The Caliph's House (22 page)

“In 1960,” I said.

“Yes, it was in January 1960,” the countess said distantly. “She was so beautiful. I have never known a woman quite like her.”

“You knew her?”

“Of course I knew Bobo,” she said, laughing.

The countess explained how she had met my grandparents before the war in Vienna, where her husband was ambassador. They traveled together through Persia and Afghanistan, and shared a fascination for the underbelly of the lands through which they passed.

“Your grandfather taught us so many things,” the countess said, “but the thing that affected me most was his advice to seek out what is not immediately seen. He said that on the surface, the carrot is a mere tuft of green, but under the ground there's a root waiting to be found.”

The countess sipped her tea.

“Ikbal was a close friend and confidant to Nadir Shah of Afghanistan,” she said, “and to Atatürk of Turkey, and to the Aga Khan. He moved in high circles, especially here in Morocco. But he was happiest when away from the limelight. He liked to sit with the shopkeeper opposite his house and chat about life. He always told me to meet ordinary people. ‘The ordinary world,' he would say, ‘is complete.' ”

The maid limped in with an apricot flan.

Countess de Longvic cut me a slice.

“I used to go to Tangier every month,” she said. “I stayed at the Minzeh, and would stroll down the hill to rue de la Plage. Ikbal had employed a guard, a Pashtun whom he had brought from the Hindu Kush. He wore a great white turban, Afghan clothes, and jabbed his ancient gun at anyone who passed.”

She paused for a moment, narrowed her eyes, and smiled.

“Inside, the terrace was covered in nasturtiums, scented jasmine, and mimosas,” she said slowly. “Ikbal would sit in the shade, writing letters or translating Sufi poetry. He always spent the mornings alone. Then, at lunch, he ate couscous with hot lime pickle. He forced any guest who joined him to smother their food in it as well.”

I said that I had recently visited the Villa Andalus.

“Sometimes I pass it,” the countess said gently. “I am curious, but I never ring the bell. The past is best left to itself. I find that when it touches the present, it vanishes like a forgotten dream.”

“In his journals, he wrote a lot about his maid,” I said.

“Afifa,” the countess replied. “She was treacherous at the end, as was the Dervish.”

“Dervish?”

“The old man who lived in the garden.”

“Who was he?”

“He had supposedly seen your grandfather in a dream,” said Countess de Longvic. “He was a Berber from the mountains. Ikbal took him in and let him live in the garden shed. He was there for years, distilling a medicine from the juice of the cactus plants. Sometimes he would come into the villa, bow down and kiss our hands. Ikbal begged him not to. He said that we were all equal before God.”

I listened to the old lady's stories for two hours, but she did not mention the Caliph's House. At last, I couldn't stand it any longer.

“How do you know Dar Khalifa?” I asked.

The countess pressed her fingertips together. “I will tell you,” she said, taking a deep breath, exhaling it in a sigh. “It was 1963 and the Cold War was at its height. My husband had died suddenly in Paris. He was so young. I was broken by it and needed to get away. Then in June that year an old friend in our diplomatic corps asked me to come to Casablanca. He wanted some information about a Russian company that had opened here. To the French, it sounded like a front for Russian espionage.

“I had not been to Casablanca before. The city was quite different then. Morocco had just broken free from France. The old Art Deco homes were in pristine condition, the streets bustling with people and European cars. I began to make contact with the Russian company, and to get to know the staff. They manufactured plastics. But of course that was just a façade. The firm's chief was called Sergey, and he lived in Ain Diab.”

The countess stood up and walked to the window.

“He lived at Dar Khalifa,” she said.

“A Russian spy lived in my house?”

“It sounds exotic,” said the countess wistfully, “but it was not unusual for the time.”

         

BACK AT THE HOUSE
there was a trail of fresh blood. It led from the garden door to the main corridor, through the salon, and into the kitchen. I followed it with mounting concern. At the end of the trail was a chair, and sitting on it was the Bear. He held up a bloodied thumb.

“What happened?”

“Bad things,” he said.

In the time I had spent chatting with the countess, a succession of events had filled the guardians with a new, terrible fear. The gardener had fallen from his ladder while pruning the dead fronds of the highest date palm. Miraculously, he escaped uninjured. Then the Bear had cut his thumb on a rusty spike, and a large chunk of plaster had fallen from the verandah roof, narrowly missing Hamza's head. When I met the guardians for their evening report, they were severely agitated.

“I thought there was
baraka,
” I said. “I thought I had
baraka
.”

“We were wrong,” said Osman. “We thought you had it, but we were very wrong.”

“How do you know there's no
baraka
?”

“There was a sign,” said Hamza.

“It was clear as day,” Osman said, wincing.

“What was it?”

The Bear lurched forward. He was holding a bucket covered by a board. He pulled the board. Inside, there was a snake. It was small, jade green, and was wriggling furiously.

“How could a snake get over the fence?” I said.

“Exactly,” said Hamza. “There was no way in.”

“Yes, there was no way in,” confirmed the Bear.

“So?”

“So it was here all along, living here for years with its nest of snakes. Maybe they got in before the house was built.”

I didn't follow. “What does the snake have to do with
baraka
?”

“If there had been
baraka,
” said Osman, “the snake would have died. But you have seen it is alive, protected by the Jinns.”

I felt the progress made with the pink slime and talk of
baraka
had been real. We had been doing so well. But suddenly the guardians were charging off in the wrong direction. I begged them to believe in
baraka
again.

“We believe in it, of course,” said Hamza. “We just do not believe it is here.”

         

IT WAS LATE FEBRUARY
and there was no sign of the decorating work ever being finished. Some days I would pace up and down, tearing out my hair, shouting at anyone who would listen. On others I would crouch in the kitchen, dreaming I was far, far away. I felt as if wolves had torn me to pieces, chewed my flesh, and sucked the marrow from my bones. There was nothing left to devour.

Kamal said that in Morocco if you pushed someone to get on with the job, they would think you were desperate.

“But I am desperate,” I said.

“Well, keep it to yourself,” he replied.

The Caliph's House had stalled. Any momentum we had ever earned was spent. The workers had come to understand that their employer's bark was far worse than his bite, and they were taking full advantage. They began to act like British workmen—arriving late in the morning and leaving straight after lunch. Then they asked my wife to make them tea and they stubbed their cigarettes out in the empty cups. After that they stopped coming at all. I asked Kamal to get them back.

“You've lost their respect,” he said. “There's nothing you can do.”

It was unlike Kamal to be defeated. I wondered if he was cashing in on my misfortune. Instead of doing anything about it, I went to the kitchen and slouched in a heap. At that moment the phone rang. It was François, the French expat. I hadn't heard from him in weeks.

“Been away in the Gulf,” he said. “They're bastards out there! Fanatics, that's what they are. You can't even get a drink. Can you believe it, a land without wine?”

In the next sentence I expected François to condemn Morocco, as he usually did. But he didn't. Instead, he lavished the kingdom with praise.

“You don't know how good we've got it here,” he said. “The people are saints. Saints, I tell you!”

“But they never finish anything,” I said despondently. “And now my workers are walking all over me.”

François cackled. “They're good people,” he said warmly.

“I thought you hated them.”

“Are you mad?” he said. “I love them.”

         

AT THE END OF
the week, all the workmen arrived at Dar Khalifa. My spirits lifted. I asked Kamal if he had cajoled them to come. He replied that he had not, that they had another motive.

“It's Eid next week,” he said.

“So?”

“So they want
baksheesh
.”

There is no time less attractive to be an employer in Morocco than at Eid. Whether you like it or not, you are expected to dish out an entire week's pay as a bonus. In return, everyone takes an extra week off and claims their normal salary at the end of it. As well as handing out tips to the workers, I was coerced into providing an extravagant feast. The craftsmen warned there might be problems finishing the job if they failed to get enough couscous and lamb.

“They're not going to finish anyway,” I said, “so why bother to give in to their demands?”

“You don't understand them,” said Kamal.

         

EVERY SECOND DAY WE
would go to the port. Kamal would slip inside and negotiate with the customs men, leaving me with the one-eyed snail seller. Over the weeks, I learned more about snails than any man should ever know. Whenever I begged him to let me slink into the port with him, Kamal refused. If the officials caught sight of me, he said, we would never get the container out. As if the situation wasn't already bad enough, word came that my second container had arrived from London, filled with books.

“Now the real problems begin,” said Kamal.

“They're just old books.”

“We're going to have the censorship office on our backs,” he moaned.

“There's nothing to censor, believe me,” I said. “No pictures of naked women, nothing sensitive.”

“Try telling the censorship police that.”

Kamal disappeared through the main gate in his waiter's disguise. I spent an hour or two making small talk about snails. Then Kamal reemerged. His face was drawn and ivory white, as if he had seen the specter of death.

“It's bad,” he said.

“How bad?”

“Very bad.”

I gritted my teeth.

“They have asked you to have all the books translated into Arabic by an official translator.”

“But there are more than ten thousand books,” I said. “Each one's more than two hundred pages.” I did a calculation. “That's at least two million pages.”

“An official translator charges ten dollars a page,” said Kamal. “He can do four pages a day.”

He pulled out a calculator and tapped in the figures.

“If the guy translates four pages a day,” he said, “it'll take him five hundred thousand days. That's more than one thousand three hundred years.”

“We can get more than one translator,” I said, “to speed things up.”

Kamal tapped again at the calculator.

“Either way,” he said, “it's going to cost you twenty million bucks.”

S
EVENTEEN

If you have much, give your wealth;
if you have little, give your heart.

UNDETERRED BY THE OVERZEALOUS DEMANDS OF
the censorship police, I decided to commission the library to be built whether I had any books to fill it or not. Having the work done would, I hoped, take our minds off the problems with the port. My attention turned to planks of wood. Time spent loitering outside the Casablanca port had taught me that Morocco imported vast quantities of timber, from the Far East and Brazil. The virgin forests in the Atlas and the Rif have long since been felled. These days Moroccans tend to plant only eucalyptus, which grows fast and provides them with valuable fuel. But there is a wood for which the kingdom has been famous since ancient times—cedar.

In Europe or the United States, I would have engaged a carpenter, described what I wanted, and let him do the rest. In Morocco, things were characteristically more complicated. As with other building work, it was up to me to source and buy all the raw materials, and to have them transported to the Caliph's House. After that I had to find a carpenter who could design the library and turn the planks into shelves.

“I'm sure we can handle it,” I said.

“You'd be surprised,” Kamal replied. “Remember, in Morocco it's the easy jobs that are hardest to get done.”

Now that I thought of it, he was right. Whenever I tried to get someone to change a door hinge, cut a piece of glass to size, or paint a window frame, the request was met with utter consternation. Weeks would pass, with me repeating the same pathetic demand. But if I asked someone to cut fifty thousand mosaics in dozens of intricate shapes, or to etch a pattern six hundred feet long in plaster, the job would be done without any questions at all.

“We'll need a lot of cedar,” I said.

“I'll find the black market,” Kamal replied.

“Can't we just go to a sawmill and buy some planks?”

“You're not in Michigan,” he said. “Anyway, cedar's expensive. You can't pay the going rate. That would be ridiculous.”

“Would it?”

“Of course it would,” said Kamal.

         

EID IS A TIME
for celebration, when the Arab world erupts into a festive frenzy of slaughtering rams and spending quality time with the family. Writers of travel guides like to say that the occasion is to Muslims what Christmas is to Christians. It's a nice line, but the two festivals are very different. While Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus, Eid commemorates Abraham's sacrifice of a ram to God in place of his own son, Isaac. Abraham is a prophet of Islam, and the tale of his famous sacrifice is recounted in the Qur'an as well as the Bible.

For seven days a sense of jubilation descended over Casablanca. The grim realities of daily life were swept aside, replaced by a childlike hysteria. I had been irritated that the workers were to be gone for a week, and I didn't much like having to hand out the bundles of baksheesh. But I found myself energized by the growing anticipation all the same.

Five days before the festival, the rams began to arrive. Some came by truck, by bullock cart, or by train; others were strapped to the front of scooters or simply herded down the highways from far away. They were everywhere—huddling on odd scraps of land, at bus stops and in supermarkets, in doorways and on traffic islands, on railway platforms and in car showrooms, in barber's shops and at ice cream stands. A local newspaper calculated there were more than a million rams brought to Casablanca for slaughter at Eid.

Kamal urged me to buy a few dozen good-sized rams and keep them to sell at the last minute.

“There's always more demand than supply,” he said. “It's simple economics.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “The city's awash with rams.”

“You just wait,” he said.

Three days before Eid arrived, a wave of terror surged through the city—rams were running out. Rumors said that the stream of trucks arriving from the villages had dried to a trickle. What began as gentle panic developed into a whirlwind of hysteria. Men and their sons formed posses and paced the streets in search of animals. It was like the panic on Thanksgiving morning when all the turkeys have gone. Tensions had reached fever pitch. Grown men were brawling in the streets, playing tug-of-war with the last pitiful rams on sale.

I might have shunned Kamal's advice to stockpile rams, but companies across the city had done as he suggested. Two days before Eid, the poor creatures became invaluable sales tools. Buy a new washing machine and you got a ram thrown in for free; buy a used car and you got half a dozen of them. One electronics store on Boulevard Zerktouni raffled an entire flock the night before Eid, causing absolute hysteria. So many people had bought tickets that the center of Casablanca had to be shut down.

At the same time, a whole industry sprouted up selling the accoutrements of slaughter—hatchets and short-bladed knives, skewers, and saws for hacking through bone. On every street corner touts were offering bales of straw, on which the sacrifices are made, and charcoal for roasting the meat.

Like everywhere else, the shantytown was echoing with the sound of bleating. Most of the rams had already been sold and were stashed away in the shacks, ready to have their throats slit at the appointed hour. Hamza told me that the last few animals in the bidonville were bad.

“They look healthy but they're diseased,” he confided, “afflicted with illness. One mouthful of that meat and you will drop down dead.”

I wondered why the guardian felt it necessary to explain the situation. Then the reason struck me. Hamza knew very well we hadn't yet bought a ram to kill.

“My cousin can get you a fine one for half the normal price,” he said. “When you pick up the knife, it will bare its neck, ready for slaughter.”

“We're not going to kill a ram,” I said.

The guardian looked at me squarely. “No ram?”

“No, we don't want to kill an innocent animal,” I said.

Hamza scratched his head. As far as he was concerned, it was a great honor to make the sacrifice at Eid, a ritual practiced by his family for centuries. To miss the occasion was unthinkable, especially as he suspected I could afford his cousin's finest ram.

         

ON THE MORNING OF
Eid, the small whitewashed mosque in the bidonville was overflowing with worshippers. Every able-bodied man was there, prostrated on rough woven mats, praying toward the east. The donkeys had fallen silent, as had the limping dogs, and the wicked boys had been hosed down and dressed in white.

When prayers were at an end, everyone rushed home, where their rams were waiting for the knife. But no blood was spilled until news came that the king's own sacrifice had been made. Then the orgy of death commenced. Every household in the land slit a throat, except for our own. The sound of dying animals was tumultuous. Ariane was in the garden when the killing began. She asked me why the animals were crying out, why they were so sad. I kept her at Dar Khalifa. All around the house the streets were red, soaked in blood, as the head man of each house butchered an animal and skinned it. The aroma of roasting mutton began to emanate from the shacks. It hung above the shantytown in an oily cloud. While the mothers cooked the meat, their children roasted the rams' heads on homemade braziers in the alleyways. They cracked the skulls, scooped out the sizzling brains, and gobbled them up.

That night, the bidonville was ablaze with light. A crude system of streetlamps had been rigged up, a thousand wires stemming from a central cable. The lamps burned with a tremendous phosphorescent light. It made for a very beautiful sight. I couldn't understand how the electrical supply had been laid on, or who was paying for it. This became clear when, a few days later, our electricity bill arrived. It was fifty times the usual amount.

         

A WEEK AFTER EID,
I stopped at an Internet café downtown to check e-mail. The room was windowless, fifteen feet square, with a dark patch of damp on the ceiling. Most of the computers were taken by an assortment of girls, all in their twenties or early thirties, all looking for a husband in cyberspace.

Whenever I'm in an Internet café, my eyes stray away from my screen. Everyone else's e-mail is far more interesting than my own. I try to concentrate but I can't help myself.

As usual I found my eyes veering to the side, where they locked onto the screen beside me. A woman was having a chat conversation in English with a Canadian man. She was wearing a yellow headscarf with a paisley motif. I couldn't see her face. She was oozing passion for her Internet admirer, describing how she longed to be crushed in his arms, kissed by him, married in white, and to live in a small house with flowers around the door. Eventually, she logged off and stood up to pay. It was then that I caught a glimpse of her face. It was Zohra.

I jumped up.

“Hello,” she said calmly, “I was expecting to meet you.”

“Really?”

“Yes, Amina said you would come.”

I asked her for the money she had taken. “You owe us more than four thousand dollars,” I said. “I need it back.”

Zohra pushed a strand of hair under her scarf. “I'm leaving,” she said. “If you come after me, you'll have a lot of trouble.”

I followed, asking why she had told the police I was a terrorist, why she had run off with our money. She didn't answer. Instead, she walked faster and faster, until she had broken into a run. I ran after her down Boulevard d'Anfa. I was gaining on her, about to catch her. Then a car startled me with its horn. I turned sharply to the right, then turned back a moment later. But Zohra was gone.

         

THAT AFTERNOON I RECEIVED
a pink slip of paper from the postman, informing me that a package had arrived for me at the central post office. I showed the docket to Kamal. He groaned.

“Your nightmare is about to begin,” he said.

The central post office of Casablanca was a great white hulk of a building, constructed by the French in the days when imposing white structures were all the vogue. The moment we entered the main door, I understood what Kamal had meant. There must have been four hundred people inside, each one clutching a similar slip of pink paper. The tension was driving ordinary people to revolt. One group were waving their slips frantically, shaking their fists at the same time. Another had climbed onto the clerk's desk and were demanding to be served.

Kamal told me to relax.

“Why doesn't anyone in Morocco ever form an orderly line?” I said gruffly.

“Because that's not their way,” he said.

We piled in. Kamal showed me how to get to the front by moving sideways, kicking shins with hard thrusting movements. Within minutes we were standing before the clerk. I handed him my pink slip. He glowered at me.

“Fill in this form,” he said.

When I had, he handed me three more forms.

“Now these.”

Forty minutes later, a slender brown cardboard tube was brought out from the storeroom. It was battered and marked along one side with a row of red crosses.

“Red crosses,” said Kamal. “It means the censorship people don't like what they've found.”

I recognized the cardboard roll. It contained some wall posters I had ordered for the children's bedroom. There was one of Dr. Seuss's
Cat in the Hat
, an illustrated poster of the alphabet, and a wall map of the world.

“I can't believe that the Cat in the Hat is going to offend the censorship police,” I said.

“You may be surprised,” said Kamal.

The cardboard roll was thrown down on a long inspection table. All around it ebbed a sea of ripped packaging and weeping Berber women with tattooed chins.

The posters were removed from the tube by the inspection officer. He was a well-built man with close-cropped hair and a week's stubble on his face. He looked like a bulldog. I smiled at him. He leered back.

“Cat in the Hat,” I said. “We love him.”

The officer looked at the cat and his red-and-white striped hat.

“Good, clean fun,” I said.

The alphabet was the next to be inspected. The miniature illustrations were checked carefully for impropriety. The bulldog put it down and opened the world map between his outstretched hands. He regarded it meticulously, examining each continent.

He said something in Arabic.

“What's he saying?”

Kamal seemed nervous. “You can't have this one,” he said. “The censorship police are taking it away. They're gonna incinerate it.”

I felt my back warming with anger. “It's for my kids,” I said. “How could a world map be offensive?”

“Western Sahara isn't in the same color as Morocco,” said the clerk.

“So what?”

Kamal slipped me a pained glance. “Keep quiet,” he said. “This is serious.”