Throwing Sparks (37 page)

I returned to the old Palace and parked in the lot reserved for residents. On my way in, I saw Hamdan flanked by two guards and looking awful. As soon as he saw me, he appealed for help.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked as I approached them.

He tried to wriggle free but the guards quickly stopped him. I drew closer and he told me in a jumble of disjointed sentences that Issa had come to the gate and that he had let him in, and that he was not aware Issa was carrying a weapon and that he had attacked the Master.

I hastened into the marble foyer where the Master usually held court.

‘Your friend here wanted to mess with me,’ he said with a smirk. ‘I couldn’t think of anyone more qualified than you to mess with him – and please me to boot.’

The sight of Issa lying on the ground surrounded by guards with their boots shoved into his abdomen horrified me.

The Master ordered two guards to pick up Issa and take him to the punishment chamber. ‘Now to your final assignment,’ he commanded. In an unprecedented gesture, he put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, ‘In addition to tarnishing my honour, your friend here tried to kill me.’

He turned and when he saw how many guards surrounded Issa, he told some of them to stand at the door of the dark space.

‘Bastards like him can’t be trusted, and I’m going to teach him a lesson,’ he said, with his arm on my shoulder again. ‘When someone trusts you, you don’t betray them. You get my drift, don’t you?’

I feigned ignorance and he lost his temper.

‘Listen to me, you son of a bitch,’ he warned, his hand dropping from my shoulder. ‘When I tell you to do something, you do it. You know the score if you don’t – I’ll get someone in here who’ll do you
and
him.’

He waited for that to sink in and then added, ‘You’d better give it your all, or else—’ His voice trailed off with the un­spoken threat.

I looked around the room I knew so well as if I had never seen it before and a shudder of revulsion ran through me, spreading outwards into a pool of total darkness.

I was completely shattered. It had never crossed my mind that one day Issa and I would confront one another here. We looked each other in the eye, taking in our defeat and our torment. Like water dripping off a block of ice exposed to the heat of a flaming hearth, the briny droplets of our long years together brimmed in our eyes. All the excitement and adventure of our now faraway adolescence coalesced in the memory of that night when Issa came to my rescue and stopped Mustafa Qannas in his tracks, and of that other, even darker night when he had saved me from Salih Khaybari’s bellowing from Tahani’s window.

Who would shield us from one another now?

Everything was wrong – the place, the person, the timing. No sooner had I begun working on Issa than the evening call to prayer rang out. Its lustrous melody pierced us to the core, the words echoing as our bodies shuddered, convulsing, and we begged each other’s mercy and choked back agonised cries to end our mutual suffering.

The evening call to prayer seemed endless, as if the muezzin’s appeal to the faithful had gone unheeded. The words of the sacred call reverberated through me but could do little against the age-old darkness that was trapped inside. The doors to my heart had been slammed shut by sin, and the inky pool had grown and widened, enabling my wounded spirit to engage in ever more cruel acts of torture. The process did not stop just because the time was up.

Our wounded spirits carried on with their outpouring of pent-up grief until all our days and nights in Jeddah appeared like a journey through a vale of tears. We were like boats racing towards some nearby harbour only to be blown back out to sea, the shoreline obliterated by a sprawling mass of walls and buildings. Time passed, the call to prayer continued uninterrupted and night fell, gathering up its cloak, not to cover us, but rather to expose us, bound together in our shameful act.

In all such instances, torturer and victim are irresistibly drawn to the edge of the abyss and their individuality is obliterated.

Our agony persisted and the imam’s dewy voice went from the call to the prayer itself. But he must have been praying alone since his chanting had grown more melodic; it was as if his voice was trying to hurry along the faithful who had not yet arrived. The recitation amplified our sorrow and our moaning echoed back and forth like a weaver’s flying shuttle.

I could hear a verse: ‘And to him who fears God, God shall find a suitable outcome, and shall provide for him from where he never imagined.’ I wondered if it was directed specifically at me, if the imam was delivering a coded message to me at that very instant.

I was shattered. I could do no more. The Master seemed satisfied with what had already been accomplished.

Gathering up my clothes, I left Issa to collect himself and dry his tears. I was now certain that I could no longer carry on with such terrible misdeeds, but said nothing for fear that my turn would be next.

The Master looked me in the eye and congratulated me on successfully completing the assignment. ‘You’re as good as you always were,’ he exclaimed. ‘Maybe I should reconsider that decision to retire you.’

I spat on the ground without him seeing, while he directed a thick wad of spittle at Issa. He brimmed with contempt for him.

‘What brought you back here?’ the Master barked at Issa.

‘I want my wife.’

Flying into a rage, the Master kicked Issa in the face, his shoe smashing into his nose. Blood streamed down his face.

‘You will never get to say those words again!’ he roared.

He pushed him still naked out of the punishment chamber and towards the Palace gates.

‘Many years ago, you were welcomed through these gates,’ he said. ‘But now your time is up.’

He pulled out a revolver and, without further ado, he pumped two bullets into Issa’s naked body: one hit him in the stomach and the fatal shot ripped through his chest and exited through his back. Issa fell to the ground motionless.

‘Where is the son of a bitch who let him in here?’ he thundered.

Two guards steered a terrified Hamdan before him. His eyes darted from the face contorted with rage to the view of the heavenly gardens he had spent a lifetime dreaming about. He was trying to blurt something out but the Master took the words out of his mouth.

‘You will say that this criminal tried to break into the Palace, that he shot you, and that you therefore killed him.’

He was uninterested in whatever Hamdan might have to say, whether by way of explanation or anything else. The Master took aim at Hamdan’s shoulder, fired one shot and tossed the revolver on to the ground beside him. ‘Do what I say and you might just live to see another day.’

The ambulance took off at breakneck speed with two people inside: one a motionless corpse and the other writhing in pain. Sirens blaring, the ambulance raced down the thoroughfare that separated Paradise from the Firepit. Hamdan seemed indifferent to the lifeless corpse sprawled next to him and only had eyes for the houses and alleyways flashing by. The ambulance flew through the streets as if trying to shake them loose.

*  *  *

It was a night like no other.

After I was done with that abominable task, I had expected the Master to issue some other order. But he kept his distance; his preoccupation had been with Issa, who had slipped from his grasp while I remained under his thumb.

I returned to my quarters inside the Palace, feeling drained. My tragic flaw bore witness to the ruin that my life had become.

Issa was dead.

He had taken his last steps with the Master pushing him towards the Palace gates. He had teetered, unable to decide whether to cover his nakedness from behind or from the front. Head hanging and gaze lowered, Issa could not see how many people were there, only that their boots crowded around him, as he switched his hands back and forth, between his backside and his groin, and tried to feel around for a wall or pillar to lean against.

Issa was utterly broken and unable to look at anyone. I was desperate for our eyes to meet, hoping he would accept the unspoken apology. But his eyes were riveted to the ground, and whenever he looked further afield, it was to follow the guards’ motions and mind their boots.

The Master told him to look up at the window facing him but he did not respond. I craned my neck to look in the direction he pointed to and saw Maram, her hair loose about her face, her eyes on the scene unfolding before her.

‘Look over there, your lady’s at the window!’ he taunted him.

Issa made his last stand and refused to do the Master’s bidding.

The Master made his final decision and fired the two shots. Everyone recoiled in horror, and even Maram flinched before retreating hastily. He went to his car, turned on the ignition and drove out of the Palace gates as if nothing had happened. For a moment, I was tempted to tell him about my relationship with Maram, and to join Issa by putting an end to the life slowly wasting inside me.

Issa was dead. Would I tell Mawdie? She had been so worried that Issa was losing his mind.

She had scoured Jeddah looking for him in the places I had told her he favoured. She finally had found him squatting in front of the entrance to the Hilton Hotel. He had looked so awful she barely recognised him: he was skin and bones and, of course, naked. Seeing him in such a state had practically obliterated her cherished image of him.

He had disavowed her completely. She had tried to get him to climb into the car. She had told him she would book him a suite in the hotel and then offered to take him home to his mother and Salwa, but he would hear none of it. He began haranguing passers-by claiming that she was trying to seduce him. Worried about attracting attention, Mawdie had slipped a security guard some money to look out for him, and had left, shaken.

He had tried to escape his predicament. He had drowned in his own blood when all he had wanted was to drown in the Master’s.

Should I tell Mawdie that Issa was dead?

Going to my room, I felt confused, humiliated, defeated, with only my dark thoughts for company. How to escape from all this? I wondered how I could stem the tide of a tumultuous past that had surged over me and was sweeping me in its wake.

What I wanted was to wipe out this memory of mine and I turned to alcohol for the escape I sought. I drank so much that I finally crawled into oblivion. I paired the alcohol with hashish in an attempt to shut out the people whose voices were ringing in my head. The ones who said I was despicable, the ones who condemned me, the ones who at every turn had nothing to say but ‘Grab that thief!’ and ‘Catch that killer!’ and ‘That bastard ruined our lives!’.

They swarmed around me like fruit flies. They closed in on me, combing through my life and issuing their condemnations, citing this or that criminal act I had perpetrated, some wrong I had done, ending their litany with a stream of abuse. Cursing, spitting, screaming, raining shoes down on my head, their fingers poking and pulling at me until I was eviscerated, all of them watching and waiting for me to die.

Despite the alcohol and hashish, the desired amnesia did not envelop me. But I finally lost consciousness and passed out. I slept like the dead, and woke up sullied and defiled, ever the thief, killer and bastard.

It felt as if a drill were boring into my skull because my hangover was so bad. I went looking for painkillers one of the Master’s cronies had brought back for me from London and in exchange for which I had given him the phone number of one of the Palace girls.

I saw that Mawdie had been calling the private cell phone non-stop and that she had sent me nineteen text messages. I read the last three:

‘Issa called. He said a whole lot of things I didn’t understand. He said, “See you tonight.”’

‘I couldn’t sleep all night. You’re not picking up and I don’t know what’s happened to Issa. I beg you, answer the phone and tell me what’s going on.’

‘My mother heard that Issa got into the Palace and that shots were fired. That’s all we know. Please let me know everything’s OK. God bless.’

The first thing I did was to turn off the cell phone. Finding that this did not ease my mind, I smashed it with a mallet I found in the kitchen. Despite repeated doses, the painkillers had done nothing for my blinding headache. I had to get away from it all. But I wondered where on earth I could go.

*  *  *

Maram had been as beautiful as ever as she watched Issa’s final moments framed inside the window overlooking the Palace gates. Had she avenged herself?

I was the one who had given him away. Secrets cannot be secure in the hearts of women because their hearts, like their wombs, seek fertilisation to bear fruit. A barren breast is not fitting for a woman since a woman’s heart is the source of utterance. The rib in Adam’s clay was so embedded with names and stories that it fell to women to transmit human lore and bequeath stories.

That is how I sent Issa to his fate.

He had been in love with Mawdie for years without anyone knowing about it. When Maram told the Master, she had set off his anger. Standing in the window, she had appeared like a marble statue, but after the two shots pierced Issa’s body, she abandoned her fossilised stance and exited the stage. As though entranced by the sight of his thrashing limbs, her neck had craned to follow the arc of his fall, and she ignored my repeated attempts to catch her eye.