The Saffron Gate

by Holeman, Linda

  Two days after I had settled into the small hotel, I went back to Le Jardin Majorelle. I was embarrassed to seek out Aszulay again, and yet I had to tell him that I was no longer at Hôtel de la Palmeraie. Then, when Etienne returned, Aszulay would tell him where I could be found; I knew with certainty that Manon would not pass on my information to her brother.

  This time Aszulay, obviously finished for the day, was walking towards the entrance as I was coming in.

  ‘Mademoiselle O’Shea, he said, looking …what? What was his expression? I couldn’t decipher what I saw, but somehow it warmed me. Did he look almost pleased at my unexpected appearance? If so, his voice didn’t indicate it. ‘So you are still in Marrakesh.’

  ‘Yes.’ I moved into the shade of thick overhanging branches, and he stepped under the tree as well. ‘I have moved hotels, and came to tell you. I know you will tell Etienne where he can find me when he returns. I’m at Hôtel Nord-Africain, on Rue—’

  ‘I know of it,’ Aszulay interrupted.

  ‘Oh. Well. You’ll tell him, then, when he comes?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And … what of Badou? Is he well?’ I asked. I had been surprised by how many times I’d thought of the little boy since I’d seen him last.

  ‘Badou is fine,’ he stated. ‘I passed by Sharia Zitoun yesterday.’ His voice was more clipped than usual.

  I wondered how Manon kept her lovers from running into each other. For all I knew, she had more men than Aszulay and the Frenchman. Olivier, she had called him.

  ‘And Badou’s father, Monsieur Maliki,’ I suddenly said, not knowing I was going to say the words until they were out of my mouth. ‘Where is he? Does he ever see his son, or help with his needs?’

  Again Aszulay’s expression changed. ‘There is no Monsieur Maliki.’

  ‘But … Manon is Madame Maliki,’ I argued.

  ‘She is Mademoiselle Maliki.’

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ I realised no one else had ever called her Madame. Only I, because I had assumed it was her married name. ‘How is this? If she isn’t married … why isn’t she Mademoiselle Duverger?’

  Aszulay ran his sleeve across his face. Again, I saw the dirt of the garden on his hands and wrists, a fine red dusting on his dark skin.

  ‘Aszulay. I’m not asking you to disclose secrets. I’m trying to understand Manon so I can understand Etienne. Manon is Etienne’s sister, but … it’s puzzling. More and more things don’t make sense. Her hatred for her father; even her anger towards Etienne. Is it only over the fact that she wasn’t left what she thought her fair share when their father died? Is it this that’s made her so bitter and full of rage?’

  ‘How do you not see it, Mademoiselle O’Shea?’ Aszulay said then, frowning down at me. He seemed, somehow, upset with me. I knew I shouldn’t question him further, should just leave. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep talking to him. ‘How do you have to ask me this?’ he continued.

  I frowned back at him. ‘What do you—’

  He shook his head. ‘Surely it’s the same in your country. It’s the same everywhere. The man has a wife. And the man has another woman. There are children.’

  I waited.

  ‘Manon’s mother — Rachida Maliki — was a servant in the house of Marcel Duverger. Monsieur Duverger and she …’ He stopped. ‘They were together for a long time. Manon told me that Monsieur Duverger came to Marrakesh and went back to France for some years before the French began to rule, and she was born during that time. But after the French took over Morocco, Monsieur Duverger brought Madame and Etienne and Guillaume from Paris, and they made their lives in Marrakesh. Still Rachida Maliki worked in the Duverger house.’

  He stopped. It was the most I had heard Aszulay say at one time. I realised I was staring at him, watching his lips. He had a sensitive mouth, I suddenly thought. His mastery of French, with the Arabic influence, had an undercurrent of rhythm that was almost a melody.

  He tapped his temple. ‘Often the wife suspects. But if Madame Duverger had known about Rachida, she wouldn’t have allowed her to remain a servant in her house. And she was kind to Rachida, and even to Manon.’

  ‘She knew Manon?’

  ‘When Manon was small, her grandmother took care of her, but when she was older, her mother often took her to the big house, to the Duverger house, to help with the work. And Manon told me that Madame Duverger gave her little gifts and some of her clothes she no longer wanted. Manon knew who her father was. In Marrakesh, in the medina, all the families know the father of the child. It’s not a secret in the medina. In the French Quarter, yes, but in the medina, no.

  ‘When Manon was helping her mother, she sometimes played with Etienne and Guillaume. But she knew she couldn’t speak of the secret — that Etienne and Guillaume’s father was also her father — because then it would go badly for her mother. She would lose her job and the extra luxuries Monsieur Duverger gave her.’

  ‘So Etienne … he didn’t know, then?’

  Aszulay’s face changed slightly. ‘He didn’t know for many years. Manon was simply a servant’s daughter. But Manon has great strength, great determination. She educated herself. She learned to speak French as if born to it. She was — is, as you can see — very beautiful. Very …’ He shook his head in frustration, saying an Arabic word. ‘I can’t think of the right word. But she could always make men come to her, and want her. From the time she was fifteen years old, Manon always had men to look after her.’

  I knew the word he was searching for. Sensuous. Desirable. I had seen it in her flirtatious behaviour with Aszulay. I also saw how much power she knew she possessed. Had Aszulay known Manon for this long, then? Since she was fifteen years old? Had he loved her all these years?

  ‘Manon would never be a subservient Moroccan wife, confined to the house and courtyard and roof,’ Aszulay continued. ‘She wanted a French husband, a man who would treat her as she saw the French women treated. And she had French men, many of them.’ Again I thought of Olivier, leaving her bedroom. ‘But none would marry her; they saw her for what she was.’ Aszulay stopped for a moment. ‘Manon is not wholly an Arab, nor is she a European. She is not alone in this; many women like her live throughout Morocco. But they find ways to make decent lives for themselves. Manon’s downfall was that she was also a woman who at one time gave herself too freely. She wouldn’t be a Moroccan wife, and yet she wouldn’t be a chikha — a concubine. It’s a legal profession here.’

  So many questions, questions I found difficult to have answered. It was a complicated web: Manon, Aszulay, Olivier. Etienne.

  ‘Instead,’ Aszulay said, ‘she looked for love. Always looking for love, Manon, clutching at it with her fingertips, and yet, sadly, unable to understand why what she thought was love was always taken away.’

  I watched his face; had he once begged Manon to marry him? Had she spurned him because he was a Tuareg, and yet he loved her still?

  ‘But … when did Etienne find out Manon was his sister?’ I asked.

  At that, Aszulay stepped out of the shade and looked at the sun. ‘I must go,’ he said.

  I stayed where I was, not wanting him to leave. The story, and his voice, had mesmerised me.

  He looked back at me. ‘I have your information to pass on to Etienne, Mademoiselle O’Shea,’ he said.

  ‘My name is Sidonie,’ I said, not sure why.

  He nodded once. I wanted him to say it. I wanted to hear how he would say my name. But he turned and strode away.

  While biding my time at Hôtel Nord-Africain, there were still times when I’d see a man from afar at one of the outside cafés in the French Quarter and think it was Etienne. At other times, as I caught a glimpse of a tall Tuareg swathed in blue walking regally down a street, I thought it might be Aszulay.

  Sometimes I dreamed of Etienne: troubling, anxious dreams where he was lost, or I was lost. Dreams of finding him, but he didn’t recognise me. Dreams where I saw him in the distance, but as I came closer h
e grew smaller, and finally disappeared.

  Dreams where I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise myself, my features moving, changing.

  When I awoke from these nightmares, I tried to calm myself by remembering the times of love we had shared in Albany. But it was harder and harder to recall tender moments, to think of his expression as he watched me walk towards him.

  One morning, lying in bed and listening to the morning call to prayer, I reached to my bedside table and picked up the tile from the Blue Man on the piste. I traced the bold blue and green design; the tile was smooth and cool under my fingertips. How had the tile-maker created this depth of colour?

  I thought of the wildness of Manon’s oils, then compared them to the painful attention I had always taken with my genteel renderings, my careful, perfect blooms of delicate hues. The cautious, minute brushstrokes that went into a bird’s crest, a butterfly’s wing. Yes, they were pretty flowers, pretty birds and butterflies, true replicas, but what did they make me feel? What part of myself had I put into those re-creations?

  I again saw myself in my old room in Albany, holding a brush, trying to capture a small, quiet image. But I knew that those paintings were not part of my world any more — not this world, this new world.

  I thought again of the journey with Mustapha and Aziz, of the bright moored boats along the Atlantic, the sky yellow at the end of the day, alight with wheeling gulls. I thought of the alert and hungry dogs under the tables of the meat merchants in the villages, waiting for the daily slithering mess of goat and sheep and lamb entrails the men threw down.

  I thought of the palms lining the main street of La Ville Nouvelle, and the richness of the flowers growing in tangled profusion in gardens. I closed my eyes, seeing, on my lids, the vibrancy of Moroccan colours everywhere: the fabrics, the clothing, the tiles, the walls and shutters and doors and gates. Colour so bright it almost pained my eyes, colour so soft, so subtle and ethereal I wanted to reach out and close my hand on it, the way one wants to capture a cloud.

  I sat up.

  Suddenly I wanted to paint it all: the boats, the sky and birds — both the free gulls and the imprisoned beauties in cages in the markets. I wanted to paint Marrakesh’s scrawny cats, even, perhaps, the gruesome decapitated goat heads, or the lonely solitude of a Muslim cemetery. I wanted to capture the serpentine labyrinths of the souks, overflowing with intricately woven baskets and the awe-inspiring designs of the carpets, the winking gems in the jewellery, the glint of silver teapots and the rainbows of babouches. I wanted to duplicate the chilling bone white — produced by lye — of whitewashed walls; I wanted to create the rich and riotous panoply of the mounds of spices in D’jemma el Fna; I wanted to copy Majorelle’s glorious blue.

  I had no idea if I could produce any of the images with even the slightest sense of authenticity. But I had to try.

  I went back to the art shop I had often passed and purchased watercolours and paper and an easel and brushes of various sizes. The purchases took more of my hoarded bills and coins, and yet I felt the need to paint so strongly that I knew I must.

  I came back to the hotel and set up the easel near the window, and spent the rest of the day experimenting. The brushes felt so right in my hand. My strokes were sure and strong.

  When I realised the light was failing, and my neck and shoulders were stiff, I stopped, studying what I had done.

  I thought of the watercolours in the lobby of the grand Hôtel de la Palmeraie, comparing mine to them.

  A thought came to me. Preposterous, perhaps.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  A few days later, as I tried to capture the look of a Moroccan woman on paper, I stopped, going to the mirror. I tied one of my white linen handkerchiefs around the bottom of my face. With a haik draped over me and only my dark eyes and eyebrows visible, I would be indistinguishable from the other women in the souks.

  Although D’jemma el Fna and some of the markets were, by now, more familiar, I was still uncomfortable going into the medina. The few times I ventured in I cringed at being stared at, at being set upon by small bands of demanding children, at being shouted at by all the vendors to buy their wares, at being surreptitiously touched.

  I went out, stopping to look at the expensive silk kaftans in the windows in the French Quarter, and then went into the medina and found a souk selling them for a fraction of the price. I fingered the simplest of the kaftans, and finally bought one, after a great deal of bargaining. It was calico, small red flowers on a yellow background. I bought a long, wide piece of coarse white fabric — the haik — and a veil. I took it all back to my room at the hotel and put it on.

  I stared at myself for a long time, then took it off and finished my painting. The next day, dressed as a Moroccan woman, I left the hotel and went to D’jemma el Fna, walking slowly through the square, looking around me. I had always hurried through, making sure I didn’t meet the eyes of any of the men, making sure I didn’t attract attention. This time was so different. I had become invisible. And with the invisibility came a freedom. Nobody looked at me — not French men or women, not Moroccan men or women. I could move about as I chose. I could watch and listen. It was so much easier to learn things, to understand, when one didn’t have to be aware of oneself.

  I saw Mohammed with the little monkey crouched on his shoulder; he didn’t glance at me. I stopped to watch the snake-charmers, seeing that when the sun was at its brightest, the snakes reacted in the liveliest fashion. I saw children swarming a European couple trying to escape as I once had. One of the smaller boys in the little group reminded me of Badou, and I was overcome with a rush of wanting to see him again. I hoped that when Etienne returned I would have the chance; when Manon saw that Etienne welcomed me, she would have no choice but to accept me. She might not like it, but she would have to accept it.

  At the end of my first week in the small hotel, I took two of my watercolours and, putting on my green silk, went back to Hôtel de la Palmeraie. When Monsieur Henri saw me approach the desk, his features tightened.

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Fine, mademoiselle. How can I help you?’ He glanced to see if I had my suitcases.

  ‘I wish to discuss something.’

  ‘You don’t wish to stay with us?’

  ‘No,’ I said, smiling, trying not to show my nervousness. This moment was so important. ‘No, I will not be staying here again.’ I took out the watercolours. ‘But I have completed these recently, and wondered if you would be interested in placing them with the others, to be sold on commission.’

  He studied them, then looked up at me. ‘You say you have done these, mademoiselle?’

  I nodded. ‘Do you not agree they would fit with the others you have displayed?’ I repeated, the same tight smile on my face, willing myself to appear businesslike, and not show too much hope. Not to let him see my desperation. If I was to stay on in Marrakesh, waiting for Etienne to return, I needed money. This was my only option.

  He didn’t say no, but he tilted his head to one side. ‘Of course it is not my decision. We have a buyer for the goods — the artwork and jewellery — sold in the hotel.’

  ‘I’m sure you could use your influence,’ I said. ‘A man such as yourself, with such good taste.’ I swallowed.

  He liked the compliment, his face loosening, and then he actually smiled. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘We’ve sold a number recently, and perhaps a new artist would be of interest.’

  My relief was so great that it took me a moment to answer. Nothing was certain, but at least he hadn’t rejected them. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Yes, fine. I’ll leave them with you, and come back in a few days to find out if the hotel wishes to take them. I have more, as well,’ I said. I had completed two more, with another started only that morning.

  ‘Thank you, mademoiselle,’ Monsieur Henri said, bowing slightly, and I raised my chin and smiled at him, an open, thankful smile.

  As I walked out of th
e hotel, I thought of his words, a new artist, and walked more briskly, swinging my arms. When an elderly man looked at me, lifting his hat as I passed, I realised I was still smiling.

  A few days later I was in the silver souk, looking at a square-cut topaz ring in a delicate silver setting. I had returned to Hôtel de la Palmeraie only that morning, and Monsieur Henri had told me that the man responsible for the decision-making on what the hotel would accept had been pleased with my work. He would take the two. If there was interest shown, he would take more.

  I held the ring out at shoulder height, admiring the way the light caught in its facets, trying to think of how I could mix colours to create this hue. As I returned the ring to the stall owner, I heard a familiar voice and turned. It was Falida, a large, threadbare cotton handkerchief draped on her head and a woven basket looped over her shoulder. She held Badou’s hand.

  My heart leapt. ‘Badou,’ I called, and he looked around. I realised he didn’t recognise me. I let go of the edges of my haik and said his name again, and this time he stared for a moment, then dropped Falida’s hand and ran to me, throwing his arms around my legs as I’d seen him do with Aszulay. I knelt and enclosed him in my arms. He felt very thin. His hair was too long, hanging over his eyes, and he had to continually toss his head so he could see properly.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a long time, Mademoiselle Sidonie,’ he said to me, pulling back and studying me. ‘You are a different lady now.’

  ‘I missed you,’ I told him.

  Falida came to us. She had a dark purple bruise, its edges yellowing, on her cheekbone. My heart went out to her. Although Badou appeared undernourished and dirty, at least there was no evidence that Manon beat him. Not yet, I thought. ‘Are you shopping, Falida?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head, frowning.

  ‘Where are you going?’