The Caliph's House (11 page)

“Moroccan mechanics are the worst villains alive,” Kamal said. “Most of them would kill you without a second thought.”

“Are they all villains?” I asked.

Kamal lit a cigarette and nodded in the smoke. “All of them,” he confirmed. “All except one.”

He jabbed the glowing end of his Marlboro at the man with murderous eyes.

“Hussein here is the only one you can trust,” he said.

“How did you find him?”

“He'd lost everything at cards,” he said. “His family were staring starvation in the eye. Then my father set him up in business. There's no way he'd ever stab us in the back.”

As the mechanic's cruel eyes inspected the engine, I asked about being stabbed in the back.

“It doesn't take much,” said Kamal knowingly. “Someone may be jealous 'cause you've got more than them, or they could have a grudge against someone in your family. If that happens, you're in trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“You might think Casablanca's modern with its chichi stores and ritzy cars,” he said, “but under that façade it's raw. It's African. It's tribal. Never forget that. Slip up, and you'll have the tribe at your heels.”

I made a note to bear the warning in mind.

The mechanic's head reappeared. His dark eyes squinted at Kamal and his voice cackled some words.

“Just as I thought,” Kamal said.

“What?”

“The engine doesn't match the car. This Jeep's three years old and the junk under the hood's ten years if it's a day.”

Kamal took out another cigarette and slid the tip of his tongue down the edge.

“You took your eye off the ball,” he said. “The last owner sold the real engine on the side for a load of cash, and he sold you this heap of junk.”

He lit the cigarette and exhaled hard.

“It's a classic engine swap,” he said.

“Engine swap?”

“Sure. It's the oldest trick in the book.”

         

THE UNITED STATES HAD
made a very great impact on Kamal. His return to Morocco in the months before the second Gulf conflict required readjustment. In the States, he had been used to getting things done fast and efficiently. He perfected the arts of wheeling, dealing, talking fast, and covering a lot of ground. Back in Morocco he found life was couched in inertia, as it has been for a thousand years. As I had discovered, if you didn't move forward like a rampaging bull, nothing ever got done at all. Even then, as you charged headlong through the day, you had to keep both eyes open wide.

“Take your eye off the ball,” said Kamal often, “and you'll lose everything.”

I was impressed by his foresight, especially as I hadn't yet told him of the problems with the neighbor and the missing paperwork. When I did sketch out the situation, he didn't seem surprised.

“That house was empty for years,” he said. “It's amazing the wolves didn't rip it up.”

“The Jinns kept them away,” I said sarcastically.

“You may be right,” he said. “I've asked people in the bidonville about Dar Khalifa. Everyone talks about it. They say it's infested with Jinns, hundreds of them. You can't imagine their fear. Without the Jinns it would have been stolen years ago.”

         

MY CONVERSATIONS WITH HICHAM
the stamp collector continued. Each week, I would turn up at his shack, step across the three-legged dog, and barter a handful of postage stamps for conversation. We talked about his childhood, and about the years he had spent on the road selling scrap metal from a donkey cart. We talked about Morocco's past, the future, and about the dreams of youth.

Hicham was the kind of man who liked a conversation to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. He didn't approve of chatter for chatter's sake. I got the feeling he took our conversations all the more seriously because they were his side of a strange business contract. He weighed his words against the value of the postage stamps I brought, fragments of colored paper glued to the top right edge of an envelope.

One week I asked if he believed in Jinns.

“Of course I do,” he said without a thought. “They are all around us. Their world shapes our own.”

“Do you like them?”

The old man looked at me with disbelief. “If they could, they would slit our throats,” he said. He scooped a stamp album from the floor and opened it.

“Would they kill us all?”

“Yes, that's why we protect ourselves!” he exclaimed. “We say
Bismillah,
‘in the name of God,' before beginning an action.”

That explained why I heard the phrase a thousand times a day. Moroccans utter it before getting into a car, before eating, drinking, even before they sit down.

“Our Jinn is called Qandisha,” I said. “He's got the guardians terrified. It's making life difficult.”

“They have a good reason to have fear,” said Hicham, arranging his stamps. “I've heard Qandisha's very strong, and likes human children. Your children are not safe. They could be snatched at any moment. That is why the guardians are so frightened.”

Hicham said Jinns were known for stealing human children in the night, sometimes substituting a Jinn-child in place of the one they take.

“The Jinn-child grows up like one of your own,” he said. “You don't suspect anything. Then one night he shakes off his human disguise, rears up as a hideous creature three hundred meters high, and swallows your family whole. Believe me, I tell you the truth.”

“What can you do to prevent it?”

The old man put the stamp album down. “There's one way,” he said in a grave voice.

“How?”

“You can trick the Jinns. You put mannequins in the children's beds, and tell your children to sleep in the oven each night. Do that, and you will all be safe.”

         

WHENEVER I BEGGED KAMAL
to take me to the bath shop, he would insist I was in far too much of a hurry. A bath was a finishing touch, he would say, and we were nowhere near ready for finishing touches. He was right. Throughout the renovations at the Caliph's House, I had a hard time with perspective. I am good at grasping details, but find it near impossible to envisage a project as a whole. I had filled an entire storeroom at Dar Khalifa with finishing touches. They were ready and waiting. There was a championship tennis net, although the tennis court was wasteland covered in rubble, broken bottles, and rotting rats. Beside the tennis net stood a stack of thirty framed paintings of Indian maharajahs ready for the dining room walls, and near to them was a trunk full of cushion covers, and a second brimming with light fixtures, bath soaps, and telephones. But the worst finishing touch of all was a twenty-foot container of Indian furniture I had ordered a few months before. It was on the high seas en route to Casablanca.

         

A GENUINE ENTHUSIASM TO
make use of my finishing touches coaxed me to call the architect. I pleaded with him to send more men, men with the ability to finish the job. I told him about the ship's container filled with furniture that was about to arrive, and about the thousand final details ready for use. As far as he was concerned, I had become just another angry voice on the end of his cellular phone, an angry voice stupid enough to have paid in advance. During our brief conversation, I sensed the architect had moved on, to new, richer pickings of another foreign client.

“Don't worry, my old friend,” he said cheerily. “Just relax. The work is wonderful.”

“When will they start laying the floor tiles?”

The architect shouted that his car was heading into a tunnel. His phone went dead.

         

THE NEXT MORNING A
team of shabby artisans arrived at the house. They weren't wearing suits like the others. As a result, they appeared rather underdressed. I asked the foreman who they were.

“The tile men for the floors,” he said.

My dream was to restore the Caliph's House to its former glory, to a time when it would have been decorated in traditional Arab styles. The wrecking crew had assisted in stripping out any trace of European detail. On this blank canvas, I planned to reinstate the ancient crafts of Morocco—terracotta tiled floors from Fès, known as bejmat; fragments of colored mosaics called zelij, and tadelakt, the fabulous marble-dust-and-egg-white plaster from Marrakech.

As a foreigner learning about Morocco, you quickly get a sense that the place is a treasure trove of tradition, bursting with artistic skill. Western bookstores overflow with beautifully produced photographic books showcasing the arts and crafts of the kingdom. It's easy to imagine that everyone is making use of these age-old crafts, just as they have done for a thousand years. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For generations, the royal family of Morocco have patronized the kingdom's crafts. In succession, they have created astonishing mosques and public gardens and sumptuous palaces. By funding such projects, they have kept the flame of apprenticeship alive and ensured that the traditions are not lost—as they have been across most of the Arab world.

While they revere their cultural heritage, the majority of Moroccans these days go for modern decor. They embellish their houses with wall-to-wall carpets and glittering factory-made tiles, with mass-produced lighting and prefab furniture. Their homes are cozy and easy to clean. And, as I was finding out, the new decor from the West saved them plenty of money and time.

         

THAT WEEK WHEN I
found Hicham Harass sitting alone in his shack behind the mosque, he was despondent. I asked what was wrong.

“Life is wrong,” he said grimly. “My son has been killed. He was about your age. He was so alive, so full of life. Then in an instant a car swerved and my boy had the life sucked from his lungs. He is dead. Nothing. Just dead.”

Hicham wiped a hand to the tears. They say the only time an Arab man can weep with honor is at the death of his son. I leaned over and held his hand in mine. He reached out and clasped my shoulder.

“We will talk soon,” he said.

         

THE MEN WHO ARRIVED
to lay the terracotta floors heaved twenty sacks into the salon and threw them on the floor. The sound of tiles shattering echoed around the unfinished rooms. The artisans declared that they were master craftsmen, the sons of master craftsmen, the grandsons of master craftsmen. Each one, they boasted, was from a line of craftsmen twenty generations long. I was delighted to hear it, and I welcomed them with small patterned glasses of extra-sweet mint tea. The aged foreman seemed unhappy at my display of hospitality. He marched over, wrenched the glasses away, and snarled at the newcomers in Arabic. Then he bore the tray of tea to his own grubby suit-clad team across the room and lurched over to kiss me on the cheeks.

“You're going to have more than problems,” said Kamal. “You're going to have meltdown.”

         

A FEW DAYS AFTER
the death of Hicham Harass's son, the old stamp collector called unexpectedly at the house. He was dressed in his formal wear—tweed jacket and faded cloth cap. I welcomed him inside and dusted off a green plastic chair in the freezing salon. We sat quietly for about ten minutes. I didn't know what to say. I am awkward when it comes to offering condolences. Sometimes silence with a friend is more memorable than the most animated conversation. Hicham glanced up at me once or twice and strained to smile.

“You may think me strange,” he said at length. “But I have a request.”

“Of course, anything.”

“I hoped I could hold little Timur, as I held my son so many years ago.”

I went into our room where Timur was sleeping, fished him out from the cot, and handed him to the old man. He cupped the baby to his heart and closed his eyes.

“You must value every moment,” he said.

         

THAT NIGHT, THE NEW
moon was sighted in a cloudless sky, and the holy month of Ramadan began. For Muslims, observing Ramadan is one of the central pillars of faith. It is a time of prayer and strict fasting during daylight hours, when the gates of Heaven are open and those of Hell are shut. During Ramadan, Muslims are forbidden to tell a lie or to think unclean thoughts, and their actions must be cloaked in purity at all times.

No one living in Morocco can escape the holy month, and nowhere is the contrast with regular life greater than in Casablanca. Many of the city's young women preferred to swan about with faces caked in makeup, their youthful bodies stuffed into the skimpiest outfits imaginable. They would spend all day lounging in street-side cafés, preening their hair, gossiping, and smoking imported cigarettes. With the shroud of Ramadan hanging over them, they were forced to do away with makeup and the racy clothing and move around in billowing jelabas, their tasseled hoods dangling down behind. During the day, the cafés were closed, and smoking was forbidden for all.

The French expat, François, had been quick to warn me on the hazards of Ramadan. He said it was thirty days of anguish, when every Moroccan was twice as grumpy as the day before. But worst of all, he said, was that nothing got done.

“What about the building work?” I asked limply.

“Forget it!” he yelled. “You might as well pack up and go home.”

“But this is my home.”

“Well,” said François acerbically, “stay home!”

Like everyone else, Kamal was abstaining from the vices that formed the bedrock of his life. He wasn't drinking, and the cloud of cigarette smoke that normally followed him was gone. He was abstaining from food and drink from before dawn until dusk, and was trying his level best to entertain clean thoughts. At the start of the holy month, he arrived at the Caliph's House in a chauffeured black Mercedes limousine. It had yellow diplomatic license plates and a miniature flagpole on the offside wing.