by Tahir Shah
One evening I was pondering the subject when Osman approached my desk gingerly. We were all invited to his home the next day, he said. I thanked him.
“What is the occasion?”
The guardian ducked his head. “It’s my son’s circumcision.”
THAT NIGHT I COULDN’T sleep. Perhaps it was a mixture of accident and pestilence, or the greater worry that someone was trying to frighten us away. My mind was entertained by images of pools of warm blood, dead rodents, and the gangster’s wife. I sat up in bed. Ariane and Timur were sound asleep, but Rachana wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the bathroom either, so I crept through the house to the kitchen. It was empty.
The guardians took it in turns to patrol at night, armed with Hamza’s homemade sword. But they, too, seemed to have vanished. The moon was nearing fullness, and the warm night air was alive with bats and with nocturnal sounds from the shantytown—the savage dogs fighting, setting off the donkeys and the hobbled mules. I walked all around the house, calling Rachana’s name. To my alarm, she didn’t reply. I climbed the makeshift ladder and searched the upper floor and the terrace. After that I looked in the outbuildings and in the garden. I suddenly realized I had forgotten to look in the courtyard garden. I rushed over, my bare feet tramping through the dirt.
“Rach! Rach!” I called. “Are you there?”
On the verandah beside the locked door, a figure was standing very still in a flowing white robe. It was Rachana.
“I have to go in there,” she said very softly.
“What are you doing here? Come back to bed.”
She resisted my arm.
“No, you don’t understand. I have to go in there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“The key’s lost,” I said.
“Then break open the door. Do it now.”
I called out for the guardians. No one came at first. Then, after a few minutes I could hear the Bear’s heavy step moving across the terrace outside.
“Oui, monsieur,” he said balefully. “What is it?”
“We have to go into this room right now,” I said. “Get me the crowbar.”
The Bear spat out excuses. “There is no key,” he said. “Only Hamza can go in there.”
“I don’t care. I own this house and I am going in there, do you understand?”
The Bear swallowed hard. He disappeared, returning a minute later with a jimmy. In the beam of his flashlight, I wedged the end of the steel bar into the crack and levered as hard as I could. The lock snapped. I pushed the door inward. The lights weren’t working. We crept inside and I shone the beam over the walls. They were discolored with algae. The room was freezing. It smelled of death.
“Can you smell that?” Rachana said.
I grunted. “Let’s go,” I said.
“No, not yet.”
Rachana walked into the anteroom, to the left of the door. She took the light and shone it upward. The ceiling was high, at least twenty-five feet. Then she moved the beam down to the floor. I edged closer to get a better view.
“Do you see that?” she said.
“My God, there are steps going down.”
THE CIRCUMCISION ATTRACTED ALL the main players from the shantytown to Osman’s modest home. Hamza, the Bear, and the gardener were there, too, as were their wives. Osman’s own wife was flustering about making sure that everyone had a glass of sweet mint tea. She had a checkered scarf tied over her head and was wearing her best jelaba. It was violet and had a trace of pink embroidery around the neck.
In the middle of the small room was Ahmed. Having recently reached the grand age of five, the boy was about to pass through Islamic ritual to manhood. He was dressed in a sky blue three-piece suit with matching bow tie and a pleated dress shirt. On his head was perched a green tarboosh, and on his feet were shiny black shoes.
Ahmed showed off a new bicycle his father had bought for him, before being prodded outside into the dusty street. In front of the tin-roofed shack, a man was holding the reins of a slender gray horse. I wondered where such a magnificent animal had come from. Osman lifted the boy up, and the horse was paraded about through the heaps of rotting garbage. Unsure of what to do, Rachana and I clapped.
“This will be the happiest day of his life,” said Osman, the smile even broader than normal beneath his handlebar mustache.
Under the circumstances, I might have disagreed. A few seconds later, little Ahmed was wrenched from the horse’s back and dragged into the house, where his miniature suit trousers were whipped down. An unshaven hulk of a man loomed over the child, who was now pinned out on a low table. I recognized him as the street-stall barber from the shantytown. Osman ordered his son to be brave. I gulped. Rachana gulped, and Ariane burst into tears as the infant’s penis was remodeled by the barber’s scissors.
The crowd of family and guests pressed in close to gain a good view as little Ahmed’s lungs swelled with air. There was no sound at first. Then the screaming began. It went on and on, rising sharply in volume, as the boy understood the scope of the operation.
“Ah,” Osman exclaimed as his son writhed in agony before him, “this surely is the finest day of his life.”
AT FIRST, I COULD not bring myself to ask Rachana why she had wanted to go into the locked room. I feared what she would say. We didn’t talk about it the next morning. When I saw Hamza raking leaves in the garden, he didn’t mention it either. I went up to him and asked where the stairs led.
“You should not have gone in there,” he replied.
“Why?”
The guardian didn’t say. He looked down at the leaves and continued with his raking. Leaving him to it, I went back to the locked door. To my surprise, the lock had been replaced.
Rachana could tell I was thinking about what had happened the previous night. She wouldn’t look me in the eye all day. At last, in the evening, when the children were asleep in bed, she turned to me.
“I had to go in there,” she said in a trembling voice. “I don’t know why, or what it was about. But something happened in there. Didn’t you feel it?”
I said I had felt something, a coldness, a danger.
“That’s it,” she added. “It was danger. Pure fear.”
“I’m sure Hamza knows about that room,” I said after a long pause.
“He won’t tell,” she replied, “at least not until he’s ready to.”
I looked hard at Rachana, her long black hair framing the edges of her face.
“Are you frightened living here?” I asked.
She didn’t reply at first, as if she was reflecting on the question.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”
TWO DAYS LATER, I received a postcard from Pete, the American who had fallen in love with the Moroccan girl he met in the Amarillo nightclub. The picture showed a grove of orange trees weighed down by fruit, and a dark-skinned man inspecting the crop. The black ballpoint script on the reverse read: You will never believe it! Have found Yasmine! She loves me! See you. Pete. PS: Some problems with her family.
THE NEXT WEEK WAS painfully slow to pass. The building team arrived at eight each morning. They were always dressed in suits and led into the house by their aged foreman. He would insist on smothering my cheeks in kisses while his men set about cooking an elaborate breakfast on a gas burner in the main salon. Whenever I drew their attention to the fire hazard, they would cackle menacingly. As far as they were concerned, safety was for wimps.
The extension of our bedroom was progressing at a snail’s pace, but at least it was under way. A forest of wooden staves was now holding up the ceiling. Large quantities of low-grade bricks were being lugged up the homemade ladders by the apprentices.
“They’re doing hard work,” I said.
“They must know pain,” said the old foreman gleefully. “Only a man who has tasted pain knows the value of life.”
Downstairs in the salon the giant holes in the walls, created by the efficient
wrecking crew, were being sculpted into rounded arches. A man in a red felt hat was overseeing the work. Each archway took about a week to complete and involved an army of masons. The process was remarkably complex. A positive form of the arch was first constructed. The archway was laid in around it, and the positive—a kind of mold—was then removed.
The architect’s grand plan to build a sweeping staircase from the new bedrooms upstairs to the salon below was in progress as well. The feature had necessitated destroying a pair of sizeable storage rooms and the laundry room. I had questioned why such valuable rooms had to go. All doubts had been brushed away by the architect’s manicured hand.
“Why do you need those useless spaces?” he had sniffed. “They just collect dust.”
Once I had paid all the money in advance, the architect himself was an infrequent visitor to the Caliph’s House. From time to time he would swoop down for fifteen minutes, roar at his workers, and reveal the next stage of his grand plan. None of them ever dared ask a question, and to my surprise, they were given no scaled drawings. There was no paperwork of any kind. I managed to collar the architect on one lightning visit.
“Don’t your team need plans to work by?” I asked.
“In Morocco,” the architect said with confidence, “we don’t do it like that.”
“Do you trust them so completely?”
Mohammed, the architect, opened the door of his vehicle and lit a cigar. “I don’t trust any of them,” he said. “They are a bunch of thieves.”
“How do you know they’re not robbing you?”
“Because I have a spy,” he said.
“The old foreman?”
The architect laughed. “Not him. He’s the worst of all. The man with the red cap. He tells me what’s really going on.”
The system of informants buoyed my flagging spirits. I went back into the salon and winked at the man in the red cap. He winked back, and was about to say something when the foreman slapped him on the back of the head and ordered him to get back to work.
The old man then strode over to the staircase, the curved form of which had taken shape. He pulled off his worn tweed hat and scratched his head. Five new walls had been constructed around the staircase, and the foreman gazed at them. He scratched again. Then he yelled at one of the apprentices. The boy handed him a hammer and chisel. With uncharacteristic care, the elderly foreman put the chisel to one of the walls and began to tap very gently. I was going to stop him from destroying the only satisfactory work the men had done. But as I opened my mouth to protest, the end of the chisel disappeared into the wall.
“What is it?” I asked anxiously. “What’s there?”
The foreman peered into the opening, no larger than a keyhole. “There’s a room in there,” he said.
“You seem surprised.”
“We didn’t know about it,” he replied.
Someone passed me a flashlight. My stomach knotted in anticipation. I held up the light and I had a look for myself. It was like peering into Tutankhamen’s tomb. The beam disappeared into what was a considerable space.
“It’s huge,” I said.
“It was sent by God,” said one of the apprentices.
“Allahu akbar!” cried another. “God is great!”
IN THE THIRD WEEK of October the rain began to fall. It rained and rained in a chill North African monsoon. The God who had sent us the miracle of the lost room was now trying to drown us. Dar Khalifa leaked like a sieve. Water streamed in through the open doorways and the broken windows, and surged down into the salon from the roof. The room in which Rachana, the children, and I slept flooded. We were forced to move to higher ground.
The constant rain made mixing and pouring the concrete almost impossible. I was surprised that the team bothered to go on. One morning they knocked away the wooden staves that were holding up the roof of our bedroom extension. It was a wildly optimistic move. The concrete ceiling held for about thirty seconds before crashing down.
Another police raid followed, and after it came a string of new injuries. And the rain fell day after day. I don’t know why I didn’t throw in the towel and lead us all back to England. It wasn’t that I was fearful of the sneers and the jibes. Deep down I knew that it was a question of endurance. If I could keep going beyond the point of reason, then, as I saw it, there was a faint glimmer of hope. So I resigned myself to keep standing, like a punch-drunk boxer who simply had to stay upright to win. Keep on my feet and, I hoped, the dark days would eventually come to an end.
THE GREATEST DAILY CHALLENGE was trying to make myself understood. My French is not good. The guardians and some of the workers had learned to understand me, but a great deal of Casablancans spoke only Arabic and no French at all. So I decided to look for another assistant.
I placed an advertisement on a local website. It sought two qualities—the ability to solve problems and to be enthusiastic at all times. No one replied. I was going to drop the whole idea when a man called. It was three in the morning and the man wanted to know if the position had been filled. He had a composed voice, with the trace of an American accent.
“It’s early,” I said, fumbling for my watch.
“Actually, it’s late,” said the voice.
I saw the time. “It’s very early!” I said coldly.
There was a silence.
“It’s very late,” the voice replied. “When can you meet?”
We arranged to meet at noon, near Dar Khalifa, at Hotel Suisse. I turned up on time, having trudged through the shantytown’s mud in the torrential rain. There was no sign of the job applicant. I scribbled a page of interview questions to pass the time. After half an hour of waiting, I assumed he wasn’t going to show up, and I went home.
HAMZA WAS CROUCHED OVER in the mud at the end of the garden, mixing a bag of sand with cement. Osman was standing beside him, holding an umbrella over them both. I went over and inquired what they were doing.
“It’s a surprise,” Hamza said bashfully.
In the house the workmen were sitting on the floor eating couscous. When he saw me, the foreman got up, staggered over, and kissed my cheeks.
“You are a good man,” he said, kissing me again.
I thanked him for the compliment.
“May you have a thousand sons!” he exclaimed, with another kiss.
I thanked him again.
“May your feet always walk on rose petals!”
He stooped to kiss again. I covered my cheeks and narrowed my eyes.
“What do you want?” I said suspiciously.
The foreman tugged off his tweed cap and held it over his chest. “We want for you to like us,” he said.
IN THE AFTERNOON, THE man with the American accent called once again. He said a drunk driver had smashed into his car on his way to the interview.
“Were you injured?”
“I wasn’t in the car at the time,” said the man.
“Oh,” I said, confused.
We planned to meet at the same hotel in the early evening. Again, I waited for half an hour, and again, the man didn’t turn up. I cursed him for wasting my time and trudged back through the mud.
It was dark but Hamza was still working at the end of the garden. The ochre-red mud was deep from all the rain. Hamza’s clothes were covered in it, but he didn’t care. He had made what looked like a section of wide concrete pipe. It was laid end down on the ground. Sitting across the top was a homemade turning mechanism and a rubber bucket.
“It’s a well,” he said.
I peered into it. “There’s no water in there,” I said. “There’s not even a hole.”
Hamza brushed my concerns aside. “It’s for the Jinns,” he said.
JUST BEFORE I GOT into bed, the job applicant called again. I was going to shout something rude and hang up. But before I could say a word, he asked for our address.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said.
“You’ll never find it. We live in the middle of a shanty
town.”
Precisely ten minutes later there was a rap at the door. The applicant stepped into the house calmly, shook my hand, and looked away as he did so. His name was Kamal Abdullah. He was thin, balding, and aged twenty-five. He looked at least ten years older. His eyes were deep-set and distant, his long face bisected by a pencil-line mustache. We sat in the salon on plastic garden chairs, listening to the downpour outside. I was waiting for an apology, but it didn’t come.
“We’re doing some building work,” I said, glancing at the mess.
Kamal scanned the walls and then looked over at the pile of sacks. “They’re using thirty-five-grade cement,” he said. “They should be using the higher grade—forty-five. If they don’t, the roof will collapse.”
“It already did,” I said.
I didn’t demand Kamal’s family tree. Instead, I asked him about his life.
“I’m from a small town in the east of Morocco,” he said in a quiet voice. “But I grew up in Casablanca. I lived in the States for seven years, mostly in Atlanta and New York. I did a thousand jobs—Arby’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen. Thought I’d never come back.”
“Why did you?”
“Circumstances.” Kamal moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “You never know what life’s going to throw at you,” he said.
SEVEN
An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat
an army of lions led by a sheep.
A GANG OF MISCHIEVOUS BOYS BEGAN wreaking havoc in the shantytown. They stole smaller boys’ homemade toys, threw stones at the limping dogs, jabbed sharpened sticks at the donkeys, and tripped up the old women as they stumbled home from the communal well. The schoolmistress said she would beat them senseless with her orange hose if she caught them. The furrow-faced imam slapped the backs of his hands together.