Lulu in Marrakech (3 page)

4

Some qualities are directly related to the intelligence process. Curiosity is, of course, fundamental, as is a thoughtful turn of mind, matched with some humility against presumptions of infallibility.

—William E. Colby, “Recruitment, Training and Incentives for Better Analysis”

S
oon after signing up for this life, my eye happened to fall on a manual used by Agency recruiters. It said that the type of young person they were looking for must be of above-average intelligence and intellectual curiosity, sociable and extroverted; good at both oral and written communication; have an interest in international affairs; be fluent in at least one foreign language; have “a preference for unstructured, even ambiguous job situations”; have a desire for leadership and readiness “to manipulate others to achieve legitimate goals,” sound judgment, common sense, self-discipline, some experience living overseas, and “experience and ability in relating to foreign persons and cultures”; be good at role-playing; approve of what we would be doing; and not have too many ties back home in America.

To think that I might conform to that description gave me at least a moment’s pause for self-examination and a stab of chagrin. While some of these are qualities I admire, some certainly are not, and some I know myself positively to lack. It’s true, for instance, that I speak a little French by now, but leadership is the last quality I picture myself having. I had lived overseas and was free of American ties (I had stayed awhile in France after my junior year abroad, then came back to finish college in California and got an M.A. in international relations after, let’s face it, various personal screw-ups and the terminal exasperation of my relatives). I was having fun, or thought I was, but I knew my life wasn’t leading anywhere, and then, coming to the end of my rope, almost by accident I was recruited to my present job.

Though I should be too old to be a concern to my parents, I’m aware that I am one. They believe I should have found my way before this. Will she ever settle down? Will she marry? If only she would marry. If only she were happy. Their sweetness to me (when I was younger, they were firm, even harsh, about my mishaps) reveals their fear that they have a fragile being on their hands whom they must not challenge. But this is far from true.

Role-playing, manipulating others—I knew I was doing those when I agreed to visit Ian in Marrakech. I knew I planned to stay on. Ian’s invitation was opportune—my rotation in Kosovo was finishing, it could not seem more natural that I should visit him before my next move somewhere. Of course I hadn’t told him about my affiliation, if only for reasons of tact—if he knew I had other reasons for being in North Africa, that would certainly challenge the sincerity of my attachment to him. It was the one thing no one must know. Once in Marrakech, I expected to find other reasons for staying on. It would seem natural that there would be interests and useful things in Marrakech to attach myself to—a museum or charity, certain people I would meet there.

As I said, I’d met Ian in Kosovo. After my training in Virginia, I’d been sent to work in Pristina with AmerAID, an international rescue organization. That was my first cover, but of course I also actually did AmerAID work, both overt and covert. Overtly, our office packaged the food donations, coordinated the medical volunteers from Médecins sans Frontières or the Red Cross, dispatched the bundles of cleaned and sorted secondhand clothes arriving from the World Council of Churches and American civic groups, and generally assisted things (despite the disillusioned air of apologetic self‐sacrifice in AmerAID headquarters). And covertly I had a modest success, by having a correct hunch about the whereabouts of Vlad Janovic, a prominent second‐string war criminal we’d been wanting to pick up.

Now, just as I’d worked in the aid organization in Kosovo, I had a cover mission here, evaluating and preparing a report on female literacy programs for the Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative, MEPI, an umbrella grants organization I had been working for after I was first recruited. As you would hope, in a country where only half the people can read, there were a number of recent programs devoted to women reading, and my inspection work would be expected to take some months. I expected this pursuit would in itself be interesting and useful; I’d majored in social work in college and was more than competent to do evaluations of this kind. I thus had a double feeling of self-satisfaction, serving my country and doing good too.

It had surprised my family and friends that I could stick at what they saw as drab humanitarian missions, as it surprised me. Still, as they saw it, I had little else to do, hadn’t found another path, so helping others was my path; and at one time I too had really thought the secret of happiness might indeed be a life of service (though not of self-sacrifice; I had no taste for that). Service, a preoccupation with helping others, doesn’t rule out personal happiness, and I had thought it might produce it. It doesn’t seem useful to think about whether you are happy or aren’t.

People my age were in general not brought up in a tradition of service, but I suppose I was. My father is a retired air force officer, now a professor. In his last post, he’d taught at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, and then after retirement he took a civilian job at the junior college in Santa Barbara, where my mother is from. My grandmother was a candy striper at a hospital; a docent at the museum; a member of the Red Cross, the Altar Guild, and the King’s Daughters; and an election official. My mother and stepmother both have been members of Planned Parenthood, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the League to Save Lake Tahoe, the League of Women Voters, and who knows what else? Was I not in a natural progression? (But, I have to say, most of the time, growing up, I thought all of that the most total, time-wasting, bullshit optimism.)

Strange to think that now if they knew about my real job, they would object—the danger, the distant postings, and above all the taint of patriotism and conservatism and clandestine assassinations and so on, for, paradoxically—given the military background—they were nice liberal Californians, horrified by all that. What they believed was that I had taken another job with AmerAID, and even that alarmed them with its smell of government. Californians, we lacked the links to good Eastern schools and Yale and so on that would have made a spy agency a more normal option. But AmerAID was an aid organization after all, and to some extent they were relieved that I had fallen into a respectable family pattern after those early false starts.

I actually did (do) believe in serving my country, even if I haven’t lived there recently, not counting the months in Virginia. But it was there I had also come to see that it wasn’t service I was really drawn to, it was adventure, and it was in that spirit I was off on this mission, a secret mission, as all would be, with a new name, a slightly altered biography, and, fortuitously, with Ian for cover. As to my employers, I didn’t know what they saw in me, yet I was prepared to defer to them; I expected to discover, eventually, some property in myself that I would recognize as validating their view. Meantime I just felt like me, a little skeptical but willing to learn.

We had been taught that sometimes you must forget your personal history and come to live another. Sometimes you must learn not even to respond upon hearing your real name, not even by a tiny acceleration of your pulse. On the other hand, your new name must turn your head as if you’d been hearing it from the cradle. I had been given elementary Arabic, but here also with a cautionary injunction not to seem to understand it. I would learn that this injunction was not necessary: I would understand very little.

In some other respects, I can see now, I was going to Marrakech with a negative attitude. For one thing, I was a little frightened of Islam; after all that’s happened, who isn’t? Maybe Muslims themselves are afraid of it, disconcerted to find themselves prisoners of societies where even their families and people they know might turn on them and blow them up. Maybe they are too afraid to speak out, for fear of getting fatwa’d, or even beheaded, like Daniel Pearl. I thought of the many tales of girls killed by their fathers and brothers, and of how no one speaks of, or even bothers with the names of, those poor young boys strapping on their suicide belts—surely with some ambivalence? Salvation must seem so eventual when the world is here and now—what makes them do it? I keep thinking about them. Had they said good-bye to their parents? Had they recited special prayers? Did they believe them?

So now I was thinking of this poor girl Suma, who was fleeing some of the things her religion had brought down on her, oppressed like the erring girls in a film I saw, made to do laundry for terrifying, sadistic Irish nuns. Those nuns were ostensibly Christians. After what we had seen in the Balkans, I wasn’t reassured about Christians either. At one point we were taken to see the bones of the Srebrenica victims, neatly polished and bundled to be returned to their families, Muslim boys killed by Christian men. Then there are the Hindu crazies, setting fire to trains and mosques to burn alive the nonbelievers. Are there any virtuous religions? It really doesn’t seem so. It almost seems that religion makes you wicked.

5

KATOUBIA
MOSQUE
,
MARRAKECH

A stunning example of how the Moroccan architectural artistry is particularly reserved for religious buildings. Though the dars and riads and kasbahs and nomadic tents (even) all provide the architecture nerd with lots of eye candy.

—Photo caption on
political Stew
Web site

W
hile Marina Cotter was helping Suma, Tom Drill was all helpfulness to me; he heaved my suitcase onto his cart and retrieved a few parcels of his own. “I co-run a tea shop, more or less an expat hangout, heavily patronized by Brits, so I have to send for certain things from London: demerara sugar, certain kinds of tea.” He went on with these details, amiability itself, increasing my discomfort, my rising irritation at Ian.

The woman in the black chador I had seen on the plane, I now noticed, was being met by a man in the white robes and distinctive headdress of the Saudis (for I had studied the different tribal costumes, the headdresses and fashions); this explained her un‐Moroccan way of dressing—they were not Moroccans. Possibly they were tourists like me. They were standing by the baggage carousel with a huge pile of fancy luggage—Vuitton cases and duffel bags of handwoven wool. I noticed his polished Gucci loafers.

Outside, the first gust of heat rising from the paved passenger drop-off road was agreeable. Tom Drill drove a nineties Peugeot 504 diesel. The road into the city was peopled by old beige Mercedes diesel taxis, fume-emitting buses, and carts drawn by donkeys or horses, driven by white-gowned men with skinny brown legs and dusty pink heels in heelless slippers. Of the women walking along the shoulder, some were veiled, some not.

My heart rose at the exotic beauty and inaccessibility—I was in North Africa! Mules and goats! Here were the waving palms! All buildings were of rust-colored mud or stucco, the walls polished and crenellated; the curious, beautiful color was the color, I supposed, of the local earth. There had been people walking along this road for a thousand years, or maybe two thousand.

But human history changes here only slowly. It had not been a hundred years since slavery had been abolished in this country, and it was said still to go on in covert forms in the recesses of the medina and in the camps isolated in the vastness of the desert. The black Africans from the south had been, and perhaps were still, enslaved by the lighter-skinned coastal people along the Mediterranean. Now, I had read, the king was trying to liberate women, but the women walking along the road didn’t look liberated, just lethargic and timeless, with a calm that could be stupor or could be biding and waiting.

Tom asked if I’d mind if we stopped by his daughter’s school to pick her up. We parked by a mud wall. He went on foot into a warren of stalls and buildings while I waited in the car. It didn’t seem like a good place for a school. I felt my uneasiness deepen, but he came back in a minute or two with a curly-haired, dark little girl in a school uniform with an enormous backpack across her skinny shoulders. She clung to Tom’s hand, or vice versa, and was called Amelie.

We drove back onto the main road, past the walls of the medina and the minarets of the Katoubia Mosque and the Mamounia hotel. I had studied these monuments and recognized them—the tower had been there for a thousand years and, like everything else, was a fragile pinkish ocher color, the color of white buildings seen at dawn. Islam, Islam, its beauty proclaimed, and I was thrilled to think of its permanence and grandeur. “The Katoubia dates from the twelfth century,” Tom said. “You may find it hard to keep track of their Almovarid and Almovad history. They were all Berbers, not Arabs, exactly. Berbers, Arabs, and Europeans all have a history here.”

In another fifteen minutes, we had left the main road for a narrower paved road. Now we had entered the desert. “The Palmeraie,” said Tom. In contrast to the walled city, the Palmeraie was the ugliest place I had ever seen, desiccated and bare, dotted with stunted palm trees so attenuated they couldn’t even grow their fronds, just emitted stubby shoots, or maybe these had been gnawed by animals. Gashes of dry creek, perhaps the vestiges of some primitive irrigation system, cracked open the stony ground. Plastic bags and empty containers lay in the ditches along each shoulder or clotted together in a wave rolling along in the light wind, a sea of plastic. The ugliness reanimated my fears, which had been lulled by Tom’s good-natured tour‐ guide recitation of what the buildings in the city were called and where we were.

In the distance, a couple of shanty villages could be seen, and some walls that probably enclosed nicer places, houses or hotels. Their hiddenness proposed opulence, oases in the otherwise bleak desert.

I know there are people who find the desert beautiful but I wasn’t finding it so. In a few minutes more we left this road and turned down a narrow dirt driveway, past a gated arch with a sleeping boy on the stoop of its little gate house, through thickets of bougainvillea trained up the walls on either hand, and through open gates.

Now we were inside a large compound, a garden enclosed by the thick, pink adobe walls. Ian’s house stood in the middle of this space, which was perhaps as large as an acre. It was a two-story pink structure of the same adobe material, with onion‐ shaped Middle Eastern arches along the porch, which wrapped around the two sides we could see. The driveway led past the house through rather tangled, pleasant foliage, and gardeners pottered in a bed to our left. I couldn’t help but think of the moment in
Pride and Prejudice,
a movie I’d liked, where Elizabeth says her love for Mr. Darcy intensified when she saw his beautiful house and grounds.

Despite my pique at Ian’s absence at the airport, I felt excited to be about to see him. I had a clear memory, perhaps now somewhat idealized by distance and longing, of him in Pristina, his tall figure, wearing khaki work clothes that gave him a somewhat military air, and a baseball hat, like those generals who give press conferences on CNN. I had known his Kosovo incarnation was temporary, that really he was a British businessman who lived in Morocco and that he would seem different in a different context, the way people always do. But his love‐making would be the same, presumably, and his ironical manner would be the same.

We parked at the apex of the driveway and got out. I wheeled one of my bags, Tom Drill took the bigger one, and Amelie carried my purse toward the house, Tom waving off attempts by one of the gardeners to help us. We stopped at a carved wooden door heavily studded with nails, and Tom pushed a button. “Don’t mind the jungle out here,” he said. “He’s still got a lot of work to do here. Inside it’s all beauty and repose.”

After a time, the door swung slowly open and a dark head, wearing a crocheted skullcap, poked out.

“Hullo, Rashid,” Tom said in English, “here’s Miss Sawyer.” The door opened the rest of the way and we went in, Amelie and I following Tom. Then Ian appeared in the dim foyer, arms outstretched. I felt a jolt of happiness.

Ian is very English‐looking—a bit heavyset, lion-colored and handsome, hair worn longish—and his roundish face with its Byronic cleft chin in repose has an expression that can seem petulant, like that of the reprimanded soccer player who turns a suave and smiling face to the camera. To me he is always suave and smiling, but I have seen him snap at a messenger or office worker. He’s well-off, or his father is, so I had extra respect for his dedication to the work in Kosovo, his zeal for it even. Despite his disguise as a soul weighed down with the tediousness of life, he’d worked tirelessly, staying up with sick people and driving long distances to get them this or that medicine.

We’d been lovers for some months. At first, by tacit agreement it was simply to sweeten our mutual exile, but since he’d gone back to Marrakech, I’d found myself thinking about him more than I had expected, and now the sudden start of joy at seeing him surprised me.

But it was followed almost immediately with concerns. I felt rather dazed. Part of this first reaction to seeing him was due to the fact that he seemed different, more imposing and in command; another part of it was due to my amazement at the grandeur and size of his house. He had told me only that he had a large old Moroccan house that he had restored. Here, away from the grim Balkan winter, he seemed more substantial and more genial, a master and host, relaxed, his collarless shirt untucked, wearing jeans. I don’t know what I had expected.

He kissed me rather formally on one cheek in the English fashion, not on both in the French way as he might have in Pristina, nor the ardent way he would have kissed me in private.

“My dearest Lu, I’m so glad you’re here. You’ve forgiven me for not being at the airport? At least I sent the charming Tom. If this dog of a tree man, who’s stiffed me three times already, hadn’t chosen the moment of your flight—you see how crucial is the tree.” He was speaking of a gnarled, many-rooted cypress tree that dominated the space by the door. A brown man in a blue robe was painting a white ring around the trunk. “It’s more than a century old.” Ian kept my hand and slung an arm around Tom. “Thanks, friend, for fetching my fetching guest. Hullo, Amelie. Would you like to see the baby goat?” He smiled at Tom’s little girl, who plainly knew and liked him. A little goat was tethered near the driveway, and Amelie ran to pet it.

A little farther off at the side of the house I now saw a swimming pool, with tables and lounges, and several people in bathing suits, seemingly dead, lying with towels over their faces. A very red man came to life, got up, waved cheerily, and crept off without coming over for an introduction. I was taken aback to see other people—was this a sort of hotel, perhaps not Ian’s house at all? Its size, and the presence of strangers, violated my idea of the love nest I was looking forward to. I had imagined us in passionate isolation, interrupting passages of love at intervals for touristic expeditions during which he would show me the marketplace, the famous square of Jemaa el Fna, the museums and public buildings, the ancient mosques and tombs of the Safavid kings.

He kept one arm around me and with the other pounded Tom in a comradely way, and drew us farther into the hall, through a comfortable-looking living room furnished with several sofas and wicker chairs, and out into a vast inner court open to the sky, with another arcaded porch shading the walls of the enclosure. It was indeed a realm of beauty, pinkish ocher exterior walls decorated with blue and white tiles of intricate design, and another immense tree that presided over the space. Orange trees in huge pots and eucalyptus scented the air, and a little fountain plashed in the center, near other tables and chairs.

“It’s all so much more beautiful than I’d imagined,” I said. “So seldom in life do things exceed expectations.” He laughed at this sententious remark and said I was too young to be so cynical. He’s a decade older than I.

“I suppose it’s the mark of an optimistic nature at that, always having expectations too high to be exceeded,” he conceded. He took my breath away with the warmth of his smile.

I was a little off balance. I was prepared to forget my personal history, but I wasn’t so sure I could obey the instruction about emotional involvement. Seeing Ian again, I knew I was emotionally involved with him. But I also knew from experience that I could handle it. The great love of my life was behind me; this was something lighter and more delightful. I had reasoned that if you’re going to have a fling, a little respite from the gruesome realties in the Balkans, you had to be involved to a certain extent; your heart had to be in it, had to flutter a little. It remained to be seen whether the same attraction, the same fascination, would still be there in Marrakech, but from first indications, it was.