The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi

Author:Thani Al-Suwaidi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ANTIBOOKCLUB
Published: 2012-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

9

A ship was heading out to sea parallel to us. It was oddly shaped; humpbacked or bowed, I could not tell which. Suddenly it veered toward us, and the sea granted its bow a big push to speed it along. In a few moments, this ship had approached our boat, while my father and Quraydah stood watching it silently.

One of the ship’s sailors soon threw Quraydah a rope, which he fastened to our craft’s bow. Then he used it to pull us alongside the ship.

A woman’s voice rang out, “Don’t be crazy!”

A man standing on the ship’s deck seized a white abaya, which he wrapped around his head, and then kneeled silently, facing us. Meanwhile all the sailors had dropped their drawers and lined up beside that man, who seized a long stick then and tapped the meaty appendages of their bodies. These were all dead, but even so strange rays emanated from them. I wasn’t really freaked out, because these rays were a reflection of the sea’s light on their bodies.

When the man respectfully requested that we board their vessel, my father insisted on learning why. The man replied: “We’ve been on board this ship for twenty-seven years. We’re all eunuchs, and the only woman is seventy-one now. All that time we’ve been searching for the end of this sea. We were told that a certain sage there might help us. The woman, for her part, is searching for a satchel in which she placed her husband’s ashes. She hasn’t been able to locate it all this time but was told that this sage might be able to find it for her. We did actually reach him, but he failed to solve our problem. Then the woman advised us to look for a young man, no older than twenty, who could embrace her stiff body with his succulent one. One of our men noticed that you have a young fellow in the skiff with you, and now we hope to satisfy the woman’s desire so that these twenty-seven years will not have been wasted.”

My two companions looked delightedly at me, and my father remarked, “It seems your luck at sea has vastly improved.”

The man asked, “What do you two men think?”

My father wasted no time. He hoisted me on his shoulder and carried me aboard the vessel. I said nothing. Then the man gestured toward a cabin below decks.

These two men wanted me to prove what studs they were by having me screw a seventy-one-year-old woman.

The man grabbed my hand, led me to a hold below decks, and left me.

The hold was dark, although a small lamp hung from the side of a rafter. Once again I was confronted by a black abaya with the mound of a body beneath it. This was the old woman. I stood nailed to the floor, waiting for this corpse to move, but it didn’t. I thought about going back to them and saying I had finished, but what would happen if they

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