In Arabian Nights (30 page)

Tie two birds together.
They will not be able to fly even though they now have four wings.

Jalaluddin Rumi

THERE WAS ONLY ONE DAY I CAN REMEMBER ON WHICH MY
father said nothing at all. We had been in Fès for more than a
week, staying at the plush Hotel Palais Jamaï. My sisters and I
spent most of our time playing hide-and-seek in the Andalucian
gardens that overlook the medina. My mother sat on the terrace,
knitting. My father was nowhere to be seen. Whenever we asked
where he was, my mother would rest the knitting needles on her
knee and say: 'He's out doing his work.'

I never thought to ask what his work actually was. I would
hear him talking almost all the time, and assumed that people
paid him to talk. Sometimes strangers would turn up at our
home in the late morning. They would sit primly on
the slippery turquoise couch and my father would start
talking to them. He would continue through lunch and the
afternoon, through the evening and then late into the night.

When he wasn't talking, he was typing on a robust old
manual typewriter. The sound of inked keys striking paper at
lightning speed haunts me even now.

On the day my father didn't say a single word, he sat on a
chair in the gardens of the Palais Jamaï, drinking coffee and
making notes in blue-black ink. Every so often he would glance
up and watch us running through the flower beds. But he didn't
really see us.

He was seeing stories instead.

The next day the blue-black notes were in his hand at breakfast.
It was clear he was ready to talk about what his mind had
processed. We were just about to scamper into the garden, when
he said: 'Who likes stories?'

We put up our hands as if we were in class.

'We all do,' I said.

'All children like stories,' said my sister.

'Do you think stories are just for children?' he asked.

'Yes, Baba.'

'Well, I'll tell you something. Stories are for everyone, not just
for children,' he said. 'But sometimes people forget that. When
grown-ups hear stories, sometimes they don't realize that they
are very clever things, things that can help them to learn other
things.'

'Are stories like going to school, Baba?'

'Well, yes, in a way that's just what they are. But stories have
been around long before there were any schools or schoolteachers.
They have been around since the beginning of time.'

'Baba, shall we go and tell people?' I asked.

'Tell them what, Tahir Jan?'

'Tell them stories are clever and that they are for them.'

My father held up the paper he was holding.

'That is a very good idea and just what I was thinking. What
I want to do is to get grown-ups telling other grown-ups stories
again where we live. Just like people do in Morocco.' He paused
and touched the paper to his chin.

'I want to start a College of Storytellers,' he said.

Robert Twigger tracked me down the next afternoon. He had
just finished a marathon session going from café to café in search
of clues and was wide-eyed from all the caffeine. I still didn't see
the connection between folklore and pygmies, but Twigger
swept my questions away with his hand.

'Folklore is like the thick green soup humanity climbed out
of,' he said. 'It's packed with nourishment, with information and
clues. The thing is that we belittle it. We laugh at the idea of
being able to tap into it. But imagine if we could decipher folklore
in a place like this.'

'In Fès?'

'Yes! Imagine . . . everyone who's ever lived here has rubbed
off and left a kind of footprint in the folklore. They've impacted
on it, touched it. Everything they've ever seen, discovered,
known, it's all there, all in the thick green soup.'

'But how would you go about deciphering it?'

Twigger took a deep breath. 'That's a big question.'

'Do you have an answer?'

'Perseverance,' he said.

At the guest-house, the owner's brother, Waleed, was stretched
out in the hallway again. I staggered in through the door with a
dozen bags filled with bargains from the medina, Rachana and
the kids treading in my steps. Waleed sat up, kissed Ariane
and Timur, and asked if I was a Christian. It was a strange
question to get hit with out of the blue. I told him that my family
were Muslim and that Rachana had been raised Hindu. Waleed
seemed pleased by the answer.

'That's good,' he said.

'I have a lot of Christian friends, though,' I said. 'I have
friends from all religions.'

Waleed groomed a hand over his chin.

'Morocco is the place where all religions live freely,' he said.
'There were Jews here two thousand years ago, long before the
Arabs. Many have gone to Israel now, but in their hearts they are
Moroccan.'

I put the shopping down.

'I don't notice people's religion,' I said. 'It's not important to
me.'

'You are right, Monsieur Tahir. We have Muslim friends and
Hindu friends and friends who are Christian and Jew.'

'Very good.'

'But there are new people here in our city.'

'Oh?'

'Yes, they are Christian, but they are not like the Christians
we have known before.'

'What's different about them?'

'They are trying to make us into Christians. We have told
them that we are very happy being Muslim, that we don't want
to change.'

'Are they missionaries?'

'Yes, missionaries,' said Waleed. 'That's what they are. They
sing songs and play guitars and wave their arms in the air.'

'Happy Clappies,' I said.

'That is their title?'

'Well, some people call them that.'

'What can we do, Monsieur Tahir, about these Happy Clappies?'

'Just ignore them,' I said.

Waleed scratched his neck.

'If we ignore them, will they listen?'

The College of Storytellers drew together an assembly of
raconteurs, folklorists and oral historians, both in Europe and
in the United States. Over the years it existed, the college promoted
the transmission of stories from almost every country in
the world. At the same time, it encouraged people to consider
how stories worked on the mind, how they helped in problem
solving and how the same tale can be found in completely
different regions of the globe.

At one of the meetings held in a community hall in London,
I was introduced to a man called Wilson. He was six foot three,
as thin as a barge-pole and hollow-cheeked, as if a mysterious
tropical illness had eaten all the flesh from his face. He had a
hard-to-place accent and was wearing yellow gumboots.

The College of Storytellers' great attraction was the throng it
attracted. It ranged from members of the establishment to the
eccentric, and beyond, to a realm peopled by the gloriously odd.
But the great thing was that everyone who turned up at the
meetings was passionate about story-telling.

Wilson slapped me on the back and said he had just got in
from South Africa.

'Been transcribing some Zulu tales,' he said vaguely. 'They
have their own form of "The Ugly Duckling", don't you know?'

'Are you going to tell a story here today?' I asked.

Wilson pulled out a briar pipe and stuck the bit between his
teeth.

'Got a little tale from the Mekong Delta I thought I'd share,'
he said. 'After all, a good story's like a rat trapped in a larder.'

'How's that?'

'It gnaws away until it's set free.'

The next week, Wilson telephoned the flat where I was living
in north London. He said he had been unable to sleep for two
nights, that another tale was gnawing away. I was busy with
university exams and hardly had enough time to eat, let alone
listen to stories. But I have never found it easy to give an excuse
down a telephone line.

'You'd better come over,' I said.

Three hours later, Wilson's finger was holding down the
doorbell. His gaunt cheeks were redder than before. It may have
been because he had walked from the East End, a distance of ten
miles. On his feet were the yellow gumboots and on his head was
a lizard-green trilby.

He sat on the sofa in my cramped studio flat. There were
papers strewn everywhere and dozens of books, each one open at
a particular page.

I excused the mess. 'I've got finals,' I said weakly.

Wilson took out his pipe, filled it with tobacco from a leather
pouch and set fire to the bowl. The papers and books
disappeared in a fog of silver smoke. He related a few stories
gathered on his travels in West Africa, New Zealand and Nepal.
Then, pulling off his gumboots, he said: 'I'll tell you something.'

'What?'

'We could have learned a lot from the Ainu in Japan,' he said.
'They didn't have a writing system, but they used stories to
remember things. Any important event or bit of knowledge was
put into a story, packaged neatly up in a frame and was told and
retold. As time passed people forgot what was true and what was
imagined, which stories were based on reality and which were
not. But then,' said Wilson, refilling his pipe, 'it didn't matter to
them.'

'What didn't matter?'

'Whether something was true or not.'

Just before dark, Wilson put on his yellow gumboots and
shook my hand before he strode off back to the East End.

'I'll see you at the college's next meeting,' I said as he turned
to leave.

'I shouldn't think so, old boy.'

'Why not?'

'Because I'm heading off to New Guinea at dawn.'

Our paths never crossed again. I didn't forget the afternoon
Wilson had spent smoking his pipe, telling stories in my flat. I
can't remember what tales he told me. But his observation about
fact and fiction rubbed off, as did his notes on the Ainu, a subject
that preoccupied me later on.

During my own travels I have found fact and fantasy blended
together throughout the developing world. Where they converge and coexist
there may be poverty, but there tends to be a kind of harmony too, a balance,
as if the culture is held in place by an invisible counterweight laid into
the fabric of the society.

Step into Fès's medina and it's almost impossible not to be
affected by what you find. Certainly, it may appear to be disorderly
at first but, as your eyes acclimatize, you begin to
understand that there's very little disorder at all. The old city
moves to an ancient rhythm, a routine that has become streamlined
through time. Like a shard of once-sharp glass smoothed
by decades on the sea bed, Fès is sensible, rounded, complete
within itself. Walk through the streets and you can tell who
belongs there and who does not. The locals have a special look in
their eye, a confidence, an arrogance.

And they have plenty to be arrogant about.

Before we bought the Caliph's House and moved to
Casablanca, I had negotiated for a vast merchant's house in Fès.
The building was so large that I toured it without muttering a
word, silenced by the enormity and by the grandeur. There were
three large courtyards and a harem, each replete with mosaic
fountains, painted wooden ceilings, stucco plasterwork and
bougainvillea vines. The house was owned by seven greedy
brothers. To buy it, I would have had to coax each one to sell. It
was a possibility, but I was still so unripe that I stormed out of the
first coaxing session after only an hour and a half. A local would
have dug in his heels, swilled down another glass of sweet mint
tea and prepared himself for days of negotiation.

There is no city on earth that gets me quite as excited as Fès,
with its medieval Moroccan architecture serene beyond words,
crafted on a matrix of perfect geometric design. It is an incomparable
joy to slip from the tangled streets through a
doorway no taller than a barrel and to find yourself in a shaded
palace, utterly cloistered from the outside world.

The appeal of Moroccan houses has not gone unnoticed by the
West. Over the last decade thousands have been sold in Marrakech, in particular
to Americans, British and French. There is an abundance of coffee-table books
of what are usually called
riads
, although many are not strictly riads
at all.
Riad
simply means 'garden' and is used to describe a house
with a central courtyard, typically with four symmetrical flower beds inside.
The flower beds signify the world beyond, for Muslims believe that Paradise
is a garden. Any visitor to the Arabian desert can imagine how the nomadic
Bedouin would have fantasized about such a place, with cool shady trees, birdsong,
and fountains issuing an abundance of fresh water.

One morning, the owner of the guest-house lurched up the stairs
and asked if I wanted to buy a house.

'My cousin is selling,' he said.

'What kind of place is it?'

'A nice one . . . old, very old.'