Throwing Sparks (17 page)

Since she was unable to spark anyone’s interest when she was still of marriageable age, she remained a spinster. Knowing that men would always flee from her, she began pursuing women. She did this openly, but the women she approached fled her as much as any man had done and alerted all their friends to my aunt’s perversion.

After everyone was gone, only she and I were left in the house, with our grudges and watchfulness. Whenever she suspected I might uncover something she wanted kept secret, she would start gossiping about me at her women’s gatherings, excoriating me for what she described as my perversions.

My aunt had watched my every move ever since I was a child. She was responsible for running the household and my mother had no say in my upbringing.

‘Aren’t you coming home?’ she called out one day, craning her neck from the window looking out on to the back alley. I heard her but deliberately ignored her. I was chasing a boy who had snatched a wooden toy Tahani had been playing with in the alleyway next to his.

Aunt Khayriyyah resumed her conversation with the neighbour, the imam’s wife. Water levels in the storage tanks were at their lowest level and another poor rainy season was in sight. Prayers for rain had been fruitless; not a rain cloud had appeared despite the oratorical skills of the mosque’s imam.

Three whole years had gone by without a drop of rain. Whenever the imam’s wife heard him imploring the Almighty for a shower, she could not help but recall how boorish and nasty her husband was to her and thought about how mercy should begin at home. ‘The All-Merciful shows no mercy for the merciless,’ she repeated like a refrain.

Tahani was leaning against a motorcycle that had been abandoned on our street ever since its owner had been run over and died. She held out her hands, smiling, as I returned the toy to her. But she ran off as soon as she heard her mother screeching about her playing with me.

Aunt Khayriyyah began complaining to another neighbour about her hair falling out in great big clumps. She lamented the loss of the locks which, she claimed, had drawn every boy in the neighbourhood to flock under the windows of her father’s house.

‘You mean that the windows in your day had no latticework?’ the neighbour asked.

‘Just as bitchy as your mother, aren’t you?’ Aunt Khayriyyah shot back, bristling.

She went back inside the house, muttering about the curse that had been cast on her and that had resulted in a wasted life, imprisoned inside her brother’s home.

Hopping over the piles of rubbish lying in front of our house, I stepped through the rotting, termite-ridden doorway whose squeak was as shrill as my aunt’s voice. To me, she was as decrepit as the old door and I wished she would give up on her mite-ridden situation.

Aunt Khayriyyah frowned at my empty hands. ‘Didn’t I send you to fetch water?’

‘There isn’t a drop of water to be had anywhere.’

‘That’s how it is with the likes of you,’ she snapped, slapping her thighs in frustration. Then she reached over to grab my ear. ‘Now go,’ she said, pulling me down, ‘and don’t come back until you’ve got some.’

I found a water-bearer willing to deliver. Almost immediately after his donkey cart pulled up at our house with the order, there was an altercation that brought out all the neighbours.

My aunt started screaming bloody murder and hitting the water-bearer with a broom, claiming that he had been ogling her. When his screams rose to counter hers, the neighbours came running to the rescue. They burst into the house, pinned his arms behind his back and started to thrash him. As the blows rained down, the water-bearer collapsed unconscious on the floor and his attackers switched to delivering first aid instead of punches. They propped him up and splashed water on his face until he regained consciousness.

Before the poor man had even caught his breath, my aunt was inciting the neighbours to give him another thrashing. She began hollering as soon as the man was able to sit up. ‘Look at him!’ she screamed. ‘Look! He’s still making eyes at me!’ She threw the broom at him.

The crowd looked at him and realised he had a tic which made him look as if he were constantly winking. They could barely conceal their amusement and helped him out of the house, apologising for their behaviour. All the man wanted was to be gone. He struggled to his feet and jumped up on to the seat of his donkey cart with a practised hop, cursing my aunt and the men who had come to her aid.

‘By God, I wouldn’t glance at that thing if I were a donkey,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ll be damned if that’s a woman.’ He was already moving away at a lively trot and had to turn his head back to deliver the parting shot: ‘That’s a woe-man!’

Unbeknownst to my aunt, the water-bearer’s name stuck. Following the incident, it gained wide currency among the women of the neighbourhood and no man ever cast the shadow of a glance at the woe-man.

10

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.