Maram finally came through on her promise.
Lying on the hotel bed and looking in the mirror directly across from her, she could see the curve of her hips outlined through the light bedcovers. She lifted the telephone receiver and ordered breakfast for two.
Her languor suggested she had just emerged from a deep slumber. Her hair had danced about her collarbones and neck until late in the night, until she had finally fallen asleep, exhausted.
She was mesmerisingly beautiful.
Like the other girls at the Palace, Maram had not expected to become the object of a derby for thoroughbreds. She had won the ultimate prize when the Master had placed her in his sights. When she finally came to me, she was like a parched field thirsting for rain.
‘Slow down,’ she had teased the night before, slipping into the bathroom. She was changing and her words were muffled. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we spent the next two days at the bungalow?’
I did not want to respond to her question so that she would not know how much the Master had me on edge: he was always around and the further I tried to get away, the closer he seemed to move. I tried going places where I thought he would not find me and spent time at different hotels along the seafront. But he always caught up with me with a phone call. ‘Where are you, scum?’ he would say.
I emerged from every escapade thinking it would be my last, feeling my neck gingerly to make sure I was still breathing. It is true that I risked death but I was watching my step. After a quarter century of confinement, I was calling the shots.
My reactions betrayed my anxiety. I was nervous when the receptionist asked with a knowing smile, ‘Just a room, or a suite as usual, sir?’
He emphasised ‘as usual’ with that superciliousness that petty officials favour – it was their way of getting back at overbearing bosses who held them in their places.
I had seen far too many receptionists looking over the women who accompanied me, barely concealing their brazen thoughts.
‘Are you going to spend the night in the bathroom?’ I asked her.
She appeared in the doorway, striking a provocative pose, hands on her hips and torso thrown back. ‘Now let’s see how well you measure up to your passionate wooing,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But don’t give up that charm offensive.’
She had me flustered. I checked that I had enough Viagra in my wallet, after I had not found any rifling through my pockets.
It had been a rough night, which I spent trying to meet her urgent needs.
Now morning, I watched Maram sleeping peacefully for a while and then moved to the bathroom. I really needed a warm bath to loosen my joints, which felt stiff and creaky. I stayed in the water, chewing gum to dissipate the smell of stale alcohol on my breath.
How I wished that some medicine had been discovered that could erase one’s memory.
Like a slideshow, all the faces from the past clicked through my mind’s eye. I saw Tahani, screaming for mercy as she squeezed her thighs together, holding her hand up to my face to show me the rosy blood that was evidence of her defilement. Aunt Khayriyyah appeared next, with her wild bush of white hair and rattling bones, shrieking hysterically despite her dwindling strength and stuttering gibberish in the torment of a never-ending life. Mustafa Qannas raised his head and roared like the grinding gears of a powerful truck engine, vowing to pound me to a pulp, dragging me stark naked through the neighbourhood’s alleyways and squeezing the last breath out of me as he sodomised me in public. That image was replaced by Osama, who trapped me in a funeral shroud and exclaimed, ‘At last, I’ve caught you, thief!’ The Master’s flushed and jowly face seeped into the picture and spread outwards like an oil slick on the surface of the sea, obliterating everything around, with his devious and cunning malice reflected in his features.
Those who did not know the Master were charmed by his smile and convinced that he would not hurt a fly. But those whose lives were bound to him knew that meekness and humility were only a veneer – and a very thin veneer at that. No matter how hard I tried to keep him at a distance, he would surprise me, worming his way into my very soul and boring into my skull. In my mind, I could always hear him say, ‘I’ll carve out a tight space for you in Jeddah’s most pathetic cemetery.’
It had been a long journey.
It had taken more than a quarter of a century but I was proud of my financial success and willing to overlook the pact with the devil that it had taken to get there. With a pill to erase my memory, I could have forgotten all the unmentionable things I had been compelled to do throughout my life.
I was brought up in a humble home with a father who came back in the evenings half dead from work. His only reaction to hearing about my childish misbehaviour was to threaten me – but his threats were empty. With every vain warning, I gained more wiggle room to disregard the next one and to do whatever I wished with the full knowledge that the threats would never be carried out.
My ability to be a step ahead of him nurtured my recklessness. It never occurred to me that the strategies and escape routes that I used to get around my misconduct might one day bring on my downfall, or that I could lose my soul in the process.
Aunt Khayriyyah was like an affliction that had wormed its way into me and contaminated me with chronic hatred. She fed me an endless diet of animosity and thanks to her relentless and hostile scrutiny, I became a master in the art of deception and evasion from a very young age.
Once when the Master had phoned to see where I was, he had shouted, ‘I’ll send you back to the streets where you came from!’ As long as he said such things, I felt I was safe. For if he had known that I was having a relationship with Maram, no street would have been punishment enough – I would have been chopped up into mincemeat then and there.
My love of the hunt, which I had acquired in the winding alleyways of the neighbourhood and on the reef islands strewn across our shore, had spurred me to go after his woman, even if it had not been easy to prise her from his grasp. I was able to get the better of him on one of those wild nights at the Palace, like so many others except that this playful young kitten had made that particular evening extraordinary.
She must have been trained by a true pro to arouse such powerful and simultaneous feelings of repulsion and attraction: one instant I felt that she had eyes for no one but me and the next I felt I was being flung into the rubbish bin like a scrap of meat.
I heard room service knocking insistently on the door of our suite. I quickly threw on a bathrobe, afraid they would barge in and feast their eyes on the charms of my reclining temptress.
I blocked the door as I opened it and grabbed the breakfast cart from the waiter. I was flustered and inadvertently exposed myself. He was mortified and muttered repeated apologies before closing the door.
I wheeled the cart into a corner and went to wake her up. I held her close and began nuzzling her neck as I considered how she too was risking so much to be with me. She shifted about, hoping to get a few more minutes of sleep, and I gave up trying to wake her.
I seated myself before the enticing smells wafting off the artfully plated breakfast and picked up a copy of Okaz, the local newspaper, that had been placed alongside. The first thing my eyes fell on was a photo of his jowly face under a banner headline. I paid no attention to the story and was fixated on the face staring out at me menacingly. I was shocked at feeling undone merely by contemplating his photo.
I looked into his eyes defiantly and before I could stare them down my cell phone began to vibrate. It was a text message from him. A wave of anxiety flooded over me. I read: ‘Son of a bitch, you’re not answering. Where are you?’
I jumped up and went out to call him from the balcony – if she said anything, he would surely recognise her voice. I was rehearsing all the excuses I would dole out but he did not give me the chance.
‘Get over here, now,’ he barked.
I shook her awake and told her we needed to leave.
‘Didn’t you say we were spending the day together?’
‘I’ll make it up to you later,’ I promised her.
* * *
Osama’s nightly sorties were anything but disappointing.
He was dashingly handsome and bold. Backed by the Master’s protection and influence, it was not too difficult being bold. In any case, those two attributes greatly facilitated his job. All he had to do was wander about the souks and other recreational areas in search of attractive girls and then start flirting with them. If a girl did not respond to his overtures immediately, he would brazenly stuff his phone number into her handbag or hand it to her. He could be very forward when it came to doing his job.
I was worried that some day Maram and I would run into him at one of the places we liked going to. We had just started seeing each other in secret, stealing moments here and there, and she had begun telling me some of her story. It turned out that what I had on her in my file of Palace girls was inaccurate.
‘Do you like Osama?’ I asked her on one such occasion.
She bit on her lower lip, trying to recall who he was. ‘Osama? Who’s Osama?’
‘You know, Osama,’ I explained. ‘He’s the guy who brought you to the Palace.’
She burst out laughing at the suggestion and said she would tell me her story some other time when she felt more inclined.
I was pleased by that as it held the prospect of more surreptitious meetings.
We did the rounds of Jeddah’s hotels, restaurants and beachfront bungalows for several months. We would steal out of the Palace once or twice a month after silently communicating our desire without ever looking each other in the eye.
‘I feel so happy with you,’ she once cooed with delight. ‘Every cell in my body speaks of you, reminds me you are there. I can feel your fire even when you’re gone.’
The imperious demeanour Maram maintained at the Palace completely vanished between the sheets. She became a sweet girl who craved affection and thirsted for any word that conveyed warmth. She loved it when I put my mouth over her ear and whispered my passion and longing for her, and she became wildly aroused and moaned urgently when I ran my tongue over her collarbone.
Once, in the Palace, she got up from her seat beside the Master and went to fill her glass. As she passed me, I whispered very quietly that I missed her. She was so disarmed, she practically fell into my lap, and began coming and going in the hope of hearing me repeat the words. She would sit down beside him and then spill her drink, or say that she got the wrong thing, or that she forgot the ice-cubes. I really thought she was going to give us away that evening. I kept my gaze averted but could sense her darting eyes looking for me around the room.
‘I feel safe with you,’ Maram said, quivering in my embrace when we were finally alone again. I buried my head into her neck, inhaling her fragrance, and started to kiss her. Moving up to the top of her head, I planted my lips on her eyebrows and began kissing her eyes. She moaned and I took her into my arms.
‘I’ve never known such tenderness my whole life,’ she confided. Putting her arms about my neck, she looked deep into my eyes and asked, ‘Would you like to hear my story?’
‘Yes.’ I pulled her head in close and ran my fingers through her thick hair.
She sat up, gave me a kiss, took a long sip from her glass of Chivas and began her story, with a distant and sad look on her face.
Maram told me how her father had died before she had laid eyes on him, which for her proved that her birth had been inauspicious. Her parents had only been married for a year and a half and her mother had been optimistic about the future when, out of the blue, her father dropped dead and they were left high and dry.
Maram’s mother thought she had left poverty behind for ever after she had found a man willing to take her on and deliver her from the humiliation of being shunted around between her brothers. They had tossed her around like a ball, letting her spend a week here, a week there, and she was beholden to them. She wanted to settle down, and accepted Maram’s father when he asked her to be his third or maybe his fourth wife. He was older than she was but she needed a way out of her predicament.
Not only did the marriage prove short-lived, but it took three months for her mother to find out about his death. She did not know his family or where he lived. He had set her up in a home of her own, that was what mattered, and he would come by and check on her periodically. Maram said her half-brothers – the sons by the other wives – had expressed no concern for them and withheld her share of the inheritance.
So now, they were two stray balls instead of one, and the last thing Maram’s mother wanted was to be bounced back and forth between her brothers again. So she sold all her gold – the jewellery from her dowry – and bought a sewing machine. She opened her doors for business, making dresses, gowns and abayas for the women of the neighbourhood, charging them whatever they could afford.
Those were dark days. Maram was at school and looked forward to securing some kind of qualification that would land her a job and help her mother out. But as she approached her sixteenth birthday, suitors had started banging at the door. Her mother’s stringent requirement was for a groom to be financially reliable and she settled eventually on a man who promised a villa, a car and a bank account in exchange for Maram’s hand.
Her mother was overjoyed at the prospect and the marriage was arranged without Maram having any say in the matter. He was a stubborn and cantankerous man and, as it would soon transpire, also a swindler. He had informed them that he was a widower who had lost his wife a year earlier. Maram’s uncles drew up the betrothal agreement in accordance with her mother’s stipulations, the most important of which was that the dowry had to be sufficient for Maram’s upkeep for life and that the deed to the house would be in her name.
The groom promptly wrote out a post-dated cheque for 200,000 riyals and promised that the title deed would be in his bride’s hands as soon as she moved in to the villa. Even though the cheque was post-dated, Maram’s mother and uncles were satisfied and the deal was sealed.
However, no sooner was the marriage concluded than he cancelled the cheque and Maram became his lawfully wedded wife with no dowry to her name.
On her wedding night, he took her to a cheap hotel and left her there. He would disappear for a whole day and come back the next, have his way with her and leave again before she could ask him where he was headed.
Once, Maram asked why they were in a hotel and he slapped her so hard that she never dared to ask again.
As far as he was concerned, she was just his whore. He would arrive, sleep with her and leave fifty or a hundred riyals under her pillow to pay for some take-away since the hotel did not have a restaurant.
This went on for almost six months during which Maram never saw her mother and could not contact the brother she had met the night the marriage contract was concluded. She felt totally alone but knew there was nothing she could do but ride it out.
At the end of six months, she began to show signs of pregnancy. When he saw her state, her husband thrashed her. Kicking and hitting, he accused her of conniving to get his inheritance. There was a loud knock on the door and he went to open it, muttering and cursing the hotel and its staff.
But it was a woman and his voice was immediately drowned by her screams and shouts of fury. She was called Salwa and when he asked her what she was doing there, she yelled that she had followed him and that he was a cheating bastard.
This woman stalked into the room, grabbed Maram roughly by the hair and accused her husband of cheating on her for this whore.
He fell over himself apologising and asking for forgiveness, like a cat rubbing up against its master’s leg. Still yelling, Salwa told him that she was not about to forgive him and that she would teach him a lesson he would never forget.
She still had Maram by the hair and forced her to move with her as she paced around the room furiously. It was at that moment that Salwa’s brother stepped into the hotel room, prised Maram from his sister’s grasp and eventually brought her to the Palace.
Maram sighed and took another sip from her glass. ‘I think you know him,’ she said slowly. ‘He’s your friend. I’ve seen you talking together.’
I frowned and shook my head.
‘Her brother is called Issa, and he’s very close to the Master.’
‘Do you mean Issa Radini?’ I exclaimed with astonishment.
‘Yes, Issa Radini.’
‘You mean that you were married to Waleed Khanbashi, the husband of Issa’s aunt, Salwa?’
‘The husband of his sister, not his aunt. You know him, right?
‘She’s his aunt and also his suckling sister.’
‘It seems you know them well then.’
‘I do.’
She chuckled ruefully. ‘It’s a small world, isn’t it,’ she said after a while and, looking directly at me, she added, ‘That guy, your friend Issa, brought me to the Palace and I have vowed to get my own back on both of them, him and his slippery snake of a sister – or aunt.’ She paused. ‘I know the Master thinks very highly of him, but I’ll get him one day, you’ll see. Everything that’s happened to me is Issa’s fault – I’ll get my own back, both for me and my child. How else will he ever be proud of me?’
She stopped suddenly, concerned she had said too much.
‘Are you upset by what I’m saying about Issa?’ she asked anxiously after a moment’s silence.
‘No, not at all.’
‘It’s been some time since I last saw him,’ she said, changing her tone and adding, almost chattily, ‘Is he away?’
‘No, but his job is with the Master’s family. He’s responsible for their day-to-day upkeep. Most of the time he’s in the lower section of the Palace, reserved for the family.’
I was keen for her to carry on with her story and I found myself wishing I had denied knowing her husband and Issa. As I feared, her need to unburden herself had been quashed by my ill-considered response.
She said one last thing and then no more. ‘For those who can afford it, marriage is nothing but serial adultery. They can marry and divorce as often as they want.’
It was not clear to me whether she was referring to her husband or the Master. I waited for her to elaborate but she just sat there stiffly, looking stone-faced at the wall.
* * *
Issa dropped in on me unexpectedly and, grabbing me by the shoulder, told me excitedly that he wanted me to be his witness. He was dancing on air.
This was at the time when I felt trapped by my aunt’s imprisonment and was considering the possibility of getting rid of her altogether.
‘I want you and Osama to be the witnesses of my marriage contract.’
So much of our lives had gone by and not one of us had started a family or had any offspring.
I had spent my time channelling the life-force within me into barren land and it dispersed bearing no fruit.
Earlier on, I had yearned to free myself of the tyranny of the ogre that made me into an animal with no other purpose than to disgorge my warm and sticky liquid. When the ejaculation of that fluid became my livelihood, I yielded to its demands in the same way that a blind man submits to the darkness of the path before him, regardless of whether it is well or poorly lit.
Life had been quick to chew us up and expel us like so much excrement to be reviled by passers-by. Subsiding in us, life could grow elsewhere. But in truth, it was best not to reproduce and therefore not to bequeath our twisted destinies to offspring who would only become tormented by our sick baggage.
I wondered what had come over Issa. Did he want to reproduce before he turned into dust again? Was he not afraid of handing down his genetic legacy or did he really think he could just root out the past and start afresh with a home, a wife, children and a nice life? Was there still time for that?
Only demolition can widen a narrow street. The three of us were on a very narrow path and the further down the path we went, the more constricted it became. We could barely pick our way from under the bodies that we had strewn along the path. I seriously doubted that we still had it in us to raise families at such an advanced age.
It was only by standing in as his witnesses that Osama and I fully grasped the extent of Issa’s grievous dilemma. He took us aside and told us of his secret love for Mawdie that had weighed on him these many years. He was at the point where he felt that he wanted us to bear witness to his very life, not just to his marriage.
The first registry clerk refused to draw up the marriage contract.
He shut his ledger and stood up, apologising. Mawdie’s family name lay in the way of his pen. Fearing that news of his plans would get out, Issa took the clerk aside and nimbly spun him a tale of woe. It was sufficiently convincing for the clerk to agree to be sworn to secrecy.
Salwa and Issa’s mother had to postpone their ululations while Osama went to find a marriage registrar willing to draw up the deed.
Issa and I chatted as we waited. I steered the conversation to Salwa and asked Issa how she was doing with Waleed Khanbashi. He had nothing good to say about Waleed, whom he likened to a stagnant bog compared to the lake of pure blue that was Salwa. Waleed was untrustworthy and he was oblivious to all that Salwa had done for him, Issa said. It would be his undoing and it would haunt him to his dying day.
I tried to get him to elaborate, but he would go no further. It was a disjointed conversation in any case because he had to jump up and attend to his mother whenever she called him. Mawdie also needed to be calmed. She was growing very anxious and was determined to have the contract drawn up that night.
Osama was soon back with a marriage clerk in tow who looked churlish and disgruntled. A very crooked set of teeth accentuated his fake smile and he grumbled about the absence of guests.
Issa greeted him expansively and explained that an enormous wedding celebration was planned in Mecca as soon as the marriage formality was concluded. The clerk grudgingly accepted the explanation and began taking down the personal information of the bride and groom and their witnesses, after I had reminded Issa to provide him only with Mawdie’s given name.
Just as he was finishing recording all the information, the clerk asked for the personal ID card of the bride’s guardian. He was taken aback when he heard that the bride was an adult and could consent to her own marriage without a guardian. She was not a spinster and did not need a guardian, Issa told him.
The clerk scoffed and told Issa he was insufficiently versed in Islamic jurisprudence and that the consent of a guardian was essential even if a woman was wizened and her hair had turned grey. Any marriage that was not physically witnessed or verbally attested to by the bride’s guardian would, he declared, be null and void.
‘In whose religion?’ Issa asked, his voice rising.
‘Don’t lecture me on religion!’ the clerk retorted, rising to his feet and refusing to proceed.
Before leaving, he insisted on being paid for his trouble. Even though it had been a waste of time, he demanded the same payment as if the formality had been concluded. The man protested vehemently when Issa offered him 20,000 riyals to do the deed. Issa raised the amount incrementally with every outburst until he offered him 100,000 riyals. At that, the clerk changed his tune and the focus of his ire shifted; he began to lambaste the ‘narrow-minded systems’ that denied people their freedom of choice.
‘I’d really like to help,’ he said, now apologetic. ‘But it is not within my power to conclude this contract. I’m so sorry.’
But Issa and Mawdie were determined not to let anything stand in their way. To overcome this latest obstacle to their marriage by hook or by crook, Issa went and fetched his mother’s Indonesian driver and sat me in the middle of the room.
‘You attended our neighbourhood mosque for a good period of time when we were there.’
‘So?’
‘You know some of the suras by heart, don’t you,’ he insisted, ‘and some prayers, right?’
‘Yes, I still remember a few, but—’
‘Great,’ he interrupted me, ‘then you can conclude this marriage formality.’
I hesitated but he urged me on. Mawdie hastily sat down facing Issa and he asked me to begin. Unable to summon up the verses that are recited for such occasions, I substituted with other verses that I knew by heart.
I swore in as witnesses Osama and the Indonesian driver, and had Issa and Mawdie proclaim their acceptance of each other in marriage. The deed was done and I congratulated them warmly.
Now, Salwa’s zaghroutas could fill the air, and his mother also trilled, although she sounded more like a rooster going to slaughter.
When I asked Mawdie if she accepted Issa as her husband, her niqab slipped – as it had the first time I ever saw her. Here before me were those same eyes in all their glory, the very eyes that had bewitched me that day when she had asked if Issa had returned from his trip.
* * *
Mawdie built him up like a tower, one brick at a time.
But before she could unveil her handiwork and proudly reveal his existence, Issa collapsed into a pile of rubble.
It was for her that he had single-mindedly pursued wealth and status, so that he could be considered deserving of her.
With the assistance of Dr Bannan, who had opened the university gates for several of the Master’s acolytes, Issa had obtained a university degree. He endeared himself to his professors by offering them a multitude of services, from the simplest to the most involved. He provided them with gifts, aeroplane tickets, nights in world-class hotels, invitations to wild parties, anything that would help him get one step closer to his goal.
He obtained a Bachelor’s degree with highest honours, and went on to get both a Master’s and a Doctorate from Cairo University. He travelled there twice to defend his Master’s thesis and, later, his doctoral dissertation, even though they were mere formalities both times, consisting of a welcome address and a presentation of the thesis chapters. There were no questions to answer nor any substantive discussions. He came away with a PhD in international law with the highest distinction and a recommendation his thesis be published.
As soon as the verdict was announced, he turned away from his well-wishers and got on his cell phone. He must have dialled more than a dozen times trying to reach Mawdie to tell her the good news, but every time he dialled he got through to a recording that the number was out of service.
All the congratulations and praise left him indifferent. The only voice he wanted to hear was hers, and hers alone.
He left Cairo University with an academic title and was irritated whenever people failed to address him as ‘Doctor’.
* * *
Under the Master’s wing, Issa had been able to invest in many projects which made him very wealthy. He often made use of the Master’s name to open doors that would otherwise have remained firmly shut.
When his collapse came, it was sudden and unexpected.
No one had imagined that the Master would find out about Issa and Mawdie so quickly, and I felt that I had surely hastened his fall by divulging their secret. I had slipped up one evening when I was out with Maram.
Her silences bothered me and I would try and cheer her up with stories I embellished here and there. She was often sad and morose; when she was in that mood at the beginning of an evening, she would gradually become dejected and sink into silence. Maram would freeze up, like a beautiful but cold statue, as if all her vitality had been sucked out of her, leaving her to stare blankly into space.
When we are not strong enough to face the reality of our situation, we flee to our inner worlds and hide. There we can despise those we dislike and punish those who have humiliated us and who remain out of reach. We think that by fleeing we can obliterate whatever undermines or defeats us. When Maram fled to her inner world, I would try my best to bring her back and cheer her up although I myself was on the run from my own defeats and from those who had inflicted them.
Whenever the Master was busy, Maram took the opportunity to enjoy herself and do what she pleased, although she was cautious and circumspect about it.
‘What’s new with your friend?’ she asked me that night.
As a rule, when she said ‘your friend’ she meant Issa. To lighten the mood I told her the story of Issa’s wedding and how I ended up officiating at the ceremony.
Secrets spread like infectious diseases. I would later wonder if she had been with me simply because she wanted to isolate the virus that would take down Issa.
She planned our rendezvous and put together elaborate plans for us to meet without having to go to hotels and beach resorts where my presence would be noted. We started meeting in the homes of her girlfriends. She would have her driver drop her off at a friend’s house and dismiss him; then she would change her outfit and have the friend’s driver take her to another friend’s home, from where she would call me to come over.
After we had had our fill of each other, she would reverse the procedure. Sometimes she would make a reservation for the entire wing of a hotel, using the name of her friend’s husband. Then she would call me and I would drop everything and rush to meet her.
By the time I arrived, she would be laid out in all her splendour and I would plough her every furrow, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet.
I was sure she was besotted with me.
But every time we met, she would gather one more strand from the thread of Issa’s story.
* * *
If not for Mawdie, I would not have known that the Master had found out. She had taken considerable risks to reach me, leaving the family wing of the Palace several days in a row and asking her driver to drive around the compound on the off-chance of running into me.
When at last they located me, the driver hopped out and called me over to speak to her. Leaning out of the window, she asked me if I knew what had happened to Issa. I was transfixed by her eyes, as ever, and said that I had no news of him.
‘My brother found out about our marriage,’ she whispered urgently. ‘I don’t know what he’s done to him, but please, please find out and let me know.’
She ducked her head into the car briefly, opened her handbag and fished out a cell phone which she handed to me. ‘This is a secure phone and I’ll call you for news,’ she said. She turned to the driver and told him to drive on.
The car had not gone a few feet when it stopped again and Mawdie leaned out of the window once more. ‘This will be the last time I see you. I’m moving to the new palace in Sharm Abhar,’ she said. Choking back tears, she added, ‘Please tell Issa if you see him!’
I wondered if she had any inkling of what might happen.