by Tahir Shah
“Don’t you want the job?”
“No way, man,” he mumbled, shaking. “Got no time for jobs.”
I walked back to the house, pondering why a guy would turn up for a job interview if he had no time to work, or why a girl would want to be my assistant if she knew her father would hunt us down and kill us both.
As I reached the shantytown the imam approached me. I had seen him from a distance, loitering in front of the whitewashed mosque. He was short and bearded with a severely wrinkled face, a small mouth, and a gray turban wound tight around the top of his head. He shook my hand, then rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.
“F’lous,” he said, grinning, “argent, money.”
I smiled a great deal, pretended not to understand, and hurried away down the lane. The garden door opened before I knocked. I crossed the threshold through the coolness of Hamza’s shadow. The guardian had been waiting for me. He saluted and said there was a problem, something that couldn’t be put off for a moment. I asked for a minute to wash my face.
“It can’t wait.”
“Not even for a minute?”
The guardian frowned. “No, not for a second!” he said forcefully.
Hamza proceeded to lead me down the garden path. At the end stood a tall wrought-iron gate. It must have been exceptionally beautiful once, long ago, before the rust set to work crumbling the curlicues. Behind the gate was a patch of good land, about the size of a tennis court. Hamza opened the gate.
“Who owns that land back there?” I asked.
“You do, Monsieur Tahir,” he replied.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
The land was encircled by a wall, the edges planted with trees. There was an assortment of palms, eucalyptus, juniper, and fig, and a burgeoning asparagus plant.
“Are you sure I own it?”
Hamza nodded. He led me through a haphazard crop of sunflowers, giant golden heads following the sun. At the far end of the wall, beyond an expansive slab of concrete, was another doorway. I followed the guardian through it to find a small, dilapidated outbuilding with its own walled garden.
“Who owns this?”
“You do, monsieur,” said Hamza.
I could not understand why no one had told me before of the building and its secret garden. The sense of getting something entirely for free filled me with pleasure. But my joy was quickly erased when I saw what Hamza was pointing to. At his feet was another dead cat. It looked as if it had been gutted. The animal was covered in flies.
“Who did this?”
Hamza rubbed his nose. “It is a problem,” he said.
“I know, but who did it?”
“Qandisha,” said Hamza. “Qandisha did it.”
“Who’s he?”
The guardian filled his lungs full of air and sighed very deeply. Then he went back to sit in his old wicker chair in the stables. Getting answers out of him and the others was not easy. There were only three of them, but they had established their own close fraternity, bound by a code of strict silence.
Over the next few days, I asked Hamza, Osman, and the Bear again and again about Qandisha. Where did he live? What did he have to do with the house? Whenever the name was spoken, the guardians would become tense. They said they couldn’t tell me, that there was nothing to tell. I begged. I pleaded. Still silence.
A WEEK PASSED. RACHANA ordered me to stop trying to find out about Qandisha and start finding an assistant again, one who could hire a nanny. I interviewed seven more people. None of them were suitable for one reason or another. Then, out of the blue, a young woman arrived at the Caliph’s House. She spoke good English, and smiled a lot, as if someone had told her to do so. Her hair was long, very dark, and shiny, like newly roasted coffee beans. She announced that her name was Zohra and handed me a family tree. It stretched back seventeen generations.
“When can you start?”
She looked at her watch. “At once,” she said.
“You are hired.”
We made a list of things to do—find a nanny, and a maid who could double as a cook, find an architect, and a school for Ariane, buy all manner of odds and ends, explore Casablanca, and look into the paperwork of Dar Khalifa.
Zohra took precise notes whenever I spoke. It hinted at a professional training.
“I used to work in the film business,” she said in a calm voice. “Hollywood shoots all its desert adventures down at Ouarzazate. I worked on Gladiator, Troy, and Black Hawk Down.”
“Did you meet any stars?”
Zohra blushed. “I fell in love with Brad Pitt,” she said.
RACHANA BEGGED ZOHRA TO search for a maid and a trustworthy nanny for Ariane. We had only been in Morocco four weeks, but everyone we met lectured us on whom to choose. Some said only girls from the mountains could be trusted, others that only a desert woman would do, or one from Fès, Meknes, or Marrakech. Moroccan society is founded on a system of helpfulness. But people are so obliging that you can almost find yourself being suffocated by their kindness. Before we knew it, women—young, old, and extremely ancient—were arriving at the door. As word spread, they came from farther and farther afield, claiming to have been sent by friends of friends of friends.
One morning four women arrived from the mountains. Each one had a similar rugged, wind-chapped face with a tattooed chin and a floral scarf tied over her hair. Their hands were rough, like the hull of a ship that has been at sea for many months, and their nails were broken through honest work. I asked how they had come to hear of the vacancy.
“In Morocco,” said Osman, “word spreads like a fire tearing through the depths of Hell.”
The women spoke a Berber dialect, the original language of northwestern Africa. None of them knew more than a few words of Arabic, and they understood no French at all. The Bear, who was from the mountains himself, talked to them in Berber.
“They tell me they have been traveling for days,” he said. “They came from a village in the High Atlas, near the Gorge of Ziz. It’s taken them five days to get here.”
The Berber women explained through the Bear that they were all widows and were in desperate need of work. There was no money in their village, they said, and life was very hard. They confirmed that they could cook, clean, do the laundry, and look after the children. Better still, they would work for a fraction of the going rate. All four of them would sleep in one room, and would charge the same as a single maid from Casablanca. Each one had brought a bedroll and a knapsack. They looked at me eagerly, their lined faces awaiting the instruction to begin. I asked Zohra what she thought.
“Let’s give them a week,” she said.
Hamza led the women to one of the empty rooms on the ground floor. They unfurled their bedrolls, lay down, and fell fast asleep.
TRAIPSE THROUGH AN ENGLISH supermarket and take a look at the fruit. It sits there staring up at you primly. It’s perfect, not a blemish on any of it. Every apple, every pear, orange, and plum, is identical to the next in color, weight, and size. Each one is shrink-wrapped with two or three others, labeled with a nation’s name. The melons are from Barbados, the pineapples from Tanzania, the kiwis from Thailand, and the strawberries have been flown in from the southeast of Brazil. There’s virtually nothing grown in Britain, and certainly nothing local.
The first time I went shopping for fruit and veg with Zohra, it was to a vast open market, popular for the freshness of the stock. Wherever I looked, there were great mounds of produce, with no cellophane or bar codes in sight—mountains of scarlet tomatoes, oceans of lemons and green beans, cartloads of pumpkins, strawberries, and succulent figs. At first I found myself cursing the irregularity and the imperfection. The crops were abundant, but they were different shapes and had the odd speck of brown. But I remembered my grandmother’s caution that taste is more than skin-deep.
The economy of English life had trained me to buy only what I knew we would use, and not an ounce more. In Morocco we could ease into com
fortable excess. On my first shopping expedition, I bought forty pounds of giant tomatoes, twenty pounds of red peppers, half a dozen cauliflowers, seven lettuces, a sack of onions, another of apples, and three hundred oranges for making juice. The huge sack of oranges cost what I would have paid for only a dozen in London.
OVER THE FOLLOWING WEEK I explored Casablanca, taking in the many quarters that made up the whole. Although she was from Rabat, Morocco’s capital, Zohra was a knowledgeable guide. She took me to the port—the largest in Africa—where I hoped our furniture would soon be arriving by cargo ship, and she showed me the old medina, and the sprawling new conurbation of Maarif, where fashionable stores and restaurants teemed with the nouveau riche. By far the most interesting area was Old Casablanca.
Built by the French after they annexed Morocco in the first decade of the last century, the buildings had the sweeping lines of classic Art Deco and Art Nouveau. I spent hours strolling there, staring up, picking out the details—the floral façades and gilded domes, the orderly wrought-iron balconies, the mullion windows and stone balustrades, and the sleek, rounded walls of a robust age. Casablanca was the first city in the world to be planned from the air. Looking at it, one thing was astonishingly clear—that the French regarded it as a jewel in their imperial crown. The buildings lining Avenue Mohammed V, the main thoroughfare, were a statement of domination, an exclamation of French colonial might.
We wandered through colonnades where a chic clientele once snapped up the latest styles of the thirties and forties. Seventy years later and downtown Casablanca was a byword for danger and dereliction. The grandeur was still there, but it was hiding—under a blanket of verdigris and grime. People hurried through fast. No one bothered to look into the shop windows anymore. Most of them were boarded up anyway. Doorways were homes to the homeless, and the backstreets were running with feral dogs and oversized rats.
I asked Zohra why the old quarter had been deserted, why people had felt it necessary to build the stylish new district of Maarif when they already had one of the most beautiful city centers in the world. She thought for a long time as we walked.
“People don’t realize what they have until they have lost it,” she said.
ONE MORNING, OSMAN FOUND me sitting under a banana tree in the courtyard garden. He approached cautiously, as if he wanted something. I smiled. He shuffled forward, dipping his head, his hands clasped over his heart. When he got to me, he saluted.
“Monsieur Tahir,” he said.
“Yes, what is it, Osman?”
“Qandisha is still not happy.”
That name again. I frowned. The guardian wiped his face with his hands.
“Tell me, Osman, who exactly is Qandisha?”
He didn’t reply.
“Did he used to work here?” I prompted. “Is he an angry ex-employee or something like that?”
“No, no, not like that,” said Osman.
“Well, is he from the shantytown?”
“No, he is not from the shantytown,” said Osman.
“Then where does he live?”
The guardian licked his lips anxiously. “In the house,” he said. “Qandisha lives in Dar Khalifa.”
“But I haven’t seen him here. Surely I would have noticed if a man called Qandisha was living in the house.”
There was a long pause. Osman rubbed his eyes.
“But he’s not a man,” he said.
“Oh, Qandisha’s a woman?”
“No, not a woman either.”
Again, Osman paused.
“Qandisha’s a Jinn,” he said.
THE WOMEN FROM THE mountains cleaned the house from top to bottom, and each afternoon they cooked a plate of couscous wide enough to feed a family of twenty-five. When they were not cooking or cleaning, they could be found sitting on the kitchen floor, gossiping in their Berber tongue. They tended to keep to themselves and didn’t fraternize much with the guardians.
After learning the name of the resident Jinn, I brought the subject up with Zohra. She took it very seriously.
“You will have to do an exorcism,” she said.
“You don’t believe in it, too, do you?” I laughed.
Zohra didn’t say anything at first. Then she said:
“This is Morocco, and in Morocco everyone believes in Jinns. They are written in the Qur’an.”
She went down to the stables and talked to the guardians for a long time. At the end of the discussion, she came to explain.
“Each night you must put out a large plate of food for Qandisha,” she said. “There should be couscous and meat, the best food, not scraps, and you must lay it out yourself.”
I could hardly believe that such a levelheaded woman would believe in such superstition but, with Osman’s help, I asked the maids to prepare a special dish and leave it for me at dusk. I didn’t say why I needed it. I felt stupid, that I was giving in, but thought it was worth trying once.
That night, the Berber women did as I had asked. They made a fabulous plate of couscous with pumpkin, carrots, and a tender chunk of lamb buried in the middle. It smelled delicious. I carried it out into the garden. Hamza showed me exactly where to place it—behind a low hedge. He shook my hand, bowed, then shooed me away.
Next morning I hurried down to the garden, ran across the lawn, and found the platter. It had been picked clean. There was nothing left, not a single grain of couscous. The Bear was raking the grass nearby.
“Qandisha was hungry,” he said.
FOR THREE NIGHTS THE women from the Gorge of Ziz prepared ever more lavish feasts, and for three nights the platters were devoured. It was obvious the guardians were the only beneficiaries of the banquets. They were in high spirits. I wondered how long to allow their ruse to continue. Zohra said a natural break would occur, and it did.
On the morning of the fourth day, one of the maids was picking sprigs of rosemary, which grew wild in the garden. She was singing to herself. The sun was not yet high. Its syrupy yellow light streamed through the lower branches of the trees, warming the air. I was on the upper terrace reading a book of Moroccan proverbs. The tranquillity was suddenly shattered by a high-pitched shriek. I peered down over the garden and saw the mountain woman waving her hands turbulently above her head. She had dropped the rosemary. It lay at her feet, along with a dead black cat.
Fifteen minutes later, Hamza called me to come downstairs. The Berber women had tied up their bedrolls, packed their knapsacks, and were waiting to be paid.
“Where are they going?”
“Back to the mountains,” said Osman.
“Is the dead cat scaring them away?”
“Not the cat,” said Hamza, “but the Jinns.”
WE HAD NOT BEEN living at Dar Khalifa very long when a stout elderly man in tweed tapped on the door. His face was craggy and coffee brown like a bar of nut chocolate. On his head was a frayed cloth cap, and on his chin a swirl of white hair. He looked at the ground when I greeted him, and asked in good French if I had any postage stamps to spare.
“I will pay you,” he said, “a few dirhams for each.”
Until then the postman had brought nothing in the way of mail. I suspected he was having trouble finding the house. I apologized.
“Can you come back next week?”
The man blinked twice. “Will you forget?” he said.
I promised not to and, with that, my friendship with Hicham Harass began.
ZOHRA PROVED HERSELF TO be efficient and kind. She put up with the glaring gaps in my knowledge of Moroccan culture and helped to fill them in. The formality of the first days eased away, and we found ourselves chatting about our lives and our dreams. One afternoon, as we swerved through the traffic in the butcher’s car, Zohra confessed her secret. There was something she had to tell me, she exclaimed, something that I had to know about her if we were to be friends.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You will think badly of me,” she said.
“Tell me, tell me what it
is.”
“I am engaged to be married,” she said without looking at me.
“Oh, who’s the lucky man?”
“His name is Yusuf. He’s an Arab. He lives in New Jersey. We met on the Internet.”
“That’s great news. When is the wedding?”
Zohra dabbed the tip of a finger to her eye. “There’s no date yet,” she said.
“The distance must be very difficult—with you here and him over there in the U.S.”
“Oh yes, yes, it is,” said Zohra earnestly. “It’s a terrible strain. But we communicate every day. We are deeply in love, and when you are in love,” she went on, her voice rising in tempo, “when you are in love, distance doesn’t matter.”
I changed the subject and asked Zohra if she had found an architect. I was eager to start work on renovating the house, and we needed someone who could plan the building work. We were still living in one room, while the rest of the house lay empty. Zohra dabbed her eyes again and said she had indeed made contact with an architect. He was young, dynamic, had studied in France, and had won praise for his innovative designs. She had set up a rendezvous for the following afternoon.
NEXT DAY AT FOUR P.M. we rumbled up to the architect’s office, located on a swish side street in Maarif. At first I thought we ought to have taken a taxi, but the blood-soaked butcher’s car suggested a lack of excess funds. The architect’s office had tall glass doors open to the street, an array of potted palms, and elevator music piped in from miniature speakers hidden in the ceiling. There weren’t the clouds of cigarette smoke or the mass of papers and blueprints more usually found in architectural offices. Instead, the walls were hung with oil paintings of traditional Moroccan scenes—a tribal wedding, a shepherd carrying a wounded sheep, a landscape of Marrakech with the snow-capped mountains rising up behind.
A secretary ushered Zohra and me to soft imported chairs at one end of a walnut-veneered desk. She served espresso with a twist of lemon, and squares of dark Swiss chocolate. I praised the paintings.