Alexandra Singer (3 page)

Maia began to suspect she was being followed, but when she turned to look, no-one was there. She passed corners where no light penetrated, and she feared to wonder what was lying there in the
gloom. Only an occasional ruin allowed light and space and the odd glimpse of foliage. She could not understand where she might be, not expecting such difficulty in understanding the city’s
layout. Slums replicated themselves in every area. Hearing voices behind her, Maia turned suddenly on the small Arab boys who were following her so incessantly. She approached them and their small
faces looked up at her with hopeful eyes. She smiled at them. “Do you know the Grand Tazi Hotel?”

The boys began to chatter unintelligibly. She stood there, in the centre of the street, uneasy and stiff. The smallest child held out his hand to her. Maia went to take it, but she felt another
hand brush the side of her leg. She whirled round and met the eyes of another boy.

“I’m too fast for you!” Excitedly they began to chatter to one another again in Arabic. She realised that even if she were able to understand them, they would undoubtedly be
giving her the wrong directions. When she looked at them again, they cackled hysterically and ran away. She continued walking, feeling hopeless, and as the alleyways sloped down towards the
woodworking area, she stopped and watched men carving furniture.

High pitched voices were trailing her and now the boys were once again behind her. They knew they could get money from foreigners by their sheer persistence. A cloying scent streamed into
Maia’s nostrils; the fetid stench of the unwashed inhabitants of this part of the city, of the spices and the people crammed in so closely together. Heaped before shops lay raw meat, and
spices spilling over in the sacks. The scent of turmeric, cinnamon, cumin coming together in one single, heady fragrance. By the spices lay cartons of oranges and lemons, the dismembered parts of
slaughtered animals accompanied by swarms of enormous black flies, as grossly enthusiastic as the gatecrashers at a wedding feast.

As always there was the dust and the dirt, as inescapable as the faces which stared at her so curiously, even the hordes of covered women, who threw at her their strange, knowing looks. Some
women jeered at her; she was uncovered and white. A woman came out of nowhere and gleefully thrust a tortoise into Maia’s face, forcing her to rush away, stumbling. A woman beside Maia hissed
and she swung around to meet her eyes. For a single moment they both stood entirely still, locked in an intensely pleasurable moment of hatred. Then the world intruded as the crowd surged along and
the catcalls started up once more, the men blowing kisses and shouting to one another in a guttural language, which followed her through the streets.

Maia sensed only a sort of interested hostility that might take little to burst into open aggression. At a junction she almost walked directly into the head of a camel which had been stuck
upright on the edge of a stick, a sickly sneer on a face. In horror she jumped back from the eyes looking at her. In the deep eye sockets, tiny maggots were wriggling frantically. At the entrance
to the shop beside the camel’s head a small, bent man watched her. The meager skin that covered his bones was dark and translucent, and he smiled at her sardonically. She began to wonder why
she had come to this medieval place. A heavy wave of nausea gripped her and she shuddered away into the crowd.

One of the small boys was back. His huge grey eyes watched Maia, his tiny hand gripped at her sleeve. “
Bisous, Mademoiselle, bisous!
” He was running alongside her. He could
not, she thought, have been more than eight-years-old. Then she felt another hand on her, pinching her from behind, and then yet another child stood beside her. Suddenly they darted off laughing to
sit with more boys who were perched upon rusting bicycles. The men in the café opposite were consumed with laughter at the scene.

“Let them laugh at me,” Maia muttered to herself as she walked along. Down here, marginalised by their grinding poverty, all that the boys could do was to scrape by in competition
with the other urchins, forcing an acquaintance with whoever they found susceptible.

She found herself disturbed by yet another man with jagged, filthy teeth tinged the colour of strong tea. He reached out and clutched her arm tightly. He was disturbingly cheerful. “I am
student. You come for tea with myself and friend!”

He waved to a boy with greased black hair, so wet it shone, who waved back at them enthusiastically from the rooftop of a café. In huge black lettering, its name announced,
‘Café Nadoor.’ From a distance, although the man on the roof was attractive, Maia could sense that there was something repulsive about him. Their enthusiasm appalled her and she
wrenched her arm away from the man.

“I am with a friend!”

“I see no-one.” He looked about him in mock confusion. He jumped backwards, and as she was trying to rush away, he grabbed hold of her again. “Oh, there you are! What is your
name? Come with me!”

He had her about the waist and was attempting to pull her closer still. Maia was engorged with fury, and her panic made her strong. Successfully she pushed him away.

“
Va t’en!
” she shouted at him. “Go away!”

He followed her for a few moments but she managed to lose him when she entered another alley. Here the streets began to narrow even further, the houses were no longer so tall and narrow, and the
streets were lined with overflowing bougainvillea and obscenely young prostitutes. The girls gazed surreptitiously at her, nonchalantly leaning against the foliage and creeping along by the side of
the walls.

As she walked on searching for the Grand Tazi hotel, the crowd eventually fell away and she found herself standing on the edge of a small square. It was twilight and the light danced upon the
buildings of ochre and sandstone playing upon the faces of the men milling there as if they too had been carved in stone, but by a sculptor who had left them unfinished.

She came across men bowing upon the ground in their eternal rendition of subservience. Maia pitied them. She despised religion. To her, it was merely a social construction, the need of mankind
to constantly prostrate himself before a higher being and to relinquish all individual control. She considered that religion’s sole benefit was to offer people the opportunity to eradicate
all personal responsibility. Too often, she noted how many people so adored being told what to do. Maia preferred freedom without encumbrances, but there were always people who wanted to tie her
in. She must have stood for a while in a daze, for as she looked again, it seemed as if almost in the same moment the lowering sun was forming long shadows over the square, and acrobats, young men
made up to look like women, their already strong features now grossly exaggerated, began to jump. Recalling the Historian’s instructions, she crossed the square and made for the walls,
keeping her eyes to the ground, hoping not to attract any further unwelcome attention and still despising herself for her feigned subservience.

On the very edge of the old part of the city, as Maia followed the twisting street to its conclusion, she found the hotel. Standing just outside the walls, large lettering in a faded bronze
announced the hotel’s name: Grand Tazi. The building appeared neglected, like a disused film set.

Next to the hotel was a small clothing stall where the extras thronged, a swarm of women swooning over the dingy fabric. As Maia stepped over the threshold into the hotel, she saw how simple it
was to pass from utter poverty to comfort. Inside the hotel the foyer was arranged with deceptive precision, betrayed only by a perspiring queue of tourists who stood waiting for the only
receptionist on the desk to allocate them their rooms. The floor was laid with the sort of marble coating which might have once lent the place a lavish air, but now it was covered in a thin film of
filth, its decades of glory long since past. In the stifling heat of the foyer the ambushed male receptionist was smiling nervously as he desperately searched through his book for the reservations
list. In the background the telephone rang shrilly, but the receptionist ignored its incessant nagging; in any case, nobody else was there to answer it.

Maia watched him as he tried to placate the tourists, who appeared to be Nordic. They attempted to speak to him in English, but it seemed that other than Arabic he spoke only French, so all that
he was able to say in reply was ‘Sorry, sorry,’ in English, which he kept repeating in a strange sort of rolling way. He did not look at all sorry, and in fact he continued to mutter
angrily to himself even as he stood being assaulted by the torrent of demands. Indeed, the size of his apologetic grin increased as the confusion over the reservations and names mounted.

Maia busied herself in studying the hotel’s faded interior. The ceiling was high and airy, decorated by a mosaic of minuscule, emerald tiles, but the desks and pieces of furniture which
lay scattered around the foyer had all seen better days. The place did hold a certain louche charm. In one far corner of the room, a sign which enthusiastically advertised, ‘Tourists: A Night
of Psychic Phenomena!’ had fallen on its side, while across the way, a crudely drawn arrow pointed up the stairs next to a handwritten sign which proclaimed itself, ‘Restaurant
Gastromonique’.

As the group of tourists inched forward and then finally dispersed, Maia found herself at the front of the queue, but by that time the receptionist had fled. She rang the old fashioned bell on
the desk and waited. Eventually he reappeared, flustered.

“Hello.” She said, clawing on her knowledge of French.

“I am sorry, I in break now,” he said with unflinching finality.

“I thought you were the receptionist. Or is that your brother?” smiled Maia. She was brittle, speaking with a confidence she did not feel.

“No. I do all. Same, same. Sorry.”

“You are not really sorry at all, are you?”

He grinned at her and she saw how deeply his face was pitted with the scars of a greasy skinned youth. He stretched out his clammy hand to her.

“I am Tariq,” he said, with great self importance, and her hand slipped from his. “Now I in break.”

“Wait – I don’t need a room. I’m here to meet somebody.”

“Who are you?” Tariq’s eyes narrowed.

“My name is Maia. I’m staying at Mihai Farcu’s house.” She wondered at his questioning. Did everyone receive this treatment? It was an unusual vetting from an inept
receptionist. Tariq was visibily delighted.

“Ah, the Historian. Welcome, welcome to the Grand Tazi, my friend! You are welcome guest.” Tariq came out from behind the desk to grasp her hand again. “
Par ici,
mademoiselle.
” He ran his eyes over her. “You go there.” He pointed to a spiraling iron staircase and she followed it up until she arrived at the restaurant on the rooftop
terrace, over which a blue and white striped canopy was fluttering tawdrily in the early evening breeze.

The place was busy, but only with other Europeans and Americans who were well rehearsed in making this transition to comfort. Maia breathed out a sigh of relief at having entered a place where
women left their hair uncovered and men did not look at her as if she were a curious object placed down in front of them. Her eyes were drawn across the room where she saw who she presumed to be
the Historian. He was flaunting a plum silk scarf which was wound twice around his neck and then flung nonchalantly over the back of his chair where he had left it to trail pitifully on the
floor.

He was attempting to get some point across to the very large man who was sitting opposite him, listening intently. On first sight, together the men formed a compelling contrast. The first,
elegantly tall and slender, his face looking as if it had been deliberately chiseled, and the second, reclining heavily and almost overflowing from his low seat. There she stood, poised on the
verge of the personal fiefdom that the Historian had carved out for himself in his years of self imposed exile. He was smoking a pipe, and the only disparity between the Historian in the flesh and
the publicity photograph on the jacket of his first book was that he now appeared a little more aged. The book had been last year’s success in historical academia; a relentless history of the
Almoravids in which he had left no stone unturned. After a long banishment, there had been a triumphant return. But still he had not returned to the universities of the West, and there was a
pervading silence as to the reason. At the pinnacle of the enthusiasm generated by his work, he even made it onto the cover of a respected Parisian broadsheet. After an extended period where he had
been excluded by the small academic community, he had then been afforded a long denied recognition and respect. All this, thought Maia, must have conspired to make him the envy of his intellectual
peers.

She lingered a few moments longer, still reluctant to approach him. The job offer was satisfactory; a recommendation was put forward to the Historian by a former, rather lecherous university
Professor she had encountered browsing in a London bookshop. Maia had chattered on inanely about her art and financial struggles, until suddenly he tired of her. But before he left, he told her of
an old Romanian friend’s opening for an assistant.

‘Well, not a friend, exactly,’ he had said, shifting from one foot to another. ‘He was a colleague. It isn’t permanent, you see. You’ll be back soon enough.’
He grinned, widely.

‘How long will I be working for him?’

‘About four months? You’ll have to agree all that with him. Free place to stay though. Lots of room for painting. Fabulous people. You can do whatever you like. Plus –
you’d be doing me a huge favour, get me out of a bit of a situation. He’s a Romanian, but doesn’t have many friends left in Europe, I said I’d find someone for
him.’

His tone was pleading. Maia received the distinct impression that he was begging her to release him from this burden. Her curiosity was piqued; from all accounts this Historian was academically
renowned, but now he was alone in a foreign country, imposing on his old colleagues to send him an assistant. It was all fabulously odd, and Maia decided to take the job offer at once.