Lulu in Marrakech (27 page)

43

The label “surprise”… can be affixed properly to the unpleasant results of deliberate gambles.

—Dr. Klaus Knorr, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

T
he eerie sameness of the three days that followed seemed to efface the unreality of our situations. Pierre, Robin, Ian, and I shared game little meals without the company of poor Posy, still kept in the clinic. Apart from that we saw little of each other except in the evenings, when, the first night, Robin again read a few poems, paeons to fatherhood, and the next night when we kept a dinner invitation to the former American ambassador’s, now retired here. When invited, we had explained that Ian was away, and he had heartily urged us to come anyway; now we warned him that Ian was coming after all. Rashid asked no questions of any of us but ferried us hither and yon, to our visits to Posy and to see the wreckage of the library—which had been bombed rather ineptly, so that the front was blown off, and the table where poor Miss Pring had been reading while many shelves were intact at the back. I salvaged from the wreckage a few books, belatedly, that others had felt beyond reclaim. Those book corpses brought home the horror of explosions, indiscriminate fragmenting of reality, a vicious contempt for the material world I hadn’t understood before.

Despite a strange lethargy that slowed my steps and made me feel sleepy all the time, I went each day to visit Posy, and so did Robin and Ian, at different hours. For the rest, Robin was working in his study. Pierre set up his easel in the courtyard to do some watercolor sketches of the maids and gardeners, picturesque in their turbans and wrappings. Madame Frank came once to call and, I thought, to look around covertly. Maybe Ian was planning to sell her his villa too? The expat community telephoned one another to expostulate about the bombings, and Khaled’s lawsuit, and whether it was safe to go to the medina and the public gardens. Ian and I didn’t continue our conversation. Nothing more from Taft, Khaled, or the colonel; it was as if the past week had not happened.

“I
have a bit of news,” Habiba told me on the way to visit a village to the south. “Assan and I, after much soul-searching, are going back. For me, it’s forty years. I’ve got such mixed feelings.” I thought she meant going back to Mecca, where they used to live.

“Isn’t it dangerous now?”

“Probably. That’s why we feel we have a role, an important mission, actually, to further understanding of the Muslim religion. People like us—like me, anyhow, a mainstream Californian—can make ourselves heard, and Assan is a moderate imam who can be a force for good. We’ve hashed it over endlessly, and it’s the right thing to do.”

I objected. “I’d think especially an American would be suspected.…” It took a while for me to grasp that she was talking about going to America, not Mecca. They were going to Connecticut, to a small town, where they would be visible good citizens. I remembered Habiba’s family money.

With Ian’s return, I felt the dismay come back that had slowly been abating after Amid’s death day, for now I saw that nothing was solved or soluble and that maybe the answer to personal misery was to have no personal life or feelings at all. A solution a lot of people had arrived at before me, no doubt, maybe including Habiba.

Ian and I didn’t have any more talks about our future. He was mostly at his office or somewhere, dealing with the death of Miss Pring. At night he would come in to embrace me tenderly, stirring my desire; but we didn’t make love. He never mentioned Gazi.

At the end of the week, I went with him to visit, with a view to investing in, an experimental garden project in the foothills of the Atlases. The Moroccan farmer and his children greeted us, smiling and brown, a boy and two girls, barefoot, who ran out of a garden shed where they were stacking shrubby branches. The air was delicious, heavy with lavender and herbal scents of other kinds, mysterious and redolent of aromatherapy salons. With his planting, the farmer had made some effort to construct a pleasant garden, or maybe North Africans always think of gardens in this fashion, as needing to be delightful to meander in, formal in design, full of surprises of hedges and tiny ponds. In a little office, he showed us bottles of oils from the various herbal shrubs he had planted.

“We sell these to a shop in Covent Garden, in England,” he said, “and we have many orders. We are exploring a soap made from this blend of herbal oil, and other products, perhaps perfumes. We are also replanting the argan tree. The precious oil of the argan tree…”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’ve been interested in the argan projects,” Ian said. “The women’s cooperative in Tidzi, for instance …”

Ian knew a lot about it and was impressed, he said later, with the farmer’s ambitions. What promising developments lay in store for Morocco, what energy and intelligence among its people, what resources the country possessed.… And his hopefulness did give me a momentary glimpse of promise and peace lying within reach.

All the more reason for our literacy work; I could look at it that way. I asked the farmer if his daughters went to school. His expression didn’t convince me, but he said, “
Bien sûr,
madame, they are good students.”

All the more reason for Taft’s and my work too, I suppose. To protect the women’s cooperative, the schools, the optimism.

P
erhaps it was in the context of this hopeful expedition, with its promise of a productive future, that led Ian, as we drove back, to bring up the subject he had begun the night he came back. “I know when you came here, you didn’t expect any more than I did. That is, we were both hoping, I think, that what we had in Kosovo would continue to grow,” he said. “We like each other so much, we get along so well—we hoped for more. And I do feel more for you even than I did then—I love you very much.”

And he went on longer in this vein. As you might at the doctor’s, getting a complicated diagnosis, I tried to concentrate but felt my thoughts exploding. This wasn’t what I expected, nor what I believed, and I was silenced by this tack, in what must have seemed an ominous silence, for he went on, almost more words flowing from Ian than I’d ever heard from him, about love, about compatibility. Finally he said, “I know I have to speak about Gazi.”

“Well, yes,” I said.

“We were in love for a long time, six years, only possible to meet when they were here in Morocco, of course, and only possible under the most ridiculous and clandestine conditions—her very life depended on me, if we were ever found out. Her life in Riyadh was impossible. Of course the very clandestinity made it exciting beyond all—”

“Oh, Ian,” I found myself saying, “you don’t have to explain. I’m sorry you didn’t tell me sooner though. It might have saved me some tears.”

“I hoped it was over. We both did. It was an impossible affair, with no future and the probability of ending in the worst way, we both always knew it. But Gazi was—is—reckless. Desperate.”

“Why no future? She’s escaped. Where is she?”

“In Marbella. She hopes to fade into the Spanish landscape. We’ll get her some papers somehow.”

“How did you get her into Spain without papers?”

“Through Algeciras. She hid in my car. The Spanish aren’t uptight— a respectable English man in a rental car, crossing to do some shopping, no problem at all.”

I could think of all kinds of reasons it could have been a problem, but it was true there wasn’t a lot of trafficking in women out of Morocco, nor were middle-age, upper-class English men big people-traffickers. There was nothing about him to excite official vigilance.

“What’s to stop the two of you, then?” I asked.

Ian shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. What I’m trying to say is that my hopes for the future involve you, Lulu, and I regret what I know must have disappointed you and put you off, but I had to see it through with Gazi, and I just hope you and I can get through this and go on together.”

Though this was what I had hoped myself, it was the last thing I expected from him now, and I had no idea how to respond. Something must have gone wrong with Gazi. He leaned over and kissed me in a somewhat brotherly way, and I didn’t object. I felt my body respond, but I told him I needed to do some thinking, and I did.

“Gazi needs to understand freedom for a while. She’s been a captive her whole life,” Ian added.

“Anyway, thanks for sparing me any hypocritical remorse,” I said.

I lay awake well into the night, tormented by thoughts and lingering fever, wondering about what to do, especially about Desi, a frightened little girl in some cell or worse, but now also about Ian—about everything. Did Ian have any contacts among the Moroccan police that could give us information about Desi? I worried about losing my job, as a matter of course, having screwed up, Snyder and I. I mourned Amid, and if he had had to die, I was sorry to have looked at his penis.

Probably Ian was thinking of marriage. We would be happy; I was sure of that, and he apparently thought so too. He’d had his fling with Gazi, and judging from his reticence now, something hadn’t worked out. It was the kind of issue in his life I couldn’t ask about if I didn’t want questions myself, though Ian didn’t seem curious or emotionally possessive the way some men are—the court‐injunctioned stalkers, the midnight phone-callers, the domineering fathers. I’d never be mixed up with men like that.

Would he want to live forever in Morocco? I’d have to think about that, but I knew my resistance to it was crumbling. I could throw myself into female literacy. How easily I could be melted into wifehood, that time-honored refuge and slightly unchallenging calling—I even yearned for it deliciously. I could even stay in my job, could tell him about it.

44

And once we accept the fact that intelligence cannot always supply us with one “right” answer, our efforts can be more productively focused on preparing contingency plans and counter-surprises for the moment when the inevitable occurs.

—Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

I
’d left a message for Colonel Barka, and there had been a message from him to meet him at the Restaurant Sidi‐Ali on Wednesday. I went straight there, without telling anyone at Ian’s where I was going or that I wouldn’t be home for dinner. When I got there, by taxi to elude Rashid, the colonel was sitting at the table we had sat at the day we saw Ian and Gazi there. He looked rakish in a conical red tarboosh with his usual military jacket, and rose slightly from behind the table, then sat back on the cushions, fatigued, it seemed, even distressed.

“My angel,” he said. “What a trying time you’ve had. My colleagues are quite abuzz.” His urbane tone didn’t convince me.

There was little point in sparring with the colonel. “That isn’t why I called. I have to know about the little girl who works at the Al‐Sayads’ and was arrested at the concert Wednesday night. Didn’t you see it?”

“Yes, I saw you taking a young woman outside. What was that about? You went to dinner at the Franks’ afterward; I supposed it was not important. Unfortunately, we did not get to the Franks’. My wife doesn’t like late European dinners.”

“Yes, I hustled her out, I thought she might be planning—there was something about her coat, I thought… anyhow the security guards took her away immediately, and now she hasn’t returned home. She’s a thirteen-year-old who works at the Al‐Sayads’ and watches their children. I have to find her, I feel terrible, the mother, everyone’s upset, it looks like the girl was just dressed up for her first concert.”

“Odd that such a one would attend such an event.”

“I thought so too.”

“I can’t help you here, I’m afraid, but I’ll inquire. I know someone who has contacts inside the
sécurité
. Dear me, you’re rather the kiss of death, aren’t you—in a manner of speaking, I hasten to say. I didn’t intend a tactless reference to the fate of the Parisian visitor.”

This was chilling. “How did you hear about that?”

“You know he was a—let us say, a valued person. Valued by
la belle
France.”

Since I had heard that from Taft, I acted only a little surprised. Of course it had long occurred to me it could be the French the colonel worked for, but now I knew it must be so; otherwise, how did he know what they were thinking about Amid?

“Suma’s brother, you knew we were interested in him. We talked about it.” Had we? Had I told him about Amid? I couldn’t thrash myself out of the tangled web in order to be sure. The colonel and I exchanged some recriminations like this, though he was growing more cheerful. Through his delicate allusions, I began to understand something else: Amid was not just a French citizen, he was a French agent.

What did that mean for, or about, Suma?

“Bourad’s real allegiances with the French
sécurité
were not known to the DST, alas for him. If so, they might have picked him up before you did, thus saving him from the bungling for which your agency is known. In any case, one of my employers—I trust your discretion, Lulu—is in a position to mitigate your legal problems. They are interested in Lord Drumm, who has many Middle Eastern connections. It would be of enormous value to know someone who knew him well.”

“I’ve only met the man once, I don’t know him well,” I protested. “You have received a letter from him.”

“No, of course not.”

I saw he was surprised, betrayed by a tiny flicker of his eyelid. He knew I had told him a lie. Maybe he was surprised because I hadn’t lied to him before.

“Perhaps you will,” he said. Little bits kept falling into place. “My employers.” Yes, the colonel worked for the French too. I was still trying to work out whether he was fishing or had actually opened my mail. He or someone could have opened my mail, and I’d never detected it. But only amateurs would be detected; we all knew how to do it properly.

“Suppose I do?”

“If you went to London, if you accepted his offer of… friendship, you could be sure that the French authorities would listen to suggestions that they not pursue the grave matter of the death of poor Bourad, illegally kidnapped on Moroccan soil.”

“They’d want reports? Real intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Would my American colleagues know—could I tell them what I was doing?”

“Of course, yes. They’d have to know—you’d have to get yourself reassigned there. I would leave to your discretion how to do it.” I thought of Taft’s mention of
Notorious,
with Ian as the longed-for Cary Grant and Lord Drumm playing the Claude Rains part. In a good cause. America! I had to face facts. Obviously, because of Ain Aouda, to avoid prosecution I couldn’t stay in Morocco, but I couldn’t go back to France or California either, and I had to be somewhere. So I had to behave and take orders, like Ingrid Bergman.

It was through this frivolous film analogy that I could see the future, and what I saw was that I had plunged so deeply into the thicket, through the dark and tangled foliage, that I couldn’t avoid seeing out the other side: there was London—a little flat in Chelsea or Canary Wharf, tickets for Covent Garden and the Coliseum, and tawdry, racy little West End plays, and the Royal Shakespeare… oh yes, I’d spent some time in London, it was very agreeable.

And, of course, I had signed on for this. Coming up, I could see, was the painful (for me) good-bye to Ian; in London, the pretty clothes and cultural events, and the weekly, or monthly, lunch with Taft, or the colonel, or some counterpart, and some time-consuming cover, crusading for female literacy. Beyond that, the view was obscured.