In Arabian Nights (2 page)

Examine what is said, not him who speaks.

Moroccan proverb

ON OUR CHILDHOOD TRAVELS TO MOROCCO, MY FATHER USED TO
say that to understand a place you had to look beyond what the
senses show you. He would tell us to stuff cotton in our nostrils,
to cover our ears and to close our eyes. Only then, he would say,
could we absorb the essence of the place. For children the
exercise of blocking the senses was confusing. We had a thousand
questions, each one answered with another question.

At dusk one evening we arrived at Fès. As usual the family
was squeezed into our old Ford estate car, vinyl suitcases loaded
on the roof, the gardener at the wheel. That evening I caught my
first sight of the massive medieval city walls, impenetrable and
bleak like the end of the world. There were figures moving
beside them in hooded robes, carts laden with newly slaughtered
sheep, and the piercing sound of a wedding party far away.

The car stopped and we all trooped out.

In the twilight my father pointed to a clutch of men huddled
on the ground outside the city's grand Imperial Gate.

'They're gamblers,' said my mother.

'No, they are not,' my father replied. 'They are the guardians
of an ancient wisdom.'

I asked what he meant.

'They are the storytellers,' he said.

For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country
than by listening to its stories. He would often line up my sisters
and me, and enthral us with episodes from
Alf Layla wa Layla, A
Thousand and One Nights
. The tales worked in a special way, he
said, diverting the mind while passing on a kind of inner knowledge.
Listen to the stories, he would repeat again and again, and
they would act like an instruction manual to the world.

As far as he was concerned, the stories and the ability to tell
them were a kind of baton to be passed from one generation to
the next. He used to say that many of the tales he related had
been in our family for centuries, that they were fastened to us in
some way, a part of us.

He would sometimes make me uneasy, stressing the grave
duty, the burden of responsibility, sitting on my shoulders. My
school friends used to love stories as much as I did, but we
differed. From before I could walk I was reminded that these
tales were magical, that they contained wisdom, and that one day
I would be expected to pass them on to my own children. Deep
down I never really expected the time would come to pass the
baton on.

But it did.

One night as I tucked her into bed, Ariane put her arms
round my neck and whispered into my ear: 'Tell me a story,
Baba.' I froze, for the words had been mine thirty years before.

I felt under-equipped to handle the duty of teaching with
stories. Ariane and Timur enjoyed listening to my small
repertoire, but when I tried to explain the many layers they said
they didn't understand, or that I was boring them. I thought
back to how my father recounted the tales to us, how he had
passed the baton on. I pictured myself in his study with my
sisters, sitting in a line on his turquoise divan. He would be
perched opposite, leaning forward cupped in a grand leather
chair, fingertips pressed together, sunlight streaming in through
French doors behind.

'Clear your minds,' he would say. 'Close your eyes. Listen to
the sound of my voice.'

We would be squirming at first, unable to keep still. Then
the voice began, soft as silk, precise, calm . . . 'Once upon a time in a
kingdom far away . . .' Within a moment it had pulled us in, taken over, and
we were lost in its realm. That was it. My father never told us how the stories
worked. He didn't reveal the l ayers, the nuggets of information, the fragments
of truth and fantasy. He didn't need to – because, given the right conditions,
the stories activated, sowing themselves.

The Caliph's House has the ability to suck you in and tantalize
your senses. There are courtyards shaded by fragrant honeysuckle
and blazing bougainvillea vines; fountains crafted from
hand-cut mosaics, gardens hidden behind secret walls, terracotta
tiled floors, carved cedarwood doors, and acres of Venetian
plaster, etched with intricate geometric designs.

When we bought Dar Khalifa, we were newcomers to the
local culture and its layers of superstitious belief. The learning
curve was a steep one. Spend more than a few weeks living in
Morocco and you understand that daily life is inextricably linked

to an ancient Oriental system. A good way to make sense of the
society, which at first seemed so daunting, so incomprehensible,
was to read it as if it were a kingdom from the time of Harun ar-Rachid.
From the first day, I found the reality of our new lives
mirroring the make-believe world of
A Thousand and One Nights
.

Almost as if through some medieval right of sale we inherited
three guardians with the Caliph's House. Their leader was
Hamza. He was tall, solemn and stooped, as if the world's burdens
were laid on his shoulders. Then there was Osman. He was
the youngest and had worked at the house since his childhood.
He had a smile that was permanently fastened to his lips. The
third guardian was called Mohammed, but known by all as the
Bear. He was strong as an ox, had enormous hands, a hooked
nose and a nervous twitch.

Hamza, Osman and the Bear spent most of their time skulking
in the stables at the bottom of the garden, hoping that I
would forget about them. On the rare occasions that they ever
spoke to me, it was to remind me of the grave dilemma, the
predicament of the jinns.

In the West, a house that has been boarded up for years on end
might attract squatters. They can damage the place and be near
impossible to evict. But in Morocco there is the threat of a far
more turbulent force awaiting the unsuspecting. Leave your
home empty for more than a moment, and it could fill from the
floor to the rafters with an army of invisible spirits, called jinns.

The Qur'ān says that when God created Man from clay, he
fashioned a second form of life from 'smokeless fire'. They are
known by many names – genies, jnun, jinns – and they live all
round us in inanimate objects. Some jinns are good-natured, but
most are wicked, enraged by the discomfort they believe that
humanity has caused them.

We spent many months renovating the house and cleansing it
of the jinns. The guardians insisted they were lurking in the
water tanks, in the toilets and under the floor. Living with jinns
or, worse still, around people who believed in them caused
unimaginable stress.

Most of the time I was trapped in Casablanca. The days and
nights were filled with builders, artisans and an ever-expanding staff, all
of them fearful of the paranormal forces they said encased our lives. From
time to time I did manage to break free. I crisscrossed Morocco on the trail
of building supplies, craftsmen and exorcists capable of dispatching the wayward
jinns. It was easy to forget that out there, beyond the wilds of the shantytown,
there was a land ablaze with vitality, history and culture: a kingdom waiting
to be discovered.

One morning I found Osman sitting on an upturned bucket
staring out at the hibiscus hedge. It was early summer and
already far too hot to work, too hot even to think. I had taken the
guardian a cup of chilled orange juice, droplets of condensation
running down the side.

He smiled broadly, teeth glistening, thanked me, then God
and, after a long pause, he said,

'Monsieur Tahir, you have been here at Dar Khalifa for more
than three years.'

'It's gone fast,' I said.

The guardian gulped down the juice and turned slowly until
his watery brown eyes locked into mine.

'And what have you learned?'

'What do you mean?'

'About our kingdom . . . what do you know?'

I thought for a moment, considering the journeys I had made
in search of mosaics and exorcists, tortoises and cedarwood.

'I've seen a lot,' I said. 'I've travelled north to the Mediterranean,
right down south to the Sahara and all the way into the
High Atlas.'

Osman slid a sleeve under his nose. He kept my gaze.

'You don't know us,' he said sharply. 'You don't know
Morocco.'

A jab of disbelief pricked my stomach. What's he talking
about? I thought.

'I know Morocco as well as anyone who's lived here for as
long as I have.'

The guardian put his thumbs in his eyes and rubbed very
hard. Then he looked at me again.

'You have been blind,' he said.

'What?'

'Blind.'

I shrugged.

'Morocco may have passed under your feet, but you haven't
seen it.'

'I'm sure I have.'

'No, Monsieur Tahir, believe me. I can see it in your face.'

Many of my earliest memories are of listening to stories. Our
childhood home was filled with
A Thousand and One Nights
, or,
as they are more popularly known,
The Arabian Nights
. I would
sit there enthralled hour after hour at the exploits of Aladdin
and Ali Baba, of Sindbad, and the world of the Caliph Harun ar-Rachid.
There was always talk of chests overflowing with
treasure, of princesses, and handsome princes charging on
stallions liveried in gold, of ghouls and
efrits
, dervishes, divs and
jinns.

My father always had a tale at hand to divert our attention, or
to use as a way of transmitting an idea or a thought. He used to
say that the great collections of stories from the East were like
encyclopedias, storehouses of wisdom and knowledge ready to
be studied, to be appreciated and cherished. To him, stories
represented much more than mere entertainment. He saw them
as complex psychological documents, forming a body of knowledge
that had been collected and refined since the dawn
of humanity and, more often than not, passed down by word of
mouth.

When he died a decade ago, I inherited my father's library.
There were five reinforced boxes of books labelled
STORIES
:
VALUABLE, HANDLE WITH CARE
. Among them were Aesop's
Fables
, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm.
There were many others, too, on the Arab collections, and
volumes of tales from every corner of the world – from Albania
and China, Cambodia, India, Argentina and Vietnam, from sub-Saharan
Africa, Australia, Malaysia, from Papua New Guinea
and Japan.

Once the Caliph's House was renovated I had more time to
spare. So I sat down to read the five boxes of stories from my
father's library. I would often come to pencilled annotations in
his small, neat hand. Many of the notes hinted at wisdom locked
within a tale, or likened one story to another from an entirely
different region of the world.

The only set of volumes missing was my father's copy of
A
Thousand and One Nights
, the rare edition translated by the
Victorian scholar and explorer Richard Francis Burton. As a
child I remember seeing the set in his study. It stood on a shelf at
ankle height. My father prized the edition very highly, and
would point out the quality of the workmanship, or tell of how
he came upon the seventeen volumes as a young man. He said
that he had saved for months to afford the books and would go
each afternoon to spend time admiring them in the shop. I
realized later it was the prized first 'Benares' edition of Burton's
Alf Layla wa Layla
,
A Thousand and One Nights
.

The volumes were bound in waxy black cloth, with bright
gold lettering on the spines. I was young and inexperienced, but
they were just about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
They were so exquisite that I would stroke my fingers over them
and stoop down to smell their scent.

They smelled like cloves.

One rainy winter afternoon a visitor arrived at my parents'
home. He was overweight, flat-footed, and chain-smoked from
the moment he stepped inside until the moment he stepped out.
I was too small to be told anything, but I remember my parents
muttering before he came. I don't know who he was, but he was
important enough to drink tea from our best china and to have
slices of lemon served on the side.