Two manifest Jews shared my compartment, alongside a heavily built European, in horn-rimmed glasses, reading André Maurois’ Ariel in Spanish. The older Jew was tall and wore a brown suit, baggy but expensive, with broad lapels, and a floppy brown hat. When it was removed, there was a black skull cap underneath. He had a full black beard, pale skin, harsh hair brushed back from his shiny forehead. His nose was rounded and fleshy, lips full and soft, the lower one drooping, a dip in the centre. His mouth was always ajar. Perhaps he was adenoidal. He spoke in a very British accent, with the odd middle-European consonant. He wore brown shoes with black socks. His hands were broad and white, like Dover soles.
His companion was a francophone Moroccan, olive-faced, smallish eyes, nose curved to a dark upper lip, profile almost semi-circular. He too wore a yarmulke and scanned a Hebrew book from time to time. The brown-suited man quizzed him, with explicit loudness, about the conduct of Zionist affairs in north Africa. He seemed to be a sort of Lawrence of Morocco. His only commendatory remark, not infrequently uttered, was, ‘He’s a very clever boy.’ Something possessed me to ask him whether, by any chance, he knew the Test match score. He seemed quite shocked. He had something of the obsessive humourlessness of the character played by Joseph Wiseman (in a similar hat) in Viva Zapata! When he opened his very big brown suitcase, with reinforced corners, to get some apples, I saw that the contents had all been compressed into tight cylinders. He might have been toting a range of pork-free sausage rolls.
My guide in Fez was an Arab who had been a sergeant pilot in the RAF. I could call him Ahmed. He wore a plum-coloured fez with a tassel and a fawn linen robe. The Hôtel de la Paix was in the modern European quarter. Between it and the old city was the Sultan’s summer palace; it had been turned into a barracks for French native forces. Mohammed V had been sent into exile for demanding independence for his kingdom. The riots that followed, and their repression, had ruined the tourist trade. We passed a Bren-carrier that had tipped into a ditch. A French officer was supervising its removal under the eyes of a carefully expressionless crowd of Berbers and local Arabs.
The Berber camp was under the battlements of the old city: dark tents, a brown and white dog, women carrying children tucked under their bosoms; seated men, in white robes, made a large double circle around a story-teller. Ahmed promised that the stories came from the Thousand and One Nights, but a good raconteur, like a Homeric rhapsode, added his own flourishes. The ancient world was coming to life in front of me, too late.
The French supervised the souks where workshops and stores were combined in tiny alcoves. There were pools of dirty water and a yellow reek of urine. Beggars squatted in the dust; rich men straddled their mules on turreted saddles. The side streets were so narrow that we had to sidle between the bulge of the white walls, as if the houses had overeaten. Tight cedar doors gave off a faintly scorched odour. The lintels were no more than five feet above the dusty ground. They had slim brass hands for knockers, pendent fingers, for luck.
One of the metalworkers took a disc of brass, like a cymbal, and laid it across a vice and took up a small chisel and a light hammer. Looking about him as he did so, he tapped the wedge and tooled the surface of the metal with a pattern of leaves in an intricate flow of curving lines. One false stroke and it would be ruined. He subdued his material with a kind of humble contempt for the admiring stranger who watched him.
The salesmen all told me how lucky I was: things were going cheap; they needed money badly. Ahmed did not quite convince me that he was arguing my case when we were bargaining. He leaned up and kissed a seller’s forehead rather too quickly. I bought a silver bracelet for Beetle, but backed away from thin teapots, coffee pots, coasters, gongs, chandeliers and incense burners gaudy with green and white and blue and red enamel.
Behind the old Arab market, with its blackened cedar arcades, now a police station, a single fat gendarme leaned, in blue shirtsleeves, over the first-floor balcony. Below him, ironworkers made grilles for windows. The forges were black as funerals. Squashed against the back wall squatted a boy clutching and pumping the double bellows with both hands so that, like alternate lungs, they breathed first one, then the other, on the hidden fire. The tip of its tongue darted, like the pulse of an insatiable passion, quick and thrusting at the bolts of iron pressed up to it by the smith’s tongs. When the arm of iron was red, he drew it out and beat on it before its heat could run away. He hammered it into curlicues, flexing it with no more than the hint of effort you might apply to bend a sheaf of spaghetti in boiling water. Behind him, the dark child, feet packed away in a curve of dark toes and pink soles, pumped and pumped as though priming his own heart.
After the bridal dresses, with their cinctures of gold twine braided on linen and the grooms’ white-belted costumes, we came to the dyers’ quarter. Pots of colour lay like fractured rainbows on the roadway. Vats of natural dye bubbled under corrugated iron hoods, cadging colour from boiling flowers and leaves. Women drowned fresh bolts of white in the vats and prodded them to stay down, like memories dumped into oblivion. Between the old and the new town – literally middle men – came the Jews in their black cowls. Their houses resembled those in Toledo: open wooden balconies on the first floor; tall windows below, where the Arab houses were closed and secret. The Jews were detached, aloof and vulnerable.
The sunset, when it came, blushed quickly, a tissue filter pinking the distracted clouds. At five-thirty the light was lit on the principal minaret of the main mosque. Crowds hurried to pray in one of the 134 mosques in the city, some grand and elegant, others like the dark box near where ironworkers filled the brazen air with their hammering. Donkey carts with lanterns bobbing fore and aft clopped along; an Arab sideways on a donkey, kicking its neck with his heel in rhythm with its agreeable movement. The muezzins’ cries rose as the sun crumbled into ash. The sky glowed hollowly in its husky wake. Night had fallen.
I went by train across the desert to Meknès. In the new town, where I found a clean hotel, the colons behaved as if they were in France: they sat in the sidewalk cafés and shook hands with each other on meeting and parting. The buildings were white and sheer and impersonal. The road curved up into the old town and dwindled into pot-holes and cracked concrete channels. I came to an Arab café, flies and more flies, blackness inside; soiled wooden benches and old card tables; the Arabs’ clothes were crusted with sweat. There were donkeys’ hoofprints in the crusted dung below the high triple gateway to the medina. Inside, there was a broad rectangular square, domed like a shallow breast, where the native buses left for Moulay Idriss, the sacred town that Europeans had to leave by nightfall.
In the modern, French quarter, I found my way to La Comédie Humaine, a librairie run by a Russian émigrée who told me that her name was Princess Kubowsky. She wrote novels and memoirs, published by Plon, under the pseudonym Jacques Croiset. She had won the Prix de Paris for her 1949 novel Europe et Valérius. She said she was delighted to meet an Englishman. She had escaped to London in 1941 and had a wonderful time as a journalist. She met Cyril Connolly. A short, thick woman in a black suit, she looked like leftover puff pastry in a black pie dish. She had a flat thick nose, pudgy cheeks, a large, loose mouth, blue eyes, chin depending from a big jaw. Her husband, a Pole, was in Brussels, trying for a job with some international agency. He always told her that she talked too much and was too inquisitive for the British taste. She did not ask me why I was in Morocco nor what I had done or planned to do. She did, however, warn me, urgently, against making a joke about a French légionnaire’s képi. I could not easily imagine feeling the temptation.
She had put her life’s savings, 4 million francs (roughly £4,000), into buying the shop, four years earlier. Now, in the midst of a war without a shot, since there were no tourists, she was broke. Local French residents used La Comédie Humaine as a social centre (always shaking hands with everyone present, both on arriving and on leaving), but they bought few books, it seemed. One of the women had a twelve- or thirteen-ye
ar-old daughter of whom a colon remarked, with a shaping gesture, ‘Elle a déjà sa petite poitrine.’
There was, Jacques Croiset told me, ‘no such thing as justice; divine justice perhaps, human never’. She seemed to think that because the Germans were beasts they could not be blamed for the concentration camps. She told me about a Russian woman, a writer, not Jewish, who was in one of the camps. A girl of fifteen was included in a list of those who were to die. When she began to cry, the woman said, ‘Don’t take it so hard. Death is not such a terrible thing. If it will help you, I will come with you.’ The woman took the girl’s hand and they went into the gas chamber together. I had not heard any such stories before.
Jacques Croiset secured me an invitation to dinner at the house of a Moroccan prince, Moulay Ta’ib, to whom she had rendered some service chez les Français. A friend of his, a slim Arab in European dress, with an inch-long beard along and under his jaw, met us at the gate of the medina. The low cedarwood door to the house was in an unlit street. The hall was angled sharply to the left, like the city gate. Pairs of open-mouthed, shucked shoes lined the tiled wall inside the door.
The central room was bare of furniture. There was a basin of washing by the wide fireplace. An open doorway led to the kitchen and the women’s quarters. The high beamed ceiling was continuous with that in the small, oblong room into which we were shown. A pale blue cotton curtain hung in the square archway. There was a radio on an inlaid table; a cheap alarm clock (bell on the top), mirror on the wall above it. We sat on the lowest of three couches. Backed by a row of plump pink cushions, it was covered with floral, blue-green linen.
When Moulay Ta’ib joined us, Jacques Croiset exchanged courtesies and then withdrew. Both the prince and his friend had sworn not to cut their beards until Mohammed V was reinstated. They were suffering financially for their loyalty. Moulay Ta’ib was short and dapper; he had a dark leathery face, the colour of roast turkey, fine-featured, with black, amused eyes, neat brown hands. He curled his small feet, in grey socks, under him as he sat between us on the highest couch. His nephew, a thin boy of twelve or thirteen, in a grey suit and dark tie, brought a silver basin and a kettle from which warm water was poured over our hands, then towelled away.
My guide cut flat loaves into six. Pieces of lamb came on long spits on which they had been grilled over a wood fire. You tore out the centre of your bread, gloved the meat and drew it off the spit. Only the right hand was to be used; the left never. As soon as one spit was empty, another came. I assumed that this was all we would get, but the kebabs were followed by a huge bowl with lumps of meat and spiced cabbage leaves, swimming in gravy. You heaped a mixture on your bread and put it in your mouth in one quick movement. It was bad manners to have your fingers touch your lips. I dropped a piece onto my lap and retrieved it hurriedly, too hurriedly, with my left hand.
Moulay Ta’ib and his friend ate with clean dexterity. We talked easily, unfazed by the clash of plates and cutlery. After the big dish was removed, the boy brought a heaped bowl of grapes. Then came the basin and warm water, now with a piece of soap, to purge the grease. We reclined on the pink cushions and smoked Gauloises while tea was prepared. Only the master of the house and his closest friends had the right and the art to make it. Various kinds of mint came in gilt coffers. There was a gilt teapot of chased metal, sugar crystals like nuggets of salt. The mint was put in the pot, with lumps of sugar, and boiling water poured in from a tall, thin-necked kettle. Then it was passed to the visitors. We drank many glasses. The pot was refreshed with more mint, before being replenished.
Moulay Ta’ib had read Spinoza, Descartes and Plato. He was both intelligent and, it seemed to me, naïve: he wanted the French to stay as the administrative servants of the restored Sultan, who would have supreme jurisdiction. Having thus advocated a civilised compromise, he said that he hoped that the French would kill them all. Salvation lay in dying as a martyr. I do not remember that the Jews were ever mentioned. At that time there were still several hundred thousand in the country. Moulay Ta’ib’s friend went home quite early, but I stayed talking with him till one-fifteen in the morning.
When I went out into the mazy streets of the medina it was very dark. I had only a vague notion of where the European quarter was. There was a curfew and no one about. I was stopped by a suspicious and (at first) hostile Foreign Legion patrol. I was not at all disposed to make a joke about their képis. My passport excited no immediate solidarity. I was at once alarmed and aloof: what did Morocco and its animosities have to do with me? My French was improved by apprehension. When I asked the sergeant to indicate the way to the hotel, he and his men escorted me to the door. I marched along with them, invisible swagger stick under my arm.
It was now late November. I had written several letters to Beetle, but I had not, of course, received any of hers; they had had to be addressed care of American Express, Rome. It was time to go back to Gibraltar and catch the USS Constitution, on which I had had the foresight to book passage to Italy. I had bought Beetle presents in the souks and loaded them, with some of my stuff, in a new blue sack before going to the station to catch the afternoon train to Tangier. I waited on a stone bench, reading Henry de Montherlant’s Carnets, which I had bought at the Comédie Humaine, as a thank you to Jacques Croiset. When the train steamed in, I got up and hurried, with my backpack, to get a corner seat. We had been on our way for half an hour when I realised that I had left the blue sack on the station bench.
A woman in the compartment said, ‘Ah oui! Je l’ai vu, un sac bleu, n’estce pas? Sur le banc, et je me suis dit…’ I smiled and shrugged. I could have killed her. At the next stop, the ticket collector called Meknès station and asked for a taxi to bring the sack to Petitjean, the oil refinery town where we had a forty-five minute halt. ‘Ne vous inquiétez pas, monsieur. Tout va s’arranger.’ When we reached Petitjean, the conductor was told that my sack was still at the station in Meknès. The taxi, numéro trente-neuf, was leaving right away. It would take an hour to get to Petitjean. With no one to blame but myself, I decided to let the train go and wait. The conductor said that the taxi could take me to the border with Spanish Morocco, but no further.
The station yard was rough, bare and muddy. The refinery was across from me as I waited and told myself to be observant: tubes and canisters, dials and gauges, towers scaled by ladders, topped with curling pipes, metal platforms with heron-necked lamps. Flags of flame flew from the vents where waste gas scorched the sky. Sentries stood with rifles in boxes along the road; guards at the gate. The service road was flat and deserted. A sentry forbade me to walk along it.
There was a Berber camp beyond the refinery, surrounded by a plaited grass fence about five feet high. The shanties, of corrugated iron, tins hammered flat, broken packing cases, sticks and dried mud, were pitched on a slope for the sake of drainage. Some were thatched with bamboo fronds, others roofed with tin sheets or sacking. Children rolled in the dust. Mortified by my own ineptitude, I sat facing the vacant station yard and the refinery. The banners of flame flew in a darkening sky, black at the edges. By 5.45 it was evident that I could never catch up with the train. Even alone, I could not take a joke. I walked to the crossroads where taxi 39 had to come, if it ever did. The sign on the Shell station was turned on. In the darkness, Arabs and Europeans cycled out of the refinery gates, laughing together. An old Morris came round the rond-point and I thought it was just my luck if it turned out to be my taxi. My luck was not that good: it contained a large contingent of Arabs and plodded past like a metal donkey. I flung myself on a concrete pier by the refinery gate and cursed and cursed. I wanted to cry. An Arab woman with a baby watched me curiously as she passed.
At 6.30, taxi 39 arrived, a big Ford. The driver showed me my sack in the coffre. Nothing had been taken. There was a bus from Arbaona, at the frontier, at vingt heures. The driver wanted 8,000 francs to get me there. I sat by him, the sack on my knee, knapsack on the seat behind me. He asked me what was in the sack that made
it worth all this trouble. It occurred to me, rather late in the day, that he might dump me in the desert and make off with the treasure. ‘Que des cadeaux. Pour mes parents et ma fiancée.’ I had never called Beetle that before.
We drove along the highway for a while and then he turned off down a dirt track. We came to a small, dark village. He stopped the car and got out. ‘J’ai de quoi faire.’ He whistled and a light came on in a doorway. If they were going to rob me, then they were. It was the Reverend Harper Wood’s money. I should put it down to experience; unless they killed me. The driver and two men came out and went to the back of the Ford. They took some boxes out of the boot. The driver came back to my window. ‘Excusez-moi, monsieur, ce sont mes cousins. J’ai de quoi leur livrer. Ne vous inquiétez pas.’
Inquiet? Moi? We drove on after I had refused tea. The headlights hit on plodding native carts with red lanterns as we neared Arbaona. There was no bus that could take me on to Tangier. We arrived at the Douanes; strip lights and policemen. My driver went over to a long black limousine, a chauffeur in the front, an old gentleman in the back. I sat and fumed. The driver came back and said, ‘Vous avez de la chance, monsieur.’ The dignified old Arab was willing to give me a lift into Tangier.
The radio played as the great car’s headlights split the purple of the night. The old man hummed and burbled, shrivelled away in his cushioned corner. He wore a turban with a little yellow soft hat settled in its folds. On his orders, the chauffeur stopped to pick up a couple of women with their bundles. They called him ‘effendi’. On reaching the Tangier frontier, he had the chauffeur take care of all the passport formalities. When he left me outside the Hotel Bristol, I thanked him becomingly. He waved me away.
XV
ON THE FERRY to Gibraltar I fell into conversation with Mr True, a furniture salesman from Hamptons of Knightsbridge. He was broad, round-shouldered, of medium height; small light eyes. He wore an unbelted mackintosh and a floppy brown hat, brim down all round. There were several initials on his briefcase. He had been on a six-week tour of north Africa: Addis, Aden, Oran, Tunis, Cairo. ‘I’d like to have gone to the Varsity,’ he said, ‘not to study, to play games and all that. I’m a rugger man. My school switched in ’26, just as I arrived. Know why? You have to have ball sense to play soccer. And ball sense, either you have it or you don’t. But rugger! You can take a boy without an ounce of ball sense, bung him in the scrum, all he has to do is stick with the ball basically. Chances are, a keen boy’ll be quite useful at rugger where he’d be hopeless at soccer. That’s why they switched.’
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