Authors: Abdo Khal
Sheikh Ibrahim Fadel,
Imam of the Salvation Mosque
I have now been carrying around this old carcass of mine for half a century.
The Master had snatched thirty-one out of those fifty years, without realising that he was sinking his teeth into carrion. It was on that darkest of nights – obscured now by the mists of time – that the barely tender nineteen-year-old had for ever hardened.
I no longer remembered the exact sequence of events: they flashed helter-skelter through my memory and I mixed up where and when they occurred. What I did know was that when I crossed the threshold of the Palace gates I stepped into an infernal life and became enslaved.
No one knew the Master as well as his entourage.
He had as many moods as he had outfits and could adapt his facial expression to suit any circumstance – and God help you if you had the audacity to suggest he might have picked the wrong thing to wear.
‘He’s just like a kid who throws tantrums,’ Uncle Muhammad Rikabi told me once, but I was not convinced. Uncle Muhammad had been employed by the Master’s father, and as the most senior employee at the Palace, everyone called him ‘uncle’ out of respect.
The Master’s craggy face featured prominently in the mass-market newspapers.
The depictions were invariably angelic, portraying him as someone who relieved the suffering of the huddled masses in the swoop of his wings. His smile could warm the stoniest of hearts, giving the lie to any suspicion one might have that it was fake. Newspaper and magazine photographs suggested an amiable and gentle-hearted man who was virtuous and righteous to a fault.
A headline above one of the shots lauded his donation of ten million riyals to a special-needs charity. In another photo, he looked straight into the camera and flashed his most charismatic smile as he handed a cheque to the president of the Association for the Disabled. In the accompanying statement, he chastised the wealthy for their stinginess and expressed his hope that they would redouble their efforts, calling for new initiatives and bolder philanthropic endeavours. He exhorted his well-heeled peers to focus on assisting the less fortunate and to lend a hand in launching voluntary support and relief projects.
I watched one of the gardeners dragging his lame leg as he crossed the grounds to prune the trees at the back of the Palace; their thick, intertwining limbs had begun wrapping themselves around the lamp posts and were obstructing the Palace lights.
Always mindful of the possibility of further impairment, the gardener was not one to postpone a chore. All those who served at the Palace had some kind of handicap. A casual visitor might think well of the Master for taking on so many disabled people and providing them with dignified if humble employment.
But those on the inside knew only too well that such disabilities were the inevitable fate of anyone who remained long enough at the Palace. Every able-bodied person who started work there expected to acquire some kind of impairment and could only pray that it would not prove fatal. Even I could be counted among them. After I entered ‘Paradise’ – as those on the outside called the Palace – the Master toyed with me and abused me at will, although I remained able-bodied.
He spent a lifetime tossing me back and forth, this way and that, like a cat delighting in its prey’s surrender, watching and waiting intently with claws primed, killing time before satisfying its instincts. My complete submission made him appear indifferent but I could tell his eyes were always on me, even if from a distance. Any move or gesture on my part and he would lash out, drawing me in with his claws. Wrenching me back forcefully only served to excite him.
The Master sought every pleasure, and with each new pleasure came the pursuit of the next; his drive to hedonism was as unrelenting as it was insatiable. As one adept at mutilation, he filled his Palace with a variety of human puppets and his incessant abuse left no one whole: eyes were gouged, limbs broken, hair and nails pulled out. Some were burned, others castrated and still others were emotionally maimed or made chronically sick. For those lucky enough to escape bodily injury, inner demons and untold nervous disorders would soon appear. In his perpetual search for new diversions, all of us were disfigured in some way or another. That is what puppets and dolls are made for; which child could resist playing with his toys?
One – merciless – day, long ago, I became his new plaything and I learned to ignore the scratches along the way.
I yielded to him without reservation because of a great piece of wisdom I stumbled upon when I was very young. While many years have passed since the incident, it taught me a valuable lesson without which I would long have despaired over all the strife I have caused in my life and in the lives of others.
Many decades ago, when loudspeakers broadcast Eid prayers through our hot and humid neighbourhood, we were filled with joyful anticipation and a sense of wonder at the prospect of the coming celebrations. People trickled on to the streets in their bright white clothing, faces shining as they happily exchanged greetings, blessings and congratulations. Boys and girls chirped as they raced from door to door in their new outfits, hoping to receive their
eidi
– a gift of cash – rather than more of the sweets that were already spilling from their pockets.
I too paraded in my new clothes, dreaming of the treasure trove of cash that would be mine if I obeyed my mother and wished all our relatives and friends a happy Eid.
It was dawn and I surrendered to a scrubbing by my Aunt Khayriyyah, whose hands unearthed a store of dirt in all the hidden nooks and crannies of my body. But her cleaning was not as thorough as it could have been; her hands moved at lightning speed, never quite ridding me of all the accumulated dirt. I later understood that this was to spite my mother by inciting my father against her – not that he ever noticed my less-than-spotless appearance.
All my friends were subjected to the same periodic cleansing. Eid was an occasion for the entire community to remember the Creator: home furnishings were changed and walls and doors were repainted so that everything would gleam to usher in the holiday.
We all attended to this day with care, decorating our homes and replacing old and tattered clothes with brand-new ones. But the public spaces were disregarded and remained as filthy and littered with rubbish as they always were, like a feast left out for the flies that had been shooed from people’s houses.
I was on my way to visit my relatives and had to be careful not to trail the hem of my new thobe through the dirt in the alleyways. A muddy puddle blocked my path and only seemed to grow larger as I considered jumping over it. I tried tiptoeing around it but the puddle just kept growing, so I stepped back to find the narrowest point to leap over without splattering my clothes and spoiling the holiday.
Since I knew I would be punished if I dirtied my clothes, which was likely to happen if I attempted to jump over the puddle, I took my time and collected rocks and pieces of wood to build a makeshift bridge. I was determined to get to the other side of the neighbourhood unsullied.
As I teetered across the improvised bridge, a hand poked out from a rooftop above me and dumped rubbish right on my head.
I saw no point in trying to avoid the squalor of the streets any further and hurried back home, considerably filthier than I had been at the start of the day. This led to a thrashing – Aunt Khayriyyah obliged even on Eid – and I swore to remain in my dirty clothes for the rest of the day.
Neither my aunt nor my mother attended to the customary duty of receiving Eid well-wishers. Instead, they spent the entire day bickering. I sobbed my heart out not because I had dirtied my holiday clothes, but because the holiday had passed and I had missed out on my
eidi
.
I learned a valuable lesson that day. By the evening, I had realised that it was not important which rooftop the rubbish had been thrown from, simply that it had come from above. There was little point in caring about what was underfoot when worse was sure to rain down from the heavens.
That
was the great wisdom that stayed with me throughout my life.
After that incident, I no longer cared whether I was defiled or not. On the contrary, I would pursue every wicked path before me and scale every mount of malice. It was the height of sin that would lead me into service at the Palace. Once inside, where there was no escape from depravity, I came upon another piece of wisdom: being human means hiding behind our own sinfulness while always pointing out the sins of others.
* * *
During the wild parties at the Palace, when luxury cars filled the interior parking lots, servants in brocaded suits glided all but invisibly among the guests, bearing trays of beverages and fruit and all manner of desserts. No one cast so much as a glance at their movements, and they remained to all intents and purposes as unseen as the houses of our neighbourhood across the way. From the Palace, our houses looked like prostrated servants forbidden to straighten up.
These parties were the scenes of undulating bodies as women set the nights on fire with their ostentatious flirting, of heads growing heavy with hackneyed phrases and pent-up desire, and, finally, of lust unleashed as the first drop of blood spilled on to the earth, perpetually seeking fresh blood to fuel its blaze.
Lust, blood, victims: the unholy trinity that contravenes the teachings of every religion and sacred tradition. It is this alternative trinity that delineates the parameters of human endeavour. This is how history is made.
One of the Palace regulars, Joseph Essam, was christened at the Church of the Virgin Mary in Beirut. Despite such immaculate credentials, he was not above doing missionary work under the cover of selling religious trinkets and semi-precious stones to would-be pilgrims.
‘If you seek purity,’ he once said, ‘acknowledge your sins and forgive your enemies, for our Father in Heaven has borne your suffering through eternity and to this day.’
‘So who is this father of ours?’ I retorted.
The way Joseph Essam stood during dawn prayers led by the Master was comical. It was clear to me that his religious zeal was contrived. He would recall that he had not set foot in a church since coming to this country. After every fracas he was involved in, an exit visa would be stamped into his passport so that he could go and perform a belated pilgrimage to some church or other, as though he were duty-bound to perform his version of the Hajj. I thought that if he had genuinely sought salvation and purification, he should have travelled to Rome.
* * *
Religion is a long, dark tunnel: we pick and choose our way through it to justify our goals, both honourable and immoral. We follow the passage all the way into the subterranean workshop that stitches and cuts cloth to suit every mood, whether bright or downcast. To every design, there is a fitting demeanour and comportment. For those who stray from their personal faith, every thought is a snare, a bottomless pit of iniquity. As the pit fills, they are either buried alive or left to stagnate like standing water.
I have been struggling with my beliefs day after day for fifty years. I have come to realise that history is made up of deviants, grafters, thieves, opportunists, panderers, fornicators, pederasts, megalomaniacs and connivers. Low-lifes advance the story of mankind as much as saviours.
At the Palace, the partisans of decadence and immorality congregated nightly to re-enact the unholy trinity: victims were devoured, blood was spilt and lust was stoked. Lust thirsts for new blood like malignant cells multiplying, immune from destruction. It is lust that propels us to endure until the very end, to strive against and cleave to one another like magnets in an endless cycle of reproduction. No one is impervious to some form of vice, but we are all very careful to cover up and hide our shame. Only the lowest of the low parade themselves in open view. And I count myself among them.
My eyes would roam over the women of the Palace looking for Tahani, perhaps the only person to invalidate my theory about the inherently foul nature of human beings.
One evening, back in the neighbourhood, after I had crept into her room and planted a kiss on her exquisite long neck, Tahani had whispered in my ear, ‘I’ll never leave you. Wherever you go, I’ll be there.’
In a sense she kept her promise since she lived in me during my time in the Palace. I could believe she was watching me covertly, her eyes following me everywhere, looking for the woman I might have selected in her place.
Women are like the fruit of the earth, each with a unique provenance and a particular flavour to entice us. They are gone one season and back the next and we eagerly anticipate their return. Summer and winter: seasons change on earth as in our souls and our desires.
I could not free myself of Tahani’s memory. It would come back to remind me of that first delectable taste of a fruit in season that lodges itself deep inside.
Most often it was my childhood friend, Osama al-Bushri, and his outbursts that brought Tahani to mind. But on those occasions, the memory was laced with bitterness and I began to look at every new woman who came to the Palace and wonder fearfully whether it might be Tahani. The Palace was full of women with tragic lives and I became convinced that she was among them, hiding in some corner or other. There were times I could have sworn she had been there and had left after seeing that I was as much of a pariah in the Palace as I had been in the old neighbourhood.