I could not stop thinking of those bewitching eyes peering from the window of the luxury car. Eyes like those could launch a thousand ships, and it would not matter if you drowned inside them.
I had never seen a niqab that framed a more entrancing pair of eyes: wide and deep and black, bordered by thick lashes and arched brows, their gaze aloof. In the days that followed, I lay in wait for her, hoping that she would reappear in the same spot. But her passage, like life itself, was not to occur twice.
I decided to imitate the water-bearer. I began practising and people were fooled into thinking that my right eye had suddenly started to twitch and blink involuntarily. My act was so convincing that I was advised to consult an eye doctor, which I promised to do. Meanwhile, I hoped that the woman with the bewitching eyes would pass me again so that I could try my winking trick on her. But she never reappeared and I dropped the tic before it became genuine.
Whenever I thought of my aunt, I could not help but snicker at the idea of a woe-man: a male seed that had rotted during gestation. My father had been infinitely more tender-hearted and gracious than his sister, for whom I felt only the deepest hatred. My imagination often overflowed with visions of revenge: when the time came, I would reduce her to a babbling idiot who could never again raise her voice.
Only after we have lived our lives do human beings actually see clearly. The past is the record of a life and its assessment can confer wisdom. My aunt’s was a record of sharp and piercing jabs, like nails strewn on my path, and every venomous word that dripped from her lips led me to some form of delinquency or another.
I have experienced both poverty and wealth and have concluded they are equally limiting: poverty pushes us to seek riches while wealth pulls us toward immorality. In either case, our lives are determined by our earliest actions.
Many years have passed since my early childhood, a time when the night became my constant companion.
I have been a night owl ever since I was a little boy. The neighbourhood commons was a welcoming space for children desperate to get away from their cramped and overcrowded homes. We gathered there, lining up in formation to play all sorts of games, with different teams selecting their players and passing over kids we had been warned to avoid.
Issa was one of those kids. Excluded from every group, he shunned all of them in return and took to hanging around drunks, homosexuals, sheep rustlers, chicken poachers and the petty thieves who stole bicycles and motorbikes. He acted much older than his age – just like Osama did – and he was not afraid of being jumped as he wandered around the dark alleyways with his older companions.
We became friends one dark night when I was crossing the Kuft, an alley notorious for sexual predators, where young boys were lured by fear or desire. I had gone there to meet up with a boy named Yasser Muft, who had asked me to arrive early because he had received threats for responding to my overtures.
As I waited for Yasser Muft to show up, I began pacing up and down the alley. Suddenly, a torch was trained on my face and I heard a little ditty: ‘Pretty boy’s gone away, gone, gone pretty boy.’ I recognised the voice of Mustafa Qannas.
He stopped singing and bluntly told me to undress.
In the beam of the torchlight I looked for a stone with which to crack open his head and when I sighted one and lunged for it, his blade pressed into my back and his left arm had me in a stranglehold.
‘You do as I say or you’re dead,’ he hissed.
Issa appeared out of nowhere like an angel descended from heaven. Taking in the scene, he laughed and tapped Mustafa on the shoulder, saying, ‘Couldn’t you find someone else to threaten other than the Hammer?’
I slipped out of Mustafa’s grasp and picked up a good-sized stone with which to split his head open.
‘Don’t do it,’ Issa warned as he grabbed me, ‘or else he’s sure to ride your arse, sooner or later.’ He turned to Mustafa almost playfully and told him that I was his closest friend.
The tension lifted immediately.
‘The Good Lord took pity and sent you Issa,’ Mustafa said, patting my cheek.
Issa chuckled, his laughter ringing in the night. ‘If you knew the Hammer like I do,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t even have tried to have your way with him.’ He went on to regale Mustafa with tales of my voracious sexual appetite and how it stopped at nothing, whether human or beast.
Mustafa began to laugh and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You and I are kindred souls, eh?’ he said with a twinkle.
At that moment, Yasser Muft came out of the shadows and all three of us dug into him.
* * *
I was spellbound by the eyes in the niqab.
My position at the Palace prevented me from seeing women, much less mixing with them. Initially, I did not understand the reason for this total prohibition, but it became clear that it was to keep me from slackening – so that my pent-up lust would have me drooling at the prospect of riding yet another victim.
On a whim, the Master decided to create a team dedicated to humiliating his enemies. He began to plan for the venture and put me in charge of recruiting for what came to be known as the ‘Punisher Squad’.
The more sexually repressed a recruit, the better suited he would be to perform the job. That was the Master’s view and he wanted me to pick the cream of the crop.
After my designation as squad leader, Issa no longer had anything to do with this aspect of work at the Palace. But he suggested that I would be able to find the kind of men I needed at the Dreams Café behind Tahliyyah Street, where all the deviants and perverts gathered. Just one visit there made me blanch.
In the event, I recruited the squad members from the wretched and impoverished residents of the densely populated neighbourhoods of the city, where people were ready to chew on whatever fodder was thrown their way – no questions asked.
I rounded up a few contenders and told them all the activities that would get them expelled from the squad if they were caught doing them. The most important prohibitions were mixing with or even looking at women, watching television outside the approved channels, using mobiles or any other kind of telephone, bringing women’s magazines into the Palace and, finally, masturbating. The last would be enforced through spot checks, including lab tests of seminal fluid if necessary.
After everyone had agreed to these conditions, the squad was housed in a secluded area of the Palace, which the team members could leave only to perform an assignment, returning to their quarters once they had finished.
The only member of the group able to transfer to another area of the Palace was Osama. Though I had recruited him, Issa assigned him a position that he felt better suited him and that had only recently come to light. Thus, Osama was seconded from the Punisher Squad and no longer reported to me.
In any case, the squad was short-lived because the Master’s rules and regulations proved impossible for most recruits to follow. Before the squad was disbanded, all its members were subjected to the same treatment they had meted out to the Master’s adversaries, with photographic evidence as back-up. They were duly warned to forget what took place in the Palace on pains of some unspecified punishment. All understood the veiled threat and the consequences of breaking the team’s vow of silence.
Only I was retained to carry on with the punishment assignments. I was less worried about my manliness being violated than by the numerous prohibitions the Master had decreed. To ensure my unflagging performance in servicing the billy goats, I was denied access to the nanny goats.
After almost seven years of formal requests, as well as numerous pleas and entreaties, the Master eventually granted me permission to move out of the Palace. I wanted to live in a place of my own, ostensibly to take care of my aunt, who had no one left to look after her in her old age.
Of course Aunt Khayriyyah’s life was of no interest to me and I was certainly not keen to relive what I had experienced with her. But it was a valid excuse that would allow me to have at least one foot out of the Palace. The idea came to me when, after one of his nightly seduction acts to lure young women to the Palace, Osama whispered, ‘Your aunt is on the verge of starvation.’
We had just finished setting up for a party and several young women had swooped down on the Palace intent on snagging a man who would prize their beauty and shower them with gifts. The Master had recently granted permission for me to leave my quarters between assignments. Osama and I secluded ourselves at the back of the hall, watching the young women sashaying about before the predatory eyes of the Palace guests.
‘Look, over there,’ he whispered urgently. ‘It’s Tahani!’
Osama dropped the bombshell as he gestured toward one of the girls. I could practically hear my heart pounding inside my chest.
‘Where? Where is she?’ I looked around feverishly.
‘Over there – dancing.’ He pointed vaguely at a small group of young women swirling around a fat guest.
‘I don’t see her,’ I said. ‘Tell me exactly where you’re looking.’
‘The one wearing the dress with the slit in the back.’
My eyes zeroed in on the girl like an infrared missile. Could it be that she was making good on her promise? Had she finally caught up with me in the middle of all this debauchery? If so, I would have to kill her, plain and simple.
I was on the point of getting up to go towards her for a better look, but he stopped me.
‘I mean, doesn’t that girl look like Tahani?’
I broke into a cold sweat and felt faint.
Whenever the past wants to reclaim us, it lures us with its finely wrought enticements. The one thing I dreaded above all else was to find myself face to face with Tahani. I became convinced that she was concealed somewhere within the walls of the Palace. It upset me whenever I thought about it as I would imagine her standing in the punishment chamber watching me. I imagined myself justifying my abject state and the time I ravished her.
Oh, dear God, what if Tahani had landed here? Could she have come here, like the rest of us, to be immolated in this infernal paradise?
Or maybe she was exactly where I had left her, wiping away her tears and the traces of blood. Maybe a statue of her had been erected to remind passers-by of the victims created by the firestorm of love.
I was still staring at the look-alike when Osama plunged in the stake.
‘What did you do to Tahani?’
When we do not right our wrongs, we are continually haunted by regret. It is futile to feel guilty about the past because we cannot make whole that which is broken. That is why I needed to escape.
Osama launched into a long discussion of Tahani and only then did I realise the extent of the torment I had caused him. At the time, Osama’s position at the Palace allowed him to come and go as he wished and he would bring me news of the neighbourhood, inserting titbits about Tahani in the hope that I would react or come clean. He was on a mission to find out what had taken place.
When I remained mute over Tahani, Osama changed tack and hissed in my ear, ‘Didn’t you hear what I said about your aunt? She’s on the verge of starvation.’
There and then, I decided to use my aunt as a pretext to end my enforced isolation in the punishers’ quarters.
* * *
I had left the old neighbourhood in the middle of that darkest night, and I slipped back into the Firepit at night, almost seven years later. I was a changed man. I had nothing left in me. My equipment was worn and slack with overuse and my body was weary from the excesses of my depravity.
The neighbourhood had barely changed. There were still heaps of rubbish everywhere. There, too, were the familiar burnt-out street lights and the kids in dirty clothes, playing and cursing at each other. Women selling almonds and roasted watermelon seeds still sat listless and resigned behind their merchandise, while pedlars plied the alleyways with their trolleys of cotton candy, pulses, spices and pastries. More flies swarmed about their wares than all the neighbourhood kids put together.
The Firepit seemed less animated than I remembered it. There were no women calling on one another any more, and all the windows overlooking the streets had been sealed. Houses were more secluded, doorway curtains had disappeared, and even the newer houses that I did not recognise already seemed old and worn.
I heard the evening call to prayer and immediately recognised my half-brother’s voice – Ibrahim’s dewy call drifted in from the loudspeakers in the Salvation Mosque. Soon, the higgledy-piggledy neighbourhood settled to a tranquil calm. As the old men responded to the call, their ablutions completed and water still dripping from their full beards, I walked by quickly with my eyes fixed to the ground and the loose ends of my keffiyeh wrapped around my face.
I entered the alleyway leading to our house and glanced up at Tahani’s window. It was boarded up, with rust-encrusted nails for ever sealing the latticed shutters. I caught sight of her older brother outside their house, who initially followed me with his eyes and then turned his face the other way, pretending not to see me. I wished to ask him about Tahani, but when I looked at him again, he spat in my direction several times without ever looking me in the eye.
I looked up again at Tahani’s boarded-up shutters and realised with a sharp pang that I would never again see her at her window. I would find nothing there but seething rancour amplified many times.
My visions of Tahani were invariably mixed up with those of my mother. I felt my mother had abandoned me when she agreed to marry Ghayth Muhannad and moved out of our home. Instead of keeping the flame of maternity burning bright for me, she had betrayed it and granted the breasts that had nurtured me to another man.
Whenever I thought of him thrusting inside her, I would imagine her being stoned like a common adulteress. I pictured ever more stones being hurled at her as she cried for mercy. But the wishful thinking would collapse when I remembered that she could not plead for anything – as it was, she could barely stammer intelligibly, managing only simple grunts and moans.
Then another picture would come to mind: of Tahani, lashed to a wooden stake in the sand and surrounded by a crowd of people pelting her with stones and screaming ‘adulteress’ at her. Her clothes would be soaked in blood and, when they removed her blindfold, she would catch sight of me in the midst of the stone-throwers. The vision always ended with Tahani being led away to some jail for sexual offenders and crying in desperation, ‘Why have you forsaken me, Tariq?’
I blended visions of Tahani’s possible fate with the stories of the Palace girls. So many young women had found sanctuary in the Palace. Many had been arrested after their very first sexual adventure and had become prostitutes on being released from jail. It was their only means left to earn a living outside the rank-smelling jail where the female warders had their way with them. Some of them were able to parlay the profession into positions of influence and get their way with prominent men. I had heard of, or observed, so many young women losing their virginity and speaking about their first sexual encounter in such a nonchalant way that my feelings about the treatment of women were wrapped in a thick layer of indifference.
With a final backward glance at her window, I wondered if Tahani had followed the same path. This was why I always looked for her in the Palace – and always dreaded ever finding her there.
Reaching my destination, I knocked on the door repeatedly and waited.
‘Who is it now?’ screeched a familiar voice from inside. ‘The devil take you! You’re going to break my door if you keep knocking like that!’
When she saw me, she could not believe her eyes. She was so taken aback that she practically swallowed her words.
‘I should have known,’ she finally managed to say. ‘Nobody but you would pound on a door like that.’ Her eyes were still wide in disbelief at seeing me there after almost seven years. ‘What brings you here?’
As she stood holding on to the door, I kissed the top of her head and inhaled the familiar smell of congealed aromatic oil in her hair parting. She pushed me away and put on a show of tearfulness as she avoided my embrace and bemoaned the cruelty of an existence that had left her alone and poor, with no one to care for her.
She was even more withered than she had been and everything about her had shrunk – except, that is, for her tongue, which had lost none of its agility. Past the shock of seeing me again, a stream of the old invective burst forth once more, and my long-buried loathing was reawakened just as swiftly.
As I was reminded of my hatred, Aunt Khayriyyah dredged up her own loathing for my mother. ‘What else can a snake give birth to?’ I, too, had not seen that serpent mother of mine since she had moved out to live with Ghayth Muhannad.
‘So what brings you here?’ she asked directly.
That was the question. Standing there, I could not fathom the overwhelming urge I had to bring this woman back into my life. She was like the germ of an eradicated disease that I had locked up in the laboratory of my emotions. I was back to show her how well her scorn had borne fruit and to give her a taste of her own medicine. I asked myself the same question: was I here to give the lie to all her dire warnings or to confirm them?
She kept asking why I was there, like a broken record, and I was tempted to give up on her. I had already had enough of her and of everything I had gone through with her. But I hesitated, remembering that I needed her for two reasons: as a means to escape my quarters at the Palace and to satisfy my thirst for revenge.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ I asked her, and immediately regretted it as it gave her an opening to refuse.
What if she turned me down? Then it really would be impossible to budge her. Before she could waver, I quickly pointed out the miserable condition she was in and the decrepit state of the house. The ceiling in the living room was caving in and there were deep cracks in the walls of the courtyard. I followed her around the house where I had spent such a significant part of my life, taking in the interior doors that had come off their hinges, the carpets and curtains that had faded and the light switches that no longer worked.
For her part, Aunt Khayriyyah was taking me in, without giving voice to the questions she had for my sudden and unimagined appearance.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ I asked again.
Perhaps she had been pondering my question quietly to give me a chance to consider her own counterproposal.
‘Your mother is in greater need than I am. Why don’t you help her?’
‘Because she has a man. She doesn’t need me,’ I said pointedly. ‘I don’t have anyone in this world except for you now.’
All she needed was a little insistence on my part to wear down her pride. She had a litany of complaints: from loneliness, to the bureaucrats in the social security system procrastinating over her papers, to having to live off the charity of others. I persisted with my offer as much as I felt she needed me to, despite her graceless temporising. I promised her a comfortable existence with servants at her beck and call to take care of her.
I had to keep myself in check often in order to disguise my deep-seated loathing for her. I put my arm around her and told her that I wanted someone from my bloodline to care about me and keep me company.
‘Why aren’t you married?’ Aunt Khayriyyah asked suddenly.
She was trying my patience with endless questions I was unprepared for, but I managed to deflect her by saying, ‘Will you be the one to pick my bride?’
She laughed and I think it was the first time I ever saw her teeth. Despite the filth of her tongue, they were a brilliant white, pristine and without decay.
‘What do you think of Tahani?’ I asked her.
‘Which Tahani? Do you mean Salih Khaybari’s daughter?’
I nodded.
‘So you’re on the lookout for a slut who is like your grandmother, Saniyya,’ she stated viciously. She paused. ‘They say Salih took her back to his village one night and married her off without a wedding.’
I was too stunned to say anything.
‘Apparently Tahani did something shameful and brought disgrace to the family. The only way her father could conceal the scandal was among his own people in his village,’ Aunt Khayriyyah said. Pulling her dishevelled braids together, she carried on, now in true form. ‘Saniyya’s blood runs in your veins, boy, that’s why you only go for whores!’
I took the double blow about Tahani and my grandmother, and swore to myself that I would silence that tongue once and for all when the time was right. I had no outlets to vent my rage and dispel my fury other than the cesspit where I had learned to swim amid streams of rubbish.
My patience reached its limits when she went to her closet to collect some tattered old clothes. I tried to stop her short by promising that we would go shopping and that she could buy whatever she needed. But she insisted on taking some of her rags, along with a small wooden jewellery chest where she stored the rings, earrings and gold chains that she had accumulated over a lifetime.
Whenever I tried to hurry her, she would remember one more thing that she needed to take along. Finally, remembering her headcovering, she went through the clothes piled up in her closet. Swearing she had not been out for over a month, she went from room to room looking for her niqab, furious that it had disappeared.
‘You don’t really need the niqab,’ I said, which immediately sparked off her hostility again.
‘The likes of you would poke their thing up a hole in a rock if they could,’ she shot back, punching me in the chest.
She was getting worked up and I feared she would change her mind. I cajoled her and pretended to be joking.
I was just about ready to strangle her when she shuffled over to the neighbours’ houses to bid the women farewell.
‘I’m off with my nephew, Tariq. Goodbye!’ she shouted, knocking on each and every door.
The farewells to the various neighbours were long and drawn-out despite my repeated calls for her to hurry up.
To her closest neighbour, Aunt Khayriyyah said, ‘If Ibrahim comes looking for me, tell him I’ve gone with his brother.’
Women crowded around to bid her farewell and convey a few parting words. As we took our leave she asked me whether she should leave the keys with one of the neighbours to look in on the place. I told her she could come and do so herself any time she wanted.
It was only when she was seated next to me in the car and we drove away that I knew for sure that I had finally prised her out of the Firepit. Her eyes were practically popping when she saw the car, and she fired off a salvo of questions at me.
‘Where in the world did all this come from?’
I had to field a stream of phone calls from women at the Palace and Aunt Khayriyyah eavesdropped on the conversations. She tried to get a question in at the end of each call but was interrupted every time by my cell phone ringing again.
I drove to my new villa and when Aunt Khayriyyah stepped inside, she was visibly astonished and her eyes scanned every inch of the place.
‘Is all this yours?’ she wondered. ‘Only thieves and drug dealers have stuff like this.’
There was an uncomfortable silence while she looked searchingly into my face. Eventually, she asked, as if dreading the answer, ‘You’ve become a pimp, haven’t you?’
* * *
Hatred has an odour, just like love.
Smells are alive. They are born and grow in our memory after becoming associated with a specific time in our lives. Regardless of its nature, a smell is for ever linked to the time we first experienced it. Smells can be associated with all sorts of things, a sweet from childhood, new holiday clothes, the chairs in a particular classroom, even a teenage song or our first love. When a smell triggers our memory, we recollect all the attendant history and context of its first occurrence and are left aching with grief or sorrow.
I had forgotten how much I hated my aunt. The full extent of my loathing and hostility came back to me as I breathed in her smell.
Whenever I came home to the villa, the air inside was redolent of my aunt and hung so heavy I felt suffocated. Our past history lurked in every corner of the house like swarms of locusts, aggravating me as I tried to cultivate patience and a measure of goodwill towards her. After all, the reason for coming to my aunt’s rescue had been to give myself a little breathing room, a place I could escape, even if only momentarily, from the Master’s clutches.
At the Palace, I hated the smell of the victims. I loathed the smell of the Master and of Osama. I hated my own smell and was sure that to someone, somewhere, I also smelled revolting. Would Tahani be nostalgic for my smell? Nothing remains fresh for ever, whether real or remembered.
After six years of uninterrupted service at the Palace, I had felt stuck and had turned to Issa for help. He said he would do whatever he could to help me move into a place of my own. I had to remind him more than once that my aunt’s situation was becoming urgent, and he finally obtained exceptional leave for me to go and live with her.
‘But I can’t go back and live in that neighbourhood,’ I protested.
‘You don’t have to,’ Issa said. ‘You can rent a villa in Zahra or Naeem. Or buy one.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘OK, let me speak to him.’
Months passed and Issa was frequently away. I followed up with phone calls and text messages until he finally got back to me.
‘I’ve spoken with the Master about your situation, and he too thinks you need a break. However, his stipulation is that you must find a substitute and that you remain on call. And the list of prohibitions stands.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘Have you thought about who could replace you?’
‘Yes, Osama.’
‘He’s been given other duties. Forget Osama.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll find someone.’
‘Of course, you can only live with your aunt and no one else,’ Issa reminded me. ‘You understand that, right?’
Looking for a substitute who would satisfy the Master was not going to be an easy matter. I had to rack my brain to think of someone who could do the job without complaining. It occurred to me that I could approach the former members of the disbanded Punisher Squad. But after what they had endured as a pre-emptive punishment, it was unlikely any of them would even consider an offer from me. They would probably want to give me a taste of my own medicine before listening to what I had to say.
I was able to arrange the purchase of a villa and to move there with my aunt. I spent the next few days looking for a substitute and settled on someone from my sordid past.
I found Mustafa Qannas just as I had left him: nursing his moonshine in an alleyway and improvising poetry about the boys he was infatuated with. He was not working and spent his time loitering around the neighbourhood schools, feigning interest in the young boys’ progress in class and exhorting their teachers to take good care of them, like some kind and attentive uncle. He had a love interest in each school, whom he wooed with his verses and protected from other predators in the area.
‘Hey there, Mustafa,’ I called to him.
He was leaning against a wall, eyes glazed.
At the sound of my voice, he squinted to see who it was and jumped to his feet to welcome me. We fell into each other’s arms; it felt like he had not embraced anyone in a long time. I noticed how he still smelled the same. Our lingering hug revived the memory of that night when we had our way with Yasser Muft. He stepped back, keeping his hands on my chest, and looked into my face, smiling broadly.
‘It’s been a long time, kid,’ he said.
‘Not much of a kid any more,’ I laughed. ‘Don’t you see how old we’ve grown?’
He shook his head. ‘We’re young at heart no matter how much we age.’
I told him why I had come to see him but he seemed unable to grasp what I was saying, as if he had gone soft in the head. I wondered whether he had any juice left in him. But my job was to find a replacement, not to assess his potential to perform.
Mustafa came with me to the Palace and I handed him over to the Filipino manservant, pleased that I could now go and enjoy my life relatively unburdened. But my elation proved to be short-lived; Mustafa categorically refused to do what was expected of him with a video camera running. I never saw him again and went out of my way to avoid him after that, since he swore he would kill me if it was the last thing he did.
* * *
With my move into my own living quarters, I began to believe I had escaped from the Master’s clutches.
I started to host soirées at the villa to which I invited people who could be trusted to be discreet. I stopped attending Palace parties on the pretext that I was having trouble with my old aunt.
One night, the Master stopped me and, looking me in the eye, asked, ‘So, how is your aunt these days?’
‘Very well, thank you. She is grateful to you and always singing your praises.’
He started to laugh viciously. ‘Singing my praises, eh?’ He found that so amusing that it took him a while to stop. ‘Singing my praises,’ he repeated with a final chortle. ‘Tell me, did you have to reattach her tongue so that she could sing my praises?’ That set him off again.
I was nailed to the spot. His sarcasm had undone me and I felt panic-stricken. How did he know? No one was there when I did what had to be done.
Her tongue-lashings had become intolerable.
Every one of her body parts had deteriorated with age except for her tongue. Aunt Khayriyyah would launch her invective in the midst of social gatherings, insulting the women in the room and showering me with obscenities.
Initially I had wanted to show her who was boss and that I could do whatever I pleased. I would bring her down from her room so that she could witness the posse of young women at my feet. I even went so far as to kiss and flirt with them while she looked on. I regretted that later, though, because it only provided more ammunition for her vile tongue.
No sooner did people arrive in the evening than she seated herself with us in the reception area and let loose on the poor guests. I would tell her to return to her room but she would ignore me and continue to buzz around like a mosquito on the trail of fresh blood.
Some of the women would leave early, unable to stand her constant griping. The less sensitive ones simply moved to another part of the room or to another part of the house. Those sitting by the swimming pool outside swore they would not come back inside until she had been silenced. They hovered around listlessly just long enough to be paid.
Even without women visitors in the house, my aunt’s tongue overflowed with venom. She would attack the men for their conduct and call them pimps and perverts. She often tipped their drinks on the floor or threw them in their faces, threatening to report their debauchery to the authorities if they did not leave immediately.
My patience was running out.
One night, Aunt Khayriyyah hurled an ashtray at a guest, inflicting a deep cut in his forehead. On the pretext of having to take him to the hospital, most of the guests fled the scene. A few women stayed behind just long enough to collect their pay, swearing never to return even if I offered them their weight in gold.
Once the house was empty and Aunt Khayriyyah had spat out every foul word in her lexicon, she crawled up to her room like a snake returning to its lair. She had tasted blood. Feeling no remorse for injuring the guest, she threatened that anyone coming to the villa from now on would be taking their life into their hands.
I was livid with rage and went after her. I burst into her room, grabbed her by the hair and threw her on to the floor. Ignoring her screams, I tied her hands behind her back with a telephone wire and stuffed a wad of tissues into her mouth.
I was determined never to hear that voice again. I ransacked the bathroom for a razor blade and came back into the room with a handful of them. I propped her up across from me.
‘This is your day of reckoning,’ I shouted in her face. ‘You do remember what you did to my mother.’ I showed her one of the razors. ‘I’m going to put your tongue in the freezer – that way you can stand in front of the mirror every day and dream of reattaching it.’
I had never seen her in such a state, her eyes bloodless and bulging with terror.
‘No, better still. I’ll get a cat, starve it for three days and then give it your tongue.’ I leaned in towards her and hissed, ‘Poor kitty will have to swallow all your bile.’
I pulled the wad of tissues out of her mouth and she immediately started to scream, ‘You stink to high heaven. You came from a filthy belly. That’s why you stink to high heaven.’
This was the last thing I ever heard her say.
I slapped her and clamped a hand over her mouth to stem the flow of bile pouring out of it. Any more of her insults and I would lose my mind completely. Still she carried on and, despite the words being muffled and unintelligible, I knew she was cursing everyone who had anything to do with my coming into the world.
I had hoped that she would finally relent and invoke our family ties – that she would beg me to honour my father’s memory, show remorse or say something, anything, rather than carry on with her insults. But only venom poured out as if she feared that if she did not get it all out of her system, she would never have another chance.
I moved my hand off for barely a second and, with her mouth gaping open in mid flow, I reached in deftly to grab hold of her tongue with my fingers. I held on tight, making sure I had it firmly in my grip. Then I pinned her head down with my leg and, in one swift motion, I used the razor in my other hand to slice off her tongue.
I held on to the amputated portion as blood bubbled out of her mouth and streamed down her face. She lay completely still.
I thought I had killed her, and for a while all I could do was stare at the body, terrified. I flipped her over and felt her frail bones but was unable to feel the slightest sympathy for the old woman. I wanted her to wake up and listen to what I had to say without, for a change, being able to talk back. I did not want her just to go and die like that. I needed her to hear me out, to hear what she had never heard before. Now what was I going to do?
My meeting with the Master occurred several weeks later, well after the doctor’s visit to administer first aid and soon after I had hired two women to look after Aunt Khayriyyah.
The Master had stopped laughing. ‘She wasn’t really the type to sing praises, was she now,’ he commented as he handed me a video tape. ‘She had a filthy tongue and it deserved to be cut off.’
I was rooted to the spot.
‘It’s not what you did to your aunt that upsets me.’ He paused and then added, ‘Actually, you’ve got talent for crime.’
Head lowered, I silently awaited his next command.
‘I’m upset that you violated the conditions of your employment. So long as you work for me, women are strictly off limits.’
This time there was a longer pause as though the Master was considering an appropriate punishment for his disobedient servant.
‘I thought I might have you castrated,’ he said slowly, ‘but then you would become utterly useless to me.’ Indicating the video tape in my hands, he warned, ‘I have my eyes on you – always. Another slip-up and it’s over. Do you understand?’
I nodded weakly.
‘Good. So go back to your aunt now,’ he said, ‘and please give her my best.’
His laughter pursued me to the end of the hallway as I walked away, drenched in sweat.
I began watching the video the moment I stepped into my room.
It was an edited recording of everything that had taken place in the villa, in perfect video and audio quality.
The film had captured everything I had given vent to that night and I was thankful that I had not said a single word against the Master. The camera work was professional, shifting seamlessly from the reception areas to my aunt’s bedroom, through the hallways and into the bathroom. It documented all of the main highlights of that evening: the ashtray hurled at the guest, the women who left early and those who stayed on to collect their pay, and the curses streaming from my aunt’s mouth before I grabbed her by the hair and she lost her tongue to the razor.
The camera moved on to focus on me in the kitchen, placing the piece of tongue in the freezer and then, the following day, on the servants changing shifts and the doctor’s visit to administer first aid. His subsequent visits and treatment suggestions were also recorded, as was my recruitment of two women to look after her, with my explanation of how my aunt had fallen and bitten off her tongue.
I had captured a cat outside, but the film showed how I kept it locked up in the house for a couple of days to starve it and to allow extra time for my aunt to recuperate. Then, finally, the closing scene was me sitting my aunt down across from me, chopping up her tongue into tiny pieces and feeding them to the cat one by one, as she watched with horror.
My crime was fully documented, in perfect video and audio quality.