The Matrix (12 page)

We sat on the carpet in front of him, crossing our legs. He took his eyes from me and looked at Duncan, smiling. It was an ugly, misshapen smile. I looked away, concentrating on a band of light that fell slanting across the wall behind the old man.

‘
Vous avez voyagé longtemps pour me rejoindre ici
,’ he said, his French stilted, almost as if he had not spoken the language in a long time.

‘
Pas du tout
,’ responded Duncan. ‘
Cela me fait grand plaisir de vous revoir. Et de voir que vous êtes toujours en bonne santé.
’

‘
U-nta
,
kif s-shiha?
’

‘
La-bas.
’

They began to talk rapidly in Moroccan Arabic, excluding me. I could make no sense of what they said, picking up only obvious words in every other sentence. Duncan was clearly in awe of our host, yet at ease with him. Tea was brought by the young man we had met earlier, sweet green tea in silver pots stuffed with fresh mint. The young man poured it into thin glasses and left it with us, sending out clouds of mint-scented steam into the cool air.

Duncan and the old man talked at length, and as they did the light moved across the wall and grew dim. Outside, the sun was dropping, and the city was returning to darkness. I heard my name mentioned more than once, though I could not understand what they said about me. The old man looked at me each time, then away again. I did not return his gaze.

There was a brief silence, then I heard the old man speak again, and I knew that this time he was addressing me.

‘
Wa anta
,
ya Andrew
,’ he said, shifting to classical Arabic. ‘
Limadha hadarta amami? A-anta tajir aw talib?
’

I could not grasp all he said, and turned to Duncan for help.

‘He asks why you have appeared before him. He asks if you are a merchant or a seeker.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It is what he once asked my grandfather. Angus Mylne came to Fez to trade in cloth and left a seeker after true knowledge.’

‘What did your grandfather answer?’

‘He does not need you to tell him that. You must give your own answer.’

I looked at the old man. His eyes had not once left me.

‘
Ana talib al-haqq
,’ I answered. ‘I have come in search of the truth.’

‘
Mahma kalifa ’l-amr?
’

I did not understand. I looked at Duncan.

‘He is asking you “Will you carry on the search whatever the price?” ’

I felt confused.

‘You know I have no money, Duncan. I can’t afford to . . .’

Duncan frowned and raised his hand gently, quieting me.

‘He does not mean money. Perhaps I did not translate well. Whatever the sacrifice, whatever may be required – that would be nearer the mark.’

I felt uneasy. What did the old man want from me? What might he demand in future? I did not even know who he was.

‘You must trust him,’ Duncan said. ‘You must put yourself in his hands if you are to find what you are looking for.’

I turned to face the old man. There was so little flesh on his cheeks, he might have been dead but for the eyes.

‘
Na‘m
,’ I said, ‘
mahma kalifa
.’ Yes, whatever it costs.

He looked at me and smiled. I felt a little sick, watching that little toothless mouth contort itself; but I had come this far, I could not turn back. The next moment, the mouth opened and the old man spoke again, except that the voice was not his voice.

‘Is this all there is, Andrew? Please tell me. Tell me there’s more than this.’

It was Catriona’s voice. They were the last words she had ever spoken to me.

His name was Sheikh Ahmad ibn ’Abd Allah, and I saw him every morning for the next month. I would sit at his feet while he read to me from the works of the medieval Arab sages and elucidated them for me. His erudition was vast, his insight the result, not of knowledge, but of direct experience. I never lost my fear of him, nor my sense that in some way he meant me great harm.

I put the incident of Catriona’s voice down to the strain of travel, or the effect of drugs I had been given in Tangier. When I mentioned it to Duncan, he merely said that in the sheikh’s house a man might see or hear whatever was in his heart. At the time, it seemed a reasonable explanation, and one that it suited me to believe, for to have thought it anything but a self-generated hallucination might well have sent me over the edge of madness. I was wholly uprooted from all that had been familiar to me, alone and effectively stranded in a strange city that seemed to belong to another century. In consequence, I found myself turning more than ever to Duncan as the one stable point in a world without fixed referents.

He told me a little of the sheikh, explaining that he had been responsible for introducing his grandfather to the inner world of Arab occultism.

‘I can scarcely believe it possible,’ I said. ‘Unless your grandfather was very old at the time, and the sheikh very young.’

‘This was in 1898, when my grandfather was fifty-two, about the same age I am now. In the account he left of their meeting, he wrote that the sheikh was already an old man then. My grandfather spent seven years studying with Sheikh Ahmad. I have photographs of them together: you can see them when we get back to Edinburgh. The sheikh is younger in the photographs than he is now; but he still seems about eighty or ninety.’

‘And you’re sure it is the same man?’

Duncan looked hard at me.

‘I have been coming here for most of my adult life. There is very little I would not believe.’

When I was not with the sheikh or Duncan, I was permitted to make use of the library. This was a vast, disorganized room on the first floor, to the north of the chamber in which the sheikh lived. It was filled from floor to ceiling with printed and manuscript texts in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian, Greek, and Latin. There was nothing on the shelves that dated from later than the eighteenth century. Time, it seemed, had truly stood still here.

It was wearying work, for the texts I was set to read were frequently stultifying, and the library, though full of shadows, remained hot for much of the day. I began to spend long hours at its latticed windows, gazing out onto a courtyard that was visited by small birds and at certain hours dappled with sunshine. It served to remind me that another world still existed outside this, that I had not been swallowed entirely by the darkness.

At the end of the first week, I asked if I were to be confined to the house, or whether I might not profit by seeing the city for myself. Duncan told me I should not be foolish, I was of course free to go where I liked and when I pleased, provided I could be sure to return to Sheikh Ahmad’s house before it grew dark.

And so I began to explore the lanes and alleyways of old Fez, mapless, guideless, with only my own wits to lead me through the maze. I became a sort of ghost, treading almost unseen down long, murky corridors of mud and cobble between blank walls, glimpsing what I could of a world that had changed little, or not at all, in centuries.

I saw other Europeans, Americans, Australians, small parties of Japanese, all huddled together, twittering like birds of passage on this latest stage of their travels, bright, careless people for whom Fez was merely a stage-set erected for their amusement. I never tried to join any of them, never attempted to engage them in conversation, never so much as thought to leave with one of their parties and return home. I was by now wholly remote from whatever I had once been, I had been drawn deeply into realms no rational mind could encompass.

Each day the city revealed a little more of itself to me, at the same time shutting something else away or making clear that it had secrets which I might never penetrate. I watched tanners and dyers go about their work, stood for hours watching metal- workers hammer trays, sat with carpenters as they turned cedarwood for beds and chairs and tables. At the butchers’ shops, flies lay like a seething film on the flanks of meat. Patches of damp appeared on the sides of buildings, like sweat. Open sewers lay unattended, filling the air with their stench. I walked for hours each day, lost among sounds and sights and smells I could only partially understand. And in the late afternoon, wherever I was, I would turn back to the sheikh’s house, hurrying through the lengthening shadows, pursued by my own echoing footsteps.

One day, when we had been about three weeks in Fez, I entered a stationer’s shop in order to buy a fresh notebook and a few pens. When I say ‘shop’, I mean one of those tiny one-room emporia that form the basis of every souk, raised up about three feet above the ground. As I was paying for my goods, I noticed that there was a telephone on the wall at the back, and I remembered my plan to ring Harriet in order to ask about Iain.

Edinburgh seemed such a long way away, and Iain and Harriet more like characters from a book than flesh-and-blood friends whom I had last seen not many months earlier. All the same, I felt terribly guilty about having let things slip for so long, and offered the owner of the shop enough money to enable me to make a call to Britain. Impressed by my use of Arabic, he readily agreed.

I rang Iain and Harriet’s number and felt a wave of homesickness when the familiar ringing tone began. The phone rang for over a minute before anyone answered. An unfamiliar voice came on the line, a woman’s voice, plain and noncommittal.

‘Gillespie.’

‘Is Harriet there?’ I asked.

‘No, Harriet’s away. She’s not in Edinburgh.’

‘I need to speak to her. Do you know where I can reach her?’

‘She can’t be reached. Who is this?’

‘I’m a friend. I’m ringing to see how Iain is. I had a letter from Harriet saying he was ill.’

There was a pause. I could hear the line crackling as though we were about to be cut off.

‘Iain is dead,’ the woman answered. I could sense an emotion in her voice, quickly suppressed. ‘He died in hospital four weeks ago. I’m very sorry if . . .’

I put the phone down. My hand was shaking. The stationer asked if I was all right. I nodded briskly and made my escape, leaving my notebook and pens behind.

Once or twice, looking over my shoulder as I stumbled back to the sheikh’s house, I thought I caught a glimpse of someone walking behind me. A man in a dark jellaba, as though dressed for winter, with the hood pulled up high over his head.

I did not sleep that night. Iain had urgently wanted to see me, and I had let him down. He had died without speaking to me, and somehow this made me feel guilty, as though I had been in some way responsible for his death. I tried for several hours to compose a letter to Harriet, but each time I tore up my attempt, until I finally accepted that anything I said would only make things worse. Perhaps I could visit her when I returned to Edinburgh.

Somewhere across the city, a wedding was in progress. The festivities would continue into the early hours of the morning, even after the groom had been taken to his bride and her bloodstained undergarments produced for friends and relatives to see as evidence of her virginity. Loudspeakers droned out a mixture of traditional music and
rai
, and from time to time the voices of guests would be carried on the night air, raucous and excited.

Around three o’clock, the music fell silent and the city was returned to peace. In an hour or so, the muezzins would chant the call to the
fajr
prayer. The day would begin.

I found it impossible to remain in my room. After the music, the silence and darkness seemed insupportable. I rose and left my room, heading downstairs to the library courtyard, where I could sit and watch until the first signs of dawn touched the sky. The house was like a tomb. Nothing stirred. I crossed the landing and reached the top of the stairs, just opposite the entrance to the sheikh’s room. As I made to pass it, I noticed that the door was open and that a faint light was just visible inside.

I do not know why I stopped, nor what made me step inside that room. My eyes had grown so accustomed to the darkness that my surroundings appeared well lit, even though only a couple of oil lamps were burning. The room seemed to draw me in, as though in some sense possessed of a life and a magnetism of its own. I stepped forward hesitantly, straining to see ahead.

The silence was absolute, forbidding. I knew I was intruding, yet I felt I could not turn back. I wanted to see what this room was like while the sheikh was asleep. As I drew closer to the far end, I could see the outline of the old man’s divan. This was where I normally sat in the mornings to read with him. There would be soft sunlight on the cushions and blankets on which he sat, and on the carpeted floor. Now, shadows surrounded everything.

A single lamp was lit near one end of the long divan. There was something strange about its upper half, as though bedding or laundry had been left on it. I stepped a little closer, and as I did so realized that the sheikh himself was lying there, flat on his back, dressed in a long white garment. It should have occurred to me before that he must sleep here, and not in another room as I had supposed.

I should have left the room then, but I did not. Something about the figure on the divan held my attention. He was very still, more like a reclining statue than a man asleep. The longer I stood, the more curious his stillness seemed to me. At last, I summoned up enough courage to walk forwards until I was only a foot or two away.

I looked down at him. A minute passed, then another. He did not move. His chest did not rise or fall, no breath passed his lips. There could be no question: the old man had died and was lying here until they came for him in the morning. I started to reach out a hand to touch his cheek, as though by doing so I could be certain that he was dead. As I did so, a voice spoke behind me, in a whisper.

‘Go back to your room, Andrew. You should not have come here. This is nothing for you to meddle with.’

I spun round. Duncan was standing behind me. Like the sheikh, he was dressed from head to foot in white. He did not seem like the man I had travelled so far with, the man I had known back home in Edinburgh.