Authors: Abdo Khal
‘Have you no fear of God?’ Ghayth railed at them. ‘His mother has died and he must not miss the funeral.’
I stood in the observation room and watched and listened as he pleaded, begged and enumerated all the ailments that prevented him from standing there too long.
So she had finally died and I was free of at least one commitment I had made years earlier.
The guards seemed more upset by the news of my mother’s death than I was. One of them seemed on the point of telling Ghayth that I was there, listening to his every word, and had he not been afraid of losing his job he would have dragged me by the scruff of the neck to relieve the old man of his discomfort.
‘I can’t stand here for very long. I have diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease,’ said Ghayth. ‘Just tell him that his mother has died and that we will pray for her soul during evening prayers at Al-Khayr Mosque. He’ll know where that is – if he hasn’t forgotten the houses of the Lord the way he forgot his mother. If he doesn’t make it to the mosque, tell him we’ll be burying her at the Cemetery of Our Mother Eve.’
Ghayth struggled to straighten up his back and then turned to leave.
The senior guard offered me his condolences formally. ‘A mother’s passing is the hardest of all losses, you know. When a mother dies, God Almighty tells the angels, “Close the door we had kept open in her honour.”’
I cut him short and told him the deceased was just my wet-nurse. Undeterred, he went on, ‘She was still your mother. May God comfort you in your loss.’
I was sure that my absence at both the prayers and burial would be sufficient to put off anyone from trying to reach me ever again.
Two years after my mother’s death, Ibrahim showed up one day at the gates and insisted he needed to talk to me. I am not sure why, but I agreed to see him in the main reception area. I suppose we fulfil our destiny, whether we like it or not.
‘Do you know what I had to go through to reach you?’ he exclaimed. ‘I need your help with something urgent.’
I pulled out my chequebook with a flourish as I looked him up and down. ‘How much do you need?’
‘I don’t want your money, Tariq,’ he said crossly. ‘Foul money has a foul smell.’ He paused briefly and added more evenly, ‘I want you to help our sister.’
‘Our sister?’ I repeated. ‘And what sister might that be?’ I was being deliberately obtuse; he was referring to our half-sister, the fruit of our father’s last wife.
‘Have you even forgotten that you have a sister?’
‘Well, I don’t know her. I’ve never seen her.’
‘That’s beside the point,’ Ibrahim stated. ‘She’s still your sister and she needs your help.’
That reminded me of Souad’s plea for her husband, Yasser Muft. ‘Is she in jail?’
‘God forbid. No, she’s not in jail – but she’s in trouble.’
‘Fine. I’ll come and see you and we’ll talk.’
That caused Ibrahim to chuckle, which somehow seemed at odds with his dignified bearing. ‘Have I not heard that before?’ he said with a sad shake of the head. ‘You think I’ve forgotten that you promised the same thing seven years ago?’
‘Life is busy and I have a lot on my mind, Ibrahim.’
‘Listen, Tariq,’ Ibrahim insisted. ‘Our sister has no one but us. At the end of the day, her honour is bound up with ours. I don’t have the means to help her. If you can’t help her either, just tell me and I’ll ask someone else.’
‘How am I supposed to help when I know nothing about her?’ I argued. ‘You haven’t even told me what her problem is.’
‘Families have their secrets.’ Ibrahim looked around the reception area and the flow of people entering and leaving the Palace. ‘Either you take me somewhere private where we can talk, or you come with me.’
‘I can’t right now. Expect me tonight – no, wait, I’ll be there tomorrow.’
Ibrahim nodded slowly.
This time, ‘tomorrow’ took another two years.
I really wanted nothing to do with the quagmire of the past. All I wanted was to run from the hooks that were embedded in my flesh. I certainly had no desire to meet a sister whose birth I had only heard about and who might end up being drawn to me like iron filings to a magnet.
After that, Ibrahim never came to see me again at the Palace.
* * *
The night my mother died, black clouds rolled into the sky above Jeddah. Bolts of lightning sliced through the heavens and unleashed a torrential downpour. Feelings of self-reproach and guilt ripped through me with similar force and I was overcome by a flood of tears.
It had been years since I had cried – at least for as long as I had been at the Palace. My spirit was as parched as the arid dunes and scrub of the wind-swept desert.
Everything about the Cemetery of Our Mother Eve was unwelcoming. Eve had gathered her children on their journey to oblivion inside, and the earth had been made earthier with the decay of their bodies. It was our mother who had led us, her children, out of Eden to roam the earth like errant cattle. When we tired of roaming and mooing, we went back to the earth, as she had done before us. We did not go to be held in her embrace but only to follow in her footsteps, for she was the archetype, the one whose actions constituted the blueprint for ours.
I ended up walking around the cemetery wall because the gate was locked shut. Bolts of lightning crackled before my eyes and accompanied my steps as if chasing a wayward cloud. I surrendered to their power and wept – my tears as futile as a torrent of rain in a swamp. For what is the use of water to unhallowed and barren ground, and what good are tears to the dead?
On this first night of my mother’s rest in the earth, I thought of jumping the wall and hurling myself inside the cemetery. I wanted to scale the wall and find that freshly dug grave, give vent to my grief and leave. It would be my final apology to her for all my years of absence. Just something to lighten the desolation of her first night.
But the downpour put paid to that idea. I would now never find her grave. After the torrential rain, all the graves would look equally fresh, as though all the cemetery’s dead had been buried on the same day.
I had never seen her again after she remarried. I had forgotten what her face looked like. I did not know whether she had gone grey or lost her teeth, whether her back was bent with age or she suffered from any ailments. I wondered if she had given birth to other children whose fate might be the same as mine, especially if Aunt Khayriyyah was right that my mother’s womb could bear nothing but rotten fruit.
I needed tears to wash away the corrosion at my core. As I walked around the cemetery, I grieved over this ultimate of separations as the drenching rain obliterated her final resting place. My mother had gone to her grave and my delayed grief devastated me, like the bare limb of an old tree that had been shorn of all its leaves.
I remembered an episode from my childhood, when I had come running home crying my heart out for some forgotten reason. ‘Men don’t cry,’ Aunt Khayriyyah had scolded. ‘And crying is no use anyway, so be a man.’ She had slapped me hard on the cheek for good measure.
In all my years at the Palace, I had not shed a single tear. Whether I was responsible for them or not, I had swept aside all my dreadful experiences and carried on with day-to-day life mechanically, like the unthinking hand on a clock.
I stopped at the cemetery gate, wanting to pray for her soul and the souls of all those buried with her. But I could not recall any of the prayers for the dead. So I muttered a few garbled phrases that sounded pathetic in the rain and beside the solemnity of the place. I cut my prayers short and wiped away whatever remained of my meaningless tears.
Just as the skies above Jeddah were overshadowed by thick clouds, my mother’s death had overshadowed my day. I was not used to being in a state of emotional turmoil.
Before her death, my mother had made that sole attempt to reunite us by sending me her decrepit old husband. She had never tried again; now I wished she had insisted, like one would with an obstinate child: first voicing a wish, then making a request and finally giving it one last try. I would have liked some determination on her part, a little persistence.
She died suddenly and deprived me of the chance to blame her for what she had done. I wanted her to know how abandoned I had felt, betrayed by my own mother, when she had taken up with a man she had been in love with as a young woman. He had waited years for her without marrying and I imagined that he had actively wished for my father’s death to get her back.
But I did not hate her – or him – the way I despised my aunt, who was like an unrelenting buzzer that went off the moment my hatred started to wane.
* * *
I drove to the villa and as I travelled north, the rain began to subside and the lightning had already moved on. My tears dried up and my heart returned to stone.
I turned the key in the rusty lock of the outer gate and the loud squeak punctured the tranquillity of the night. Even the plants seemed startled by this sudden visit, as if they had been caught unawares with their leaves
withering.
Inside, the smell was suffocating. From the moment I set foot in the villa, I was assaulted by a putrid smell. I turned on the lights and went up the stairs, hurrying through the hallways that led to my aunt’s room. I had not brought anything for her and it had been at least a month, possibly two, since my last visit.
The stench of decay became stronger the closer I got to her room. I wondered whether she, too, might have died.
If that were the case, I would be visiting the cemetery two days in a row. My mind was already reeling off a series of images: I would place them next to each other, she and my mother, so that they could continue quarrelling and arguing until Judgement Day – both mumbling unintelligibly with their clipped tongues.
The stink was thick in the hallway leading directly to my aunt’s room. It was a rancid mix of excrement, urine, mould, sweat and putrefaction.
With the house reeking like that, her death would arouse suspicion. It would be best to delay the announcement. There was no one whose heart would be broken by her passing, in any case. Besides, no embalmer would be willing to carry out the ritual washing in this stench. By postponing the news of her death, I also would have the chance to air the place and allow the stench to disperse in the fresh air after the rain.
The only thing I was afraid of was that her body had already decomposed and that her bloated remains had exploded and scattered everywhere.
I held my nose, closed my mouth and opened the door warily.
It was a scene from hell: the room, plunged in darkness, reeked to high heaven. With the fingers of one hand still pinching my nose shut, I felt for the light switch with the other. As the light came on, the full horror of what lay before me was revealed. The room was one big mound of rubbish, piled with clothes, cartons, cans, bottles, lids, food scraps, bedding and blankets. The bed was overturned, the wardrobe was broken, and I could see faeces and dried-up blood everywhere.
As I took in the scene of mayhem, I scanned the room for her corpse but there was no trace of one. I carved a path through the debris, holding my breath against the stench. Every time I pushed something aside, the smell of decomposing food and excrement would rise into the air. I was beginning to wonder whether her body had completely decomposed under the heap of rubbish and all that remained was the smell of putrefaction.
Dreading that I might step on her corpse or bones, I moved hesitantly, with visions of my feet sinking into her viscera, or crushing her skull or rib cage.
All of a sudden I felt a blow, and my heart began pounding.
I had been so convinced that she had died that I did not expect her to leap from under a pile of cartons like a fury. She lunged at me with metal coat hangers she had filed to dart-like points and drove them into whatever part of my body was within reach, moaning and groaning loudly.
I pushed her away with all my strength and sent her flying into a wall, crying out in agony like a wounded animal.
She looked monstrous.
Aunt Khayriyyah was so emaciated her bones protruded from under her clothes, and her skin was so wizened that the criss-cross of wrinkles looked like a scorched river bed. Her front teeth were chipped, her fingernails were black with filth and long as talons, and her white hair stood on end like a mass of carded wool. Only her sunken, hollow eyes retained their fierceness.
She tried to get up but could not, as if she had exhausted every last drop of energy to pounce on me. Staring at me wild-eyed, still clutching one of her darts, she seemed to be pulling herself together to resume combat. She struggled to her feet and made for the light switch. Darkness descended on the room like a blanket, with only a faint ray of light trickling in from the cracked door.
She was used to the gloom. I could sense her approaching, making stabbing motions in the dark, hoping to get me in the chest before I could reach for the light switch. I backed away slowly and felt my way to the door. I moved faster than she did and reached the door before she could get to me. I slammed the door shut and ran.
She, too, had been honing her hatred. She had sat in that ruin of a room and manufactured weapons to sink into my chest and finish off the foul offspring that had sprung from my mother’s womb.