Authors: Abdo Khal
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.
‘That faggot is making my life unbearable.’ There were only two things left that mattered to Osama: getting out of the Palace and tending Tahani’s grave. ‘Why shouldn’t I set up camp in those sand dunes and spend my time planting seeds and watering seedlings on my beloved’s tomb? Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?’
Ever since returning from Salih Khaybari’s village, he had been collecting varieties of drought-resistant seeds that could grow into lush plants around Tahani’s grave. He had acquired this enthusiasm from Kamal Abu Aydah. After Samira’s death, Kamal had gone to her graveside every evening to commune with her and water the trees and plants bordering her tomb. Osama loved the idea of following in the footsteps of that star-crossed lover.
Helping him up, I tried to convince him that he should spend the night at my place and that we could carry on the conversation in the morning. But he staggered to his feet and set off towards the shore. There, he launched into reciting verses he had memorised and slowly sank to the ground. When I went to help him again, he jerked my hand away violently.
‘You were the thief,’ he yelled. ‘You killed Tahani!’
He tottered off towards his quarters, swearing and cursing all of creation.
When I reached the checkpoint at the Globe Roundabout, a soldier waved me on. I was always terrified at checkpoints whenever I was with Maram. I would worry that something would happen, and that the news would reach the Master that I had appropriated the one heart that kept his beating.
I never understood his attachment to Maram; he could have any woman he wanted on the face of the earth and yet he remained true to her.
I had promised myself that I would spend two whole days with her, but his stern manner on the phone had revived my anxieties.
‘Tariq! Get over here!’ His voice over the cell phone was irate.
How I wished I could elude that summons as easily as I had eluded my mundane existence in the old neighbourhood when I had left everything behind in my rush to get ahead. I was determined not to look back and would not allow my emotions to rule me, or my memory to hold me hostage to the past. Even though Osama stirred up old memories from time to time, I turned the other way and focused on the present. I was bent on obliterating every moment I had spent in the clutches of privation.
I was able to shed my past thanks to the Master. Now, I needed to shed him.
Trying to block him out was futile. He had the power to make himself heard and ensure I did his bidding, regardless. Ever since the night that Issa had led me to the Palace, I had been a captive to his every command.
I drove toward the palace in Sharm Abhar, terrified at the thought that he had found out about my relationship with Maram.
Just as I pulled up at the gates at Sharm Abhar, the Master called and told me to turn around and go back to the old Palace to meet him there.
Deferential words of submission were on my tongue before he had finished speaking. Expressing irritation or impatience at his erratic moods was out of the question.
‘Hurry up!’ he ordered.
My imagination ran wild and I had visions of blood and gore. I saw my skull cracked open by a hatchet whose sharp and jagged edges would tear down the entire edifice of my actions. I became convinced that he had summoned me either because he had found out about my relationship with Maram, or that he had discovered that Mawdie had been calling me on a private line. I hoped now that he was merely lusting for another of my stud performances and the abuse of some new victim, or that he wanted to hand me a video of my most recent skirmish with my aunt.
I had never gone back to see Aunt Khayriyyah after fleeing the villa and going back to my quarters at the Palace. Had she breathed her last thirsting for a drop of water? I had conveniently forgotten to bring in more supplies in the hope that it might cut short her remaining time and she would simply die and relieve me.