In Arabian Nights (28 page)

When Sukayna visited us and told me that the stairs and the
high ceiling were symbols, I understood exactly what she meant,
because I remembered sitting on the lawn with my box of bricks.
The astrologer's idea, the symbols of Heaven and Hell, sounded
preposterous.

But the more I turned it in my mind, the more sense it made.

In Morocco, and in the Arab world, symbols are all around,
just as they are everywhere else. But the difference is that the Oriental
mind can make sense of them, decipher them. People are trained to recognize
symbols, to understand through a chain of transmission that stretches back
centuries. The Occidental world once had the same chain but, somewhere along
the line, one of the links was broken and the chain collapsed. The result
is that the symbols that ornament Western society – and are quite plain
to Orientals – can't be decoded any longer by the Western mind. They
are regarded as nothing more than pretty decoration or, in the case of stories,
as simple entertainment.

A few days after Noureddine went into hospital, I heard from
Osman that a date had been given for the demolition of the
bidonville
. It was to take place the next month, a week after
the move to newly-built tower blocks up the hill in Hay Hassani.
The guardians and Zohra, who all lived in the shantytown, were
unable to contain their excitement.

'We are going to have hot water in the bathroom,' said
Osman, 'and special windows that do not let in the cold.'

'And there will be a lift that zooms up to the top,' said the
Bear.

'And from there, we shall have a view of the whole of
Morocco,' Zohra added.

'What will happen to the land on which the
bidonville
is
built?' I asked.

Marwan swept his hand out sideways.

'Flattened,' he said. 'Then there will be buildings, lots of them.'

'What kind of buildings?'

'Villas for the rich,' said Osman.

'People with a lot of money.'

'Casa Trash,' I said.

The fact that the Caliph's House is located where it is – slap
bang in the middle of the city's prime shantytown – gives us a
window into a world where people are less financially fortunate.
As time has passed, we have developed an abiding respect for
everyone who lives in the
bidonville
. The people who live there
may not have pockets lined with money, but their heads are
screwed on right. Their values are rock solid.

If the shantytown is at one end of the equation, then Casa
Trash can be found far at the other extreme. Their lives are
created from an alphabet of name brands, cosmetic surgery and
monstrous black SUVs. Female Casa Trash is dressed in the
latest Gucci or Chanel, is heeled in Prada and is so thin that you
wonder how her organs function at all. Her vision is obscured by
oversized sun goggles and her mouth is masked in lipstick of
such thickness and viscosity that it hinders her speech.

She can be found in a handful of chichi haunts, such as Chez
Paul, picking at platters of imported salad leaves, smoking
designer cigarettes and rearranging her curls. She never looks at
the friend she has come to lunch with, because she is on her
phone and too preoccupied scanning the other tables, making
sure she's been seen.

The male variety of Casa Trash carries at least two mobile
phones and has a diamond-encrusted Rolex on his wrist. He
drives a black German 4x4 with frosted windows and aromatic
rawhide seats. He wears a black leather jacket, tight Levi 501s
and so much aftershave that your eyes water as he passes. To
show just how important he is, he speaks in little more than a
whisper. His hair, weighed down with handfuls of gel, shines
like a bowling ball and his teeth have been chemically whitened
to create a Hollywood smile.

Casa Trash almost never come to the Caliph's House, partly
because they are not normally invited, but also because, for them,
the idea of fording a full-on shantytown is tantamount to committing
bourgeois suicide. When they do come, we find them at
the door, the women shaking in their high heels, the men
inspecting the chassis of their car for damage.

On one occasion in the first week of March, a Casa Trash
couple did penetrate our defences. They had seen an article
about me in
Time
and had known a previous owner of Dar
Khalifa. They drove at high speed through the
bidonville
, schoolchildren
scattering in the nick of time before the black Porsche
Cayenne crushed them into dust. The husband whispered he
was an industrialist. He lit a cigar as thick as his wrist and asked
me if the area was safe. Just before I answered, he pulled out a
pair of mobile phones and whispered into them both at once.

His trophy wife seemed to have spent much of her adult years
on a surgeon's table. The skin on her face was so tight and so
loaded with Botox, I feared it might split right then. Her lips had
been cosmetically edged with a dark pink line, her teeth capped,
and it looked as if a pair of tennis balls had been pushed down
her blouse.

The guardians were whitewashing the front of the house
when the Casa Trash couple arrived. On the way into the house,
the husband slipped his car key to Marwan and barked an order
fast in Arabic to wash the vehicle down. I led the couple into the
house for a show of forced hospitality. As we moved through
the hallway, the Casa Trash wife waved a hand back towards the
shantytown.

'Those poor little people,' she said, 'living in those squalid little
shacks. It's a shame on our society.'

'But the homes in the
bidonville
are spotlessly clean inside,' I
replied defensively. 'Everyone who lives there is well dressed and
clean as well. Despite the lack of running water.'

The wife twisted a solitaire diamond on her finger.

'You must remember that they're not true Moroccans,' she
said.

'I don't understand you,' I said, my hackles rising.

'They're thieves,' whispered the Casa Trash husband between
phone calls. 'Nothing but thieves.'

Thankfully the couple left almost as soon as they had arrived.
When they were gone, I went outside. The guardians were
gloomy because the stork had disappeared again. As I was standing
there outside the house, a little girl approached down the
lane from the
bidonville
. She couldn't have been more than about
seven. Her cheeks were rosy, her hair tied back in a ponytail. In
her hand was a posy. They were not the kind of flowers you find
in the fancy French florists in Maarif, but were in a way all the
more beautiful. The little girl approached me, half nervous and
half proud. When she was about two feet away, she motioned for
me to bend down. I did so. She kissed my cheek, placed the posy
on my hand and said, '
Shukran
.'

I didn't understand why she had thanked me. I asked
Marwan, who was standing there.

'She was thanking you, Monsieur Tahir,' he said, 'for not looking
upon us with shame.'

The next afternoon, I dropped in on the hospital where the
cobbler was convalescing. I made my way through the dim
corridors, which echoed with the sound of bedpans and patients
moaning, and traced the route back to his ward. He was lying
asleep in a bed beside the door, his face grey rather than its
characteristic dark brown. He was struggling to fill his lungs.
An oxygen mask had been fitted to aid his strained breathing
and a drip was feeding his arm.

I stood there for quite a while just looking at him.

The man in the next bed had his legs strapped and his head
was bandaged tight. He seemed delirious, but his eyes managed
to follow me as I crossed the room to take a chair over to the
cobbler's bed. I leaned forward and held the old man's hand. It
was cold and the fingers were almost purple. As I sat there, clearing
my mind of the insignificant debris that tends to fill it, I
remembered visiting one of Rachana's relatives in an Indian
hospital some years before. The lady was in intensive care. We
were permitted to go in a few minutes at a time. At the far end
of the sterile room were ranged three small incubation units.
Inside them were triplets, a day old – two girls and a boy. The
father was there, his face ashen, dejected. The nurse said the little
girls were expected to live, but the boy was so frail his chances
were slim.

I visited two or three days in a row to see Rachana's relative.
Every time I dropped by, I heard the babies' father talking to the
boy in a whisper. He paid hardly any attention to the girls, spoke
only to his son. By the end of the week the little girls were both
dead. Their brother, although feeble, was expected to survive.
All the while, his father continued talking to the boy. He didn't
stop for a moment.

I asked one of the nurses what he was saying.

She said, 'He's telling him the epic tale of the
Mahabarata
.'

'But the child isn't awake.'

'It doesn't matter,' she replied. 'The words slip into the
subconscious.'

Sitting at Noureddine's bedside and remembering the experience
in India, I pushed a little closer to the bed. Holding his hand, I recounted
a tale my father had told me as a child, when I was lying sick in my bed –
the story of 'The Man Who Turned into a Mule'.

The night after visiting the cobbler, I dreamed of the magic carpet
again. Weeks had passed since I had last been wafted up into
the night sky, carried away to its distant kingdom. As soon as I
saw the carpet lying there, laid out on the lawn, I ran to it,
stepped aboard and sensed its fibres bristle with eagerness to get
away. With the breeze rustling through the eucalyptus trees, we
left the Caliph's House far behind and travelled out over the
Atlantic, what the Arabs call
Bahr Adulumat
, the Sea of
Darkness.

The carpet flew faster than before, pushing up higher and
higher to where the air was thin. The stars above were bright
like lanterns and, as we flew at great speed, I glimpsed the curve
of the earth's atmosphere. Suddenly, we plunged. Spiralling
down, my cheeks pinned back, like a skydiver in freefall. At first
I screamed, but there was no one to hear me. No one except for
the carpet. I clung on to its edge, spread-eagled, but I became too
hoarse to shout. Then, gradually, our rate of descent reduced and
we were flying horizontal once again.

The carpet skimmed over a thousand domed roofs, over
streets and across grassland. I sat up and then a very strange
thing happened. I found I could understand what the carpet was
saying.

'Everything I show you has a meaning,' it said. 'Sometimes we
know at once what something represents. But at other times we
have to turn the signs around in our heads and decipher them.
Do you understand me?'

'Is that you, the carpet, talking to me?'

'You know it's me,' said the carpet, bristling, 'and you heard
what I asked.'

'I understand,' I said. 'But I don't really know what's going
on.'

The carpet banked right and soared down a black street lined
with windows, each one shrouded in gauze. In every window
was a candle. It made for a chilling sight.

'What is this place?' I asked.

'You know it,' said the carpet.

'No, I don't.'

'Yes . . . remember my words, that what I show you has a
meaning.'

'Well, what could this mean?'

'Think! Think!'

'I don't know!'

'Yes, you do, but you must let your imagination tell you.'

'I closed my eyes as we flew, faster and faster down the pitch-black
street, each house a facsimile of the last – six windows with
a solemn candle in each, the flames flickering as we passed.

'The street is Death,' I said, 'and the windows are Hope.'

'And the candles that burn in them?'

'They are . . .'

'Yes?' the carpet yelled. 'What are they?'

'They are Innocence.'

The next morning, I sat up in bed, my eyes circled with fear.
All I could think of was the princess at the gallows. What did she
represent? I thought hard, imagined all kinds of lunacy. Then it
hit me. It was obvious, right in my face.

The girl standing at the gallows was my own ambition.

'The king spoke to me this morning!' exclaimed Joha at
the teahouse.
'What did he say?'
'Get out of my way, you idiot!'

I RETURNED TO THE HOSPITAL A DAY LATER TO FIND THE
cobbler's bed stripped of its sheets and the nightstand cleared.
My stomach felt sick with bile. The man at the next bed was still
there, his legs suspended with wires and weights.

I stopped a nurse and motioned to the empty bed.

'Mr Noureddine,' I said, 'has he been moved?'

'He was very old.'

'I know. But where is he? In another room?'

She looked at me, her eyes reading my dread.

'He is in Paradise,' she said.

I was too sad to stay in Casablanca a moment longer. I told
Rachana to pack some clothes, and Ariane and Timur to fetch
their favourite toys.

'We are going away,' I said.

'Where?'

'I'm not sure.'

'How long are we going for?'

'A couple of days, a week, a month.'

A short time later we were all in the car sitting in the lane. The
cases had been piled in the back and the seat belts fastened.
The children were already fighting. I had left money with
Osman to pay the guardians for four weeks and had given him a
note for Dr Mehdi, to be taken to Café Mabrook the following
Friday afternoon. It said simply:
Gone to search for my story
.

We drove down the lane and through the
bidonville
. The fishseller
had rolled his cart down the track from the road. It was
surrounded by a cacophony of cats. The knife sharpener was
there, too, and the man who wrote letters for the illiterate, and
two dozen children playing marbles in the mud.

Rachana asked again where we were heading. I didn't answer,
but thought back to the security of my childhood. I was squeezed
up in our red Ford Cortina, between my twin sister, Safia, and a
giant brass candlestick my mother had got cheap in Marrakech.
The car was low to the ground, whining, weighed down with
mountains of bargains. My father was haranguing the gardener
on the taste of Kabuli melons in Afghanistan and my mother
was knitting a fluorescent pink shawl. My older sister, Saira, was
on the back seat, her head pushed out of the open window, about
to be sick. The car was freewheeling downhill across farmland,
the soil nut-brown and moist. There was a screen of tall trees,
their leaves quivering in the breeze that precedes the rain. After
it was a signpost. My Arabic was almost nonexistent, but Slipper
Feet had ground its alphabet into my head. I read the sign: 'Fès.'

The word caught my father's eye too.

'Fès!' he cried out halfway through a sentence about Afghan
pilau. 'It's the dark heart of Morocco. It is the
Arabian Nights
.'

For a third time Rachana asked the name of our destination.
I had a flash of the storytellers crouching outside the great city
walls, then another of the tanneries, which look like something
out of the Old Testament.

'Baba, where are we going?' asked Ariane.

'We are going to the dark heart of Morocco,' I said.

After three hours on the highway, we descended across the same
nut-brown fields I had seen as a child. The sky boiled with anvil
clouds, the earth below it lush from months of rain. Ariane
spotted a large stone in the middle of the highway, then another
and another. They were all the same shape – smooth and oval,
about the size of a tortoise . . . Then I realized: they
were
tortoises
and were about to be flattened by the giant red truck we had
struggled to overtake a mile before.

With Ariane in tears at the thought of the execution of her
favourite animals, I did an emergency stop, threw the car into
reverse and leapt out. The truck was close and closing in, freewheeling
down on to the nut-brown plain, the driver's crazed
face already visible in the cabin. I jumped into the fast lane,
scooped up the first tortoise and, in the same movement, another
three. The truck was now so close that I could see deep into the
driver's bloodshot eyes. They told a tale of a life dependent on
kif
.

My arms juggling tortoises, I spun to the side and managed to
lay the little reptiles in the soft grass at the edge of the highway.
Ariane had calmed down on the back seat. She said that a witch
had once turned a handsome prince into a tortoise for laughing
at her warts.

'Who told you that, Ariane?'

She thought for a moment.

'The Queen of the Fairies did,' she said.

There can be no place in the Arab world quite as bewitching as
Fès.

We reached the ancient city as twilight melded into night.
There were no stars and no more than the thinnest splinter of a
moon. A blanket of darkness shrouded the buildings, muffling
the last words of the evening call to the faithful. Arriving at Fès
by night is almost impossible to describe accurately. There's a
sense that you're intruding upon something so secretive and so
grave that you will be changed by the experience.

We found a small guest-house deep in the medina through
Bab Er-Rsif, one of the central gates. I hauled the cases there and
shepherded Rachana and the children through the labyrinth, to

the door. The owner offered two rooms for the price of one. He
said it was because we had brought
baraka
into his home – in the
shape of children.

'A house without children is like a landscape without trees,'
he said. 'It may be beautiful, but there is emptiness.'

He bent down, kissed Ariane and Timur on the head and
then on each cheek. I found myself thinking about it later. If we
were in the West and a man you didn't know covered your
children in kisses, his motives might be considered questionable.
In Morocco, however, a gentle innocence still prevails, as it did in
the Western world until a generation ago.

Just before we turned in for bed, the owner rapped at our door.
I half wondered if he wanted to kiss the children goodnight. But
he had come to say that a man was waiting for me downstairs.

'Who is he?'

'A foreigner.'

I went down. A single forty-watt bulb struggled to illuminate
the hallway, projecting long shadows over the walls. The man
was standing near the door, wearing what looked like a Stetson.
He was smoking a cheroot.

'It's Robert,' he said.

'Robert?'

'Robert Twigger.'

I shook his hand.

'My God, it's been years. How did you find me?'

'The medina grapevine,' he said.

At dawn I crawled out of bed, woken by the muezzin, and made
my way to the vantage point above the old city, at the Merinid
Tombs. The first blush of pink light had touched the medina,
where the only sign of life was the smoke rising solemnly from
the bakeries in the twisting maze below. My father had taken me
to the same spot thirty years before. He said that watching Fès
was like peering into a world that had disappeared centuries ago.

'This is the city of Sindbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba,' he said, 'of
jinns and ghouls and the medieval Arab world.'

'But the
Arabian Nights
were set in Baghdad, Baba.'

'That's right, but Fès now is how Baghdad was then.'

'It's dangerous,' I said.

'Tahir Jan, what you think of as danger is the soul. Stretch out
to touch it. Embrace it.'

We had stood at the Merinid Tombs each morning for a week.
On the last day, my father touched my shoulder as we walked
back to the red Ford.

'Fès will be important in your life,' he said.

'How do you know?'

'Because it's a centre of learning, a place where transmission
takes place.'

'But, Baba, it's just an old city,' I said.

My father's face froze.

'Never do that,' he said coldly.

'Do what?'

'Never call a diamond a piece of glass.'

He opened the car door for me and stared into my eyes so
forcefully that I found it hard to breathe.

'Fès is where the baton is passed on,' he said.

The first time I met Robert Twigger was fifteen years ago when
I was homeless in Japan. He was a poet with a fondness for
martial arts, a friend of a friend. I had travelled to Tokyo to
study the culture and language of the indigenous Ainu people,
the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands. Unfortunately I
had severely misgauged the cost of living. Tokyo at the time was
the most expensive city on earth. A cup of coffee, albeit flaked
with gold leaf, could set you back a week's wages.

Ten days after arriving, I had blown my entire savings, most
of them on a single elaborate meal of Kobe beef, from a herd so
pampered that each cow boasted its own private masseur. When
Twigger found me, I was squatting in a disused office block,
living on ornamental cabbages I had stolen from Ueno Park,
where they grew in the flower beds. I would cook three at a time
and stir in a couple of heaped spoons of monosodium glutamate.
It wasn't what most people regard as luxury. But then real
luxury is in the eye of the beholder.

Twigger took me in. While I lived on his floor, simmering my
infamous soup for us both, he would spend all his time preparing
for the harshest martial arts course in the world. It was a
form of aikido, a course designed to harden the Tokyo Riot
Police. During the months I lodged with him, Twigger would
spend the evenings talking of a dream that had gripped him
since infancy – to find a lost race of cave-dwelling dwarfs
thought to reside in Morocco's Atlas mountains.

For a decade, he subjected himself to routines of wild preparation.
He took to sleeping on a bed of nails that he had made
himself, learned to shoot a pistol blindfolded and even canoed
across Canada upstream to build the muscles on his arms.

From the beginning, he was certain the dwarfs were part of a
pygmy race that had once inhabited all of north Africa. His
interest in the subject had arisen as a child. He had read a
curious monograph entitled
The Dwarfs of Mount Atlas
by the
nineteenth-century scholar R. G. Haliburton. The paper suggested
that the dwarf people were afforded an almost sacred status,
and that their whereabouts was kept secret from outsiders.

Twigger believed that a local community somewhere in
Morocco must have known stories of the small people. After all, he
said, the subject had been a sensation when it first reached the West
a little over a century ago. Trapped in the communal knowledge of
the society he felt sure there was a clue waiting to be unearthed, a
clue that could lead him to the lost tribe of Moroccan pygmies.

We met for coffee the next morning, at a café outside Bab Er-Rsif.
The place was filled with a dozen unshaven men in tattered
jelabas
, each one nursing a glass of
café noir
, with a cigarette stub
screwed into the corner of his mouth. Rachana had taken the
children to a
hammam
. She said male cafés were worthy only of
men who frequented them.

I couldn't understand what Twigger was doing in Fès.

'You're not going to find your lost pygmy tribe here,' I said,
once we had both been served coffee.

'I know that.'

'So what are you doing in town?'

'Looking for clues,' he said.

'In the old city?'

'Kind of . . . in cafés like this one.'

I swilled a mouthful of coffee.

'I'm not quite sure I see the connection.'

'It's in the folklore,' he said.

'Meaning?'

'Meaning you've got to tap into the substrata.'

I ordered another round of coffee. Twigger lit a cheroot and
sucked at the end.

'Anthropologists are a pathetic bunch,' he said. 'They never
find anything because they don't know how to look.'

'How do you look?'

'With my eyes closed.'

That afternoon, I had a chat with the owner of the guest-house
in which we were staying. He said his brother had committed
the entire Qur'ān and the Hadith to memory by the age of
twelve, that his ability to remember was so defined he had
created a business from it.