In Arabian Nights

by Tahir Shah

  'He was very old.'

  'I know. But where is he? In another room?'

  She looked at me, her eyes reading my dread.

  'He is in Paradise,' she said.

  I was too sad to stay in Casablanca a moment longer. I told Rachana to pack some clothes, and Ariane and Timur to fetch their favourite toys.

  'We are going away,' I said.

  'Where?'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'How long are we going for?'

  'A couple of days, a week, a month.'

  A short time later we were all in the car sitting in the lane. The cases had been piled in the back and the seat belts fastened. The children were already fighting. I had left money with Osman to pay the guardians for four weeks and had given him a note for Dr Mehdi, to be taken to Café Mabrook the following Friday afternoon. It said simply: Gone to search for my story.

  We drove down the lane and through the bidonville. The fishseller had rolled his cart down the track from the road. It was surrounded by a cacophony of cats. The knife sharpener was there, too, and the man who wrote letters for the illiterate, and two dozen children playing marbles in the mud.

  Rachana asked again where we were heading. I didn't answer, but thought back to the security of my childhood. I was squeezed up in our red Ford Cortina, between my twin sister, Safia, and a giant brass candlestick my mother had got cheap in Marrakech. The car was low to the ground, whining, weighed down with mountains of bargains. My father was haranguing the gardener on the taste of Kabuli melons in Afghanistan and my mother was knitting a fluorescent pink shawl. My older sister, Saira, was on the back seat, her head pushed out of the open window, about to be sick. The car was freewheeling downhill across farmland, the soil nut-brown and moist. There was a screen of tall trees, their leaves quivering in the breeze that precedes the rain. After it was a signpost. My Arabic was almost nonexistent, but Slipper Feet had ground its alphabet into my head. I read the sign: 'Fès.'

  The word caught my father's eye too.

  'Fès!' he cried out halfway through a sentence about Afghan pilau. 'It's the dark heart of Morocco. It is the Arabian Nights.'

  For a third time Rachana asked the name of our destination. I had a flash of the storytellers crouching outside the great city walls, then another of the tanneries, which look like something out of the Old Testament.

  'Baba, where are we going?' asked Ariane.

  'We are going to the dark heart of Morocco,' I said.

  After three hours on the highway, we descended across the same nut-brown fields I had seen as a child. The sky boiled with anvil clouds, the earth below it lush from months of rain. Ariane spotted a large stone in the middle of the highway, then another and another. They were all the same shape – smooth and oval, about the size of a tortoise . . . Then I realized: they were tortoises and were about to be flattened by the giant red truck we had struggled to overtake a mile before.

  With Ariane in tears at the thought of the execution of her favourite animals, I did an emergency stop, threw the car into reverse and leapt out. The truck was close and closing in, freewheeling down on to the nut-brown plain, the driver's crazed face already visible in the cabin. I jumped into the fast lane, scooped up the first tortoise and, in the same movement, another three. The truck was now so close that I could see deep into the driver's bloodshot eyes. They told a tale of a life dependent on kif.

  My arms juggling tortoises, I spun to the side and managed to lay the little reptiles in the soft grass at the edge of the highway. Ariane had calmed down on the back seat. She said that a witch had once turned a handsome prince into a tortoise for laughing at her warts.

  'Who told you that, Ariane?'

  She thought for a moment.

  'The Queen of the Fairies did,' she said.

  There can be no place in the Arab world quite as bewitching as Fès.

  We reached the ancient city as twilight melded into night. There were no stars and no more than the thinnest splinter of a moon. A blanket of darkness shrouded the buildings, muffling the last words of the evening call to the faithful. Arriving at Fès by night is almost impossible to describe accurately. There's a sense that you're intruding upon something so secretive and so grave that you will be changed by the experience.

  We found a small guest-house deep in the medina through Bab Er-Rsif, one of the central gates. I hauled the cases there and shepherded Rachana and the children through the labyrinth, to

  the door. The owner offered two rooms for the price of one. He said it was because we had brought baraka into his home – in the shape of children.

  'A house without children is like a landscape without trees,' he said. 'It may be beautiful, but there is emptiness.'

  He bent down, kissed Ariane and Timur on the head and then on each cheek. I found myself thinking about it later. If we were in the West and a man you didn't know covered your children in kisses, his motives might be considered questionable. In Morocco, however, a gentle innocence still prevails, as it did in the Western world until a generation ago.

  Just before we turned in for bed, the owner rapped at our door. I half wondered if he wanted to kiss the children goodnight. But he had come to say that a man was waiting for me downstairs.

  'Who is he?'

  'A foreigner.'

  I went down. A single forty-watt bulb struggled to illuminate the hallway, projecting long shadows over the walls. The man was standing near the door, wearing what looked like a Stetson. He was smoking a cheroot.

  'It's Robert,' he said.

  'Robert?'

  'Robert Twigger.'

  I shook his hand.

  'My God, it's been years. How did you find me?'

  'The medina grapevine,' he said.

  At dawn I crawled out of bed, woken by the muezzin, and made my way to the vantage point above the old city, at the Merinid Tombs. The first blush of pink light had touched the medina, where the only sign of life was the smoke rising solemnly from the bakeries in the twisting maze below. My father had taken me to the same spot thirty years before. He said that watching Fès was like peering into a world that had disappeared centuries ago.

  'This is the city of Sindbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba,' he said, 'of jinns and ghouls and the medieval Arab world.'

  'But the Arabian Nights were set in Baghdad, Baba.'

  'That's right, but Fès now is how Baghdad was then.'

  'It's dangerous,' I said.

  'Tahir Jan, what you think of as danger is the soul. Stretch out to touch it. Embrace it.'

  We had stood at the Merinid Tombs each morning for a week. On the last day, my father touched my shoulder as we walked back to the red Ford.

  'Fès will be important in your life,' he said.

  'How do you know?'

  'Because it's a centre of learning, a place where transmission takes place.'

  'But, Baba, it's just an old city,' I said.

  My father's face froze.

  'Never do that,' he said coldly.

  'Do what?'

  'Never call a diamond a piece of glass.'

  He opened the car door for me and stared into my eyes so forcefully that I found it hard to breathe.

  'Fès is where the baton is passed on,' he said.

  The first time I met Robert Twigger was fifteen years ago when I was homeless in Japan. He was a poet with a fondness for martial arts, a friend of a friend. I had travelled to Tokyo to study the culture and language of the indigenous Ainu people, the original inhabitants of the Japanese islands. Unfortunately I had severely misgauged the cost of living. Tokyo at the time was the most expensive city on earth. A cup of coffee, albeit flaked with gold leaf, could set you back a week's wages.

  Ten days after arriving, I had blown my entire savings, most of them on a single elaborate meal of Kobe beef, from a herd so pampered that each cow boasted its own private masseur. When Twigger found me, I was squatting in a disused office block, living on ornamental cabbages I had stolen from Ueno Park, where they grew in th
e flower beds. I would cook three at a time and stir in a couple of heaped spoons of monosodium glutamate. It wasn't what most people regard as luxury. But then real luxury is in the eye of the beholder.

  Twigger took me in. While I lived on his floor, simmering my infamous soup for us both, he would spend all his time preparing for the harshest martial arts course in the world. It was a form of aikido, a course designed to harden the Tokyo Riot Police. During the months I lodged with him, Twigger would spend the evenings talking of a dream that had gripped him since infancy – to find a lost race of cave-dwelling dwarfs thought to reside in Morocco's Atlas mountains.

  For a decade, he subjected himself to routines of wild preparation. He took to sleeping on a bed of nails that he had made himself, learned to shoot a pistol blindfolded and even canoed across Canada upstream to build the muscles on his arms.

  From the beginning, he was certain the dwarfs were part of a pygmy race that had once inhabited all of north Africa. His interest in the subject had arisen as a child. He had read a curious monograph entitled The Dwarfs of Mount Atlas by the nineteenth-century scholar R. G. Haliburton. The paper suggested that the dwarf people were afforded an almost sacred status, and that their whereabouts was kept secret from outsiders.

  Twigger believed that a local community somewhere in Morocco must have known stories of the small people. After all, he said, the subject had been a sensation when it first reached the West a little over a century ago. Trapped in the communal knowledge of the society he felt sure there was a clue waiting to be unearthed, a clue that could lead him to the lost tribe of Moroccan pygmies.

  We met for coffee the next morning, at a café outside Bab Er-Rsif. The place was filled with a dozen unshaven men in tattered jelabas, each one nursing a glass of café noir, with a cigarette stub screwed into the corner of his mouth. Rachana had taken the children to a hammam. She said male cafés were worthy only of men who frequented them.

  I couldn't understand what Twigger was doing in Fès.

  'You're not going to find your lost pygmy tribe here,' I said, once we had both been served coffee.

  'I know that.'

  'So what are you doing in town?'

  'Looking for clues,' he said.

  'In the old city?'

  'Kind of . . . in cafés like this one.'

  I swilled a mouthful of coffee.

  'I'm not quite sure I see the connection.'

  'It's in the folklore,' he said.

  'Meaning?'

  'Meaning you've got to tap into the substrata.'

  I ordered another round of coffee. Twigger lit a cheroot and sucked at the end.

  'Anthropologists are a pathetic bunch,' he said. 'They never find anything because they don't know how to look.'

  'How do you look?'

  'With my eyes closed.'

  That afternoon, I had a chat with the owner of the guest-house in which we were staying. He said his brother had committed the entire Qur'ān and the Hadith to memory by the age of twelve, that his ability to remember was so defined he had created a business from it.

  'What kind of business?'

  'He remembers things for people.'

  If you required an important date to be memorized or the text of a legal document, or a poem you especially liked, Waleed would remember it for you. He made a small charge depending on the length and complexity of the thing to be memorized. Like a social hard disk, he performed a function with the ear and the mouth that is more usually done by the eye and the hand.

  Late in the afternoon Waleed turned up at the guest-house to take a nap. He had just memorized a seventeen-page document and was feeling a little drained from the feat. He was big-boned and calm, with a waxy face that reflected the low-watt lighting. As soon as we had been introduced, he asked for my parents' names and my date of birth.

  'Don't worry,' I said, 'I won't need reminding of that information.'

  Waleed tapped the front of his head.

  'It's for the register,' he said.

  I asked him why people didn't write things down like everywhere else, why they preferred trusting his service to a sheet of paper.

  Waleed stretched out on the divan that ran along the far end of the entrance hall.

  'It's a tradition,' he said.

  'What is?'

  'Using the mind.'

  'But if something happened to you, all the information would be lost.'

  Waleed tugged off his yellow slippers.

  'Just as it would be if there was a fire, a flood, or a thief.'

  'But paper liberates the mind,' I insisted.

  'You're wrong,' he replied. 'The written word is weakening society, turning it to pulp.'

  'But writing makes books,' I said. 'And books are the most precious thing we have.'

  'Books are an insult to the mind,' said Waleed.

  'They are magical.'

  'No, they're the reason for society's collapse.'

  Waleed was part of a tradition almost lost in the West, a tradition that predated writing. Most of us spend our lives railing against the deadening effects of television and computer games, and we celebrate the written word. Waleed was a link in a far more ancient chain, a chain that existed since the dawn of humanity and is now under threat – that of the spoken word.

  For Muslims, the power of memory is important because it enables them to memorize the Qur'ān, an achievement regarded as a blessed act in itself. According to Islamic tradition, the Angel Gabriel recited the Holy Book to the Prophet Mohammed over a period of about twenty years. Mohammed, who was illiterate, committed the entire text to memory as he received it, just as his disciples did and Muslims continue to do today.

  But at the battle of Yamahah, little more than a decade after Mohammed's flight from Mecca, so many of his followers were killed that there was a real fear the knowledge of the sacred text would be lost altogether.

  It was then that the Qur'ān was written out for the first time.

  Waleed had said the only man in Fès with a better memory than he was a storyteller called Abdul Aziz. He was in his eighties but had a mind so crisp that he could supposedly remember every word he had ever heard spoken.

  'Where can I find him?'

  'I will take you,' said Waleed.

  Two days later, we packed the children into the car and, with Waleed directing, we drove out of Fès, down a series of bumpier and bumpier tracks into the low hills that encircle the town. There were olive groves on either side and the odd stone wall speckled with moss.

  After forty minutes, we rattled to a stop.

  'It's the end of the road,' said Waleed. 'We walk from here.'

  The sun was dazzling, the air tinged with the scent of warmer months approaching. We strolled through a meadow of citrus-yellow flowers. Ariane fell to her knees and made a posy. She gave it to Waleed.

  At the end of the field there was a ramshackle house, its brick walls pocked with holes, its roof about to cave in. The path leading to the place was littered with tin cans and shards of broken glass. A dog raised the alarm, ran out barking, a smudge of brown.

  A moment later, the silhouette of a man was in the doorway. He was tall, alert and walked with a cane. The sun was in our eyes and so I didn't catch his face at first. Waleed stepped forward, kissed the old man's hand and made the introductions.

  'I present to you Abdul Aziz,' he said solemnly.

  The man shook our hands and welcomed us. His hair had been dyed orange with henna and his face was dominated by a sore on his right cheek. It was an inch across and glistened in the light.

  He rounded us up with his arms.

  'It is a blessed day,' he said.

  Three stone steps led up to the house. The door was badly warped and had a crack down the middle so wide you could see through it into the salon.

  We went up the steps.

  The inside was cosy and simple, the home of a man with no interest in the material. There was a picture of fantasia, a swirling rush of paint, men charging with th
eir guns; and a dark lacquered cabinet packed with an assortment of plates. At the far end of the room stood a copy of the Qur'ān on a carved wooden stand.

  Abdul Aziz opened a cupboard and wrestled with a long object, tied at both ends. He slid it out. It was a carpet. The strings were unfastened and the rug laid over the floor. The design was Persian, a central medallion with interlocking arabesques at each corner. It was exquisite, the colours cochineal-red, sapphire-blue, with a hint of lilac along the edge. Just before spurting praise at seeing such a beautiful thing, I put a hand to my mouth and swallowed my words. In the East, an object admired by a guest is presented to him as a gift.

  Abdul Aziz invited us to sit on the carpet, then limped away to prepare the tea. When he came back a few minutes later, he found me stroking a palm over the knots.

  'It was given to me a long time ago,' he said.

  'The work is very fine.'

  'I keep it in the cupboard,' he replied, 'and bring it out when guests come to visit.'

  'It's Persian.'

  'Yes, from Isfahan.'

  'Have you been there, to Isfahan?'

  'No, no. A man from Iran gave it to me. I helped him through a trouble in his life.' Abdul Aziz paused, poured a glass of tea and tipped it back into the pot. 'I told him a story,' he said.

  He poured the tea again, leaned forward and kissed Timur on the cheek. I said that I had heard of his powerful memory. He waved a hand to the window.

  'A memory is no more than a tool,' he said. 'It's worthless in itself. A good memory is not the power to think. What has value is the thing you are holding in your mind.'

  'How many stories do you know?'

  The old storyteller stared at the carpet's interlocking arabesques, the corners of his mouth rising in a smile.

  'Many hundreds,' he said dimly. 'Thousands. I don't know. But a single good tale is as valuable as them all.'

  I asked about the tradition of storytelling in Fès.

  'The stories that touched the ears were as great as the buildings that still entertain the eyes. They were sacred in their own way.'

  'Are there any storytellers left?'