In Arabian Nights (20 page)

I thought of Dr Mehdi and the favour he had asked – for me
to fetch some special salt from the Sahara. I told Ottoman about
it. He smiled and broke into a laugh.

'Do you think he will abuse my trust?' I asked.

Ottoman stopped laughing.

'I am sure you can trust him,' he said.

'How do you know?'

'I think you'll find out.'

Burt was wearing a gold plastic raincoat and a matching hat. He
moved very slowly and seemed extraordinarily fragile, almost
like a porcelain figure. His skin was so pale it looked as if he had
spent the last fifty years underground. His hair was white as talc,
his voice shrill and his mannerisms decidedly strange. When he
talked, he twitched his eyes; when he had nothing to say,
he hummed the tune to 'Yankee Doodle Dandy'.

'I found it,' he squeaked, pushing his way through the door.
'Bet you didn't expect me.'

'No, we didn't,' I said.

Burt shook my hand, then tugged off his coat and his matching
hat and threw them over a chair.

'I can't wait to get the full tour,' he said.

'Tour?'

The Californian opened a daypack and removed a large camera.
He tested the flash twice, blinding me. The sound of the
equipment recharging filled the sitting room.

'Yup, ready,' he said. 'Where do we begin?'

'Welcome to Morocco and to Dar Khalifa,' I said feebly.
'Thank you for coming and for buying my book. But there's
something I ought to explain . . .'

Burt's eyes twitched once, then again.

'I know what it is,' he said.

'Do you?'

He nodded excitedly.

'Oh, good,' I said.

'You're shy, aren't you?'

I gritted my teeth.

'That's not it.'

Burt lifted the camera, blinded me again and moved over to
the fountain outside the children's playroom.

'Oh, you wrote about this!' he exclaimed. 'It's beautiful. Just
like you described it.'

'Burt, I must stop you,' I said, faltering.

'Am I too early?' he asked. 'I am, I know I'm too early. I can
just sit on the couch and wait for the others.'

I didn't know quite what to say. But one thing I did know was
that Rachana wouldn't take kindly to having guided tours of the
house. She had been supportive of my book, but secretly resented
the way I had thrown a window open into our private lives. I
cornered Burt at the fountain and urged him to put the camera
down. Rachana was coming out of the kitchen and was about to
find us.

'You have to listen to me! We don't do guided tours. We
aren't a theme park. This is our home!'

The Californian pushed past me. He seemed shaken.

'But your book,' he said.

'What about it?'

'Well, I loved it. I bought copies for all my friends.'

I thanked him once and then a second time.

'You don't get me,' he said.

'I do and I'm grateful. I really am.'

'No, you don't understand me.'

'What don't I understand?'

Burt held out his arms, as if he was about to give me a bear
hug.

'That I'm your number one fan!' he said.

Each morning a chicken would flap over the wall and lay an egg
in the wide hedge near the swimming pool. It was lured by the
promise of safety and the idea that one day its chicks would run
free with grass beneath their feet. The garden was a paradise
compared with the mud in which the shantytown's chickens
lived on the other side of the wall. While strolling over the lawn,
I caught the guardians red-handed. They had grabbed the
chicken and were about to break her neck and stew her for
lunch. They strained hard to look submissive. I asked what was
going on.

'It's good for eating,' said the Bear. 'Look at the legs.'

'Whose chicken is it?'

'It comes from over there,' said Marwan, pointing to the other
side of the wall. 'That means we can eat it.' He held up a sprig of
parsley.

'It's been coming in here and eating the worms, so it belongs
to the house,' said the Bear.

'We want to eat it,' said Osman.

It was then that I heard the sound of chicks chirping.

The chicken pecked herself free from Osman's clutches and
ran to her offspring.

'It's a mother,' I said. 'You can't slaughter an innocent mother
with chicks!'

The guardians lined up, saluted and agreed that it would be
cruel to end the life of any mother.

'What shall we do with her?' asked Marwan.

'Keep them safe and show them a little hospitality,' I said.

The next night I dreamt of the magic carpet again. It had been
weeks since I was last lifted on its silk threads. I lay back, spreading
my weight over the geometric patterns, and we soared over
the sea, towards the distant kingdom. But this time we did not
fly over the city, or pass the tower, the princess, or the gallows.
Instead, we flew west until we came to a vast desert. It was still
night and the sky was empty; not a star, not a sliver of light. I was
freezing.

Sensing my chill, the carpet reared up and wrapped me in its
edge.

We flew on and on, over a thousand miles of sand. Below
there was nothing but dunes and the occasional silhouette of a
Bedouin encampment. Above, the black was touched with gold,
as the first rays of dawn pierced the horizon. The sun broke over
the sand and I glimpsed the outline of a city, far more fabulous
than the last – an endless panorama of domes, towering
minarets, pools of glistening water and a palace encircled by an
iron wall.

The carpet banked to the left, swooped down over the palace
defences and came to rest on a patch of grass near the royal
stables. I could smell the horses and hear the grooms saddling up
the king's prized mount for his morning ride. Because I was in a
dream, I somehow knew about things that more normally I
might not have known. I knew, for example, that the palace
belonged to the great warrior-king Hassan bin Iqbal, who had
recently conquered a land far to the east and had taken its own
royal family prisoner. I knew, too, that the king had seven sons
and that each one was the guardian of a piece of knowledge that,
when united, would lead to a breakthrough in science that
would change the world. But, when separated, the information
had no value at all. The king had reached a higher plane of learning.
He had spent years trying to get his sons to pool their
resources, but the boys despised one another. Each one was plotting
secretly to kill the others and to become the crown prince. The
eldest, who was the crown prince, was about to poison his father.

The carpet flicked up its corner, directing me to the last stable
on the main block. I went over and found the door open. Inside,
a groom was busy saddling a white mare. Holding the reins in
his left hand, he turned to face the light. He froze. As soon as I
saw his face, I did the same. He approached, almost in shock.

I was looking at myself.

Each day, another egg was laid by the chicken and, each day,
another chick hatched. They followed their mother about the
garden chirping, avoiding the pack of ferocious cats that vaulted
the wall and bred in the long grass on the tennis court.

The guardians gazed longingly at the hen, tasting the tender
meat hanging off her thighs. Then, one afternoon, there was a loud knock at
the garden door. A bristly, big-boned woman with a floral headscarf barged
in. She growled something in Arabic and was taken to the bottom of the garden
by the Bear. He pointed at the hedge, where the mother hen and her progeny
were scratching for grubs. The woman pulled out a sizeable box that she had
somehow been concealing under her
jelaba
, scooped up the chicken, her
offspring and a pair of unhatched eggs and marched back to the garden door.
Before she stepped out, back to her life in the
bidonville
, she glared
at the guardians and me, for laying claim to her birds.

Late the same afternoon, I drove up to Hay Hassani and parked
outside the mattress shop. There were cries across the street. I
looked over and saw a woman shouting. She was waving an
empty purse, as if she had been robbed. Suddenly, she caught
sight of the thief and ran into the road. But she didn't look. A
van swerved to miss her and collided with a cart piled up with
eggs. It tipped over, smashing most of the stock. A taxi swerved
to miss the cart and hit an old man passing on his bicycle. He lay
in the road, dazed. But no one took any notice of him. Instead,
all the participants, including the taxi's passenger who had hurt
her leg, formed a scrum, blaming one another for the accident.

Sukayna ushered me inside and pulled the curtain down. I
told her that I had seen myself living an entirely other life and
that I needed to know more about the holy man who had taken
refuge at the house.

The astrologer lit a candle stub and mumbled a prayer under
her breath.

'We share the world with jinns,' she said.

'I know . . . they live in animate objects, created from smokeless
fire.'

Sukayna pointed out to the street.

'Did you see that accident?' she said.

'Yes. People are so careless,' I said. 'The woman didn't look
when she stepped into the road.'

Sukayna clicked her tongue.

'That wasn't the fault of people.'

'What do you mean?'

'It was a jinn.'

'
What?
'

She repeated herself.

'I saw all that happen,' I said. 'I can explain it to you.'

Sukayna shook her head and folded her arms.

'I saw it, too,' she declared. 'And I know it was the work of a
mischievous spirit. He's always there in that same spot, causing
trouble.'

I pulled the curtain back and glanced out through the
mattress shop. The crowd had grown in size. The old man was
being carried off to a battered-looking orange ambulance. A
policeman was being petitioned by the mob.

'Where you come from,' said the astrologer, 'you have jinns as
well, but you don't know about them. When misfortune touches
your life, you imagine it's random. But it's not.'

'Will you tell me about the holy man?' I said.

Sukayna peered at the flame and closed her eyes for a second.

'There's another difference between Morocco and Europe,'
she said.

I looked up, waited for the answer.

'It's that here in Morocco we work things out. We listen, we
watch. But in your countries you do the opposite. You expect
everything to be worked out for you, handed to you. You
expect other people to use their brains so you don't have to use
your own. In your society people are lazy. They want everything
now, everything for free.'

'But what about my dream? And what about this holy man
you mentioned?'

Sukayna washed her hands over her face.

'The answers are in front of you,' she said. 'Open your eyes
and you will see them.'

'Tell me, Baba,' said Joha's son to his father, 'why
do you speak so little and listen so much?'
'Because I have two ears and only one mouth.'

MARWAN COULD SEE I WAS STILL HAVING A PROBLEM UNDER
standing
Morocco. He may have been a modest carpenter by
trade, but he had the wisdom of a man much given to deep
thought. When I told him about the astrologer's caution, that I
should use my own brain, he broke a twig from the hibiscus
hedge and scratched a circle in the dirt.

'This is Morocco,' he said. 'Every point is connected to every
other point. It's a whole, balanced and more complete than you
might first think.'

He drew another circle, but just fell short of joining the two
ends.

'And this is the West,' he said. 'It looks very similar, but it's
not quite whole. One day the ends may touch but, until that
happens, your world will be incomplete.'

'What difference does that make?'

The carpenter threw the twig back into the hedge.

'In Morocco we have a saying,' he said. 'We say that a fool
thinks he's wise and that a wise man knows he is a fool.'

Burt had left Dar Khalifa and gone to Marrakech to buy
souvenirs for all his friends. As he walked slowly out through
the shantytown, I watched him, knowing instinctively that he
would be back. It was just a matter of time.

A day or two passed. Then another. It was a cold afternoon,
sheets of rain lashing at the windows. Ariane and Timur were
riding their bicycles around the sitting room, gathering speed.
Rachana was cooking in the kitchen and I was drifting off to
sleep in one of the low club chairs we had shipped from India.

The doorbell rang. A long, hard buzz followed by a series of
shorter bursts. I opened an eye, jolted upright. The next thing I
knew, the Bear was leading a gold raincoat into the salon. The
figure inside it was drenched from head to toe.

'Hello,' said a calm voice, 'have I missed you guys!'

Burt unbuttoned the coat and let it flop on to the floor. He was
shivering. I fetched a towel and some dry clothes.

'How was Marrakech?'

The Californian unlaced his shoes, pulled off his socks and
splayed his bare white feet out in front of the fire.

'It was like stepping into an episode of
The Twilight Zone
,'
he said.

'Did you enjoy it?'

Burt stared into the flames. He didn't look happy.

'In California our lives are so comfortable,' he said. 'The
drinking water's clean, the supermarkets are massive and
gasoline is cheap. It's all easy and in a way it's perfect. So much
so that we get trapped and we forget.'

'What do you forget?'

'That there's a world out there, out here.'

'That happens everywhere—'

Burt broke in. 'No, you don't get me,' he said. 'We were living
in a bubble, a bubble of security. It seems real, but it never is. And
now terrorists are beating down our door, we're all surprised.'

'The world's changing,' I said.

'I wish every American could spend five minutes in
Marrakech,' said Burt. 'I wish they could stand in that great
square and see, smell and hear what I did.'

'How did it make you feel?'

'Alive,' he said. 'It made me feel alive. What I saw there was
real, totally real. There wasn't the bullshit, the sterile wrapping
that we use to cover everything. We're so good at wrapping that
we take our eye off the ball. We forget what we're actually
wrapping up.'

Burt moved over to the window and watched the rain. I told
him about Ariane's box, the one that holds the 'Tale of Melon
City' – the container and the content. He asked me to stand up.
Then he gave me another bear hug.

'Your head's screwed on right,' he said. 'You understand the
East and the West. You're at home in both. You know both. You
know what you are?'

'What am I?'

'You're the bridge.'

The more I asked Dr Mehdi when I ought to leave for the desert,
the more he pressed me to stay.

'The time will come,' he said dreamily.

'But I'm ready to go now.'

'This isn't the right time,' the doctor replied.

'Why not?'

'Because certain things are not ready yet.'

'What sort of things?'

'The conditions.'

At Dar Khalifa, Ariane was going up to bed. I tucked her in and
kissed her goodnight. Just as I was about to turn off the light, she
said there was something she wanted to ask.

'Can't it wait till tomorrow?'

She shook her head. 'No, Baba, unless I know the answer, I
won't sleep.'

'Tell me then, what do you want to know?'

Ariane nestled her head into the pillow.

'I want to know about honour,' she said.

'What about it?'

'Can you tell me what it is, Baba?'

I had once asked my father the same question, while lying
back on his turquoise couch. I told Ariane.

'And what did he say?'

'He told me this story.

'Once upon a time there was a wandering dervish, a holy man.
He was crossing the vast deserts of Arabia when he was taken
prisoner by a clan of nomads. They said: "You are a spy and we
are going to chop off your head."'

'What did the dervish say?' asked Ariane.

'He said: "I am not a spy. Before you kill me I want to ask a
favour. Give me a sword so that I can kill one of your men.
Then, when you kill me, you will have done so out of revenge
and your honour will have been saved. Because, as things stand
now, your honour is in danger of being tarnished by killing an
innocent man."'

The Caliph's House may be surrounded on all sides by a sprawling
shantytown, but it's located at the edge of Casablanca's
exclusive suburb called Anfa. Land in the area is so valuable that
all the developers in the city have their eye on the shacks.
Ripping them down would be a licence to print money. The
government have regarded the
bidonvilles
in Casablanca and
elsewhere as breeding grounds for fanaticism. The thinking goes
that if people live in deprived circumstances they have less to lose
and are more likely to listen to radical talk.

Whenever I asked them about the future, the guardians
looked at me with faraway eyes. They had always been bonded
by a communal fear, a fear that one day the shantytown would
be torn down and they would be homeless. Over the time we had
lived at Dar Khalifa, there had been moves to sweep away the
bidonville
. They had failed, perhaps because there had been no
plan to settle the inhabitants elsewhere. But things had changed.
The guardians, and all the others who lived around us, had been
seduced with new promises.

'They will build a great tower,' said Marwan, his eyes wide with
wonder. 'It will soar up towards heaven, all dazzling and white.'

'Who will live in it?'

'We will,' he said. 'We all will.'

'Where will it be built?'

'In Hay Hassani, near the mattress shop,' he said. 'There will
be running water and electricity as well, and television, toilets and huge
windows through which we will look down on the city.' Marwan wiped his nose.
'It will be Paradise,' he said.

One February afternoon, I was walking through the old Art
Deco quarter of Casablanca, when I spotted a young man

standing on the corner outside the Central Market. He was a
little taller than average and very thin, the buckle of his belt
pulled up to the last hole. A tray was suspended round his
neck by a frayed length of cord. Laid out on the tray were some
home-made cards. They all looked the same – green with red
polka dots. I wasn't sure if he was selling the cards or offering a
service. So I watched.

A client would approach, hand over a coin and choose a card.
The skinny man with the tray would read the card. More often
than not, the client would burst out laughing and wander away
into the throng. My curiosity was piqued. I went over, gave the
man the required amount and chose a card. He turned it over
and translated a short text.

'Every night Joha would bolt his shutters and hang out
bunches of garlic. His neighbour asked why he did it. "To keep
the tigers away," he said. "But, Joha, there are no tigers here,"
said the neighbour. "Then, it works, doesn't it!" said Joha.'

I thanked the man and gave him a tip.

'What is this for?' he said, pocketing the money.

'It's for making me very happy,' I said.

Joha is a medieval folk hero, a wise fool, whose humour is
known in Morocco, in China and in all the lands in between. In
Turkey they call him Hodja; across North Africa, Joha; and
in Afghanistan they know him as Mulla Nasrudin. He's
known in Greece too, and in Russia, Sicily, Albania and even in
Uzbekistan. Tales of his own special brand of warped genius fill
the teahouses and caravanserais of Fès, Cairo, Kabul and
Samarkand.

Everyone knows a few Joha jokes and they tell them to pass
the time, to deliver a nugget of wisdom to illustrate a point, or to
bring a smile to a glum face. For the Sufis, Joha is a tool, a kind
of Trojan horse. The humour deviates the mind, the concentration,
and allows something more serious to slip inside the
subconscious.

My father brought us up with Joha's exploits. He was
obsessed by the character and published four collections of his
tales. He used to say that a short story with a beginning, middle
and an end was like a magic wand: that it could effect a change
that would be impossible to emulate by any other method.
Why? Because of the way the human mind is wired.
Throughout history, every community has told stories, he
would say. People told stories long before they understood
mathematics or psychology, before they could read or write,
even before they had built the first mud hut. These stories kept
the human brain in check, balanced it and maintained a kind of
cerebral status quo.

From an early age we were encouraged to choose a Joha tale
and to turn it round our minds. 'Take it into yourself,' my father
would say, 'and it will become yours.'

When I was very young, I asked him if I could go and meet
Joha. My father waved a finger.

'You have to think in a different way,' he said softly. 'With
Joha, the message he gives is more important than the man who
gives it or the way in which it is given. Do you understand,
Tahir Jan?'

I didn't quite understand, but I said that I did. My father
touched a hand to my cheek.

'It's like the box,' he said: 'the contents are a key, but the box
itself is nothing more than something that protects something
else. Learn to find the key, and to use it, and you will have
received something very important.'

Years passed and, very gradually, I learned that Joha jokes
were about decipherment just as much as they were about
humour. And I learned that the study of seven Joha tales at a
time was regarded as a special preparation in itself. The stories
usually involved known variables, each one with a second higher
meaning. Understand these meanings and, like a cryptologist,
you have a chance of deciphering the riddle, a chance of reaching
another layer. For Sufis, this ultimate layer – or layers – is the
ideal, a kind of jackpot. But at the same time the student of
the story can be content with base level, the joke itself.

One rainy afternoon my father had demonstrated how to
unpick a Joha tale. If I concentrate hard, I can hear the even tone
of his voice.

'Salt had become so expensive that Joha went into the salt
business,' he said. 'He loaded his old donkey with panniers of
salt and was heading to market to make a fortune. On the way
there, the pair were forced to wade through a river. As they
crossed, all the salt dissolved. On the other bank, the donkey
rolled on its back, delighted at the loss of its burden.

'The next week, Joha filled the panniers with wool. This time
when they waded across the river the wool became soaked and
the donkey almost drowned. Joha was delighted. 'That will
teach you,' he yelled, 'for thinking that every time we cross, you
will come out better.'