Throwing Sparks (4 page)

The blackout lasted three nights and news spread that the Master had died, leaving all his wealth to two sons, who went on to bring unprecedented levels of rowdiness to the Palace. One of the sons ascended the throne to become the new lord of the manor – the second Master – and the news reignited the hopes of everyone in our neighbourhood who dreamed of entering the Palace.

The death of the old Master coincided with the disappearance of Issa from the neighbourhood. Rumour had it that Issa had been hired by the new
Sayyid
to work for him, which only fuelled our longing to be inside those walls. Though the rumour of Issa’s employment was hotly disputed for some time, it was eventually confirmed by one of our local Palace snoops.

One of the boys greeted the news with the ominous words: ‘From that Palace, life will flow.’

In hindsight, the statement was oddly prophetic. It could be interpreted in two, contradictory ways: a soul gaining more out of life from the experience of being in the Palace or, conversely, of the Palace squeezing life out of every living soul. All those who eventually entered the Palace, including me, found out for themselves that before life left their bodies, their spirits had been utterly crushed.

Maymoun Abdel-Hadi was the very first victim of the new order. He broke through the main gates one day in a state of uncontrollable rage to demand payment for land he owned that bordered the Palace grounds and that had been expropriated by the Master. His ranting culminated in barely veiled insults and he was dragged off by the collar to languish in the Palace jail. When his family tried to obtain news of him through intermediaries, the local notables who interceded on their behalf became marked men. They came back from the Palace chastened and never again made any reference to him or his story, leaving the family to cling to hope of his return for many years.

*  *  *

Hamdan Bagheeni would scurry through the narrow, twisting alleyways of our neighbourhood with a polka-dot shawl covering his mouth and a hand holding his nose shut. He hurried to reach the other side of the neighbourhood in the old heart of the city, propelled by dreams of entering Paradise and desperate for a breath of air that did not carry the putrid stench of Khalil Masawi’s decomposing chickens and pigeons.

The birds had met their end in a bout of avian flu that struck an isolated chicken coop. Poor Masawi never found out how it had happened and was so distraught that he left the carcasses untouched, and the pervasive smell of rotting flesh was carried by the wind. He vented his rage on whoever happened to be within earshot, cursing and swearing and blaming the untimely death of his poultry on the Ministry of Agriculture. Following the death of a first batch of chickens, the ministry had failed to supply him with vaccines to save the rest.

‘Now, you wouldn’t happen to be the reason those poor chickens died, would you?’ Aunt Khayriyyah asked, winking at me knowingly. I only understood the insinuation later, when she began to tell me that all my actions were evil and to hold me responsible for every misfortune and mishap that befell anyone in the neighbourhood.

A very long time has passed since Aunt Khayriyyah’s insinu­ating question and Hamdan’s desperate bid to find a way into the Palace. Like every other boy from the neighbourhood, Hamdan spent much of his leisure time looking for a breach in the road whose course had been diverted to prevent access to the main gates.

Dr Khalid Bannan, who was in the Master’s inner circle, loved to hold forth and pontificate on the rags-to-riches dream. ‘Dreams are the drug we inject to induce an instant of oblivion in which all of our wishes, both fair and foul, can be fulfilled,’ he would say. ‘But dreams are like sleep, and the dreamer is in a trance when the body slows down.’

Referencing his wealth of scientific knowledge as a professor of psychology, he dispensed advice liberally to whoever was present at Palace events, regardless of whether or not his advice was pertinent to his listener.

On the brink of old age, I look back on the ‘dream-drug’ that made us all so high – magic stuff so pure that most of the neighbourhood boys became instantly hooked. Life passed us by while we remained in this state of protracted stupor.

Once on the inside, I remembered the Firepit – the old neighbourhood – and dreamed of going back. I yearned for it with the same longing that once propelled me so obsessively to enter Paradise.

That realisation came as a crushing blow. I have no doubt that every single one of us who entered the Palace has had such moments of nail-biting regret, unequalled by any others.

Back in the days when the neighbourhood’s inhabitants swirled around the Palace full of hopes and dreams, boys stood and pointed at its towering walls and heads were filled with lush dreams of fertile ground behind the massive gates. Few of us could imagine that we would be inside the Palace in our old age pointing to our dilapidated neighbourhood and longing with every fibre of our being to return to those Elysian Fields of our youth. We sit and rake through our memories in the hope of collecting some scraps from a long-buried past. Decades have passed since the pigeons took flight from the rooftops of our ramshackle houses, fluttering in unruly formations towards the Palace and its gardens. Even the birds were enticed by the bright vision bordering the shore – a pillow offering rest to the weary bones of dreamers.

Every day, Hamdan would run through the stately avenue that bisected the city and our universe: Paradise here, the Firepit there.

It was Hamdan who first coined the name the ‘Firepit’.

Every day after the sunset prayer –
adhan
al-maghrib
– he set off with his tattered school satchel to attend a literacy class at night school. He wanted to obtain his primary school certificate in order to improve on his rank of private in the army; after ten compliant years in the service, he had not gained a single stripe. He was spurred to do this after his father-in-law referred to him as ‘an ass’ and said that ‘iron wouldn’t turn to gold even in a million years’. These words were uttered when the father came to retrieve his daughter, Hamdan’s wife, and take her away.

Hamdan had dropped out of school early and, as a young adult, no one would give him a job besides the army. So while the other boys of the neighbourhood started better jobs and progressed within their chosen careers, Hamdan laboured away as a private in the army for ten years.

He thought literacy classes would help him to advance and so he persevered with night school in order to gain the respect of his father-in-law and his superior officers. As soon as he completed the sunset prayer at the local mosque, before the imam
had even intoned the closing of prayer and with his tattered school satchel and prayer mat vying for space, Hamdan would leap to his feet and bound into the twisting, rubbish-strewn alleys, holding his nose against the putrid stench and muttering to himself.

When he reached Masawi’s dead poultry, he had to cover his mouth to quell his surging nausea. Simultaneously he would take in short breaths of air to keep him going as he hurtled towards the west side of the city, with its gardens, street lights, neon signs, villas and luxury cars, as well as a plethora of construction sites, opulent shopping malls, entertainment centres, hospitals and banks. Once there, he would take a long, cleansing breath to fill his lungs to their maximum capacity, and then invariably exclaim, ‘At last, I’ve made it to Paradise!’

The letters of the alphabet exhausted him, in the way they were so similar and yet so different from one another. He sought help from a neighbour who attempted to make the Arabic alphabet accessible to a mind that knew only the configurations of domino pieces and playing cards. Hamdan could never get through this daily rote without being struck by the difference between the letters
noon
and
jeem
, and was completely mystified by the notion that some words that began with one of those letters could have a synonym that began with the other.

He voiced this observation one day at the neighbourhood hang-out, where some men and boys had gathered to discuss what could be done to stop raw sewage from spilling into the alleyways and to put a decisive end to the stench. Hamdan jumped right into the discussion with an idea he believed was unique and that would solve all their problems.

‘Our situation might improve,’ he said, ‘if we changed the name of our neighbourhood.’

This caused an immediate outburst by the assembled men who mocked his suggestion and harangued him.

Hamdan held his ground. ‘Just listen first,’ he insisted, ‘and then decide.’

The men quietened down and grudgingly gave him a chance to speak.

‘There is a paradise of riches a stone’s throw from our neighbourhood,’ he began, pointing in the direction of the Palace. ‘Why is that?’ he asked them. ‘Can you tell me why?’

There was a moment’s silence.

Hamdan answered his own question. ‘Because there is
Paradise
,’ he said triumphantly, stressing the Arabic word
Jannah
. His finger still stretching westward, he continued, ‘There, it is
Jannah
, a word that begins with the letter
jeem
. And as everyone knows,
jeem
occurs early in the alphabet – and Allah always starts at the beginning of the alphabet when bestowing His blessings.’

Upon hearing God’s name used this way, some of the men started to shout, warning him that this was close to blasphemy.

Hamdan was undeterred. ‘But we are in the
Firepit
, don’t you see?’ Again he stressed the Arabic word
Naar
and his finger shot down to indicate the ground under their feet. ‘And as everyone knows,
noon
, which is the first letter in
Naar
, is near the end of the alphabet. So we get nothing from Him but hardship.’

This time most of the men shouted, some in loud protestations of their virtue and others, louder still, admonished Hamdan for his blasphemy. A few, however, nodded and liked the contrast he had drawn between the two sides of the road.

They brought up the suggestion in subsequent get-togethers, albeit sarcastically at first. But gradually Hamdan’s names were adopted by the residents of the neighbourhood. From then on, they referred to the western flank as ‘Paradise’ and the eastern one as the ‘Firepit’.

But Hamdan did not know that the word ‘firepit’ had a synonym beginning with the letter
jeem
–
jehannam,
or hell – nor, for that matter, that the synonym for ‘paradise’ was
na’eem
, which began with the letter
noon
that was
closer to the end of the alphabet. Residents of the neighbourhood had no need for knowledge beyond what they already knew in their bones: that they were burning up inside a raging inferno and that this was reason enough to escape the blazing flames at the first opportunity.

The Palace extended as far as the eye could see on the west side of the neighbourhood. Its huge gates were operated by remote control and were quickly shut after they were opened as if fearful a flame might escape from the Firepit to lick at the vast and magnificent grounds. The massive gate across the way was a constant reminder for the miserable wretches, tormented by physical privation and poverty, of their desper­ation for a place in Paradise.

Almost overnight, the poverty-stricken Firepit wedged itself to the flanks of the Palace like a clinging mass of bar­nacles. Those wishing to jump ship needed only to lay down the burden of life – that is, the heavy weight of conscience and morality – if indeed they carried it at all.

Issa convinced me that we should go through life together. ‘We’ve been friends since we were kids,’ he said. ‘So let’s just carry on.’

We were all so ready to leave our pit of privation that the mere idea of leaping across to the other side spread like a contagion. But the idea died on everyone’s lips as soon as it was expressed because we did not have what it took to reach Paradise.

Abu Yunes the plumber worked day and night at an indoor metalwork shop but never made enough money to buy a house for his ever-growing number of offspring. One day when he was bone-weary he asked the question that had seeped into everyone’s mind: ‘Who dares enter the Palace?’

It was a provocative question since each of us was scheming to find a way into the Palace or, at the very least, to stand and behold its huge gates from close up. Even those who had done neither claimed to have been there. People who boasted they had been inside the Palace and swore they had met the Master became the laughing stock of the neighbourhood.

Egged on by Issa and this contagious desire, all I wanted was to find a way in, and my ambition had little to do with high walls or resplendent lights.

When we were young teenagers, Issa would not join our light-counting contests. He just looked towards the shimmering bulbs and repeated confidently, ‘I’ll count them when I’m on the inside.’

Everyone jeered and mocked him so that, like a small fish making room for itself in a school of sharks, he had to raise his voice to make himself heard. Even though he was interrupted repeatedly, that did not deter him from recounting his exploits and what he had seen when he had hidden on the island of Umm al-Qumari. The islet was just offshore from the Palace’s reclaimed land and the deeper Issa got in retelling his story the more he succeeded in silencing his sceptics.