My father was considered one of Jeddah’s master builders. Even though he used traditional methods to calculate measurements, he rarely made mistakes. He was meticulous to a fault and would not tolerate assistants who strayed, however modestly, from his designs. He had a knack for erecting houses that were in perfect alignment and was adept at designing architectural plans that were still unknown when he was growing up in Jeddah.
He was inspired by the Hajj and Umrah pilgrims who came from foreign lands. He would ask the visitors what they did for a living and, whenever he came across fellow builders, he would sit them down and enquire about the sorts of buildings they had in their country, providing pen and paper for their architectural sketches.
Before long, he distinguished himself as a builder and his reputation grew. He had wanted me to succeed him in the trade, but I would just run off on the pretext that I had to study. When, instead, he found me wandering the alleys aimlessly, he wasted no time in telling me what I should be doing.
He had three permanent wives, in addition to several fleeting consorts, and the responsibility of generating enough income to feed all those mouths weighed heavily on him.
On the nights he was scheduled to spend with my mother, he would arrive at sunset and fall asleep at the dinner table, right in the middle of the meal. He refused to get out of his seat and go and lie down for fear that he would no longer be drowsy. So he remained wherever sleep overcame him, which meant that my mother also had to sleep wherever he happened to have drifted off. To avoid being in full view of the rest of the household while sleeping and scantily clad, my mother hit upon the strategy of ushering him into their bedroom as soon as he came home. This, of course, further fuelled Aunt Khayriyyah’s resentment and she began to accuse my mother of deliberately keeping her brother away from her and of monopolising him, body and soul.
As I grew older, I began to suspect that my father had reached the point where he could not bear to stay with us because of my aunt’s relentless screeching. She complained to him about my waywardness, about my mother’s laxity with me and about her need for more housekeeping money. She hectored him about doing more for his relatives and lectured him on ways to increase his income and take better care of her interests, which she accused him of neglecting. Perhaps it was this constant nagging that precipitated his drowsiness and that gave rise to his unusual sleeping habits. By daybreak, he would be gone, leaving at the crack of dawn, as might be expected of a master builder who oversaw every last detail on his work site.
However, with the advent of modern construction, my father went from being a master builder to a mere foreman. Occasionally, when the project engineer was absent, he had the audacity to alter designs as he saw fit. He lost a good deal of standing among the workers as a result because whenever the engineer returned to the site and ordered the removal of the innovations – naturally, at my father’s expense – the work had to be done all over again.
He felt diminished in this subordinate capacity and resented having to comply with engineers’ instructions.
One fateful afternoon, he thought he had discovered an error in the pillar and beam supports of a roof structure he was working on. He wanted to verify his hunch before the engineer in charge discovered the mistake and became angry with him. Using his foot as a measure, he extended his leg beyond the ledge.
At that moment he lost his balance and, before he could pull his leg back to the solid surface of the roof, he fell off the scaffolding and ended up in a pool of blood.
He would never climb another scaffolding again or have to face the consequences of tweaking engineers’ plans. For that matter, he would also never have to hear his sister’s squawking. After a month on an artificial respirator, his lungs finally collapsed and the machine released him from this life.
I did not love him, nor did I hate him. As far as I was concerned, he was a low-maintenance guest – he came home in the evening, went to sleep and left quietly at dawn.
The sum total of his worldly legacy added up to two sons and one daughter. The daughter was born to his last wife, a week before his demise, and I had never met her. The three of us were left with nothing that might remind us of our father. We had little in common with each other, did not live together and each kept to their own.
* * *
The year before my father’s accident had been the year of Egyptian soaps. Summer was upon us with its sticky heat and people everywhere were climbing up on to rooftops to adjust their television antennas or to wire satellite dishes. Soap operas from Egyptian channels were all the rage, and the installation of powerful receivers guaranteed improved reception. Egyptian programming was of particular interest to the neighbourhood women, who at social gatherings vied with one another to relay the latest twists and turns in the dramatic serials and to mimic the dance moves of the Egyptian celebrity, Sherihan.
My aunt and mother were no different and decided our antenna needed adjusting. I had told them I could not do it because I was on my way to a shakshaka, where Hijazi men gathered to sing and dance. I was not inclined to waste my time on something as trivial as Egyptian television.
On my way to the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, I heard the two of them draw straws. They both agreed that the loser would fetch the ladder, prop it up against the inner wall of the courtyard and climb up on to the roof, while the winner would stand below holding the ladder in place. Aunt Khayriyyah lost and then proceeded to contest the draw, saying that there had to be three consecutive draws and that only the third one was decisive. By the third draw, the result was reversed and all my aunt had to do now was hold the ladder.
As I washed in the bathroom, I could hear my mother shouting down from the roof, ‘Is the picture coming in clearly now?’
‘No, not quite,’ Aunt Khayriyyah shouted back. ‘A little more to the left. No, no. Wait. Move it to the right.’
‘OK.’
‘Yes, yes, hold it there. That’s it. OK, done!’
I stepped out of the bathroom as my mother grabbed hold of the ladder to come down from the roof. Just as her hands reached the top rung, I could swear I saw my aunt pull the ladder away from the wall. For a moment, my mother remained suspended in mid-air but by the time she fell to the ground, blood was gushing from her mouth.
My mother had bitten her tongue so badly that a large portion of it had been sliced off.
* * *
Until his own fall, a year later, my father only ever came to the house to fulfil the moral and religious obligation of treating his wives equally. He typically spent his time holding forth as my mother responded with a nod or a shake of the head. I suspected that she waited until he was out of sight to open the floodgates and let flow the tears that had dammed up within.
As soon as my father would come in, barbed words began flying out of my aunt’s mouth.
‘So who is going to look after the mule now?’ she asked him shortly after my mother’s accident.
He asked whether she meant my mother or me. ‘Haven’t you done enough to her?’ he went on, his voice dropping.
‘Me?’ Aunt Khayriyyah was beside herself with rage at the insinuation. ‘I have done nothing to her! She fell all by herself!’
Hoping somehow to reattach her tongue fragment, my mother stored it in the freezer. Without her knowing, I would watch her bring the mirror up close to her face and try to fasten the severed portion she held between her thumb and index finger. It invariably slithered out of her grasp. When it fell on the floor, she would snatch it up and, cradling it as if it were a nursing infant, run crying to rinse it off in the sink. She would do this over and over again, but it fell every time.
One day, the fragment was not in its usual place: she searched for it frantically, emptying the freezer, to no avail.
I knew it was lost for ever. Earlier in the day, I had seen Aunt Khayriyyah reaching into the freezer and tossing something at a famished cat that had wandered into the house meowing for something to eat. I had watched, transfixed, as the cat set to licking the tasty morsel and batting it between its paws.
Having just fed it something, my aunt half-heartedly attempted to part it from its quarry. ‘Beess, beess, beess,’ she called out to it softly and the animal bolted out of the house with the morsel between its jaws.
The cat had got her tongue.
From then on, whenever my father was staying with one of his other wives, my mother would sit alone and practise enunciating clearly since everything she said had become mangled and unintelligible. She made valiant attempts to say my father’s name, but failed after repeated efforts. She buried her head in her pillow and sobbed with frustration.
She avoided going out of the house and stopped calling on her neighbours. She resigned herself to doing housework – cooking, cleaning and spinning wool. Since my mother was unable to entertain her neighbours, Aunt Khayriyyah had ample opportunity to bad-mouth her; she would describe my mother as a cripple who did nothing all day but lie in bed and stammer like an imbecile.
My aunt spent her evenings glued to the television, chuckling at her own imitation of the announcers’ Egyptian accents.
Tahani would stand behind the latticed window, with the lights off, waiting for me. We exchanged glances and softly whispered words throughout the evening until she would let me in after her family had gone to bed. I would spend the entire time pressed up against her. If we heard a noise or the sound of footsteps in the street that we thought might awaken someone in the house, I would dash out the door as she pretended to be tossing rubbish out of her window on to the alleyway below.
Although it is now buried in the furthest recesses of my memory, I remember that last, terrible night as if it were yesterday. It had started out quietly enough but the ogre was tired of lying in the shadows and it bolted into the light and set the universe ablaze.
Those with a particularly sensitive disposition suffer a lifetime of torment because a star continues to burn brightly despite the ashes and smoke of its dying embers. Stars are like that: they continue to burn even after they collapse.
Tahani would be my eternal star.
The night I stole her virginity, the ogre stole my life. It wrenched her life away, and mine with hers.
* * *
The rich and powerful men who milled around the Palace were afflicted with a sickness of their own. Their clothes were spotlessly white but their blood roiled with greed and excess, and their tongues became vicious if anything got in the way of their instant gratification. Moody and capricious, they were forever seeking new thrills, which quickly bored them. They were jaded and dissolute since nothing could make them happy. They had no purpose in life and were as impulsive as they were aimless. Whenever they spoke, such jumbled nonsense would spew out of their mouths that they sounded like madmen.
Some had grown effeminate in their search for ever more pleasure, especially if they happened to have been on the receiving end of the abuse I meted out to satisfy the Master. Instead of resenting me, they sought me out, and I could not get away from them. These were men whose virility was on the wane and who were willing to indulge in perversion to satisfy their thirst for carnal pleasure.
During the early years at the Palace, I was like the tethered ram in Aunt Khayriyyah’s pen. But rather than slithering on ewes, my job was to service the other rams before they had a chance to wander out of the pen. My role at the Palace was to be the prized stud on call.
Many acts of debauchery were committed on the backs of men who, outside the Palace walls, were highly regarded members of society. Some of them begged for deliverance from my rearing over their backs, but the afflicted ones sought me out afterwards so that I could minister to their shameful disease.
Dr Bannan did not set much store by what he called ‘primary feelings’. He held that they were akin to the infantile phase of ‘discovering the world’ – when the first stirrings of desire are cloaked in the garments of the woman in our life and to whom we ascribe feelings of love.
‘People don’t know this,’ he declared monotonously, ‘but underneath the blazing embers, there is nothing but darkness.’ He nodded as he brought to mind a whole list of hackneyed aphorisms. ‘Life is like that – today’s brightness is yesterday’s darkness. The past is the only darkness we can traverse unguarded and unescorted.’
His pronouncement was made in the course of one of the rambling monologues he launched into whenever the Master was bored with him and he had nothing better to do than coin pithy sayings that no one listened to. Whenever the Master’s attention was turned away, Dr Bannan was like a dog, lying prostrate at his owner’s feet, panting eagerly and awaiting his next command.
But then we were all begging and panting dogs at the Palace. As soon as we had completed our respective duties, we rushed back to lie at the Master’s feet and looked up into his face adoringly, in anticipation of the next command.
From the time he first set foot in the Palace, Issa’s role was to take care of the Master’s family affairs, while Osama and I were engaged in that other line of work, that is punishing his rivals.
Osama and I were bound together not only by a shared youth and job at the Palace, but also by our feelings for Tahani. The hostility between us remained constant; however much our paths diverged, we were inexorably drawn back to each other by our rivalry over Tahani.
One night, Osama was particularly disaffected with life inside the Palace and wanted to talk about our youth: the first – and less antagonistic – of the ties that bound us together. Leaning towards me, he whispered, ‘Who will give us back our innocence?’
I lent Osama my ear but kept my eyes open for any sign or gesture from the Master.
He kept whispering to me. ‘Aren’t you tired of all this depravity?’
It was like a barb aimed at my heart.
In life, the further we go, the dirtier we get. With every breach we cross, our spirit is sullied incrementally by the inherent squalor of existence. Driven by our basest instincts, we inevitably turn into a fetid pile of rubbish.
Only the spirits of our nearest and dearest, embedded in us like a seed in soil, keep us vaguely human.
Tahani was a seed that had divided into two: half was sown in me and, after I tended her with unholy water, she became pure spirit while I was left to wallow in her wake. The other half was sown in Osama’s soul and withered there, laying bare his venomous nature.