Lulu in Marrakech (19 page)

To my shame, one night soon after this, the anguish cost me an entire
nuit blanche,
shedding tears of chagrin to be so sleepless, chagrined to be so obsessed and wracked with jealous egotism. We had all come up to our rooms at midnight—we’d been to the house of a former American ambassador to Tunisia, at a riad in the medina near the Cotters. I’d been uneasy the whole evening. We didn’t see that many Americans, and I found it slightly disconcerting to meet this one, as if, in the spirit of “It takes one to know one,” the ambassador would spot me as a spy and
poseuse.

Back home, in my bedroom, I was still keyed up and found myself sitting at my desk fooling around with my computer, listening out for any noise or tiptoeing from Ian’s room, even from time to time going into the bathroom to be closer to Ian’s door. Then, at two, faced with going to bed or owning up to myself what I was doing—staying up to spy—I couldn’t avoid understanding that I was in the grip of personal misery I couldn’t really master. I sat at my desk for endless moments more, then lay down on my bed, sleeplessly, ears straining and hearing nothing but night noises and, at four thirty, in the silent desert, from afar somewhere, the call to prayer. Then, despite my intention to sit listening the whole night through, I must have dropped off, because it was seven thirty, and I did hear footsteps in the hall, but it would be maids or Ian getting up.

Then I knew Posy was right that I should confront Ian and ask for an explanation of what was going on. Can you be sleeping with someone in the happiest way—happy at least till recently—and not sense insincerity or reservation? Apparently, yes. The history of spy literature, for one thing, is full of Mata Haris and Christine Keelers and their abashed victims—seduced, susceptible males who didn’t notice even a hint of treachery. Can it work the other way? Of course—there’s the whole history of prince consorts and gigolos. But there I was, clinging to the idea of the beauty and sincerity of the sexual act and thinking I couldn’t be mistaken that Ian loved me. I longed to confront him, yet I was afraid of what he might say.

31

To what extent was the past, the history of the phenomenon under examination, understood? Were past trends identified and their origins and significance perceived?

—David S. Sullivan, “Evaluating U.S. Intelligence Estimates”

W
e kept closed the big wooden gates leading into the compound. These were ordinarily barred at night, but since Gazi came, they were barred in the daytime too, and the watch-boy who was always sleeping on the doorstep of the little shelter at the entrance began to wear an alert, pleased air of rendering an important service. When Ian left for his office or Posy and I went somewhere, it was with a great clatter of unlatching and the scraping of the doors along the gravel of the drive. Shut behind these gates, we were a nuclear facility, a radiation zone.

This state of things lasted several days, until we inevitably relaxed our guard. We had braced for the arrival of an infuriated Khaled Al‐Sayad, but he didn’t appear. Either he wasn’t coming, or he hadn’t put two and two together yet, or he was content to let Gazi go. Ian and I, in my room at night, discussed the possibilities: Maybe he didn’t really care that Gazi had gone, maybe he was glad to be rid of her. It seemed unlikely that he didn’t know where Gazi was—she’d been at Ian’s nearly two weeks, apparently reassured by the thick walls and the care we took to bolt the gates, but surely a kitchen girl or a gardener would eventually tell someone despite Ian’s instructions. Other than closing the gates, we didn’t any longer go to unusual lengths to hide her.

Ian, by his perfectly bland manner, still gave no sign of his relationship with her and facetiously expressed sympathy for Khaled. “What a handful,” he agreed. We were not having a private talk; this was before dinner, and the Crumleys were there. Ian avoided being alone with me even during the day, it seemed to me, though there was still the nightly perfunctory visit to my room. “However, when he gets back to Riyadh, how does he explain why she hasn’t come home with him? ‘Oh, I just lost track of her when we were in Morocco’?”

“They’re used to that, in Riyadh,” was Posy’s comment. “Gazi told us, wives disappear all the time.”

At dinner we often discussed Gazi’s passport. Without it, she was trapped in Morocco forever. The problem seemed insurmountable. She’d left without it, and it was locked in a safe at home, in Khaled’s office. Moreover, Khaled worked in his office all day long. I knew, of course, that I could get a passport for Gazi. We did it all the time. But how could I admit to having this power? And could I justify it to Taft? Now, looking back, I suppose I didn’t want to help her—yet I did want to get rid of Gazi, I wanted her to go away, wanted Ian to be as I had thought him, wanted love to reign.

“Suma is the obvious person to get it,” Ian said. “Or one of your kids could get it, Gazi. Khaled must trust Suma. Maybe she knows the combination.”

“No, how could she?” Gazi said. “Anyway, it’s a key.”

T
hese were terrible times for me, inopportune times for me, with Taft in town, and we were about to kidnap someone, and my thoughts kept veering to Ian when I ought to have been thinking about work. There were other things I had to do. Ian was applying for grants to rebuild the burnt factory and build some more. Since I had some experience with grant proposals, I was able to help him with writing these. His plans were ambitious and idealistic; I felt he should take an administrative fee—my suggestion and the usual practice—but he wouldn’t hear of it. I didn’t know the details of Ian’s apparently adequate finances: Where did his money come from and how much did he have? Again, I felt funny looking into it, even though it was germane to my mission—it was even my duty to look into it. I could certainly confirm in my reports to Taft about the general flow of development money and charitable donations in Marrakech that sending some of it to Islamic extremists would be easy and probable, innocent donors not knowing where their money went.

Working on his grant proposals, thus did I morph from a mistress into a secretary.

It had occurred to me before this that we had made love maybe only once a week for some time now, with me initiating it, and sometimes my provocative moves were ignored, leaving me with disagreeable feelings of longing and resentment, a frustrated need that was worse than forgetting about love altogether. I thought desperately of the occult, charms or potions, or beauty measures, or sexual arts—maybe of
The Perfumed Garden
: “If a woman intends to contract her vagina, she has only to dissolve alum in water, and wash her sexual parts with the solution, which may be made still more efficacious by the addition of a little bark of the walnut tree, the latter substance being very astringent.…”

But I knew there was no way I could demand that somebody make love to me, or find a walnut tree either. I did remember a scene in Anthony Powell, where Jean, Nick’s mistress, greets him at the door in the nude, and how it turns him on, and I tried that. When Ian came in for his evening talk, I arranged, at his knock, to be naked.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, and began to back out.

“No, come in,” I said. In fact, this worked very well. Men are such uncomplicated creatures, basically, I guess; I didn’t know how reliable this stratagem would turn out to be in the long run, though.

My double life was also threatening to become more complicated when Taft thought of this or that for me to do at hours when I’d usually be at the library or having lunch with Posy. For instance, since he had assigned me to drive the van on the day we picked up our subject, he sent me several times on a practice route into the outskirts on a side road leading to the highway to Rabat, urging me to unsafe speeds along the dirt track where small children from the mud shelters on each side threatened to toddle into our path. “You must be the only woman your age in the world who can drive a stick shift,” he said, a tiny trace of approval in his voice at last.

Most mornings, Posy and I left as usual with Rashid, Miss Pring came for Ian, and Robin Crumley and Pierre Moment went off to work at their respective arts. Gazi might be in the garden gathering the blossoms of the saffron or tangerines, or sleeping late. I found myself spending at lot of time at the Mamounia or working at the library, avoiding her. Pierre Moment, however, spent less and less time in his studio and more and more time with her. We all noticed that.

“Quelle femme adorable,”
he said.
“Imaginez sa vie en Arabie Saoudite.”

The night he came to dinner, Suma’s brother Amid had said, “My mother is not well. It’s important my sister knows this. Please, if it happens that you see her, tell her this.”

“I’m so sorry to hear it. Maybe she’ll happen to call Madame Cotter,” Ian had said. “We’ll suggest that Marina pass that news along.” Whether Marina had or hadn’t, we now had four reasons for getting hold of Suma, to tell her about her mother, to get her to submit to a virginity test, to find out about Gazi’s kids, and now to get Gazi’s passport. Talking to Suma was of course made trickier since Gazi was with us, and so we’d procrastinated. Suma knew about Gazi’s flight, obviously, but for her to know where Gazi was could put her in a difficult position. What if Khaled asked her, or blamed her, or thought she was involved? When I did call Suma with news about Amid, we decided I was to pretend we hadn’t even heard that Gazi was gone. How would we, after all?

It turned out that Suma didn’t know it either, had the idea Gazi was just traveling. Things seemed to her normal at the Al‐Sayads’. The children were fine. I had to decide then and there how to ask her to cooperate, and concocted the following story: Gazi was traveling in Morocco, but had decided to go to France and thus needed her passport. Could Suma get it out of the safe? As soon as I outlined this plan, I saw its flaw—why wouldn’t Gazi just call Khaled and ask him for it?

And now, if Suma asked Khaled for the passport and said she’d been asked for it by me, all the dots would be connected in his mind—he would realize she was at Ian’s, and Suma would know that Gazi had fled instead of being away on a trip. I told her not to mention it after all.

Gazi called Suma herself, in the morning, and in a wheedling tone asked about the kids and whether Suma knew where the safe key was. I couldn’t guess what Suma was saying, but evidently a lot, because Gazi did more listening than talking, and eventually she said, “If you knew, you would not blame me.” We heard her say this several times, “If you knew what my life was like… ,” leaving us, as we hung on this conversation, to imagine that Suma was reproaching Gazi, which didn’t sound like the meek Suma we were used to. Gazi was starting to speak sharply, then modulated her tone and said, abruptly, “Goodbye, Suma.”

Gazi turned to the rest of us and began to cry again, as she had the first day, sobbing bitterly into a thin shawl she had worn against the chilly morning and now pressed against her eyes. I think Ian wanted to take her in his arms to comfort her, but he didn’t. How could he, in front of me?

O
n Christmas Eve, Gazi danced. As the weather was now cool, we’d eaten inside in the dining room and had gone into the salon for mint tisane (I always asked for coffee, though). But outside, tonight the night was strangely warm for this crisp time of year, and the candles were lit on the paths. Tom and Strand had been by earlier, but now it was only the Crumleys, Pierre Moment, Ian, Gazi, and me there. No one had been invited since Gazi’s arrival, though I had argued for keeping to our normal pattern of dinner parties and people visiting, which would seem more natural and not draw attention to us. I had had tea with Colonel Barka at least once during this time but didn’t tell him about Gazi. I had told Taft, of course, about Colonel Barka; he knew about it anyway, and he had told me to keep that relation intact.

In the salon we had been listening to Handel’s
Messiah,
but now, maybe in the spirit of ecumenicalism, we had CDs of Moroccan music, soft, wailing dinner music that added ambiance without compelling attention, and then somehow the music had intensified; maybe someone turned it up. It developed a sort of bump‐ and-grind beat that couldn’t be ignored. Ian, joined by Robin, Pierre, and Tom and Strand, urged Gazi to show us a Saudi Arabian dance. Eventually, after the de rigueur disclaimers, she got up, laughing self-consciously, and rolled up on the balls of her feet, first one, then the other, and flipped one hip up and down.

“There wouldn’t usually be men present,” she said, looking at the men. “All right, just for one minute.” The music, the ouds and what‐not, was dominated by the sonorous, insistent beat of the drums. She wiggled to get the time and pushed up her sleeves. Throb, thrum, thump—she measured the drums and the sound of sticks clacking against each other, then she began a strange progress across the room, arms extended, hips rising and falling, at half-time at first, then she caught the full beat and doubled her pulsations. She added a little shimmy of her shoulders, her breasts moving softly beneath her shirt, stopped it, tried it again, all the while pendulum hips in motion. The music seemed to speed up. Her eyes narrowed and lengthened, and she did this dance all around the room, and might have stopped but didn’t, into it now, another turn around the room. I couldn’t look at Ian, couldn’t watch him seeing her doing this sexy bump, grind, pelvic thrusts, exotic in her velvet pants, which were low-cut and showed her navel, so, belly dance. She was paying no attention to Ian or to any of us. I think she was dancing her freedom, another and another turn around the room before she stopped, laughing. We all clapped and cheered.

“We can all do it, every Saudi girl,” she said. “I’m not very good.”

I took this to mean she knew she was good. Women danced for each other at women’s parties, she said. Some perhaps for their husbands eventually. I wondered if she’d done this dance for Khaled. I could imagine his gaze, smoldering with desire, now turned to murderous rage, like Othello’s.

Ian then surprised me. He’d been watching, like the rest of us, and now said, “ ‘You are the music ’til the music stops.’ Did you write that, Robin?”

“T. S. Eliot. ‘You are the music while the music lasts.’ It’s a little different point.” He recited a few lines more:

These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

Prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action—this was a good mantra, I thought, for anyone in my line of work, or for anyone: prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.