Authors: Abdo Khal
Maram slowed down until I caught up with her and then leaned in towards me, her shoulder brushing against mine. ‘I apologise for all the insults,’ she said, suddenly coy.
I could not believe the reversal; barely a minute earlier, I could have wrung her neck, and here she was being as sweet and gentle as a breeze on a hot day.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she repeated. ‘I thought the car might have been bugged. You know what I like about you?’
She pretended to be interested in the jewellery and clothing on display. ‘You’re bold. The way you look at me as if you couldn’t care less about the Master. No one ever looks at me any more! There’s no excitement in that. Everyone looks away when I try to meet their gaze. You’re the only one who still makes me feel desirable … your smouldering glances make my heart race.’
She paused. ‘Do you remember what I told you once? Didn’t I promise that one day … All you had to do was set the time and the place, and I’d be yours!’
Every fibre of my being began to sing. I could feel the heat of her body as we moved between the shopfronts and her shoulder brushed against my chest every time we stopped. She went into a beauty supply store for various hair bands and coloured clips, and all eyes were on her.
‘You know why I love coming to the souk?’ Maram asked. ‘Because here, at least, I can feel people looking at me.’
The fact that I was there helped to tone down the effrontery of the young men who lined her path and who would otherwise have made passes at her.
I overheard one of them say to his friend, ‘Watch out – don’t you see she’s with her dad?’
Had I aged that much? Our lives flash by like sand in an hourglass. Deep down we continue to feel our youth is not far behind.
As we made our way back to the car, Maram leaned in towards me once more and urged, ‘Please don’t talk to me in the car. Just don’t say anything.’
I stepped out and opened the car door for her and, as she swept in, she brushed her cheek against my lips. I felt as if an electric shock had just run through me. I wished she would step out again, and that I could open the door for her once more, and then again and again, one hundred times over.
I turned the key in the ignition and before I could pull out of the VIP parking space, I heard her bark out an order. ‘And now, to the Oasis Hair Salon, you dolt.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Terrorism is not just a matter of an explosion here and an explosion there. Terrorism is the corruption of society as a whole, the withering of its values and principles: that is the real terrorism. It is the inevitable outcome of grievances that are left unaddressed and of the relentless perpetration of injustices.
From a Friday sermon by
Sheikh Ibrahim Fadel,
Imam of the Salvation Mosque
Issa stood in the middle of the bank, shouting at the manager, Adnan Hassoun. He had just learned that all the money in his accounts had vanished into thin air. A security guard came running and the bank manager slipped behind him. The guard was already bristling and ready to pounce, like a newly trained hound eager to go after its prey.
Realising that his shouting was having no effect, Issa did the unthinkable.
He began by tearing off his
iqaal
, going on to remove one article of clothing after another until he stood stark naked and fully exposed, indifferent to the howls of indignation from customers and staff who pleaded with him to cover his shame. He dashed out of the bank, gesticulating wildly and babbling incomprehensibly as he ran up and down the streets. For those who knew him, his crazed ranting was evidence that the loss of his fortune had caused him to lose his mind.
He remained in this vagrant state, sprawled out naked and demented on the sidewalk of the city’s upscale bank and hotel district for several months. Guests and customers had to step around him and the security staff of the banks and hotels waged a losing battle to move him away. As soon as they prised him out of one spot, he would set up somewhere else, brandishing a toy pistol in their faces. They detained him several times, but he would always get back on the street.
Passers-by who urged him to cover up were met with an avalanche of abuse and profanity so foul they hurried away scandalised. The guards got tired of dealing with him and would drag him away from the entrances of the plush establishments they protected.
The police got to know his story as he became a regular in the detention cells. They moved him out of the district, first to a psychiatric facility and then to an underpass on the outskirts of the city. But he came back every time.
I came across him a month after he first lost his mind. He looked pitiful, slumped on the sidewalk in front of a McDonald’s in the bank district, naked and thrashing about in an assortment of
keffiyehs
that shoppers had thrown to him to cover up his shame.
When Issa had led us to the Palace all those decades ago, little could he have imagined that he would suffer a vertiginous fall that would leave him splayed out on a sidewalk, his genitals on display like a baboon in a zoo.
I had seen his genitals three times before, twice up close. All that remained of them now was atrophied and shrivelled, superfluous as used plastic utensils or napkins that have been discarded. It was only when I got down on the ground and stuck my face right up against his that he recognised me.
‘Tariq!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look at me, stripped bare for ever!’
Before I was able to take it all in, he went on and asked, ‘Will you help me kill him?’
I said nothing.
‘I will get him one day, you’ll see, even if my initial attempts failed.’
I had not been aware of any attempts to kill the Master.
* * *
It never occurred to me that I would end up doing what I did.
Whatever freedom of choice I might have had was lost the minute I set foot in that damned place. I did not realise how bad things would get or that my fall would be so precipitous.
If only I had shaken hands on it when Issa had suggested we kill the Master.
Issa was not the only person who had thought of it: people from within his own circle were loath to see him die a natural death. Some of them would have liked nothing more than to expedite him with their own hands; as far as they were concerned, death had tarried and he had hardened like a gourd withering on the vine.
At first I was daunted by the Master’s influence and standing, but I gradually became obsessed with the idea of getting rid of him. I had few desires left in life and would have been honoured to guide the Angel of Death to his door. My priority, however, was to preserve my sanity and avoid doing anything rash: I lived in fear of emerging from the Palace stripped as literally bare as Issa.
The Master had now snatched thirty-one out of my fifty years. When I started working at the Palace, I had not wanted to listen to the warnings of those who had preceded me there and whose lives were already poisoned. I considered them ingrates, carping and complaining while living large. Uncle Muhammad knew the ins and outs of life at the Palace and the fate that awaited newcomers. He had tried to warn me.
‘Rich folks are like little girls playing with their dolls,’ he told me one night, taking me aside before one of my torture assignments. ‘They don’t care about the consequences of their acts and the mess they make.’ He prodded me in the chest. ‘As for the dolls, well, they’re just dolls – they submit to being pulled and twisted without complaint. All they do is provide passing amusement for the rich.’ He paused briefly. ‘As for the Master – well, he’s just like a kid who throws tantrums.’
He had advised me to leave the Palace. But back then, I had been too young and rash to understand. In any case, Uncle Muhammad had not listened to his own advice and even now, past his self-imposed solitary confinement, he still chose to spend most of his days holed up in his quarters, waiting for death to carry him off because he could not bring it on himself.
Slavery has not been abolished. It exists in many guises and lurks hidden behind all sorts of façades. How I yearned to be my own master. Wealth and power are the foundations of sovereignty: throughout history these alone have determined whether one belonged to the master class or to the mass of slaves. Without wealth and power, we are slaves even if it does not feel like it.
Dominion over others necessarily implies being surrounded by slaves, opportunists, sycophants and crooks who regard their master’s word as gospel. There is no morality that is compatible with being a master: power cannot limit its own reach. The lust for power of the overlords is absolute and it has always been their practice to crush whatever and whoever comes in the way.
One of life’s grievous lessons that comes too late is that we are all inextricably caught up in some form of bondage and are as accustomed to it as we are to our own skin – which is why we do not feel it.
I knew that there was not much left in the vial that was my life, and what remained had become so stale and musty that even I turned away in disgust.
The murky outline of a bleak destiny was traced on that night, thirty-one years ago. I could only hope that in the future, others would be sufficiently liberated from the strictures of current conventions to look upon every shameful act with as much amusement as Issa did. It was with this notion that I calmed my anxiety.
I had begun to feel that I, too, would end up being kicked out on to the streets, and that I would have nothing to do but chew over my bitterness and spew profanities like overflowing sewage.
I had lost my closest friends and there was no one I could talk to about the terror that gripped me one day when the Master gazed down at me from his balcony that overlooked the deep blue. He fixed his gaze on me as if he could look into my very thoughts, probing for something with which to indict me. He had just returned from a hunting expedition in Equatorial Guinea, with his retinue of cooks, marksmen, entertainers, gamblers and other sycophants.
I was seriously considering taking the step on which Issa had faltered. His mistake had been to visit the lion just as it was waking; its jaws had snapped shut around Issa, chewed him up and spat him out. It was left to me to bleed the beast, drop by drop, so that as he watched his blood coagulate he might understand how many innocent souls he had destroyed.
I was only worried that he would read my mind before I had a chance to do what had to be done. I had also taken to repeating, almost like a mantra: ‘It’s either him or me.’ It was almost unconscious, like a tic, and once I caught myself doing it right in front of his smug face.
‘Who are you talking about?’ he asked, spinning around.
He burst out laughing when I told him and then left the room with his customary swagger, with Maram by his side. She could steal one’s heart in a flash and the assembled guests delighted in her disappearing derrière.
* * *
The towering walls of the Palace kept out all global and local news, whether the bloodshed in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, the terrorist attacks in the country or the roving patrols of the religious police. People came to the Palace bent on cutting a deal, or the promise of a deal, and nothing else mattered. Bloodshed and dignity were irrelevant.
In fact, the trickle of virginal blood was the highest form of pleasure for the denizens of the Palace. There was nothing like a thin stream of blood trickling between a woman’s thighs to heighten their passion, while bloodshed around the globe was of little concern.
I awoke to the news of Osama’s escape, which did not entirely surprise me since he had asked me to join him. I thought his plan was stupid and rash and had told him so.
‘It’ll be the end of you.’
‘It’s better than dying here,’ Osama retorted.
Issa had ended up naked on the sidewalks of the bank district, and Osama was convinced that we were next in line. He wanted us to avenge Issa and was surprised by my indifference.
‘What do you want us to do? We’re just puppets on a string,’ I said.
‘This place is nothing but a charnel house,’ he exclaimed.
‘Calm down!’
‘I came to tell you I’ve decided to leave,’ he said abruptly. ‘Come with me.’
‘He’d pull us back in.’
‘Not if we went somewhere he’d never find us,’ Osama countered.
Tahani had been calling out to him in his dreams and he had decided to make a run for it.
‘Maybe we’d find her killer,’ he ventured.
‘Whose killer?’
‘I wish I could be like you, with a conscience that erases everything and remembers nothing. Have you forgotten about Tahani’s killer?’ He paused and then looked me straight in the eye as he added, ‘Maybe
you
are the killer since you’re always telling me to forget her.’
‘Will you lay off with your accusations?’ I said, but he had already turned away.
I was now the only one left.
When Osama escaped and had gone missing for a few days, his boss, Nadir, vowed unimaginable punishment when he got his hands on him. His desperate search for Osama and the near hysteria with which he spoke of him raised a few eyebrows. Speculation increased when he offered a financial reward to anyone with information on Osama’s whereabouts. The amount increased steadily with each passing day until it topped out at one million riyals. He called me in and I finally realised what was causing him such agitation. He had recently taken on an entirely effeminate demeanour, and the old queer could no longer live without Osama’s expertise in pleasuring him.