel and abase himself, and do whatever else was necessary to feed his ambition. The accumulation of wealth was predicated on abasing oneself, he felt; to do otherwise would be counterproductive.
Issa had already reached the point of prostration before Mawdie, ignoring the fact that prostration is an inescapable part of enslavement.
Financially speaking, he was already on his knees since the Master held him in a vice-like grip inside the stock market. When the bubble eventually burst and the value of shares collapsed, the bank hastened to liquidate Issa’s portfolio and recover its loan. His entire account was wiped out in one stroke, down to the last piastre on the paper statement. Issa was left to wander the streets naked and deranged, hurling abuse at the high and mighty of the city.
* * *
By the time he was fifty-eight years old, Hamdan Bagheeni had managed to become a security guard at the Palace. While he would always have difficulties with the alphabet, particularly the letters noon and jeem, he felt that he had now made it in life. Hamdan swelled with pride as he stood to attention with his rifle propped up beside him, marvelling at the sight of the gates to Paradise, which, for most of his life, had been a distant vision.
The only thing that marred his enjoyment of this new position was that his father-in-law had not lived to see it. He would have liked to witness the old man’s ridicule turn into pride: his father-in-law had little good to say about him and all the bad-mouthing had eventually driven Hamdan’s wife to leave him. Had he lived just a little longer, Hamdan would have been able to repay him with a few choice words of his own. He had endured all the disparagement silently because the responses he would have liked to make would have been considered inappropriate to utter in front of a woman. So he said nothing and she had eventually given up on him.
After twelve long years of intellectual exertion and perseverance, Hamdan had finally obtained his primary education certificate. His motivation was very nearly destroyed by the repeated failure of several years, but he found new resolve every time he saw his father-in-law coming or going. With every passing year, his father-in-law got closer to the grave and when he died, Hamdan described him as a mean man because he had passed away before he could witness his success.
Hamdan had gone on to obtain his primary education certificate the same year, with a mark of ‘fair’. When he proudly showed it to his estranged wife, he told her that her father had deliberately sought to annoy him by dying when he did.
He stood proudly in front of the Palace gates, with nothing on his mind besides gazing at the high and imposing walls, and occasionally allowing his eyes to stray towards the interior of the compound. He sensed that with a little more persistence he too would be able to get actually inside Paradise.
The guards were on notice to prevent Issa from entering the Palace compound under any circumstance. Hamdan could not really get his head around that and he voiced his misgivings. ‘Issa, who brought everybody in through these gates, is now forbidden from crossing its threshold? Why is that?’
No one knew the reason for this sudden reversal in Issa’s fortunes and no one had expected it. Issa had kept his secret buried so deep that when he decided to act everyone was caught unaware.
* * *
King Abdullah Street runs through the heart of Jeddah, with more recent neighbourhoods flanking it on either side. It is the main thoroughfare into which secondary and intersecting streets feed and is plagued by permanent traffic congestion that only adds to the sticky humidity.
I wondered what the Master could want at this time of day when I set off to his other palace on the shores of Sharm Abhar.
I had stopped running like a racehorse that gallops off at the first sound of the firing gun and I had honestly contemplated not responding to his summons now.
I stopped at a cash machine to check on my bank balance and was relieved to find that it still stood at twenty million riyals. I was worried that it might just evaporate one day, as had happened to Issa. The Master’s moods were erratic and unforgiving. This servitude had gone on too long.
I had reached the autumn of my life and had nothing to support me except for this bank balance acquired at the price of humiliation and abuse. Thankfully, I had been too slow and despondent to trade shares and had narrowly escaped the stock market crash – otherwise I would not have had a pot to piss in.
The main reason for my hesitation, however, was probably Joseph Essam, who had counselled restraint. ‘Don’t over-expose yourself,’ he had warned. ‘You know he’ll skewer you.’
Seeing me perplexed, he spelled out what he meant. ‘Look, you have no children, so why kill yourself to get even richer? You already have more than enough.’
His words also reminded me that I was wasting what was left of my life in unnecessary servitude. It was a reminder I did not want and I pushed it from my mind, clinging to my old conviction that nothing but rubbish would be dumped on my head regardless of whether it was a holiday or not. Once we are immersed in what is, to all intents and purposes, disgusting and filthy, no matter how much we yearn for something pure, we are stuck in the putrid rot.
I was not used to disregarding the Master’s orders, no matter how onerous. I was, a
fter all, at his mercy, and he could destroy me any time he chose to. I wondered what was stopping him. I had observed him for years and knew his vicious streak intimately: the people he surrounded himself with were kept on a tight leash and the day inevitably came when he simply crushed them.
He was careful to expose only one side of his multifaceted personality, whether in public or with the media. All of us who worked for him were bound to silence – you broke the rule of silence at your peril, for any leak of a word or deed of his would ensure you were permanently silenced.
Three of the Palace staff literally lost their tongues that way. Their enforced speechlessness resulted from relaying stories about Palace goings-on that only they could have known about. It was his chosen punishment that planted the seed in my mind to cut off Aunt Khayriyyah’s tongue. I found out how one amputated a tongue with a razor and followed the process to the letter.
When it came to dealing with the Master, you could not be deluded by any sense of closeness you might think you had. He was like a wild horse that bucked and threw its riders as soon as they got in the saddle. I very nearly lost my tongue the first night we met: I had come out wanting to tell Issa what had happened and he had clamped my mouth shut, warning me not to breathe another word.
I remembered our first encounter on that ill-fated night. After performing the punishment as he had instructed, I had scrubbed myself clean to remove both the traces of Tahani’s blood that were still on me and the filth of what I had just done at the Master’s behest. He summoned me and when I appeared before him meekly, he was holding court with his cronies.
‘You did an admirable job,’ the Master had said as I stood facing him. ‘Now just forget it ever happened – until the next time I call on you.’ He motioned that I should leave but stopped me as I turned to go. ‘You won’t be leaving the Palace. I’m keeping you close at hand.’
Issa fell into step beside me and stuffed 1,000 riyals in my pocket. ‘Now you truly belong at the Palace,’ he whispered. ‘It’s a godsend – and don’t you forget it.’
The Master’s word carried as much weight now as it did back then and his influence was as unchecked. I had not imagined he could last this long. I had assumed that he would be diminished with age and that, like a rotting tree with termites at its core, the shadow he cast would subside and disappear.
I had hoped that he would be whittled down to size with time and that his old carcass would be relegated to a wheelchair, to be wheeled to the toilet by a disgusted Asian servant so that he could relieve himself after his gargantuan meals.
It remained a vain wish, at least as far as the Master was concerned. His brother, Nadir, on the other hand, did end up in a wheelchair after a traffic accident which left him a double amputee. Nadir was the spitting image of his brother, albeit an image that was smudged by his perpetually gloomy mood. He liked dirty jokes and was particularly fond of a joke which Osama had once told and which broke all records when 50,000 riyals was offered as a prize.
Nadir’s companions flocked to his side to relay the latest jokes. He would handsomely reward the one who could tell him a joke three times in a row and still make him laugh so hard that he cried. This joke session would take place early in the evening, before the parties, and Nadir would then retell the jokes to the entertainment girls in his own sick and twisted way.
He was a lanky man with a long and lopsided face. The goatee he favoured further accentuated his crooked features, especially when he laughed. His unusual height was not hampered by the electric wheelchair he used, and even when seated he was as tall as a stocky man. His elegance, however, was distinctive and, so long as he did not speak, he appeared quite handsome. It was only when he spoke or laughed that his face looked contorted; he looked even more repulsive talking for any length of time because of his pointy stunted teeth and the saliva foaming at the corners of his mouth.
Many a Palace employee had been glad when he emerged from his accident half the man he used to be. If their hope had been that he might not emerge at all, it was dashed by his speedy dispatch to Germany for medical treatment. In the event, God was thanked for a half-fulfilled hope: Nadir returned in a wheelchair, but his tall body and wide appetites brimmed from the ambulatory device.
His accident in no way curtailed his lust although it took on such a form that Osama was led to leave his employ.
He had a series of unsuccessful marriages – the women were turned off by his limp rod and his overactive thumb.
He did not want to accept that his medically induced impotence constantly placed him in the embarrassing position of having to pay women to divest themselves of their modesty and butter him up with affirmations of his prowess.
He was bent on going with Osama on his nightly recruiting sorties and insisted that he, rather than the servant assigned to the task, wheel him around the malls and souks they went to. He thought that the young women who looked at him with pity because of his condition were captivated by his good looks, and he flirted with them coarsely and aggressively.
Osama was at the end of his tether: whenever a girl caught his eye, Nadir insisted that Osama hand her his calling card. Some of the girls would take it and then leave it at their table and others would tear the card up right under his eyes, but a few who recognised the name on the card were sufficiently enticed to keep it.
He made Osama wheel him up and down the hallways of the malls in hot pursuit of the young girls he favoured. If his aggressive banter was ineffective, he would resort to tempting them with money; if that did not work, he might threaten to take them by force. This worked with some of the girls who would climb into his car, enveloped in the obscurity of the dark-tinted windows and the partition that secluded the rear passenger compartment from the driver.
As soon as he was transferred to the car from his wheelchair, he would hurl himself on the girl, petting and fondling her with his hands as well as his tongue, oblivious to her screams and cries for help. Generally, the frenzied groping would suffice and there would be no need to bring the girl back to the Palace.
The pleasure he derived from such acts was their performance in public places. After a period of avid and eager interest, he grew bored with the repetitiveness and monotony of such escapades and began to look for a new pleasure to cultivate.
He was well aware of what Osama did when he poached him from the Punisher Squad. Soon afterwards his desires blossomed and grew as twisted as his facial features.
He began to exhibit undisguised effeminate mannerisms. He spent entire days at the hands of Filipino men who smoothed and lightened his complexion, and removed every last trace of hair from his body. His obsession with hairlessness extended to his goatee which, when it was also removed, left his face formless and even more elongated and ugly. Every crevice of his body was exfoliated to loosen dead skin and calluses, and he was slathered with moisturising lotions to soften his skin. He favoured tight-fitting silk clothes, acquired a toupee made of long wavy chestnut-brown hair and began applying light foundation and eye make-up.
The sight of him was enough to turn anyone’s stomach, and it was what Osama had to contend with whenever he was summoned to Nadir’s bedroom. Recounting what had gone on in there, Osama would gag and curse his very life.
I still had a way to go along King Abdullah Street.
The checkpoint right before the Globe Roundabout slowed the northbound traffic, and as my thoughts darted from the past to the present, I wondered what was in store.
I no longer lived at the villa and had gone back to living in my quarters at the Palace. My aunt’s moaning and whining had become intolerable; whenever I threatened her, she played dead. Under her clothes, there was nothing but a disintegrating corpse, a heap of rattling bones and shrivelled skin.
By this time, the Master had moved to the new palace in Sharm Abhar. He would go back and forth between the two palaces as he pleased, maintaining the old routines and refusing to loosen his hold on the old shoe of a servant that I had become. The
alertness of the cat toying with its prey still pulsed through him.
He taught me the importance of keeping one’s enemies disarmed but within reach, and of smiting them without hesitation, if necessary.
I had no enemy beside my aunt, and I had kept her in her place. She was my incurable disease, the affliction for which I had no treatment. Whenever I used to see her, venom would run through my blood. The only thing we had in common had been my visits to the prison cell I had fashioned for her. It was as if I used to go there to take a reading of my hatred. Whenever I had been to see her, carrying supplies of food and water with me, we were always on the exact same wavelength of unequivocal and reciprocal hatred.
Nadir remained in the old Palace and as a result of his latest perversion, Osama was desperate to get away. He came to see me one evening, undone.
‘Tahani is lying there all alone, and she needs me,’ he said, dredging up the story I had now heard dozens of times.
Despite my best efforts, he was still almost certain that I was to blame for Tahani’s death.
He fell silent and took another swig from the bottle he carried with him at all times. Telling him not to drink was futile and would have been hypocritical in the light of my own unceasing depravity.
His limbs might have grown heavy but Tahani remained buoyant in his imagination. He had taken to collecting and reciting well-known love poetry.
‘Do you know of any famous poets who waxed lyrical about their beloved?’ Osama asked me. ‘I’d like to collect every poem ever written by a bereft lover.’
I was no connoisseur of lovers’ deliriums and was not taken in by the fraud that poets and lovers perpetrated with their cleverly crafted words. I had learned early on that the only true possessions are those which are tangible – the things we can hold in our hands. Whatever slips from our grasp is gone for ever.