by Tahir Shah
'One or two, but they can't support themselves. Some have paying jobs. They tell tales in the evenings after their work is over. But they are not celebrated any longer.'
'I am searching for the story in my heart,' I said.
Abdul Aziz lifted his head until his eyes were in line with my own.
'I haven't heard of that in many years,' he said.
'Most people don't seem to know about it.'
'Of course they do not,' said the old man, raising the pot high to pour more tea. 'They have lost the tradition. It's like a piece of slate that's been wiped clean.'
'Could you tell me my story?' I said.
'How can I do that?' Abdul Aziz replied. 'For only you will know it.'
'Can't you see it?'
He shook his head. 'Of course not.'
'But how will I know it?'
The storyteller raised a finger. 'Be patient,' he said.
The brown dog ran inside and rolled over. Moroccans usually keep dogs outside. They say that when they enter a home, the angels leave. But Abdul Aziz was a doting master.
'An audience of dogs would listen far better than a crowd of people,' he said, running a hand over his dog's belly. 'These days people tell stories haphazardly,' he said. 'But it was never like that. Before the traditions faded, they used to choose them more carefully, selecting a tale for a particular person and a particular setting, to have a special effect.'
'You mean teaching stories?'
The old man traced one of the carpet's lines with the tip of his finger.
'All stories are teaching stories,' he said.
Ariane and Timur were growing restless. They wanted to run out to play in the meadow, to hurl each other into the carpet of yellow flowers.
'I will tell them a story,' said Abdul Aziz. 'I think that they will like it and that it will like them.'
He stretched back, stroked a hand down over his throat, and said: 'Once upon a time there was a kitchen in a palace, as grand as any the world has ever seen. There were pots and pans hanging on all the walls, and delicious ingredients piled up, waiting to be prepared. In the middle of the kitchen stood an enormous chimney and below it was a magnificent iron stove.
'Fifty chefs worked day and night to prepare the food for the table of the king. There were pies filled with peacock meat, roast lambs, skewers of venison and platter upon platter of meatballs, for everyone knew that the king's favourite dish was meatballs in creamy white sauce.
'Now,' said Abdul Aziz, 'one of the junior chefs had just finished preparing the last platter of meatballs. He opened the great iron door of the stove and slipped it inside. The dish began to sizzle as the fat melted and the temperature rose. The heat grew more and more suffocating and the meatballs began to bake. They cried out to their leader: "Help, help, do something, please, because we are being cooked alive. We will do anything for you, but first you must save our lives!"
'The meatball leader, who was the largest of them all, raised himself as high as he could and called to his fellow meatballs: "Have faith, O meatballs, I shall save you. I promise that we shall not be cooked, but salvation will occur in the most extraordinary way!" "What will our salvation be, O great leader?" "There will be soothing medicine to cool your burns and a fragrant bed for you to lie down upon and rest."
'Just then, the door of the oven was swung open and a cool white sauce was spooned over the meatballs. They gasped with joy and thanked God for saving them from the terrible fire. "You did not listen to me, my fellow meatballs," said the meatball leader, "for I promised you a cooling medicine and, look, it has come." But then the heat began to rise once again and some of the meatballs, the ones nearest the edge of the platter, were roasted alive. "O leader," cried the others, "please save our souls. We will follow you to the end of the earth. Just save us from this terrible heat." "Be calm, my meatballs," said the meatball leader. "Calm yourselves and the fire will be cooled. I promise you."
'At that very moment, the door of the oven opened again and the great platter was carefully removed by the chef. He shook it a little, to make sure the meatballs were not sticking to the bottom, and tipped it on to a bed of saffron-coloured rice. The dish was adorned with fragrant leaves and herbs. The meatballs were carried at shoulder height from the kitchen through the palace corridors and into the throne room, where the king himself was dining with his guests.
'The meatballs couldn't believe the change in their fortune. "I told you all that our bad luck would be reversed," declared the biggest meatball. "You just need to believe in me for I am your leader." The other meatballs squeaked words of praise as they nestled into the soft cushioning bed of rice. Suddenly the platter was laid down in front of the king himself.
'Some of the meatballs were dazzled by the glint of jewels on the necks of the guests, and others became overcome by the sound of the musicians playing on a dais in the room.
'But then the brotherhood of meatballs were removed a few at a time, spooned off the platter on to individual plates. And, far worse, hungry mouths round the table began gobbling them up. "O leader, our leader," cried the remaining meatballs, "what is happening to us? Our numbers are being culled and in the most shocking way! We are being exterminated."
'The king himself dug a fork into the platter and skewered six meatballs in one blow. "Treachery!" the last few meatballs cried. "How could this be happening to us?" By this point, the meatball leader was sick of hearing of the problems his meatball followers were facing. He shouted to them: "You were cooled by the medicinal white sauce, were you not?" "Yes, yes, we were!" shouted the last remaining meatballs. "And you were removed from the terrible fire and placed on a bed of cool, calming rice, were you not?" "Yes, yes, we were," said the meatballs. "Well, when are you going to understand that you are meatballs and that as such you are destined for the stomachs of hungry men?"
'A moment later, the meatball leader was scooped up and swallowed whole by the king. The last meatballs on the platter continued to shout and scream and protest their unwillingness to be eaten. But by then no one was left to listen to their cries.'
TWENTY-TWO
Tie two birds together.
They will not be able to fly even though they now have four wings.
Jalaluddin Rumi
THERE WAS ONLY ONE DAY I CAN REMEMBER ON WHICH MY father said nothing at all. We had been in Fès for more than a week, staying at the plush Hotel Palais Jamaï. My sisters and I spent most of our time playing hide-and-seek in the Andalucian gardens that overlook the medina. My mother sat on the terrace, knitting. My father was nowhere to be seen. Whenever we asked where he was, my mother would rest the knitting needles on her knee and say: 'He's out doing his work.'
I never thought to ask what his work actually was. I would hear him talking almost all the time, and assumed that people paid him to talk. Sometimes strangers would turn up at our home in the late morning. They would sit primly on the slippery turquoise couch and my father would start talking to them. He would continue through lunch and the afternoon, through the evening and then late into the night.
When he wasn't talking, he was typing on a robust old manual typewriter. The sound of inked keys striking paper at lightning speed haunts me even now.
On the day my father didn't say a single word, he sat on a chair in the gardens of the Palais Jamaï, drinking coffee and making notes in blue-black ink. Every so often he would glance up and watch us running through the flower beds. But he didn't really see us.
He was seeing stories instead.
The next day the blue-black notes were in his hand at breakfast. It was clear he was ready to talk about what his mind had processed. We were just about to scamper into the garden, when he said: 'Who likes stories?'
We put up our hands as if we were in class.
'We all do,' I said.
'All children like stories,' said my sister.
'Do you think stories are just for children?' he asked.
'Yes, Baba.'
'Well, I'll tell you something. Stor
ies are for everyone, not just for children,' he said. 'But sometimes people forget that. When grown-ups hear stories, sometimes they don't realize that they are very clever things, things that can help them to learn other things.'
'Are stories like going to school, Baba?'
'Well, yes, in a way that's just what they are. But stories have been around long before there were any schools or schoolteachers. They have been around since the beginning of time.'
'Baba, shall we go and tell people?' I asked.
'Tell them what, Tahir Jan?'
'Tell them stories are clever and that they are for them.'
My father held up the paper he was holding.
'That is a very good idea and just what I was thinking. What I want to do is to get grown-ups telling other grown-ups stories again where we live. Just like people do in Morocco.' He paused and touched the paper to his chin.
'I want to start a College of Storytellers,' he said.
Robert Twigger tracked me down the next afternoon. He had just finished a marathon session going from café to café in search of clues and was wide-eyed from all the caffeine. I still didn't see the connection between folklore and pygmies, but Twigger swept my questions away with his hand.
'Folklore is like the thick green soup humanity climbed out of,' he said. 'It's packed with nourishment, with information and clues. The thing is that we belittle it. We laugh at the idea of being able to tap into it. But imagine if we could decipher folklore in a place like this.'
'In Fès?'
'Yes! Imagine . . . everyone who's ever lived here has rubbed off and left a kind of footprint in the folklore. They've impacted on it, touched it. Everything they've ever seen, discovered, known, it's all there, all in the thick green soup.'
'But how would you go about deciphering it?'
Twigger took a deep breath. 'That's a big question.'
'Do you have an answer?'
'Perseverance,' he said.
At the guest-house, the owner's brother, Waleed, was stretched out in the hallway again. I staggered in through the door with a dozen bags filled with bargains from the medina, Rachana and the kids treading in my steps. Waleed sat up, kissed Ariane and Timur, and asked if I was a Christian. It was a strange question to get hit with out of the blue. I told him that my family were Muslim and that Rachana had been raised Hindu. Waleed seemed pleased by the answer.
'That's good,' he said.
'I have a lot of Christian friends, though,' I said. 'I have friends from all religions.'
Waleed groomed a hand over his chin.
'Morocco is the place where all religions live freely,' he said. 'There were Jews here two thousand years ago, long before the Arabs. Many have gone to Israel now, but in their hearts they are Moroccan.'
I put the shopping down.
'I don't notice people's religion,' I said. 'It's not important to me.'
'You are right, Monsieur Tahir. We have Muslim friends and Hindu friends and friends who are Christian and Jew.'
'Very good.'
'But there are new people here in our city.'
'Oh?'
'Yes, they are Christian, but they are not like the Christians we have known before.'
'What's different about them?'
'They are trying to make us into Christians. We have told them that we are very happy being Muslim, that we don't want to change.'
'Are they missionaries?'
'Yes, missionaries,' said Waleed. 'That's what they are. They sing songs and play guitars and wave their arms in the air.'
'Happy Clappies,' I said.
'That is their title?'
'Well, some people call them that.'
'What can we do, Monsieur Tahir, about these Happy Clappies?'
'Just ignore them,' I said.
Waleed scratched his neck.
'If we ignore them, will they listen?'
The College of Storytellers drew together an assembly of raconteurs, folklorists and oral historians, both in Europe and in the United States. Over the years it existed, the college promoted the transmission of stories from almost every country in the world. At the same time, it encouraged people to consider how stories worked on the mind, how they helped in problem solving and how the same tale can be found in completely different regions of the globe.
At one of the meetings held in a community hall in London, I was introduced to a man called Wilson. He was six foot three, as thin as a barge-pole and hollow-cheeked, as if a mysterious tropical illness had eaten all the flesh from his face. He had a hard-to-place accent and was wearing yellow gumboots.
The College of Storytellers' great attraction was the throng it attracted. It ranged from members of the establishment to the eccentric, and beyond, to a realm peopled by the gloriously odd. But the great thing was that everyone who turned up at the meetings was passionate about story-telling.
Wilson slapped me on the back and said he had just got in from South Africa.
'Been transcribing some Zulu tales,' he said vaguely. 'They have their own form of "The Ugly Duckling", don't you know?'
'Are you going to tell a story here today?' I asked.
Wilson pulled out a briar pipe and stuck the bit between his teeth.
'Got a little tale from the Mekong Delta I thought I'd share,' he said. 'After all, a good story's like a rat trapped in a larder.'
'How's that?'
'It gnaws away until it's set free.'
The next week, Wilson telephoned the flat where I was living in north London. He said he had been unable to sleep for two nights, that another tale was gnawing away. I was busy with university exams and hardly had enough time to eat, let alone listen to stories. But I have never found it easy to give an excuse down a telephone line.
'You'd better come over,' I said.
Three hours later, Wilson's finger was holding down the doorbell. His gaunt cheeks were redder than before. It may have been because he had walked from the East End, a distance of ten miles. On his feet were the yellow gumboots and on his head was a lizard-green trilby.
He sat on the sofa in my cramped studio flat. There were papers strewn everywhere and dozens of books, each one open at a particular page.
I excused the mess. 'I've got finals,' I said weakly.
Wilson took out his pipe, filled it with tobacco from a leather pouch and set fire to the bowl. The papers and books disappeared in a fog of silver smoke. He related a few stories gathered on his travels in West Africa, New Zealand and Nepal. Then, pulling off his gumboots, he said: 'I'll tell you something.'
'What?'
'We could have learned a lot from the Ainu in Japan,' he said. 'They didn't have a writing system, but they used stories to remember things. Any important event or bit of knowledge was put into a story, packaged neatly up in a frame and was told and retold. As time passed people forgot what was true and what was imagined, which stories were based on reality and which were not. But then,' said Wilson, refilling his pipe, 'it didn't matter to them.'
'What didn't matter?'
'Whether something was true or not.'
Just before dark, Wilson put on his yellow gumboots and shook my hand before he strode off back to the East End.
'I'll see you at the college's next meeting,' I said as he turned to leave.
'I shouldn't think so, old boy.'
'Why not?'
'Because I'm heading off to New Guinea at dawn.'
Our paths never crossed again. I didn't forget the afternoon Wilson had spent smoking his pipe, telling stories in my flat. I can't remember what tales he told me. But his observation about fact and fiction rubbed off, as did his notes on the Ainu, a subject that preoccupied me later on.
During my own travels I have found fact and fantasy blended together throughout the developing world. Where they converge and coexist there may be poverty, but there tends to be a kind of harmony too, a balance, as if the culture is held in place by an invisible counterweight laid into the fabric of the society.
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sp; Step into Fès's medina and it's almost impossible not to be affected by what you find. Certainly, it may appear to be disorderly at first but, as your eyes acclimatize, you begin to understand that there's very little disorder at all. The old city moves to an ancient rhythm, a routine that has become streamlined through time. Like a shard of once-sharp glass smoothed by decades on the sea bed, Fès is sensible, rounded, complete within itself. Walk through the streets and you can tell who belongs there and who does not. The locals have a special look in their eye, a confidence, an arrogance.
And they have plenty to be arrogant about.
Before we bought the Caliph's House and moved to Casablanca, I had negotiated for a vast merchant's house in Fès. The building was so large that I toured it without muttering a word, silenced by the enormity and by the grandeur. There were three large courtyards and a harem, each replete with mosaic fountains, painted wooden ceilings, stucco plasterwork and bougainvillea vines. The house was owned by seven greedy brothers. To buy it, I would have had to coax each one to sell. It was a possibility, but I was still so unripe that I stormed out of the first coaxing session after only an hour and a half. A local would have dug in his heels, swilled down another glass of sweet mint tea and prepared himself for days of negotiation.
There is no city on earth that gets me quite as excited as Fès, with its medieval Moroccan architecture serene beyond words, crafted on a matrix of perfect geometric design. It is an incomparable joy to slip from the tangled streets through a doorway no taller than a barrel and to find yourself in a shaded palace, utterly cloistered from the outside world.
The appeal of Moroccan houses has not gone unnoticed by the West. Over the last decade thousands have been sold in Marrakech, in particular to Americans, British and French. There is an abundance of coffee-table books of what are usually called riads, although many are not strictly riads at all. Riad simply means 'garden' and is used to describe a house with a central courtyard, typically with four symmetrical flower beds inside. The flower beds signify the world beyond, for Muslims believe that Paradise is a garden. Any visitor to the Arabian desert can imagine how the nomadic Bedouin would have fantasized about such a place, with cool shady trees, birdsong, and fountains issuing an abundance of fresh water.