by Abdo Khal
I doubted it. Had he sensed the merest wisp of an inkling about any of these, he would have ground me into the dirt, not just thrown me out.
What, then, had happened exactly? I wondered if the decision had been instigated by Maram to pre-empt anything that might threaten her life with the Master. I was already more or less convinced that she had carried on with me simply in order to destroy Issa and, therefore, that I was as expendable as an old shoe that was no longer fit to be worn to a filthy toilet, much less to fancy parties.
My decision to leave her was a considered one but when she responded with indifference, I was stung. I could find no trace of her at the Palace even though I looked for her everywhere. The Master’s sudden decision added to the distance between us and compounded my banishment.
Maram was just the same as that old worm I had for an aunt – maybe the same blood ran in their veins. Both of them were devious and underhanded and they dragged people down without the slightest compunction.
My only hope of finding her was to contact her girlfriends whose homes we had used for our trysts. Those women could always be found in a shopping centre, particularly Iceland Mall. I loitered around there, convinced that one of them would help me to track down Maram. The mall thronged with women of every hue, all of whom had some shady story or other.
Could they sense I was on their trail?
I saw a friend of Maram’s, a woman called Lama’a, but after that one time I was never able to catch her or any of the others. The day I saw Lama’a she was hanging on the arm of a young stud who looked for all the world as if he were some gold insignia shining alongside the rest of her glittering accessories. He brimmed with health and vitality, and his muscles rippled under his shirt.
She removed her arm from his and he looked around peevishly, maybe for something or someone to shore up his machismo. I went up to Lama’a, raising my hand in greeting.
‘Do you know where Maram is?’ I asked without preliminaries.
Flustered by my sudden appearance, she reached for the young man’s arm.
‘Umm,’ she faltered, ‘who are you, mister?’
‘Have you forgotten me, Lama’a?’
‘Lama’a?’ Her voice was shrill. ‘No, no, you must be mistaken,’ she said. ‘I’m Shama’a.’ Her laughter was shameless and coarse as she tugged at her boyfriend’s arm and moved on. I almost insisted, but looking at the stud with bristling muscles, I thought better of it.
A few young women nearby who had caught the gist of our exchange looked at my frozen countenance with evident scorn. Did I seem that decrepit to them?
I suppose that the sight of an older man feverishly scanning women’s faces and looking women over as they congregated in the malls and around the shopfronts was cause enough for ridicule.
Young women evaluated contenders for their affections on the basis of age. Men deemed too old for such inappropriately youthful pleasures as banter and flirtatiousness were simply put in their place with a couple of well-chosen forms of deferential address, such as ‘uncle’ or ‘mister’.
When Lama’a first came to the Palace, she had taken up with a sixty-something man who disguised his advanced age with hair dye, Viagra and frequent medical treatments. Age was no object to her, and she never called him anything but ‘dearest’ and ‘darling’.
But a scornful ‘mister’ was all she had for me.
Maram had been a luscious sweet that no longer wished to tickle my fancy, but at this point finding my aunt was the greater priority. After leaving the Palace, I had gone back to the villa and lived there holed up like a rat. I was paralysed with fear that my aunt’s condition would become public knowledge. I no longer had the Master’s impunity to protect me and I was sure the discovery would set me on a downward spiral to perdition.
The Master had told me I would be fine as long as I minded my step. For a moment, I wondered whether he was holding my aunt hostage. But the notion was too preposterous: I was hardly the kind of threat to him that would warrant taking a hostage as a bargaining chip. The jumble of events blurred together in my mind and ended up like a foul-tasting, grit-coloured liquid.
I tried to clear my mind and hang on to just one idea but no sooner had I done that than a myriad of other possibilities bubbled up inside my head.
I needed to find her before she blew up in my face. Her story was grizzly enough to land me in big trouble. If he wanted to, the Master could have me led to the execution block purely on the evidence of what had been recorded in the videos.
I reminded myself to keep my priorities in order. The videos and the Master were irrelevant. My aunt’s disappearance disturbed me, and I would have no peace of mind until I found out where she was. Even if it killed me. Or her, for that matter. Where could her tired old feet have carried her?
A visit to Ibrahim had clearly become imperative if I was to get rid of all the static that was buzzing in my head. It was more than likely that she had gone to him.
I rang the doorbell and also knocked for good measure, and a boy of about twelve or a little older opened. His poise and good manners were striking and without first trying to ascertain who I was or the purpose of my visit, he invited me in with the customary words of welcome.
‘Are you Ibrahim Fadel’s son?’ I asked him.
‘Yes, that’s right. Welcome.’
‘Is your father at home?’
‘Please come in. Welcome to our home,’ he said, adding formally, ‘We are blessed by your visit.’
He showed me in and ushered me to the seat that had pride of place in the parlour. He asked after my health and invited me to make myself comfortable. He disappeared inside the house to fetch his father and his little brother joined me.
The boy was the spitting image of my father. He greeted and welcomed me as is proper but with far more reserve than his older sibling, and then sat absolutely still watching me. He scanned my features and my general appearance and when our eyes met, he smiled. It was the exact same smile I had worn at his age.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
‘Tariq. Tariq Ibrahim Fadel.’
A chill ran through me and goosebumps covered my skin. His expression betrayed nothing; he did not notice my reaction and just fiddled with the armrest of his chair. Then he turned his attention to rearranging a pile of religious books on the table in front of him.
I looked around at the simple furniture in the room. It was a modest house and somewhat ramshackle with steel girders that protruded from the roof. I had the impression that the structure was just barely standing. But it was a home and it was full of the smell of life.
Voices drifting in from the back of the house sounded loving and sweet. For the boy called Tariq, I was merely a distraction. His features were my father’s and his demeanour mine.
‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked him.
He shook his head indifferently. I had wanted to spark his curiosity, but he was not interested. He continued to examine me as he fiddled with the armrest. Then a precociously good-looking boy came into the room. He looked somehow familiar and greeted me bashfully before hopping over to sit beside little Tariq. He melted my heart and I wanted to give him a hug, but he shrank back and just held out his hand silently. I asked Tariq who he was.
‘This is Aghyad.’
‘Your brother?’
‘No, my cousin. My auntie’s son.’
So here was another Tariq with a paternal aunt of his own. Who was this sister who had appeared all of a sudden at the end of my life? Life plants the seeds of stories just as it propagates the events that move stories along. Was life breeding a new version of the Tariq and Khayriyyah story? Was this a hereditary propagation of the story of an aunt and a child with minor variations?
The boys sat together like two cats eyeing their prey, slowly following my movements and exchanging sly little glances with one another. One of them would get my attention and the other would look over my appearance. The older boy returned and saved me from this mon
itoring. He carried a tray with coffee and a plate of dates, intoning hospitable words of welcome.
He was meticulous in his presentation of the coffee, as if he were practised in the art of hospitality. He ignored his little brother’s antics and contrived to come up with a suitable topic for adult conversation.
‘The rains are very late this year.’
‘When was the last time it rained in Jeddah?’ I asked. ‘The rain has gone the way of better days, son.’
My remark flustered him. He said nothing and I continued to be the object of attention in the room. I held their gaze in an attempt to stare them down and slow their overactive imaginations. I looked at them thinking these were the new branches that had sprouted from our common roots. I wondered whether I was sharp enough to tell which of them would be the ill-starred one.
Tariq seemed to me the most likely candidate to replay that story.
I erased the images taking shape in my mind and set them aside as one might put away unsharpened pencils.
Here then were people who were part of my family even though they did not know me nor I them. These were the people whom I was running away from and whose veins pulsed with the same blood as mine, although they did not know it. Did that insolent little wretch, Tariq, know that his impudence was my legacy?
Their eyes on me like wayward flies began to wear me out. When the silence had gone on long enough, I asked the eldest boy what his name was.
‘Fadel Ibrahim Fadel, uncle.’
He had used the term ‘uncle’ deferentially, but I was sorely tempted to confirm my status as his uncle. I wanted to tell him that I truly was his father’s brother, and the son of Fadel the elder who had sown his seed in two different wombs.
‘Isn’t your father at home?’
‘Yes, yes, he’s here,’ replied the boy quickly. ‘He’s just finishing his ablutions. He’ll be here any minute now.’
As though prompted, Ibrahim poked his head around the door just then, water still dripping from his face and down his thick beard.
Seeing me, he shouted with astonishment, ‘Tariq!’
Little Tariq jumped up, thinking that his father meant him. Ibrahim rushed in and flung his arms around me, squeezing me so tightly that I lost my breath. I was unable to contain myself any longer, and the tears streamed down my face. I sobbed as Ibrahim held me close. He wiped my tears and I dried his.
He waved at me grandly to the boys and said, ‘This is your Uncle Tariq – my only, my dearest and most beloved brother!’
As if he felt that the introduction was inadequate, he cried out, ‘Kiss his hands! And his feet too!’ Fadel bent down to kiss my hand and I picked him up and showered him with kisses of my own.
‘This is my eldest, Fadel,’ Ibrahim said.
Then Aghyad came forward and accepted my embrace without reticence. ‘And this is Aghyad, the son of Mariam, our sister. He’s been wanting to meet you for a long time.’
That left the devilish little Tariq who, yet again, did things in his own time. At his father’s insistence, he finally followed Aghyad’s example.
‘This is Tariq. In some ways he’s like our father, but in others he’s just like you.’
Ibrahim kept his arm around my shoulder and called out, ‘Mariam! Come over here, Mariam!’
I could not bear the flood of emotion any longer. Suddenly the branches of the tree had sprouted new shoots – nephews from both a brother and a sister – and here I was having lived my entire life like a severed limb, with nothing to sustain me but my dry and withered feelings.
What would I say to this Mariam now: I am your wayward brother who broke with his family? How was I going to justify my disappearance from before the day she was born?
A little girl, who could not have been more than ten years old, stepped into the room hesitantly and hurried shyly towards me.
‘Say hello to your uncle. This is Mariam, the last of my bunch. She looks just like our sister.’
She greeted me, speaking with a pronounced lisp. Her father’s eyes glowed with love as she spoke. He pulled me down affectionately to sit by him.
‘When all of you left the neighbourhood, I named my children after you – Tariq for you, Fadel for our father and Mariam for our sister – so that I could still feel your presence even though you were all gone.’
After a while, Ibrahim asked, ‘Where’s Aunt Khayriyyah? Why didn’t you bring her with you?’
‘She’s fine. I wasn’t planning on this visit, otherwise I would have brought her along.’ It was a stupid thing to say but it silenced Ibrahim.
So my aunt had not returned to her house in the neighbourhood or gone to her other nephew, Ibrahim. The worm was still wriggling around somewhere on the face of this earth. I thought I should cut short my visit as quickly as possible before I got mired in this sludge of emotions that already had me out of my depth. Before I could say anything, however, Aghyad was tugging at my sleeve.
‘Are you my mother’s brother?’ he asked. I nodded but had no desire to embrace him. ‘My mother never told me much about you,’ he added.
‘That’s because she hasn’t seen me yet. She doesn’t know anything about me.’
‘But you’re her brother,’ said the child, not quite understanding. ‘How could she not know anything about you?’
‘Well, it happens.’
‘Have you been away ever since you were born?’
His probing and unsettling questions silenced me.
They stirred up bitter feelings, reminding me that I was nothing but a transient, a stranger, a wanderer – and that I was lost. The journey had been so long, yet I still had not reached safe harbour. I had dropped anchor in many ports but had only seen land from a distance. When the journey is long, our memory is like a desert island; we no longer recall the people who washed ashore and could not but endure, or die.
‘Please tell me,’ Aghyad demanded, poking at me.
Would I ever be rid of the pest? For every question I answered, he nailed me with another as if he were trying to establish that I was the only crooked board in the lot. I looked at him closely: the boy was very handsome and he was determined to stick to me. I was not accustomed to being around kids, but I tried to be friendly and placed my hand on his shoulder. He jumped right into my lap and hugged me. The boy should have been named Arghad rather than Aghyad – cuddly rather than delicate.
The flow of questions was unstoppable now.
‘Did you just get back from your trip?’
‘Sort of.’
‘They said grandmother was away with you. I want to see her. Can I see her now?’
The boy’s questions were aggravating me. ‘Your grandmother? What grandmother is that?’ I asked him.
Ibrahim intervened. ‘He means Aunt Khayriyyah. He had been complaining to his mother that he doesn’t have any family, so she told him all about everyone in her family and in his father’s family. He knows most of them by name now and studies them as if they were one of his school subjects. If there’s someone he doesn’t know much about because they haven’t been around, he fills in the gaps with his imagination.’
Aghyad started tugging at my sleeve again.
‘Uncle, can I have a picture of you?’
He had a family photo album which he showed me now. Every picture was identified by type of relationship and there were a few words about his impressions of the person. Aunt Khayriyyah and I were on two facing pages. In the space left blank for our photos were pictures of two cartoon characters. Under them, he had written ‘Don’t know him’ and ‘Don’t know her’.
I flipped through his album and found his mother’s page. But instead of a photo of her, there was a picture of the Lebanese pop star, Haifa Wehbeh. Underneath the photo he had written: ‘Heart-throb’.
‘You little devil, is this your mother?’ I exclaimed with a laugh to take the sting out of my words.
‘No, but it wouldn’t do to have a real picture of my mother in here.’
Everyo
ne sensed that Aghyad was monopolising the conversation. Tariq’s response was to giggle at whatever his cousin said or did. Desperate for the flood of questions to end, I turned to Ibrahim.
‘Honestly, I’d like to meet our sister, Mariam. Where is she?’
‘She lives with her mother and sometimes comes with Aghyad to visit us. And I take him to see his father, sometimes.’
‘Are they divorced?’
‘It’s a long story. I came to see you some years ago, asking for your help with her situation. But you weren’t concerned at the time.’
I tied myself up in knots offering an apology. The excuses were flimsy and unconvincing.
‘What’s done is done,’ Ibrahim said, cutting me off. ‘It’s over and done with. She is now working and supporting herself, as well as her mother and her son.’
‘Does she need any help? I could—’ I started to say.
I pulled out my chequebook. Ibrahim placed his hand on mine as he had many years ago when he had uttered the words that had stuck with me since: ‘Foul money has a foul smell.’
This time, he said, ‘I don’t think so. Her work pays well.’
‘And what does she do?’
‘She manages a women’s clothing company. She apparently also got some money from her husband before he went into the hospital. If you saw the state he’s in you’d feel sorry for him.’
‘Is it serious?’
The evening call to prayer rang out, a harmony of cascading chants from nearby mosques, and it interrupted our conversation. Ibrahim turned to the boys.
‘Come on, get ready for prayers,’ he instructed.
They said their ablutions were done and that they were ready to go.
‘Have you done yours or do you need to do them?’ Ibrahim asked, turning to me.
‘No, no, I’ve done them.’
My tongue raced ahead of me and even though I said I had done them, the last time I had completed any ablutions was way back in the day of the Qur’an study groups. Ever since I had entered the Palace, I had been in a state of ritual impurity.