The Caliph's House (12 page)

“I called in a favor,” he said by way of explanation.

“Who from?”

“From the ambassador of Mauritania.”

I asked Kamal for a rundown on Ramadan.

“It's the lack of sleep that gets to you first,” he said. “You eat dinner at midnight, sleep for three hours, then go to the mosque, eat a mouthful of food, sleep a little more, and then get up.”

“Ramadan's going to finish off the workers,” I said.

“It does have some advantages,” Kamal replied.

“Like what?”

“Like when you want to buy a bath.”

         

THE BLACK LIMOUSINE ROLLED
up the hill away from the ocean and turned right toward the sprawling new residential zone of Hay Hassani. Hundreds of plain, whitewashed apartment blocks lingered there, crisscrossed with washing lines and filled with people who had realized their universal dream.

“My uncle was mayor of this area,” said Kamal as the stretched Mercedes swerved to miss the potholes. “He built the entire place from scratch.”

“What kind of people live here?”

“People who have broken free and escaped the slums.”

The limousine veered left off the main drag and descended a slope. We passed a man with a homemade cart on which was heaped a pyramid of odds and ends. There was a coffeemaker and a tangle of ropes, a crate of onions and a box of springs. At the apex of the pyramid was a large glass fish tank. It caught my eye. The tank was still filled with splashing water and fearful fish.

On one side of the street stood more low carts arranged in a line. At each one, energetic men were touting bruised vegetables and fruit. On the far side of the street lay a flea market of astonishing size. Kamal ordered the chauffeur to stop. We got down and he led the way into the souq. Every inch of the place was taken up with secondhand bric-a-brac. There were heaps of televisions with their guts ripped out, stacks of smashed VCRs twenty feet tall, industrial welding gear, and giant balls of barbed wire. There were bales of old magazines, too, a thousand doorframes and toilet bowls, spiral staircases, marble fountains, and mounds of old shoes.

I voiced surprise at the sheer quantity of stuff on offer. Kamal motioned for me to keep silent.

“Speak English,” he said, “and the prices will quadruple.”

“But we don't need any of this stuff,” I said.

We turned down an alley and walked through cool shadows thrown by what looked like a row of ships' boilers. At the end of the track was a mountain of rotting bread. Rats the size of house cats were running over it, gorging themselves. Beyond the bread lay a cornucopia of old clothes, more shoes, and a sea of broken glass. We kept going. More televisions, more bread, boots, and magazines, then, at the end of the alley, we spotted an elderly man asleep. He was lying back in a rolltop bath, with a ginger cat asleep on his chest.

The bath was French cast iron, with a slow curve to the back and attractive clawed feet. It was Art Deco, about eighty years old. In London such a gem would have been in the window of a swish store on the King's Road.

I whispered for Kamal to check the price. He tugged at the salesman's sleeve. The cat woke up and flexed out its claws. There were groans of pain followed by conversation. The salesman was tired, hungry, and wanted to go back to sleep. He asked us to come back in the night. But, as Kamal was about to demonstrate, the one advantage of Ramadan was that Moroccan traders had no energy for the fierce bargaining that has made them famous. At the same time they were desperate for cash. During Ramadan nagging wives nag all the more.

“The price is two hundred dirhams,” the man croaked, the lids hanging heavy over his grapelike eyes.

“I'll give you half that,” said Kamal.

“No,” said the salesman, “I always charge two hundred for baths like this.”

Kamal nudged me to hand over the money. The salesman breathed in deep, swished the cat from his chest, and clambered out of the tub. He kissed the bills and thanked God. The bath was loaded onto a cart. Three men set off pushing it toward Dar Khalifa. We walked with them, with the Mercedes crawling behind. The sun was searing down, and the men pushing the cart were very soon drenched in sweat. After thirty minutes we were nearing the house. I was startled by the sound of small feet shuffling behind us. It was the tradesman who had sold us the bath. He was extremely agitated.

“Stop! Stop! Please stop!” he called.

“What is it?”

The man waved a fist of worn bills. I prepared myself to hear we had cheated him.

“I had to come after you,” he said. “I ran all the way. I had to stop you.”

“Why?”

The salesman seemed embarrassed. “I told you the bath should cost two hundred dirhams,” he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve, “but that was not true. They are always a hundred dirhams. So please, take back this hundred dirhams and forgive me.”

“Why the sudden honesty?”

“It's Ramadan,” said the man, “and I'm forbidden to lie.”

E
IGHT

Rain came, wind came, a lot of troubles came.

AT THE END OF THE FIRST
week of Ramadan, I received another postcard from Pete. His spidery black writing announced that progress was being made.
The father's telling me to convert
, he wrote.
He wants me to have the chop below the belt. He says he'll do it himself. He's got a sharp penknife. It's a small sacrifice if it means I can be with Yasmine
.

The thought of adult circumcision being performed by a future father-in-law put me off my lunch. I was in the kitchen, crouching under the dining table, with a plate of cold couscous on my knees. The house was full of workers. They leered poisonously at anyone who entered the kitchen during daylight. As they rightly knew, the kitchen meant eating, and eating during Ramadan was a blasphemous act beyond all comprehension. The workers noticed that I went in and out of the kitchen frequently. They had taken to peering in through the windows. I was quite happy to be open—to tell them that I was not observing the fast, but they didn't want to hear the truth.

         

THE WORKMEN HAD SLID
into a Ramadan routine of doing even less work than usual. They reeled about, their faces rapt with self-pity, hoping to win sympathy. François called me on the Thursday of the first week. There was an urgent tone in his voice.

“I have to warn you,” he said, “you've got to tread carefully in Ramadan. Don't push people around. They could snap and run amok. You see, they're not getting any nicotine. Their chemicals are all screwed up.”

I could make out shouting in the background, as if a disgruntled employee was picking a fight. François cried out once, then again, before the line cut.

The bejmat team had gone against my wishes and started to lay tiles in the library. I had asked them to begin anywhere but there, as it was the last room we needed finished. As the weeks of renovation passed, I learned that ignoring the client's wishes was a method of control perfected by Moroccan artisans, as it was by the guardians and everyone else.

Every so often, I would walk past the library and glance at the zigzagged tiles. The workers were laying beige bejmat, made from Fès clay in a herringbone design. The pattern is known locally as palmeraie, as in the zigzags created when palm fronds are laid one against the next. The artisans had started at the far end of the library, a room fifty feet in length. The original floor had been torn up and a new foundation of cement slapped down. A great heap of terracotta tiles had been towered up in one corner. I noticed that many of them were badly chipped or broken in half. The system seemed to lack the precision more usually associated with Moroccan tilework. Handfuls of the rectangular tiles were grabbed from the heap, casually tossed down into the cement, and poked into a crude herringbone arrangement.

I stopped the team leader and asked him about quality control, or the apparent lack of it.

He jabbed an index finger at the work, then gave an assertive thumbs-up.

“Très bien, non?”

I shook my head. “
Non, pas bien.”

The leader thumped both hands to his chest, like a primate attracting a mate.
“Je suis un expert,”
he said.

I am naturally a calm person, but at that moment I felt inspired to rip up the tiles and hurl them across the room. But François's caution held me back. I fought the anger, and instead of shouting, I blew a kiss at the artisan, backed out of the library, and phoned the architect.

“The work's not good,” I said coldly. “It's not good at all.”

“My friend,” came the silken reply, “trust me. We are brothers.”

Again, another unforeseen road tunnel, and the line went dead.

         

THE NEXT DAY A
new team arrived: six men with dark, morose eyes, torn clothes, and matching maroon hats made from felt. They said that they had been sent to prepare samples of tadelakt, the plaster for the walls. After a few hours, they had pasted up a dozen swatches in what was to be the children's nursery. Their work looked good at first, applied with broad, flat trowels, like frosting on Christmas cake. But by the next morning, the plaster was cracked with a thousand miniature lines. Kamal shouted at me when he saw it.

“You have to fire the architect,” he said. “You need craftsmen, and he's sending you clowns.”

“Teething problems,” I replied. “He'll sort them out.”

Kamal grabbed my arm and marched me into the library. The workers were sprawling on the floor telling jokes. Some of them had taken off their trousers.

“Look at this work,” he said. “Ariane could lay better bejmat than that!”

He hadn't been working with me long, but I could see Kamal was the sort of person who was always right. It was in his character to be so. You could fight his opinions, but in the end you found yourself giving in. However optimistic I tried to be, I saw that the architect's men were not up to scratch.

“Fire the architect,” Kamal said again.

“But I paid in advance.”

“Walk away from it,” he said. “Risk not getting the money back and you will be stronger for it.”

I dialed the architect's office. His silky voice cooed pleasantries.

“You're fired,” I said. “Your men are clowns and I'm not running a circus.”

The architect choked on his excuses. Kamal snatched the phone, barked, “We're going into a tunnel,” and hung up. Fifteen minutes later he had rounded up the three teams of workers and their motley possessions and had routed them from the building. As they ran down the lane fearfully, some clutching their trousers to their chests, with Kamal chasing them, I said a prayer. I prayed that goodness would emerge from the chaos.

         

DURING RAMADAN THE SHANTYTOWN
became more lively in the night. To say there was a carnival atmosphere would be an exaggeration. But the usual stalls—peddling thirdhand clothes and vegetables—were joined by half a dozen more. An old woman started selling pink boiled sweets in clusters of three. Beside her sat a man with a crate of chickens, a scale, and a knife. You chose your chicken by weight, its head was then lopped off, and it fell into a box on the ground. The sea of blood attracted the limping dogs.

One morning a donkey hauled a well-built trailer into the slum and deposited it opposite the mosque. It was painted white, with go-faster stripes on the sides. A crowd of children gathered expectantly to see what tempting sweetmeats would be offered. Two men jumped from the trailer and swished them away with sticks. They had long black beards, teaseled out at the edges, and they wore the flowing robes of the Arabian Gulf. I asked the secondhand shoe seller about the newcomers and their trailer. He seemed very agitated.

“Go to your house,” he said, “lock the door, and don't think about those men. They're trouble.”

“Who are they?”

The man stuffed the assortment of shoes into a sack and staggered away. A moment later I saw the sweet-selling woman hurry off home. Ten minutes after that the bidonville had become a ghost town. I went back to Dar Khalifa and asked Hamza what was going on.

“They're bad men,” he said. “They'll cut out your tongue and feed it to the dogs.”

“Why would they do such a thing?”

Hamza rubbed his coarse hands together. “We are not rich,” he said. “But we are Muslims, real Muslims. We read the Qur'an, and we understand it. The words of Allah are clear to us. But those other people . . .” The guardian stopped mid-sentence. He breathed in, then out in a deep sigh. “Those other people are hijacking our religion. They don't understand the Qur'an.”

“Where are they from?”

“From the Arabian Gulf. They come here from time to time and try to win supporters for their vision.”

“What is their vision?”

“Islamic anarchy.”

         

WITH NO CAFFEINE TO
power his bloodstream, Kamal's Ramadan mornings were almost unendurable. I could hardly remember ever seeing a man so despondent. But as a problem solver par excellence, he came up with an ingenious way of kick-starting the day. The secret was adrenaline. Each morning, after he picked me up, Kamal steered his cousin's pickup to the top of Anfa hill and pulled over to the side to mutter a short prayer. There was a clear view down to Maarif and to the old city. I would take in the sights as Kamal prepared for the contest. Swelling his lungs with air, he would rev the engine until the car was consumed in a thundercloud of oily diesel fumes. Against a backdrop of noise and smoke, he would jerk out the clutch. The tired old pickup would be propelled downhill. Kamal's method of producing maximum adrenaline was to swerve the wheel to the left. In an instant the odds of survival were slashed as we fought to dodge the stream of oncoming traffic. After a mile, Kamal would be drenched in sweat, panting, whooping with elation, ready to face the day.

         

THE HOUSE WAS SILENT
. I wandered through it, depressed beyond words. The workmen had broken everything their unskilled hands had touched. The wiring and the plumbing were a disaster, the arches were a mess, and the terracotta tiles looked as if a monkey had laid them. I didn't understand. On television and in books, other people managed to renovate houses effortlessly. For them, there was nothing to it. They didn't have problems with slothful, ghoulish workmen. Their laborers were always cheery, fresh-faced, and incapable of making a mistake.

Kamal arrived in the evening. He said in Morocco only fools worked during the day, that all the serious employment was done at night, especially during the weeks of Ramadan.

“What about office hours?” I said.

“Pah! I never meet people in offices,” he said curtly.

“Why not?”

“Too many ears.”

I asked him how we could get new workers, men with the skill necessary to turn the house around.

“Don't be in a rush,” said Kamal. “If you rush, you'll fall into the hole.”

“Where's the hole?”

“It's all around you.”

         

THE NEXT DAY, KAMAL
borrowed the Mercedes limousine again. We drove across Casablanca in search of a new engine for my Jeep. It was a cool, bright day, with a strong breeze chasing in from the west. I could smell winter approaching. The only consolation was that by now London would be in the grip of black ice and freezing fog.

Kamal told me that to get an engine on the cheap, we would have to tell the vultures. Only the vultures, he said darkly, knew where to look.

“Tell them what you want, and they'll get it,” he said.

“How do they do that?”

“They have their methods. If you have the cash to pay, they'll run a car off the road and track what's left to a scrap yard.”

“That sounds illegal to me,” I said. “In any case, I don't have much cash.”

Kamal clicked his tongue. “Don't worry,” he said, “I know a vulture with a conscience.”

Far from the palm-edged avenues of the Corniche, we came to a fearful, ramshackle place. The sky was drab and gray, even though it was only late morning; the tin-roofed buildings were masked in decades of grime. The road had been torn up, and the smell of raw sewage hung in the air, a warning to the honest to stay away. The place was an automobile graveyard. They lay everywhere, carved up and contorted, ripped down the welding lines, despised heaps of steel.

From time to time a man would descend from the mountain of wrecks, clasping a trophy—a steering wheel, part of an engine, a fragment of indescribable metal. He would hand it to another man, who would count out a stack of tattered bills and leave with the trophy. We approached cautiously. My eyes were streaming from the rank smell of sewage. Kamal asked one of the vultures a question. The man pointed to the left, to a squat shed made from beaten sheets of tin. We went over. Another man came out and kissed Kamal three times on each cheek. He was average height, with a thick mane of orange hair and long sideburns that met beneath his chin. He was the vulture with a conscience.

Kamal described what we needed, stressing that the engine had to be in good condition. He didn't mention our budget. When I asked him about this on the way home, he said: “In the States, the first thing they ask about is the price. How much is this? What does that cost? But in Morocco, the very last thing you talk about is money. First you choose the thing you want to buy. You make sure it's just right. Then you fix the price.”

The system seemed back to front.

“How do you know if you can afford it?” I asked.

“You don't,” Kamal replied. “But that's what bargaining's for.”

         

AT THE HOUSE, HAMZA
and Osman were pacing up and down waiting for me. They said that there was something important for me to attend to.