by Tahir Shah
SHORTLY AFTER THE AFTERNOON call to prayer, there was a knock at the front door. Hamza always insisted vehemently that he, and only he, should ever let visitors into the house. Explaining this, he said that in Moroccan culture an important man would never stoop to perform such a lowly action as opening the door to his own home. By merely touching the handle, I was bringing shame on the house. As I made my way over to the entranceway, the guardian thrust me aside and lunged at the door’s bolt.
A woman was standing on the other side, waiting to be received. I recognized her as the gangster’s wife. She was wearing a tailored leopardskin coat with a matching hat, and knee-length ivory boots. Her eyelids were weighed down with furry fake lashes, and her face was so caked in makeup that it looked as if she had stepped from the lead role in a Kabuki play. She introduced herself as Madame Nafisa Maliki.
I would have asked why her husband had paid twenty thousand dollars to have our paperwork hidden or destroyed, but something stopped me. Instead, I welcomed her formally and led the way inside the house. Hamza hissed loudly as we walked into the empty salon. The woman’s furry eyes scanned the room.
“I see you are doing some building work,” she said coldly.
“Just a little,” I replied.
“Do you have permission from the authorities?”
“Um, er, well,” I fumbled, “yes, of course we do.”
“That’s good,” she said, “because in Morocco the authorities are very strict.” She cleared her throat forcefully as if to make a point. “If your paperwork isn’t in order, they can take away your house.”
“I am sure that won’t happen,” I said.
There was a pause, in which the gangster’s wife lit a cigarette and stuffed the end into an extra-long holder.
“You never know,” she said.
AT DAWN THE NEXT day, forty workers arrived, led by a foreman who was at least eighty years old. The entire team were dressed in suits as if they were going to a wedding. I would normally have barked at anyone turning up so early, but I was so thrilled they had come, I took them into the kitchen and served them mint tea.
The workers set about smashing down the wooden staircase that led up to our bedroom. The planks were chopped into matchwood by an apprentice and stacked very neatly against the wall. A crude, homemade ladder was swung into place, to the fury of Rachana but to the delight of Ariane. Five of the men scaled the ladder, marched into the bedroom, and tossed our bedding out onto the terrace.
I went down to see what the rest of the workforce were up to. The ferocious sound of hammers soon lured me back upstairs. To my disbelief, the men—who said they were masons—were breaking down one of the bedroom’s supporting walls. They indicated in primitive sign language that the room was to be enlarged, and so one wall had to go. We would have to find somewhere else to sleep, they said.
On the ground floor, another group had started ripping up the floors. I protested, saying that some of the tilework could stay.
“It’s damaged,” said the ancient foreman.
“Well, it is now that your men have hacked it up!”
By midday the interior of the house looked as if the Horde of Genghis Khan had stormed through. The floors were ripped up, broken tiles flung about in all directions, and most of the windows were smashed for no reason at all. Water pipes and electrical cables had been hunted down and chopped up, and any wall that had been intact that morning was damaged now. The builders appeared very satisfied with their efforts. In the afternoon, they lit a fire, fueled by the chopped-up staircase, and brewed a colossal urn of chicken stew. When the bones had been picked clean, they spread out in the salon and fell into a deep childlike sleep.
I plucked up courage to call the architect. His smooth voice inquired after my health and praised my good sense for staying calm.
“The first days can be a little disorderly,” he said.
“Your men are doing a lot of damage,” I protested. “They’re smashing up the house.”
“It’s all in the name of renovation,” came the reply. “Have faith in me. Don’t worry about a thing.”
THE BUILDERS WERE NOT my only concern. Since being ditched by her beloved Yusuf, Zohra had begun to behave in an increasingly peculiar way. She took to wearing black, ringed her eyes in kohl, and tied her hair back in a bun like an old matron. I assumed it was an expression of her grief. When I asked if she was coping, she lashed out.
“You can’t understand!” she said. “You’re a stupid man!”
She began to turn up less and less for work, and when I did ask her to do anything, she said she was busy. I didn’t know what to do. The guardians were always eager to dish out suggestions, but their own rock-solid belief in the spirit world prejudiced their advice. So I met François for lunch. Through the main course he listened patiently to my problems with the workers, and the guardians’ obsession with the Jinns. During dessert I explained about Zohra’s hundred-foot friend.
“When you’ve got talk of Jinns,” François said, “you’ve got nothing but trouble.”
“What can I do?”
The Frenchman sighed. “You’ll have to fire your assistant,” he said. “Get rid of her right now. If you don’t, the cancer will spread, and things will get much, much worse.”
The timing of François’s advice was curious. I had planned to meet Zohra that evening at a café to discuss the work at the house. She was often late, and so after forty minutes of waiting, I didn’t think much of it. I was about to pay the bill and go home when I received a text message on my phone. It was from Zohra.
“You are a bad man,” it read. “The Jinns will kill you. You have no luck. God help you.”
I tried calling Zohra’s number, but there was no reply. The next day she sent me an e-mail. It was six pages long, a rant about lies and deceit. It said she had informed the police that I was a terrorist, and that she had taken sanctuary in the mountains with what was “rightfully hers.” “Amina knows the truth,” it said ominously toward the end, “and the truth is clear like glass.”
I went straight to my bank to check that no money was missing. But it was. A little over four thousand dollars was gone.
EARLY OCTOBER WAS A terrible time. Each day brought new problems, and I began to feel that moving to Morocco was the worst decision I had ever made. Doing the simplest things, like paying a bill or communicating with the authorities, was a further burden that made life exceedingly difficult. The missing paperwork was another dilemma, one that needed local know-how. As for the builders, they were proving to be hopeless. It was not that I was losing control, because I had never had control. I kicked myself for early kindness. I’d paid money in advance to anyone who asked for it, in the hope it would solve problems.
I reflected about Zohra a great deal, pondering why she had felt it necessary to run off. Rather than boiling over with anger, the episode had made me very sad. I found myself slipping into depression. I missed the ordinariness of England—the land where nothing extreme ever takes place. I missed the dreary gray skies, the drab conversations about nothing at all, and, to my own astonishment, I even missed the food.
AS THE FIRST WEEK of October came to an end, the Bear charged into the bedroom where we were now living like refugees. It was late morning, and I was still huddled under the duvet, reluctant to get up and face the world.
“Monsieur Tahir,” he said fearfully, “there has been an accident.”
I leapt out of bed and hurried down the long corridor to the verandah, where a group of workmen were clustered. In the middle of the pack, a man was lying on the ground on his side. He was still breathing, but it was clear that at least one of his legs was broken, and possibly an arm. The old foreman pointed up to a glass roof fifteen feet above. I could easily make out the shape of a man framed in broken glass. It looked like a cartoon.
“He fell through there,” he said.
“It’s a miracle he isn’t dead,” I replied. “You’d better call the architect.”
Ten minutes later, we made out the purr of the Range Rover gliding through the shantytown. The architect stormed into the house and looked down at the injured worker. He roared at the foreman, clapped his hands until they were red, and fired off a salvo of orders.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I said weakly.
“Oh no,” he replied. “Absolutely nothing to worry about, these little things happen from time to time.”
I voiced my concern at the lack of safety measures. After all, there were no hard hats, or gloves, or goggles, nothing in the way of protection, and all the ladders were cobbled together from scrap wood as and when they were needed.
“This is the way we do things in Morocco,” the architect said, smoothing back an eyebrow with his fingertip. “There are injuries, but they can’t be helped.”
“Won’t the man sue?” I whispered anxiously.
“Of course not” was the casual riposte, “this is Casablanca, not Colorado.”
“Well then, I’d like to buy him a radio or something,” I said. “He’ll be in hospital for a long time. I want to show that we care.”
The architect’s face quivered. “No, no, no, that would be a bad idea,” he said. “If you do that, all the others will be throwing themselves off the roof. You don’t understand the Moroccan mind.”
THE WEEK THAT FOLLOWED was beset with more trouble. On the Monday, the cook managed to slash her wrist with a fruit knife. Gallons of blood spurted over the kitchen walls like a scene from a horror movie. Remarkably, she survived. The next day, the gardener fell off his ladder while pruning a hedge, and on the Wednesday, I got knocked off my feet by a powerful electric shock as I turned on the kitchen lights. The Thursday was quiet, although I did find a pool of blood in what was to be the dining room. Despite an investigation, no one owned up to having lost it. Then, on Friday, the pièce de résistance . . .
We had just finished eating lunch on the terrace when we heard the sound of a fist pounding at the garden door. It was followed by loud cries in Arabic, what sounded like threats. Hamza and Osman appeared from nowhere. They jumped at the door, held it shut, and sent the Bear to rally the workmen. A minute later there were twenty men on our side holding the door shut.
I went over and asked Hamza who was trying to break down the door from the other side.
“It’s the police,” he said.
“Shouldn’t we let them in?” I said.
“Monsieur Tahir, s’il vous plaît!” he retorted. “Of course we should not let them in.”
As we stood there blocking the path of the authorities, I realized I still had much to learn about Morocco and the way things were done. In England we are raised to have a certain respect for the police. We may not like them, but we feel bound to do as they ask, whether we like it or not. If a squad of English bobbies tried to knock down your door, most people would consider themselves obliged to open it and inquire why they had come.
“Hamza,” I said, “why are the police trying to break down the door?”
The guardian looked askance. “You don’t have permission to do building work,” he said.
“Don’t I?”
“No, of course you don’t. No one ever does.”
“Then is this normal, then, the police hammering at the door?”
Hamza’s spirits rose. “Oh yes, Monsieur Tahir,” he said, “it happens all the time.”
SIX
A lame crab walks straight.
MISFORTUNE CONTINUED TO hound us. Household accidents decreased, but other forms of ill fortune arrived. First came the locusts. Their camouflage made them hard to see. But when my eyes had adjusted to picking out their segmented forms, I saw them all over the garden. They covered the hedges and the shrubs, the vines and the low boughs of the trees, and they consumed whatever they could get into their miniature mouths. Their territory spread from the end of the garden to the top of the house. Before we knew it, they were in the storeroom and in the cupboards and in our beds, in the laundry and even in the food.
The balance of nature prevailed, and the plague of locusts was slaughtered by the rise of the rats. At the end of the second week of October, the savage, thickset rodents were almost everywhere the locusts had been. An easy supply of locust meat had made them strong and brave. They caused extensive damage. My files and all my books were chewed to pieces, as were Ariane’s toys and Timur’s quilt, and almost all the food in the larder was destroyed. They gnawed holes in sacks of cement as well, and shredded our duvet to make a nest. Ariane’s soft leather shoes were eaten in the night. All that was left were the buckles.
I told Hamza to go and buy ten tubes of the rat-catching glue. He shook his head and said the only way to dispose of a plague of rats was to get a fierce dog. The bigger the dog, he said, the better.
“Why do you think the bidonville has so many dogs?” he intoned.
“For the rats?” I guessed.
“Precisely.”
“Can’t we just get a cat?” I said. “Rats are scared of cats.”
Hamza burst out laughing. “In Morocco,” he said boastfully, “rats eat the cats for breakfast.”
Again, I instructed him to put out more cardboard strips laden with glue. The method had already proved its effectiveness.
“I told you,” he said. “It’s too late for glue. We need to spray the garden in poison!” he exclaimed. “Every blade of grass must be covered, and every centimeter of the house!”
Mindful of the children’s safety, I told him not to use poison. Instead, I promised to find the most ferocious dog money could buy.
THE SUBJECT OF CHILD safety reemerged the next day. Ariane was found under the kitchen table by the cook, vomiting uncontrollably. Her face was scarlet, her breathing strained. Beside her was an open tub of oily white cream. It had a pungent smell, like drain cleaner. The label’s script was Arabic; it bore the image of a grinning, fair-faced woman in Moroccan dress. We set to work trying to get Ariane to throw up more while waiting for the pediatrician to arrive. The cook, who had bulbous eyes and a swarthy complexion, was pacing up and down on edge. I asked her what the cream was for.
“I want to be fair like you and Madame,” she said.
I repeated my question: “Fatima, what’s the cream for?”
“It’s for bleaching my face,” she said.
ALL THAT WEEK I searched for a dog. The pet stores offered prim little Pekinese, bichons frises, and jittery poodles with silk bows tied all over them.
“These won’t do,” I explained to the sales staff. “I’m not looking for a lapdog. I want a blood-crazed demon dog, wild enough to devour a plague of rats!”
After much searching, I was given the number of a man who was rumored to own a German shepherd. He lived in an apartment and felt bad keeping his animal cooped up all day. The dog was seven months old. I asked if it was ferocious. The owner’s voice trembled on the telephone.
“Of course not, monsieur,” he said reassuringly. “She has a lovely character.”
“What a shame,” I said. “You see, I want a vicious dog. The wilder, the better.”
The man thought for a moment. “Well,” he said acidly, “I suppose if you want her to be aggressive, you could treat her very badly.”
In the afternoon, I tracked down the man’s apartment in fashionable Maarif. The German shepherd was brought out. As soon as she saw me, she gave me her paw and licked my face. Then she rolled on her back and whimpered.
“I’m desperate,” I said. “I’ll take her.”
BACK AT THE HOUSE, I let the new rat-killing hound into the garden. But the rats were already dead or dying—cut down in their prime by a mysterious affliction. The carnage made for a terrible sight. There were dying rats everywhere. You couldn’t walk two yards without stepping on one. Ariane was bawling her eyes out. She had grown to like them.
I took Hamza aside and quizzed him.
“I sprinkled a few pellets of poison,” he said.
“A few pellets could not have caused death on such a scale,” I replied. “How much poison did you use?”
The guardian rubbed his eyes. “Five bags,” he said.
At that moment, the German shepherd began chewing at something on the lawn. It was a dead rat. I lunged for her mouth and prised the jaws apart. Thankfully, her teeth hadn’t reached the rodent’s stomach. I ordered Hamza to pick out every pellet of poison and to burn the dead rats. He would rather have tossed them over the wall into the bidonville, as he did with the trash. Do that, and we would have killed all the dogs in the shantytown.
Hamza was about to ask me something when he slapped a hand to the back of his neck.
“It’s a bee,” he said. “It just stung me.”
A moment later, the colonnaded corridor was filled with bees. They were swarming. I couldn’t believe it. First locusts, then rats, and now bees—all in the same week.
“What’s going on?” I said. “I’ve never known anything like this.”
But Hamza wasn’t listening. He was dancing.
“Have you been stung again?”
“No, Monsieur Tahir,” he said, “I am happy. Bees are a blessing sent by Allah!”
A FEW DAYS LATER, peace began to return to Dar Khalifa. Gone were the locusts, the rats, and the bees. The only scourge left were the oversized mosquitoes. They infested the house, where they tormented Ariane the most. She had an allergy to them. Her eyes swelled up like tennis balls when she was bitten. The pediatrician suggested getting the garden sprayed with insecticide.
When we moved to Morocco, I was not overly superstitious, but as time went on, I found myself wondering if someone had put some kind of curse on us. It was the easiest way of explaining the run of bad luck. You can’t live in North Africa without being affected by the ingrained belief in superstition. It’s everywhere. The more you think about it, the more it seeps into your bones. I was used to hard luck, but there was usually a gap between the waves of misfortune. In Casablanca, bad luck came in three dimensions.