by Tahir Shah
I ambled down the line where light sand met dark and I thought about what Dr Mehdi had said, about the power of seeing with fresh eyes. At first I had resented him for discarding the salt, something I had travelled so far to fetch. But his wisdom had gnawed away at me.
He was quite right.
The best medicine is sometimes not medicine at all.
For once, there had been tranquillity in my absence. Rachana said the guardians had been preoccupied with watching a stork which had begun to build a nest on top of the roof. They spent all their time straining against the bright winter light to get a glimpse of the great white bird.
As soon as I went into the garden, they dragged me over to their viewpoint.
'Allahu akbar! God is great!' Marwan shouted. 'This is a blessing on the house, and a great thing for us all.'
'A bird's nest?'
'This is no ordinary bird,' Osman chipped in.
'It's a stork!' shouted the Bear.
'Can you believe it, a stork, here!' said Marwan.
'What's so good about a stork?' I asked. 'There are egret nests by the dozen and you don't ever talk about those.'
The guardians gathered round and shook their heads.
'You do not know, Monsieur Tahir.'
'Don't know what?'
'Our tradition.'
Three days after getting back from the desert, I got the feeling someone was following me. I was certain of it. The first time was when I was buying a sack of oranges in Hay Hassani. I had paid the money and was taking the fruit to the car, when I saw a red baseball cap duck behind a pick-up truck. I didn't think much of it at the time. But later that day I spotted the cap again, in Maarif. I was going to Café Lugano to meet Abdelmalik. This time I had turned sharply and saw it darting round a corner.
A couple of days passed. I almost forgot about the red cap. Then I went to see Sukayna at the mattress shop in Hay Hassani. She had given me some powder to sprinkle in the corners of the sitting room. She said it would help the house to heal itself. When I asked her what it was, she hadn't wanted to tell me. I pressed her.
'It's very special salt,' she said.
'From the ocean?'
'No, from the Sahara.'
As I was leaving the mattress shop, I saw the cap ducking out of sight again. I didn't get a look at the face, but ran after it. After a minute or two the man lost me in the back streets of Hay Hassani's forest of white apartment blocks. I returned to Dar Khalifa with the salt, concerned that someone should want to spy on me.
Zohra was holding court in the kitchen and was smiling broadly again. The tooth was fitted and looked quite good. I asked if the surgery had been painful. She winced.
'Worse than childbirth,' she said.
Osman came to the kitchen to inspect Zohra's dentistry. His mouth was a dentist's casebook. He asked the maid about the pain.
'You could never stand pain like that,' she said.
Osman straightened his back.
'Of course I could.'
'Impossible,' she replied. 'You are just a man.'
The guardian asked me if he could have an advance on his wages. He took the money and stormed off to find the dentist.
When he was out of earshot, Zohra said, 'Moroccan men are like cooking pumpkins.'
'How is that?'
'Quite hard on the exterior, but all pulp on the inside.'
The guardians cleared all the dead twigs from the hibiscus hedge and laid them out on the roof for the stork. Then they filled a washing tub with water and hauled it up there too. I quizzed them on what they were doing.
'Storks are very lazy,' said the Bear. 'They don't like building nests because it takes so much work.'
'But I'm sure he can handle the task.'
'It's not a he,' cracked Marwan. 'It's a female and she has come to lay an egg.'
'How do you know?'
Marwan rubbed his eyes.
'I just know these things,' he said.
I asked why storks were such an omen of good fortune.
The Bear explained: 'There was once a judge who killed his wife by strangling her. He buried her body and married a young woman. As a punishment, God turned the judge into a stork.'
'Where did you hear that?'
'Everyone knows it,' said Marwan.
Confused, I went to the kitchen, where Zohra was cuddling Timur in her arms. I asked her what she knew about storks. She had never heard the story of the judge who murdered his wife.
'Those men spend too much time talking rubbish and not enough time working,' she said.
An hour later, I went back into the garden and glanced up at the roof. I did a double take. The stork had disappeared. Marwan and the Bear were weaving something with the twigs. I called up to them. They didn't answer. I called again, louder.
'We are helping the stork!' shouted Marwan.
'Why?'
'We told you, storks are very lazy!'
Osman didn't show up for two days. On the way to the market, I stopped at his home and tapped on the door. There was no reply. I banged again and heard groaning inside.
'It's me,' I said. 'It's Tahir.'
The door was pulled back by a feeble hand. Osman peered out, squinting into the light. His face was hung, his eyes ringed with grey circles, his lips tightly shut.
'You look terrible,' I said.
Osman put a hand over his mouth.
'The dentist,' he mumbled.
'He came?'
'Mmmm.'
'Was it painful?'
A look of unimaginable fear swept over the guardian's face. His entire body seemed to quiver. He struggled to stand up straight.
'It was nothing to a man like me,' he said.
At the market I spotted the figure in the red cap again. This time he wasn't moving, but standing across from me at a butcher's stall. He had turned his back and was chatting to the butcher, who passed him a cow's hoof. I stepped up and tapped his shoulder. He turned. I froze.
It was Kamal.
I have never met someone so adept at hiding his emotions.
'Hello,' he said.
I was almost too shocked to speak.
'Are you . . . are you following me?' I said after a long delay.
Kamal passed the hoof back to the butcher and shook my hand.
'Good to see you,' he said.
I breathed in deep.
'And you.'
A few minutes later we were installed inside the window of a smoky café opposite the Central Market. Kamal tugged off the cap. His head was shaven clean bald. He could have passed for fifty. He wasn't a day over twenty-eight.
'What have you been doing with yourself?'
He unwound the cellophane from a packet of Marlboros.
'Waiting,' he said.
'Waiting for what?'
'The right opportunity.'
'I knew our paths would cross again,' I said.
'Casablanca's very big but very small.'
'Did you get a job?'
Kamal flicked his ash on to the floor.
'A whole life change,' he said.
'Really?'
'Sure.'
'What?'
'I'm leaving Morocco.'
'Oh?'
'Yup.'
'Where are you going?'
'Down south.'
'To the Sahara?
'To Australia.'
'What are you going to do there?'
Kamal flicked his ash again, bit his lower lip.
'Start a family,' he said.
A month after our last breakfast at Café Napoleon, Kamal had met an Australian backpacker at a hostel near the port. He didn't say it, but he had been fishing for a foreigner, a passport to a new life. She was a medical student, the daughter of a property tycoon, and had been touring round the country alone.
'She loves me,' he said.
'And do you love her?'
Kamal didn't answer right way. He paused as if to add a touch of doubt.
'Sure I do,' he sai
d.
I pressed a couple of coins on to the table and we shook hands. As we shook, we looked at each other's eyes. I don't know about him, but I was remembering the madcap adventures we had shared. We left the café. Kamal put on his red baseball cap, straightened it and stared at his watch. He crossed the street.
I have not seen him since.
Osman returned to work and showed off his new smile. The other two guardians were envious, but too busy fretting about the stork to make a point of it. The bird had flown away towards the ocean and disappeared, despite the fact a ready-made nest was awaiting it on our roof. Marwan said he and the others knew a great deal about storks merely by being Moroccan, that the birds were a national obsession.
Somewhere in my library I knew I had a book about African birds. I went in search of it. When finally I found it, I flicked to the page on Moroccan storks and read a passage to the guardians. They weren't impressed.
'That's how you are,' said Osman scathingly.
'What do you mean?'
'In the West it's always like that.'
'Like what?'
'You read something in a book, some writing, and you think you are an expert.'
'I'm not an expert,' I said.
'Osman's right,' said the Bear. 'Our knowledge isn't the kind of thing you can find in a book. It's given to us through generations of . . .'
'Of conversation,' said Marwan.
I went inside and slipped the book back in its place. The guardians hardly knew it, but they had touched upon one of the greatest differences between East and West. In the Occident learning tends to be done through reading, while in the Orient the chain of transmission is made through generations of accumulated conversation.
That night I took Ariane and Timur up for their bath. As they splashed about, I told them never to take water for granted. I described the desert, what it was like to sleep under the stars, and how it felt to have the first rays of morning sunlight on your face.
'Baba, why do we live in Morocco?' Ariane suddenly asked.
'To be a part of something very real and very ancient,' I said.
After their bath, I dried them and got them ready for bed.
Ariane put her hand on mine.
'I know you are worried,' she said.
'About what?'
'About finding your story.'
I kissed her head.
She pulled on my shirt until my face was level with hers.
'I already know what story is in my heart,' she said. 'The one about the lion and the water.'
Before turning out the light, I read them the story of 'The Lion Who Saw Himself in the Water', a teaching tale that my father had told me, and fathers have been telling children at bedtime for a thousand years or more.
'Once upon a time long ago there was a lion called Sher. He lived deep in the jungle and was the proudest lion who had ever lived. He had a great mane of hair, long, long teeth and claws that were as sharp as razors. All day he would prowl up and down scaring the other animals, until they told him that he was the bravest creature in the kingdom.
'One day it was very hot and all the animals went down to the waterhole to drink. They drank and they drank, and they drank and they drank, until they could drink no more. Sher the lion had been preening himself, but at last felt that his tongue was very dry. He strode down to the edge of the waterhole and opened his mouth to drink. But just before his tongue touched the water, he saw a terrifying lion looking back at him, its mouth open wide in a growl. Sher the lion jumped back in fear and ran into the jungle to hide. The other animals wondered what was the matter.
'One day passed, and then another, and the summer heat grew worse. Sher the lion became thirstier and thirstier, until he could stand it no more. He walked down to the waterhole once again, and opened his mouth wide to drink. The lion was there as before, glaring at him angrily, roaring. But this time Sher was too thirsty to care. He drank and he drank and he drank until he could drink no more.'
The moral of the story of course is not to be afraid of what you cannot understand. By the time I had finished reading, Ariane and Timur were sound asleep.
They always fell asleep before the end.
At dawn the next day, the stork returned. The guardians regarded it as a miracle and forced me out of bed to come and see. The bird was sitting awkwardly on the nest, rearranging itself, trying to get comfortable.
'She's happy,' said Osman under his breath. 'She'll stay here now.'
'I wonder why she's chosen our roof,' I said.
Marwan cleared his throat.
'Dar Khalifa has baraka,' he said.
Explaining the idea of baraka is not easy. It's a notion found in Islam, but must surely be pre-Islamic: the idea that a person, creature or thing is blessed. The blessing runs so deeply that it touches every cell, every atom, so that any association with that thing extends the blessing on to you.
When we bought the Caliph's House, the guardians believed it was inhabited by jinns. Their fear had been so great that they almost never entered the actual house. The idea of living there before the spirits had been expelled was almost too much for them to bear. Not so much because of what the jinns would have done to us, but what revenge they might have exacted upon them.
But now that Dar Khalifa had been exorcized, the guardians – and the people living in the shantytown – regarded it as a place with baraka. The Bear hinted that the house may have always been blessed, a possible explanation why the jinns had chosen it in the first place. When the renovations were over, I would take pride if a visitor praised the work we had done. Renovations were like frosting on a cake, fodder for the eyes. Baraka was something far deeper, something connected to the soul.
All the talk of the stork and baraka got me thinking about Sukayna. There had been no chalk graffiti for a while, but I wanted to use the lull to investigate the matter of the holy man she had mentioned. I sent a message to the astrologer and the next day there was a ring on the bell.
When I went to the front door, I found a queue of people already there. It consisted of the three guardians, the two maids, the gardener, and a blacksmith who was making some furniture for us at the end of the garden. They had formed a reception committee. Sukayna shook the men's hands and kissed the women's cheeks. Amid much whispering, she stepped inside.
First, I showed her the so-called heart of the house, the courtyard where the exorcists had sacrificed the goat. Sukayna lit a candle and placed it on the floor. She moved very slowly, touching her fingers over the plaster, absorbing the energy. I led her through into the main courtyard, with a large room at either end. It was the original section of the Caliph's House, which would once have stood alone, far from the city of Casablanca.
Sukayna removed her slippers and walked barefoot. In her clinic at the back of the mattress shop, she had struck me as a calm person. But she seemed all the calmer the moment she entered the courtyard garden. We had installed an elaborate mosaic fountain on the far wall, which backed on to the shantytown. The sight of the fountain with its dazzling colours, the sound of water flowing into the pool, and the coolness of the liquid touching the skin stirred the senses.
The astrologer stepped over, dipped her hand in the water, closed her eyes and said: 'I am overwhelmed.'
'What do you feel?'
'The energy, the baraka.'
'How did the energy get here?'
'The saint,' she said. 'I can feel him.'
'Where?'
'In this garden, in the walls.'
We ambled down the narrow path to the far end, to the room where the jinns were believed to have resided. As she entered the room, which is now used for guests, Sukayna's eyes widened. She touched the walls, opened her mouth a crack, swallowed.
'What do you feel in here?'
'Good and evil met in this room,' she said.
'The exorcists battled the jinns in here for hours. They spilled blood and they sucked the jinns from the walls.'
'I know,' said
Sukayna. 'I can feel it.'
'Have the jinns gone?'
She nodded. 'There are no bad spirits now.'
I pointed out where the stairs went down, the great mystery of the house. They ended nowhere, at a blank wall.
'Why are there stairs?'
Sukayna stepped down, running her hand along the wall. She was concentrating very hard, her back muscles tight with anticipation. On the last stair she lit another candle, held her palms upwards in prayer and, after several minutes, touched the three walls with both hands.
'Where do the steps lead?'
'I will tell you,' Sukayna replied.
She climbed the stairs and we sat in the garden courtyard, the sound of water flowing behind. Sukayna wiped her eyes and smiled.
'There was a holy man,' she said. 'He was travelling along the coast, to a shrine in the north. As he neared Casablanca, a winter storm hit. Waves as high as mountains, rain so heavy that it could knock you down. The sage was drenched, freezing cold. He was by himself with a donkey.'
'What did he do?'
'He looked for shelter. There were no houses, just the bare shore, sand and waves. He staggered inland a little way and, through the pouring rain, he saw a house, this house. He called out, and the owner, the Caliph, welcomed him, gave him dry clothes, food, warmth. He stayed here for several weeks.'
'When did this happen?'
'A long time ago, a hundred years or more.
'Before he left, he touched the house with his hand. It wasn't the same as you or me touching something. It was far more powerful. His touch transferred energy, baraka. You can feel it, it's still here.'
'What about the stairs, though? Where do they lead?'
Sukayna stood up and led me back to the room.
'Do you see how high the ceiling is here?'
'Yes, it must be twenty feet.'
'Is there such a high ceiling anywhere else in the house?'
'No.'
'These steps do not go down to anywhere,' said Sukayna.
'Then why are they there?'
'They are a symbol,' she said.
'Of what?'
'Of our condition.'
'What?'
'Down there is what is below and up there is what is above.'