by Tahir Shah
'Time passed, and Jamia became close friends with the king's own daughter, Princess Nabila. The two would go down to the royal stream and bathe. One day, before jumping into the water, the princess removed her golden necklace and hung it on a low branch of a nearby tree. She forgot about it and, that night, searched high and low for the necklace. Eventually she fell asleep, and dreamt that the woodcutter's daughter had stolen the necklace for herself.
'The next day she whispered to her father. Within an hour the woodcutter's daughter had been cast into an orphanage. And the old man was flung into the deepest dungeon in the kingdom. Weeks passed and he grew weaker and weaker. After six months, he was taken out in chains and tied to a pole. Every so often, people would throw rotten food at him or laugh at his miserable state.
'Then one afternoon, he heard a man telling his wife that it was Thursday evening. He suddenly remembered the story of Mushkil Gusha, the remover of obstacles. A moment later, a kindly passer-by threw him a coin. He asked if the man might take the coin, cross the street and buy a handful of dates for them both. The man did so, and the woodcutter recounted the "Tale of Mushkil Gusha".
'The next day,' Murad went on, 'the princess was bathing at the stream when she spied her gold necklace through the water. She looked up and saw that it was a reflection and that the actual necklace was still hanging on the low branch where she had left it. Without wasting a minute, she ran to her father and explained her mistake. The king gave the woodcutter a royal pardon, compensated him handsomely, and released his daughter from the terrible orphanage.'
Murad stopped talking. He blew very gently into his fist.
'The "Tale of Mushkil Gusha" is very long,' he said. 'Some people say that it never really ends. But now that you know it, or some of it, it's your duty to retell it for yourself every Thursday after dusk.'
I could hear the butane lamps roaring in the main square below and smell the racks of skewers grilling over charcoal, sending a curtain of smoke up into the desert night. The way Murad had told his tale, the 'Tale of Mushkil Gusha', touched me. It wasn't just another story recounted to earn a handful of coins, but something that had come from within him.
'The story in your heart,' I said, staring into his frosted eyes, 'if I remember it, and protect it well, perhaps it can help me to find my own story.'
Murad tilted his head back and breathed in the scent of roasting mutton.
'I told you that if you believe,' he said very gently, 'if you really believe, a world of incredible possibility opens up, like the stairs in the "Tale of Mushkil Gusha". What was not visible will become visible.' Murad bent forward and tapped my shoulder with his long, tapered hand. 'But you must have the courage to climb,' he said.
There was silence for a long time. Then I asked what had happened to the eel.
The storyteller adjusted his calico turban.
'When he had finished telling the "Tale of Mushkil Gusha",' he said, 'the great eel instructed me to value what was deep inside. "The search for truth can lead a man around the world and back to the point from where he took the first step," he told me in a squeaky voice. "Always remember that the journey is nothing more than a path that leads to a destination."
'And, without another word, the electric eel turned towards the ocean and slipped into the waves.'
EIGHT
The destiny of a wolf cub is to become a wolf, even if it is reared among the sons of men.
Ibn el-Arabi
ONE FROSTY MORNING BEFORE I LEFT FOR SCHOOL, SLIPPER FEET was waiting for me down in the hallway. He said there was a story he had to pass on without delay. I reminded him of my prep school's policy on being late – six strikes with a cane. Slipper Feet ran his claw-like nails through his long red hair and said in a calculating voice: 'I promise you, this morning you will not be late.' I don't remember now which story he told me that dark winter morning, only that it was about a dragonfly and a jinn. What I do remember is that by the time he finished, I was frozen to the bone. It was as if the story had sucked all the heat out of my blood. I went upstairs, took a steaming hot bath and put my uniform back on.
By the time I got to school, it was late morning. I approached the main door in terror at the thought of being taken away and beaten. A prefect was standing there, holding up a sign. He told me to go home. I asked why.
'The headmaster is dead,' he said.
From that day on, I never quite trusted Slipper Feet. At night he would come down from the attic and roam about the house. I have no proof, but I know he used to come into my room. I could smell him in my dreams. My mother didn't trust him, either. She started sitting with us when he recounted his tales. I asked her why and she said it was because she hadn't been lucky enough to have a storyteller when she was young. Years later she admitted it was because the red-headed man had done something very bad.
Not long after that, Slipper Feet was gone. No one ever spoke about him again, although the stories he told stayed inside me, and they are still there.
A decade passed. Then, one morning, my father was opening his mail. An envelope came with an unusual stamp from a country in the East. He regarded the envelope for a long time, cut it open and squinted at the lines of uneven black script. He looked quite pale.
It was a death threat from Slipper Feet.
The Caliph's House has an agenda of its own. It's an agenda of self-sabotage. I've never quite understood it. As soon as I leave it for more than a moment, the building begins to destroy itself. The window frames rot through, the bougainvillea roots push up the courtyard tiles, and alarming patches of damp take hold on every wall.
When I wondered aloud why the house was so self-destructive, Zohra rushed over.
'Are you so foolish, so blind?' she cried. 'How could you not understand?'
'Not understand what?'
'That Dar Khalifa is sick.'
'That's nonsense.'
Zohra stuck out her hands and waved them about her head.
'Believe me,' she yelled, 'I speak the truth!'
In the days I had spent down in Marrakech, a wall had collapsed. Osman and the Bear were looking at the heap of rubble when I arrived home. They shook their heads and cursed.
'It's because of the ants,' said Osman.
The Bear agreed. 'The ants are bad,' he said.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
'The ants?'
The guardians nodded. 'Yes, Monsieur Tahir, the ants.'
'But how could such tiny insects do so much damage?'
'Do not be fooled,' said Osman. 'They look very small, so small you don't think of them at all. Weeks pass. Then years. Then one day you wake up and your home has fallen down.'
The Bear pointed at the rubble.
'First a wall,' he said. 'Then the house.'
Rachana was bathing the children upstairs. I burst in, babbling about Murad the storyteller and the 'Tale of Mushkil Gusha'. She looked at me blankly. Ariane kissed my ear and asked me to tell her about Mushkil Gusha.
'You will have to wait until Thursday,' I said.
Rachana said that the two maids had been at each other's throats over Timur.
'You go away and this place is like a circus,' she said.
'Don't worry, from now on everything will be much calmer.'
My wife gave me a sideways look.
'Why?'
'Because Murad the storyteller is coming to stay.'
It wasn't more than a day or so before the guardians linked the broken wall to the business of the chalk symbols written on the door. I reminded them of their earlier deduction. They looked confused.
'The ants,' I prompted.
'Yes, ants are strong,' said the Bear, 'but we see now this was not their work.'
'It was a jinn,' mouthed Osman.
'What changed your mind?'
'When the wall fell down three days ago,' said the Bear, 'there was the bitter smell of sulphur in the garden. And after that came a ferocious storm and this morning we found a dead chamele
on in the hedge over there.'
'Who said sulphur, storms and dead chameleons point to a jinn?'
The guardians looked at each other, then at me.
'Sukayna did,' they both said at once.
The day after I reached home, Murad arrived on the train from Marrakech. I went down to Casa Voyageurs and found him sitting on the platform, wrapped up in his patched jelaba, with a home-made sack at his feet. I had been anxious about bringing him when I discovered he was blind. But he seemed quite at ease at the idea of following me up to Casablanca. My other worry was how much Ottoman would have to pay him. I broached the subject of money an hour before I left Marrakech. The old storyteller said that hunger helped to keep his tongue moving well.
'Give your extra money to those who have use for it,' he said, 'and give me a soft pillow for my head.'
As Murad was blind, I thought it best to put him in the guest room on the ground floor. Located at the far end of the large garden courtyard, it had been the room in which Qandisha the jinn had supposedly resided. The exorcists had spent a full night at work in there, extracting her from the walls.
Since the exorcism, the room had maintained a dampness, as if it were on a different frequency of some kind. On the left side of the room there had been a short flight of steps leading down to a brick wall. We had blocked it off from the bedroom. The guardians had taken to storing the long ladders there.
Murad moved through the house and out into the garden courtyard, trailing his long fingers across the walls. Timur skipped up and kissed him on the cheek. Then Ariane stepped forward, clutching her favourite doll in one hand and her pet tortoise in the other. She asked why the old man couldn't see. Murad, the storyteller, leaned down and patted his long fingers over her hair.
'My eyes have never worked,' he said.
'Why not?'
'Because they were not meant to.'
'Why were they not meant to?'
Murad touched her cheek with his hand.
'Because God wanted me to be blind,' he said.
'Why did God want you to be blind?'
'Because he wanted me to see.'
Ariane wasn't listening. She ran ahead and pushed open the door to the storyteller's room.
As soon as Murad entered, his face twitched on one side. Then he thanked me.
'You have given me a very special place to sleep,' he said.
Osman and the Bear were not good at keeping secrets. When cross-questioned, they admitted that Zohra had brought her astrologer friend while I was away in Marrakech.
'She came in the night,' said Osman in a soft voice.
'Who?'
'Sukayna.'
'And she walked up and down,' added the Bear.
'She burned incense and she killed a chicken.'
Where did she do that?' I asked.
'Out at the front door,' said Osman.
'She dripped blood all over the step.'
'What happened to the meat?'
The guardians looked sheepish.
'We ate it,' they said.
While we were talking in the shadow of the stables, Zohra strode up and tugged my sleeve.
'You must go and see Sukayna right away,' she said.
I resisted. 'You know we had an exorcism,' I said gruffly. 'That's the end of it. We have to move on.'
An expert in dominating men, the maid tugged my sleeve a second time.
'There are two little children living under that roof,' she said. 'If you don't go and see Sukayna, you will live to regret it.'
I cursed loudly.
'Where does this woman, this astrologer, live?'
'You have to go to Afghanistan,' said Zohra.
'What?'
'Afghanistan.'
'I thought she lives up the hill.'
'She does,' said the maid.
'Well, then, what's she doing in Afghanistan?'
'That's where she works.'
'In Afghanistan?'
'Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!' snapped Zohra. 'Yes, I told you. Afghanistan.'
My mind was reeling.
'Am I missing something?' I asked.
Osman brushed a leaf from his shoulder.
'Boulevard Afghanistan,' he said.
That evening Murad crept out of his room at ten o'clock and felt his way to the kitchen. Fatima had cooked him a colossal lamb tagine, which he promptly devoured. After sucking on lamb bones for a while, he ate three apples and a bowl of apricots. He thanked God, kissed his knuckle and touched it to his brow.
'I shall tell you a story,' he said.
'But I'm going to bed now,' I replied.
The storyteller's face sank.
'It will help you sleep,' he said.
As far as Murad was concerned, he was more than a humble raconteur, more than a teller of tales. He believed that his repertoire had an intrinsic power, an ability to change the way people feel and think, and even had the power to heal.
Before I joined Rachana and the children upstairs, he told me a tale that will stay with me until my last breath. It was about a little girl who learned to speak the language of fish. I put on my pyjamas, crawled into bed and slept more soundly than I had done in years.
The next morning, Murad was waiting for me in the kitchen.
'How did you sleep?'
I told him.
'Of course you did.'
Murad the storyteller rearranged himself on the kitchen chair.
'It was a sleeping story,' he said.
Out in the garden Osman and the Bear were polishing a pair of brass lamps I had bought in Marrakech. They didn't like polishing and had always forced Hamza to do it. As far as they were concerned, polishing was woman's work, like doing the washing and opening the front door.
Osman said the polish made him sneeze.
'It makes us both sneeze,' said the Bear.
'It didn't make Hamza sneeze, though,' I said.
'Well, his nose was always blocked up, so he couldn't smell it,' quipped Osman.
Since we were talking about Hamza, I probed again why he had felt it necessary to leave.
'We told you, it was because of the shame.'
'What shame?'
'Hamza's shame.'
'But why did he feel ashamed?'
'Because of his wife.'
'What did she have to do with it?'
'Everything,' said Osman.
'Can you explain?'
'Hamza's wife saw him looking at another woman. Then she made him quit,' he said.
'Did he touch the other woman?'
'No! No!' said the Bear loudly. 'Of course not. He just looked at her.'
'His wife is very jealous,' Osman prompted.
'Who was this other woman?'
'It was Fatima, the maid,' said the Bear.
That afternoon, I tracked down the address Zohra had given me on Boulevard Afghanistan. Up the hill from the coast, it wasn't far from Dar Khalifa, in an area called Hay Hassani. The place with a thousand uses – you went there if you needed a jelaba to be made, a tube of rat-catching glue, or a second-hand fridge.
Sukayna saw her clients one at a time in a small room at the back of a mattress-maker's shop. I clambered over an assortment of half-finished mattresses and workmen sitting cross-legged on the floor, past a dozen bolts of bright purple cloth, until I arrived at a torn lace curtain. It was fixed to the ceiling with a length of barbed wire. Behind it, the astrologer was waiting for me.
Sukayna was not as I had imagined her. She was about twenty-five, had bottle-green eyes and a wavering smile. Her voice was deep, more like a man's and, when she spoke, she stretched her back straight, like a sergeant major on parade. Her jelaba was embroidered with a paisley motif and her fingernails were painted bright red.
I sat down on a home-made plywood chair. We looked at each other for longer than was comfortable and then the astrologer mumbled Zohra's name.
'She has urged me to come and see you,' I said, 'and that is why I am here.'
'I have been to your
home,' Sukayna replied, 'and I have seen the proof.'
She blinked twice, as if to link the bottle-green eyes before me to her visit to the Caliph's House.
'There had been a problem with jinns,' I said. 'But it's all been attended to well. We had twenty-five exorcists from Meknès.' I paused for a moment. 'They made a terrible mess,' I said.
The astrologer glanced up at the barbed wire, perhaps wondering if it would ever fall.
'Zohra told me Dar Khalifa was locked up for years.'
'For almost a decade,' I said.
Sukayna touched a red-nailed finger to her chin.
'When a house is left empty for a long time, jinns can enter,' she said slowly. 'They live in the walls and below the surface of any water.'
'I know. Believe me. I have first-hand experience.'
'Something else can also happen,' Sukayna mumbled.
'What?'
'The house can bleed,' she said.
That afternoon, I took Murad down to the stables to meet the guardians for the first time. He shuffled through the garden in his yellow baboush like a patient on forced exercise. 'I have not walked on grass in a very long time,' he said, as I led him firmly by the arm past the swimming pool and down to the guardians' bolt-hole.
News of the storyteller's arrival had spread through the house and grounds like wildfire. The Bear and Osman were waiting in the middle stable, which they had turned into a rough sort of social club. There was a row of coloured lights nailed to the far wall, three half-broken chairs and a low coffee table made from the giant wooden spool of an industrial cable. Osman had brewed a pot of extra-strong mint tea and rinsed out the best glasses for the visitor. Murad fumbled his way into the stable's dim interior and shook hands with the guardians. He slumped on one of the chairs, thanked God and began to recount a tale.
I went back to the house, where I found Zohra feeding Timur a packet of scarlet bubblegum. When she saw me, she grabbed my little son, hugged him to her chest and bared her teeth like a wolf vixen protecting her young. I said I had been to see Sukayna the astrologer and that I was supposed to go back for a second consultation.