Throwing Sparks (15 page)

Without another word, Issa climbed into his car and drove away from the Firepit, leaving me speechless.

Our meeting had been postponed to the following evening because Issa thought I looked too scruffy. Were it not for that delay, I would not have gone to Tahani’s house the following night and violated her so brutally.

*  *  *

It was the darkest night – so remote and yet so close.

The night after Samira died, the neighbourhood was shrouded in a black veil of gloom. Streams of dignitaries and well-wishers headed to a pavilion, set up by the bereaved family, to offer their condolences on the premature death of one of their loveliest young roses.

That night, I sneaked into Tahani’s house.

She was shattered, her body shook as she buried her head into my chest sobbing. ‘Samira is dead, Tariq,’ she moaned.

Samira was a friend and had often served as go-between for Tahani and me, even standing guard for us sometimes so that we could finish a conversation peacefully.

Until that night, Tahani had always slipped out of my embrace when I tried to hold her too close. But now, drowning with grief, she was in my arms. Her hair cascaded to her waist, her breasts melted into my ribs, and I was seized by a demonic desire to take her.

That night, pressed into a corner of her room, I held Tahani tightly against me. At first, she tried to cool my excitement. But as I nuzzled against her throat and neck, her passion was also ignited. Languid with desire, her body went slack while mine tautened with urgent tension.

Cleaving to each other, we moved slowly and gradually became incandescent, liquefied, and then frenzied. The last traces of resistance faded and she offered herself to the torrents of my passion. Her deepest vale flooding, she cried for deliverance.

I subjugated Tahani that fateful night. I was running my hands all over her splendour when a sudden power outage plunged us into pitch darkness. Friction generates fire: at first, the sparks of passion only dispelled our inner gloom but soon the blaze was lit and we cleaved to one another, longing for release. Tahani seemed bent on self-annihilation, as if she wanted to follow in Samira’s footsteps.

Where had the enveloping darkness come from? Everything died in that black night.

‘Spare me, because I love you,’ she cried in one last gasp of resistance.

I penetrated her forcefully.

She screamed, her voice carrying in the dead night.

Her cries alerted her parents and brothers and I was prevented from enjoying her fully. I could hear rushing footsteps, swiftly followed by a relentless pounding on the door.

Tahani was glued to me, crying, moaning, our breaths commingled as the voices outside thundered, ‘Open the door!’

I shook her off and scrambled in the dark to the window, jumping down to the street below. As my feet hit the ground, I heard her father, Salih Khaybari, from inside her bedroom bellowing, ‘Thief!’

Salih was now shouting from his daughter’s window, ‘Grab that thief!’

Her brothers ran out into the alleyway to chase the intruder, and as the father’s yell reverberated throughout the neighbourhood people rushed to help. The call was picked up and repeated to anyone passing by in the dark.

The sound of running footsteps and the cries on everyone’s lips echoed through that dark, cold night. Everything was engulfed in tumult and agitation that night – animals that had been left untethered, the odd vagrant, even the vacant streets. No one could remember a night like it.

The shroud of darkness hanging over the neighbourhood had muted everything; gone was the usual noise of men playing a late-night round of dominoes or cards and calling out boisterously when they were on the brink of victory or defeat. The dominoes lay scattered and the playing cards blew in the wind. The mourners at the condolence pavilion for Samira had also dispersed, scattering every which way in response to the call.

In the inky blackness of that night, people ran helter-skelter between the uneven walls, hurrying through the narrow, twisting lanes, their features indistinguishable, colours blacked-out and disembodied cries piercing the gloom. A single battery-operated radio provided the only counterpoint to the surrounding din of chaos, and the Saudi singer, Talal Maddah, added his plaintive voice to the night: ‘And when you leave, my cry is silent as an echoless valley.’

My breath still carried Tahani’s scent, but remorse gripped my heart like a vice. Candles and lanterns were lit and I passed a number of men clutching woefully inadequate torches against the pitch-black alleys. I greeted them tersely and added my voice to the insults they were heaping on the utility company for cutting the power at that inopportune moment.

‘Grab that thief!’

Every time Salih’s voice rang out across the neighbourhood, we let out a stream of invective.

Everything was engulfed in darkness, and I was desperate for someone or something to deliver me from the pall of gloom that enveloped me. Escaping with Tahani’s blood on my conscience, my mind replaying the whole episode, I could no longer tell which had been louder: Tahani’s languid moans or her cries begging me to stop.

I was in that confused and desperate state of mind when I went to meet Issa.

I found him at the prearranged rendezvous point. He had parked his flashy car between adjacent grocery stores and he switched on the engine and the headlights when he spotted me. I slipped into the vehicle and we drove out of the neighbourhood. I was grateful to put the night behind me.

But, much as I tried, I could not obliterate the sound of Tahani’s cries. Her plaintive voice was seared into my heart and became mingled with the distant strains of Talal Maddah’s song: ‘And when you leave, my cry is silent as an echoless valley.’

9

News of issa’s unexpected appearance in the neighbourhood had swept through the alleyways and reached his father, Abu Issa. No sooner did Abu Issa hear the news than he began to prepare to welcome his son home. He was going to let bygones be bygones and forgive Issa for his belliger­ence; all he wanted after this long absence was to inhale the boy’s smell again.

Abu Issa set about rearranging the furniture in the house, thinking of where his son would want to sit. He ran through his mind the most important things he would say to his son in the course of apologising to him, playing a series of scenarios, until he settled on the simplest and most heartfelt: he would clasp Issa’s hands, kiss them and then implore him to return home with his mother and reunite the family under one roof.

But his enthusiasm faded as midnight drew near.

Abu Issa showed up on our doorstep at one in the morning saying that whoever had put out the news that his son was in the neighbourhood had to be an abject liar. He refused to believe Issa could have been in the neighbourhood without so much as knocking on the door of his family home.

I had seen Issa barely an hour earlier – our first meeting – when he had sniffed at my attire and told me to return the following night better prepared for the Palace. ‘Issa was here,’ I confirmed.

‘And you didn’t bring him to see me, Tariq?’ he asked reproachfully. ‘Didn’t you tell him that his father is no longer the man he once was?’

‘He has also changed,’ I offered by way of a reply as I brought to mind his fancy car, his new clothes and his affected speech.

‘Didn’t you tell him that I’ve become incontinent, that I’m going crazy thinking about him and his mother?’ Abu Issa asked. ‘All right, leave me out of it. Didn’t you tell him that his brothers miss their mother?’

I could not tell him that Issa had refused to come inside the neighbourhood and had said there was no one there who meant a thing to him any more.

Long before this, when her son had disappeared for an entire week, Umm Issa had become convinced that he would never return home. She set about trying to glean snippets of information about his whereabouts from his closest friends, but none of us had any idea how to reach him and our guesses failed to satisfy her.

Umm Issa wanted to know for sure that her son was all right and since no one in her family would accompany her to search for him, she started asking the neighbours for help. Whenever her husband left the house, Umm Issa would go out and rope some young man into driving her around the places she thought she might find her son.

Eventually it got back to Abu Issa that his wife was going out unaccompanied by a family member. Livid with rage, he ambushed her when she returned from one of her excursions in the car of the neighbourhood’s money changer. He flung the car door open and set upon her right in the alleyway, hurling insults at her and accusing her of carrying on with the young men of the neighbourhood using the pretext of looking for her son. He swore that if she went out one more time he would break her bones and she would never walk again.

Umm Issa became a prisoner of her own home and of her tears. Nothing could console her or provide relief; when one of her aunts tried to intercede on her behalf, Abu Issa became even more enraged and intensified his cruel and humiliating treatment by strapping his wife to the foot of his mother’s sofa.

Issa stole back into their home one morning, after he had made sure that his father was gone for the day, and he took his mother away. He disowned his father and told his grandmother to convey the message to her son that he would never again set eyes on his wife.

Abu Issa would die without either of his two most fervent wishes being granted: to be reunited, by the grace of God, with his wife and eldest son, and to sail out to the open sea one last time.

*  *  *

Issa did not express himself obliquely or cryptically. Life in the streets had divested him of any notion of shame and he was quite blunt about the reason for his reappearance in the neighbourhood. During our second meeting, when I slipped into his car, he told me, ‘Those vital juices of yours have a price and from now on, they will bring in their weight in gold.’

I sealed the deal with a nod. He probably thought it was debauchery and greed that motivated me. What he did not realise was that only moments earlier I had ruined Tahani and was now a fugitive. I had her blood on my hands and her disgraced honour on my conscience. As his car bumped along the narrow twisting lanes, the men of the neighbourhood were out scouting the alleyways for the thief who had broken into Salih Khaybari’s house.

I went to work at the Palace with Issa’s warning ringing in my ears. ‘Don’t even think about objecting to anything,’ he said several times as he steered me into the Master’s presence.

The
Sayyid
looked me up and down, his eyes travelling over every inch of my body and general appearance. He told me to take a few steps, then to turn, and then to stride from one corner of the room to the other.

‘I hear from Issa that your life is tied up in your loins,’ he said.

The Master had me come towards him and as I stood facing him he ordered me to get closer and then closer again, until I was less than a metre away.

Without further ado, he commanded, ‘Take off your trousers.’

Just like that! The man’s coarseness far exceeded anything which we, so-called street kids, were capable of. For someone immersed in a life of opulent luxury, his vulgarity was un­believable – and it was like that throughout my employment at the Palace. I was the object of insults and profanity unheard of even among the lowest riff-raff. He was compulsively profane and not a day went by when he did not hurl obscenities at me.

By the end of my time at the Palace I knew why he had such a filthy vocabulary. But standing in front of him at our very first meeting, it never occurred to me that his depravity could so far exceed that of pimps and whores with a hallowed history in the business.

Standing before him with my trousers around my ankles and frozen with embarrassment, I had no idea what I was supposed to do or what he expected of me.

‘Take off your underwear,’ he ordered gruffly.

I fumbled around trying to delay, but a Filipino manservant swiftly stepped forward and his fleeting hands stripped me naked. I burned with shame.

Not content simply to look, the Master tugged and prodded provocatively at my manhood, which had the last traces of Tahani’s virginity, the rosy blood of her maidenhead, still clinging to it. ‘I’m entitled to check for myself the thickness of the stick that will chastise my enemies, right?’

He pulled and tossed my member this way and that, making his own assessment. He flipped it to the right, then to the left, raised it, lowered it, pulled and stretched, and finally released it as nonchalantly as if he were examining a fish for its freshness.

‘Do you always walk around with visible traces of your aggression?’ he asked with a nauseating laugh.

I burned with shame.        

Then he looked towards Issa and issued his verdict: ‘He’ll do.’

I pulled up my clothes while the Master, with a sneer of distaste, reached for a tissue from a box on a marble-top table and began to wipe his hand. This was a signal to the Filipino, who nodded eagerly and flashed a wooden smile as he jumped into action.

Issa was just as obsequious. As soon as the Master had uttered his opinion, Issa left the room, nodding deferentially as he went. I was left in the care of the Filipino who walked me down the corridors of the Palace, sometimes a few steps ahead, sometimes propelling me from behind, as we went through a series of doorways. Whenever I slackened the pace, he stopped smiling and urged me on, until we came to a comfortable-looking bedroom flanked by a small antechamber and a bathroom.