Throwing Sparks (38 page)

I did not want to call her. The last time I had spoken to her, I was panic-stricken, worried that the Master had found out about our relationship. She responded to my call, fresh from the scene of her crime, so to speak, and was awaiting the curtain to rise so that she could witness the fall of the protagon­ists on the stage.

The painkillers eventually had an effect and my hangover subsided. I was haunted by Issa’s face, among others. Before passing out drunk, I had had visions of myself apologising to him and sealing the two bullet holes with my fingers as he lay covered in a funeral shroud at my feet. He had not removed his hands from covering his backside when the two bullets had surprised him in his last stand. He had gone to his death, blood gushing down and coagulating in his groin.

He had managed to penetrate my stupor and during my drug-induced sleep had visited me in the guise of the young man I had known in the alleyways of the Firepit. Not one to abide injustice even in death, he had come back to exact punishment, indifferent to the blood gushing from the bullet holes. But I had managed to give him the slip by waking up with a jolt.

Afternoons on the streets of Jeddah drag on like beggars searching for a drop of water to drink, shuffling between cars and buildings, intersections and shops, wending their way through the crowds desperate for people to take pity.

The disaffection that permeated my being led to a stupid and rash decision, like others I had made in similar circumstances. When nothing matters, choices are meaningless.

Getting out of the car and proceeding on foot would have been unwise in the torrid heat. While it did not kill you, the heat did not spare you, either. I parked my car in a lot near Bab Makkah Street and set off on my burning quest.

The gate to the Cemetery of Our Mother Eve was flung wide open and workers inside the grounds were busy digging a grave. A shrouded body had been set down next to the wash-basin area while the relatives were busy supervising the gravediggers. They were digging up a new space after the family had refused to see the deceased buried in a concrete vault and had paid them handsomely to have an individual tomb.

Three funerals had succeeded one another and each had had to wait for the gravediggers to finish with the previous one. The cemetery thronged with mourners eager to be relieved of the burden they carried and see it lowered into the ground so that they could get out of the heat. I wondered how the burning blaze felt from the bottom of a grave.

The trees and shrubs scattered about the graveyard had all turned to thorns and their bleached colours cried out for water. I was tempted to fetch some water from the wash basins at least to moisten their roots. That was the sort of nonsense my mind was occupying itself with as I waited to ask the chief gravedigger my question. He had just finished taking care of three obsequies when I asked him where I might find two particular tombs and proceeded to give him the names of my mother and of my friend.

Despite the solemnity of his vocation, he burst out laughing. He turned and related my question to the others, and all of them fell over laughing.

After I insisted and repeated my question, he turned to me and answered, ‘We don’t have gravestones around here. We don’t know the names of the dead or where they’re buried. Our job is to bury bodies, not to remember names and dates. Don’t bother us any more, brother – and we won’t bother you, either.’

He must have thought I was mad if very generous when I handed him a note of 1,000 riyals. He immediately changed his tune.

‘When were they buried?’ he asked.

‘The man, two days ago. The woman, two years.’

He went through the motions and pretended to look for the burial papers that he now claimed were in the cemetery files. Stored under his cot pillow, this archive yielded the records of two graves, pulled out at random. I knew they would contain no useful information, such as names or numbers, about anyone buried a month ago, let alone two years earlier. But I needed some kind of a platform on which to stand and address these two people as if they were still alive. I played his game.

The gravedigger’s choice of a tomb did nothing to improve the charade. He picked an old grave telling me it was Issa’s and concocted some implausible story of his burial. I really did not need to hear any of this fabrication, but I listened anyway as he spun his tale that portrayed an angelic Issa, even in death.

Playing into this absurd atmosphere, I cast fervent words on the two graves.

I stood before my mother’s presumed grave fleetingly and effortlessly. I could hear her speaking to me with unprecedented severity: ‘Go and get your aunt and bring her here right away – before you beat her to it.’ Her amputated tongue had apparently regained some of its agility. But she did not apologise for having abandoned me; all she wanted was my aunt because she missed their endless altercations.

The sun’s rays can illuminate every dark corner of the world, but not the human heart. The sun bore down on me as I walked around dazed, stumbling through my own inner darkness. I was lost and felt incapacitated. The darkness that had seized hold of me was so profound that I could neither feel nor imagine anyone anywhere willing to reach out to me.

The gravediggers watched me and probably thought I was soft in the head. Before their laughter could reach me, however, another funeral procession came through the cemetery gate and they moved as one to greet a new set of mourners.

Leading the procession, tearful and red-eyed, was Kamal Abu Aydah. I would not have recognised him but for the imperious mole perched on his right eyebrow – it gave him away immediately and was so grand as to be etched in my mind. Time itself could not have worn down the rude growth. His good looks had faded with the years since his youth, as had the twinkle in his eye that would light up whenever he caught glimpses of Samira.

I found myself wondering whether he remembered Samira the way I remembered Tahani. Moreover, did I truly remember Tahani as my beloved or simply as a victim who had left me bloodied and howling at the moon?

I was certain Kamal’s feelings for Samira ran deeper because when she died, she still thought the world of him. Tahani, on the other hand, could only have gone to her death despising me. The chronicles of lovers are not recorded in their times. Before the stories can be written or even made known, time must pass. Only then can they be assessed at their true worth.

I was a fraud. An animal that ate its own excrement. Kamal nearly lost his mind the day Samira died and yet not even his hand had touched hers following the declaration of his feelings. They were content to gaze at one another and flutter around the dream of a shared life.

Following her death, his frequent visits to the cemetery had apparently given him the necessary experience to lead funeral processions. He was almost zealous as he guided the mourners to the right location, removed his head covering and rolled up his sleeves to help the pall-bearers lower the shrouded corpse, smoothing the green cover that was stitched with the Muslim profession of faith, or
shahada
, and urging the mourners to watch that the cemetery staff performed the burial rites properly.

I had not seen Kamal again since leaving the neighbourhood. I left my mother’s presumed grave and went towards him.

‘My sincere condolences, brother,’ I said.

He turned to face me and then pulled me to him in a forceful embrace, greeting me warmly. He grinned, apparently delighted at seeing me and momentarily forgetting that he was there to send a man to his grave. ‘Tariq,’ he said. ‘You haven’t changed one bit. What are you up to these days?’

‘Still in the land of the living.’

He nodded at that. ‘My condolences on Issa’s passing. His death came as a big shock.’

I did not want to exhume the spectre of Issa that was buried in my heart and so I quickly asked him whom he had come to bury.

‘Our brother, Hassan Darbeel,’ replied Kamal. ‘He died last night.’

Hassan, too, had once worked at the Palace, training the dogs. So Hassan, too, was now dead.

The bodies of the dead may be covered with earth but their stories poke at our memory whenever we have a moment to reflect. We all shrink from death. Tahani went to hers willingly, without asking for her raptor’s permission. She chose death over betrayal.

It was thanks to her exemplary courage that Tahani kept the image of womankind branded on to my heart. The women of the Palace were poor replicas of the real thing by comparison. Or maybe they just reflected the vagaries of circumstance that tossed one here and the other there. Samira, too, was an exemplary paramour. I wanted to ask Kamal whether his memory was still suffused with her but that would have violated the sanctity of the dead and I was prevented from speaking out of turn by the press of mourners crowding around him.

Setting out towards the vault ahead of the procession, Kamal invited me to join them in lowering Hassan into his final resting place. ‘You know that besides his childhood friends and his dogs, Hassan had no family. Now that you’re here, you can share in the divine recompense.’

Hassan had been banished from the Palace in disgrace after a feral dog he had raised without the Master’s knowledge attacked a guest and mauled him.

Kamal patted me on the shoulder to signal that I should come along, and I fell into step beside him. As the chant of the mourners’ prayers and supplications grew and swelled and their footsteps churned dust up into the air, all I wanted was to run away. Kamal proceeded down the steps, flanked by two gravediggers while the others adroitly guided the body and lowered it into the narrow space.

I left quickly, before he came back up from the vault and before Hassan Darbeel had been covered with dirt. I hurried to the cemetery gate, where packs of dogs howled mournfully. I wanted to believe that they had come from the city to pay their last respects to the man who had devoted his life to them.

Like someone trying to shake off a person on his heels, I wended my way through the maze of the neighbourhood and into the back street where I had left my car. As soon as I turned the key in the ignition, the spectre of my mother rose once again to reiterate her last wish with urgency. ‘Go and get your aunt,’ she had said.

*  *  *

It was a wise command and one I could not refuse because it had issued from a truly loving heart.

It had been more than two months since I had last brought in groceries and water. I wondered if Aunt Khayriyyah had survived, like a lizard whose constitution is designed to cope with extended periods of scarcity. I did not think it likely because the one thing she could not stand was thirst. Whenever we had water shortages, she would send me out to fetch some, and woe betide me if I came back empty-handed. Aunt Khayriyyah quivered with happiness when she could float little chunks of ice in her glass of mulberry juice or lemonade and suck up the liquid through them, her eyes dancing between the ice and the liquid, as she smacked her lips with pleasure. She always needed to have a glass of water or juice close by, maybe to keep that tongue of hers well lubricated and moist.

I wondered what had become of her old carcass. I would have to come up with a convincing explanation for the death of an old woman alone in a room as squalid as the one I had left her in.

Rushing to the conclusion that she was dead was perhaps an expression of my barely repressed hope for her demise. Neglecting her all this time had been a mistake, but I did not think she could have died. If she had, the foul smell of her decomposing body would have led everyone by the nose, and investigators would have ferreted out the owner of the villa and questioned him about the decomposing corpse inside.

I dreaded going back there. If she was going to attack me again, I would end that life that already hung by a thread. I was not going to let her take me down with her. I would of course be careful and bestow her just deserts with caution.

The villa was in shambles: its gate was flung wide open; the trees in the courtyard had shrivelled up, their roots exposed; the outside lights were smashed; the swimming pool was covered in leaves and slime, and all the fixtures, including the diving board, had been vandalised.

I waded through the desolation and found the front door ajar. I pushed it open and was stunned by the wreckage before me. The villa had been laid to waste and only a few bare light bulbs still burned.

I bounded up the stairs, having armed myself with a metal rod I had picked up from the rubble in the courtyard. Her room was in the same abject state I had left it. I advanced cautiously, tiptoeing between the heaps of detritus, on high alert for a surprise attack.

I shoved aside the mounds of rubbish in search of her. I looked carefully but could find no trace of her or her carcass. I combed the entire house: all the rooms, the bathrooms, the kitchens, as well as the roof and even the courtyard and the pool house. She had vanished into thin air.

I remembered that the last time I had been at the villa, I was unsure as to whether I had locked the door. Clearly I had not and I wondered where she had gone and whether I needed to notify the police. Hesitant to do so, I remembered that there were surveillance cameras everywhere. Had they recorded what happened after I was here last time? How on earth would I raise such a matter with the Master?

Before notifying the police, I thought, I should try and obtain the video. But the Master had to be in a calm mood, and even if he was, I would hardly dare to ask.