Authors: Abdo Khal
This was in the days before Crazy Jamal was run over by the Rolls-Royce. So what was indeed strange was that Issa was able to describe the features of the first Master long before we had ever laid eyes on him in the back seat of his car. And when his son, the next in line to the throne, became the new lord of the manor, we called him the Master while his father became known as
Sayyid al-kabeer
– the old Master.
Until Issa’s whole story came out, I remained puzzled by his detailed description of the older man’s features.
* * *
At the Palace, I belonged to a group known as the ‘punishers’, a label reserved for people whose despicable deeds were considered beyond the pale.
Its members were collected from the dregs of the city’s poor neighbourhoods and their sole mission was to destroy their victims’ sense of manhood through sodomy. If they overexerted themselves in the course of their work, they would be confined to their quarters to recuperate or assigned to other, equally distasteful tasks.
I had been recruited for one particular purpose, but soon found myself taking on all sorts of foul assignments, and always in the dead of night. I knew that I was lost and that not a prayer could save me.
Very few people knew my true role inside the Palace and I was sometimes alarmed when I overheard some of the staff talking about me. ‘He’s the one who alters the Master’s mood,’ they would say and my blood would run cold at the thought that anything that might be said about me, or him, should get back to the Master.
Many people avoided my company, fearing they would be tainted. Men who Issa brought into the Palace greeted me from a distance, almost grudgingly, and at times they ignored me altogether.
The punishers were housed in a remote section of the Palace. Given our reputation, only those who had lost their way ever wandered there. Whenever one of us emerged from our quarters, rumours would spread like fire that a new victim was now in the Palace, and screams and pleas for mercy could be heard even before we reached the punishment chamber.
Many of the servants and staff at the Palace went about their business like ants, performing their duties with painstaking diligence and with fixed smiles on their faces. They never looked behind them nor met anyone’s gaze; their uniforms served to indicate their function at the Palace.
No common history bound them and none of them knew each other’s personal history. With the exception of a group of employees from our neighbourhood who were assigned different jobs, all of us discharged our duties anonymously, whether in the open or behind closed doors. Our given names were unnecessary to our roles and we were known by the jobs we performed. No one asked about anyone’s past.
Dr Bannan was one of the few exceptions. He had fallen into the Palace through some sort of trapdoor and would talk about his past and pontificate on fate. ‘Our destiny,’ he would say, ‘is the only true darkness through which we can navigate unhesitatingly and recklessly.’ His endless quest for a way out of the snare consisted of making presentations at various low-level conferences and of publishing mediocre political articles in second-rate newspapers that nobody read. Not that it stopped him from reading out loud those articles to anyone who happened to be within earshot.
His attendance at these conferences had nothing to do with his intelligence or the depth of his knowledge; rather, it owed entirely to an exchange of mutually beneficial favours with the organisers. This helped him to pad his curriculum vitae with a long list of professional memberships and dozens of lectures and papers.
Whenever he heard the most senior employee at the Palace, Uncle Muhammad, bemoaning the ‘good old days’, he would offer what became his infamous dictum: ‘In our yearning to recover our true selves, we continually fall into the deep well of the past.’
Despite his pompousness, once in a blue moon a nugget of wisdom would actually tumble from his mouth, though often he would merely be repeating or adapting someone else’s theories. He no longer had work to occupy himself beyond, that is, keeping the Master company, hanging on his every utterance and grovelling at his feet.
While absolutely everyone grovelled in the Palace, Dr Bannan was like a moon bending in its orbit around its planet. He was the Master’s constant companion, whether in motion or at rest, and became his partner at the card game
balut
. Playing
balut
was complete drudgery since everyone made sure the Master always won; during those sessions, the good doctor would click his tongue to warn the other players whenever the Master had a winning hand.
We were as lifeless as the cards in that dreary game. Our role was to be flicked and tossed indifferently by the Master. Neither he nor his so-called opponents ever cared whether the cards landed face up or face down.
* * *
Stepping through the Palace gates for the very first time, I was hit by a blast of cold air the likes of which I had never before felt. At the sight of the Palace and its gardens, as well as all the yachts, cars and stables, I really thought I had set foot in paradise.
The first money I earned was for performing a foul act that I thought would be over as soon as my panting stopped. But after a succession of repeat performances, vice became the signal marker of my life. A darkness I had never previously known descended on me, and I became desperate to hide from everything and everyone, including myself.
Whenever I felt the need to hide I would bring to mind the rubbish landing on my head that distant Eid. Sometimes that memory alone was enough to dispel my sorrow at having left the old neighbourhood.
When asked about their place of work, many of the staff declared with pride that they were employees of the Palace. I was the only one who kept my reason for being there a secret. I had chosen an immoral line of work, and performing my job had ruined my life and deadened my soul.
Uncle Muhammad liked to say we were abandoned ponds that had been left to breed gnats and grow slime, and whose stagnant contents belied all the life-giving properties of clean water. That is how I came to feel.
I had not felt that way during my early and reckless adolescence. Back then, I felt full of myself and elated by my actions and I paraded before my friends like a puffed-up rooster, vaunting my stuff and flaunting my colours. I would hunt down ‘prey’ to ensure my elevated reputation among my circle of friends, violating my victims not so much to relieve my lust as to show off my virility. In doing so, I was also able to fend off the predators in our neighbourhood who would have made me their victim.
Life yields its secrets too late, after we can no longer turn back and erase or rectify our mistakes. When we are finally ready to pass on the baton, it is rejected because the next generation, the young people, are naïve and believe their lives will be different.
Uncle Muhammad tried his best to explain this to me on my first day at the Palace, but I was too young to listen. How I wish I had stayed in the Firepit! That wish can never be granted because I have fallen to the very bottom of the abyss.
Gravity is an immutable law. Even though we are all governed by it, we have trouble understanding the precise way it affects our lives. The process of falling is gradual; it does not happen all at once, but in stages. The consequences of the fall are apparent only once the process is complete.
I fell gradually, stage by stage, and now I am at the bottom of the fall.
I fell, and from there I fell further.
People were lodged into every nook and cranny of our dilapidated neighbourhood like grains of sand blown in by the wind. Whether it was called the ‘Pit’, the ‘Saltmine’, the ‘Depths of Hell’ or simply the ‘Firepit’, all the designations rhymed with suffering and described our miserable lives inside the neighbourhood.
It had not always been so.
Lying against the bloated and belching sea, it was once a place that stirred even before the first rays of the sun could cast their beams on the windows of the houses. The neighbourhood would wake up to the clamour of children wending their way to school down the narrow lanes, to the din of boisterous fishermen returning with their catch from a night at sea, and to songs blaring from radios that were as dewy as the dawn of the day they celebrated. Like the fine mist from a summer rain, the songs refreshed our spirits and pierced our hearts, and our lungs filled deeply with energising breaths.
The early morning commotion would include the clatter of shopkeepers as they pulled on the whining shutters of their shops and the shouts of street pedlars selling sweetmeats and cheap tinny toys to schoolchildren. Others sold street food that caused a sudden rush of diarrhoea in all but those with the constitution of an ox.
Day after day, the cycle was repeated without interruption, with the sun circling in the sky to reach its zenith and the merciless rays beating down to bleach the last trace of colour off people’s faces, off the neighbourhood’s walls and doors and off the washing hung out to dry on rooftops. Everything dried in the blink of an eye.
At the end of every day, its blaze exhausted, the scorching sun undertook its final journey and descended peacefully in the direction of the Palace foundations.
* * *
Life is a filthy journey that starts out pristine, and we are driven on that voyage of discovery by words of encouragement and censure. In reality, it is only by committing sins that we become fully human. Like millions of people everywhere, it was only after I had left that I realised where I was from.
I had emerged from a humble home buried at the end of the neighbourhood, a gathering-point for the Huroob, Jahnaan and Rawaabigh tribes, who considered city life a stain on the purity of their stock. When Jeddah’s city walls burst, so to speak, people from all manner of descent mixed together, making the neighbourhood appear as if it had been deliberately designed for chaos. In this respect, it was no different from many other neighbourhoods that proliferated outside the old city walls.
My maternal grandfather had arrived from Hadhramaut in Yemen, bringing with him his merchandise of Indian textiles and Javanese incense and sarongs. He built a spacious house, which he had planned to fill with human pups. A man of considerable sexual appetites, he set up four women, one in each corner of the large inner courtyard, consorting with them in turn. His pleasure peaked with my grandmother, Saniyya.
She was of Turkish extraction and had a stunningly beautiful face and a body to match. They say his desire for Saniyya burned undiminished and that, to be fair to his other wives, he always started with the other three first. After his passage through the first three doorways, he would bathe, groom himself carefully and come to Saniyya as fresh and energised as if he had not spilled a drop of his sap earlier.
During his morning sessions with his friends, my grandfather would boast of his prowess with the four women, unaided by the prescriptions of Abu Rasheed. The apothecary of Indian descent had a vast knowledge of herbs and claimed to possess a secret elixir that would give any man the strength of a crocodile and the ability to take on ten women without flagging. Indeed, Abu Rasheed was venerated by men whose vital forces were spent and who had become desperate for his remedies to keep their honour in the bedroom upright.
In a bid to grow his business, Abu Rasheed approached my grandfather with a proposal and, for a while, they became partners in marketing traditional remedies. But the project was short-lived, coming to an abrupt end with the invasion of cheap products to treat the same woes.
Years later, my mother convinced my father to dabble in the trade. However, her recollection of the recipes and concoctions was incomplete and my father’s success in the profession was therefore mixed. But she did remember Abu Rasheed’s most secret concoction and my father used it to boost his own prowess.
While my father’s virility was enhanced by the apothecary’s potions, mine flowed directly into my veins from my grandfather without the need for any treatment. I have been governed by ravenous lust all my life, and in the absence of decent outlets for release, I have channelled it in twisted ways.
Sexual prowess was a badge of honour worn by all men and it was doubtless a desire to prove constantly their competence in the bedroom that caused the population explosion in our neighbourhood.
Small markets sprang up across the length of the main road to cater to ever-growing demand; the burgeoning population also brought on a proliferation of telephone, electricity and sewage networks. Once the roads were paved, the neighbourhood attracted all sorts of people from every imaginable race and language group. Secreted into its winding lanes and tired of hatching in crowded and modest homes, this pullulating life spilled over into secondary streets and sinuous byways.
We arrived late in the game. Our fathers, already past their fifties, were still raising the banner of their prowess on the undulating hills of women, outdoing past sins with more wicked ones. Most of the neighbourhood children were fatherless and clung to mothers worn down by the daily grind of their lives and the battle to keep their frail children alive.
The neighbourhood choked with people and all means of livelihood had dried up. After the fishermen had to give up fishing and the old artisanal trades died out, all that was left for people were jobs that emaciated their bodies and brought in meagre incomes.