The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  “If I catch them,” he said, “I’ll hang them up by their ears.”

  As he was the only applicant for the position, I took Kamal on. From the outset, it seemed to me as if there were an invisible expiration date tattooed on the back of his neck. I didn’t expect him to last very long. After the debacle with Zohra and her Jinn, my expectations were very low.

  To my surprise, Kamal was punctual on the first day. He arrived at the house wearing a charcoal gray suit and a bulky Italian-made diver’s watch strapped to his left wrist. His lips were tight together. If I asked him anything, he responded with a carefully considered answer and closed his mouth again. He didn’t seem fond of idle chatter. When presented with a problem, he thrived on it. My first impression was that he was a loner, someone whose eyes had seen too much.

  I gave a string of orders.

  “We need the garden sprayed for insects,” I said, “that old windmill above the well has to be dismantled, and the heap of wood in the vegetable patch taken away.”

  Kamal didn’t take notes. He followed me quietly, his mouth clenched shut, hands behind his back.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Well, there’s so much more,” I said. “For a start, we need to buy a bath, and a satellite dish, and someone has to fix the pool. We have to get safety railing made, to buy fire extinguishers, and to get the windows fixed.”

  I had an appointment with an official from the British consulate, and so I left Kamal to it and traipsed through the shantytown’s mud to find a cab. The Korean Jeep had ground to a halt. The engine had seized up.

  When I got back to the house three hours later, there were people everywhere. More unusual was that they were doing things. Ten men were carting away the logs from the end of the garden; a team of soldiers had scaled the windmill with ropes and were dismantling it; an engineer was repairing the pool pump, someone else was installing a satellite dish, and another man was putting in new windowpanes. I called out to Kamal. His head popped up from the roof.

  “Up here,” he said.

  A moment later he was standing to attention before me, mouth closed, hands behind his back.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “It’s under control,” he said. “I did a deal with the bakery in the shantytown. They are taking the wood for their oven. They’ll pay two hundred dollars for the lot.” He asked if that was satisfactory.

  “They’ll pay us?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about the soldiers?”

  Kamal squinted. “Everyone was going to charge a lot of cash,” he said, “so I invited the army to remove the windmill as a military exercise. I’ve done a deal with a scrap metal guy, too. He’ll buy the metal for a hundred and fifty bucks. That pays for fixing the pool.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “Not as great as this . . .”

  Kamal picked up the television’s remote. He pressed a button. There was the grinding sound of a satellite dish rotating on the roof. When it stopped, the screen came alive with what looked like the news from Peru.

  “You’ve got two thousand channels now,” he said. “I had a guy hack them for you for free.”

  “What about the bath?”

  Kamal pinched his mustache. “We’ll do that later,” he said.

  The guardians were not impressed by the day’s progress. I toured the place with them in tow, showing off the repaired swimming pool pump, the dismantled windmill, and the thousands of television channels. Their faces were long and cold, as if I had betrayed them.

  “Monsieur Kamal is not a good man,” Hamza said scornfully.

  “He will steal the clothes from your back,” added Osman.

  “He’ll steal the house from you,” said the Bear.

  “Then I’ll have to be careful,” I said. “But if he can get so many things done in a day, I can’t do without him.”

  THAT NIGHT, WE WERE all kept awake by the sound of a donkey thrashing about in pain somewhere in the bidonville. The poor creature brayed and brayed, as if the end of the world had come. Suspecting the band of unruly boys out on a night journey, I crept into the garden and called to Hamza to go and chase them away. It was a dark night, no more than a sliver of moon hanging above in the cloudy sky. The guardian was down at his ornamental well. He was throwing handfuls of what looked like raw meat into it.

  “It’ll attract rats,” I said, against the echo of the donkey’s pain.

  “It will protect us,” he replied.

  We both laughed. And, for the first time, I sensed a warmth between us. I did not believe in Jinns, but I respected the superstition as an expression of a mature culture.

  “What are we to do about the Jinns?” I asked him.

  Hamza tossed the last few chunks of meat into the waterless well. The sound of the donkey became muffled and then stopped altogether.

  “They live at Dar Khalifa,” he said. “They have always lived here.”

  “We could have an exorcism,” I said. “We could kick them out.”

  “You do not chase your grandfather away just because he’s old,” he replied.

  We both stopped speaking. Silence was more appropriate than sound. I breathed in the nocturnal scent of jasmine and listened to the haphazard chorus of the wild dogs. We were both blinkered by our upbringings. I was restricted by the West’s scientific ideals, and Hamza by the traditions of his culture. His certainty that Jinns existed was mirrored by my own conviction that they did not. I wondered if we would ever reach a middle ground, a no-man’s-land in which one believed but did not believe.

  The noise of stray dogs fell away, and the light breeze hushed. I could not recall a moment more peaceful at Dar Khalifa. I treasured it. In the East, silence is regarded as golden, and not the awkward space between conversations, as it is to us. For me, a break in speaking is a fearful thing, a thing to be extinguished as rapidly as possible. But for the first time in a long while, I cherished it.

  Eventually it was me who broke the silence.

  “Why is the room always kept locked?”

  Hamza wiped his hands on his shirt. “I can’t say,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Some things we speak about, and others we do not.”

  “What happened in there? Did someone die? Is that it? There was a coldness. A fear. A scent of death.”

  The guardian sighed. “I cannot talk about those things,” he said. “If you want to know about Dar Khalifa, live here. The house itself will tell you.”

  A DAY OR TWO passed. Then one morning, as I staggered blearily down the long corridor to the kitchen for breakfast, I was accosted by a man wearing goggles, rubber gloves, and a chemical suit. On his back was a pressurized tank, and in his hands was a hose that ran back to the tank.

  “Get inside,” he said calmly. “This is poison.”

  He waved an arm vigorously at another man positioned at the far end of the garden. He was wearing the same outfit, with an identical tank on his back. The pair switched on their tanks, and greasy black gas billowed out. They aimed it low at first into the flowerbeds, then across the shrubs, and finally up into the trees. Within three minutes it was impossible to see anything at all. It was like being at the center of an industrial accident. The birds fell from the trees and lay stunned on the ground. I closed my eyes and fumbled back to our bedroom to warn Rachana and the children not to move.

  After we spent an hour cowering there, Kamal arrived. He had got the pesticide team on the cheap, he said. They were government employees, but had dropped by before work to help us out.

  Over the next few days, my new assistant solved one problem after the next. I found myself thanking providence for causing Zohra to run off. Her replacement was far more efficient. He treated me with formality, always called me “Mister,” and seemed quite unhappy when the day’s work was at an end. “I learned to work hard in America,” he said one afternoon. “Over there people just get on with it. They don’t sit about making up excu
ses, feeling sorry for themselves, or drinking mint tea all day long. If you work hard in the U.S., you can make good money and,” he added, “you can get respect.”

  But all the while I knew it couldn’t last. Such efficiency never does.

  We were in a cab, stuck in Casablanca’s gridlock traffic, when I asked Kamal what had taken him to the United States in the first place. His glance didn’t leave the road. I watched his profile. He swallowed hard.

  “There was an accident,” he said. “It was a bad one. My mother and my little sister were driving through Spain. A truck hit their car. They both died—my mother first and my sister a few days later.”

  I expressed sympathy.

  “When I was told the news by my father,” he went on, “I didn’t cry or anything. I was too numb.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “Nine years ago.”

  “And you left for the States?”

  “My family was shattered,” he said. “Its heart was ripped out. I didn’t speak a word of English . . . but I had to get away. So I took a flight to Georgia—home of Southern hospitality.”

  THE RAIN BEGAN AGAIN, while the architect’s team floundered about like Lotus Eaters in the sun. I dreaded walking through the main body of the house. Nothing there ever changed. The floors were broken up, and the doors had been yanked from their frames; the light switches were smashed, electrical wires hung from the ceiling and walls, a hint at the chaos that lay beneath. Only half the arches were finished, and there was no sign the others would ever be done.

  From time to time the foreman would buttonhole me as I hurried through the salon, my eyes covered by my hands. He would smack his lips to my cheeks and wrestle my right hand away to fondle it in his. When Kamal saw the old man greeting me, he barked at him in Arabic.

  “He only wants to be friendly,” I said tenderly.

  “He wants your cash,” he quipped. “The holy month of Ramadan starts next week. He’s hoping his groveling will be rewarded with your generosity.”

  Kamal asked about the architect. I said he was a good man with a fondness for fine Cuban cigars.

  “Don’t give him any money,” he said.

  “I paid him everything in advance,” I muttered. “He asked for it.”

  “Did he give you a receipt?”

  “No, I wired the money into his Paris account.”

  Kamal rolled his eyes. “Only pay a Moroccan,” he said, “if you want to see the back of his head.”

  BEFORE I MOVED TO Casablanca, my morning bath was typically occupied by the question of how I might escape the shores of England. I like to spend a great deal of time soaking in a tub, controlling the hot tap with my big toe, reflecting on life. Now that we had made the great escape, I wanted a bath in which I could steep myself long and hard and consider the future. It would have to be grand, well made, and built in a time when people understood the glory of soaking.

  When I asked Kamal where I could get an antique bathtub, he promised to take me to the best bath showroom in town. I asked if it was in fashionable Maarif. He crimped up his nose.

  “Maarif is for hustlers,” he said.

  I took Kamal to see the Korean Jeep before tramping out in search of the bath. It had been shut up in the garage since the engine had seized. He opened the hood and examined the mechanics before checking the papers and the mileage. He sent for a mechanic—a well-built man with dark murderous eyes and a scraggly gray beard, dressed in overalls so covered in grease that it was impossible to make out their original color.

  “Moroccan mechanics are the worst villains alive,” Kamal said. “Most of them would kill you without a second thought.”

  “Are they all villains?” I asked.

  Kamal lit a cigarette and nodded in the smoke. “All of them,” he confirmed. “All except one.”

  He jabbed the glowing end of his Marlboro at the man with murderous eyes.

  “Hussein here is the only one you can trust,” he said.

  “How did you find him?”

  “He’d lost everything at cards,” he said. “His family were staring starvation in the eye. Then my father set him up in business. There’s no way he’d ever stab us in the back.”

  As the mechanic’s cruel eyes inspected the engine, I asked about being stabbed in the back.

  “It doesn’t take much,” said Kamal knowingly. “Someone may be jealous ’cause you’ve got more than them, or they could have a grudge against someone in your family. If that happens, you’re in trouble.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “You might think Casablanca’s modern with its chichi stores and ritzy cars,” he said, “but under that façade it’s raw. It’s African. It’s tribal. Never forget that. Slip up, and you’ll have the tribe at your heels.”

  I made a note to bear the warning in mind.

  The mechanic’s head reappeared. His dark eyes squinted at Kamal and his voice cackled some words.

  “Just as I thought,” Kamal said.

  “What?”

  “The engine doesn’t match the car. This Jeep’s three years old and the junk under the hood’s ten years if it’s a day.”

  Kamal took out another cigarette and slid the tip of his tongue down the edge.

  “You took your eye off the ball,” he said. “The last owner sold the real engine on the side for a load of cash, and he sold you this heap of junk.”

  He lit the cigarette and exhaled hard.

  “It’s a classic engine swap,” he said.

  “Engine swap?”

  “Sure. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

  THE UNITED STATES HAD made a very great impact on Kamal. His return to Morocco in the months before the second Gulf conflict required readjustment. In the States, he had been used to getting things done fast and efficiently. He perfected the arts of wheeling, dealing, talking fast, and covering a lot of ground. Back in Morocco he found life was couched in inertia, as it has been for a thousand years. As I had discovered, if you didn’t move forward like a rampaging bull, nothing ever got done at all. Even then, as you charged headlong through the day, you had to keep both eyes open wide.

  “Take your eye off the ball,” said Kamal often, “and you’ll lose everything.”

  I was impressed by his foresight, especially as I hadn’t yet told him of the problems with the neighbor and the missing paperwork. When I did sketch out the situation, he didn’t seem surprised.

  “That house was empty for years,” he said. “It’s amazing the wolves didn’t rip it up.”

  “The Jinns kept them away,” I said sarcastically.

  “You may be right,” he said. “I’ve asked people in the bidonville about Dar Khalifa. Everyone talks about it. They say it’s infested with Jinns, hundreds of them. You can’t imagine their fear. Without the Jinns it would have been stolen years ago.”

  MY CONVERSATIONS WITH HICHAM the stamp collector continued. Each week, I would turn up at his shack, step across the three-legged dog, and barter a handful of postage stamps for conversation. We talked about his childhood, and about the years he had spent on the road selling scrap metal from a donkey cart. We talked about Morocco’s past, the future, and about the dreams of youth.

  Hicham was the kind of man who liked a conversation to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. He didn’t approve of chatter for chatter’s sake. I got the feeling he took our conversations all the more seriously because they were his side of a strange business contract. He weighed his words against the value of the postage stamps I brought, fragments of colored paper glued to the top right edge of an envelope.

  One week I asked if he believed in Jinns.

  “Of course I do,” he said without a thought. “They are all around us. Their world shapes our own.”

  “Do you like them?”

  The old man looked at me with disbelief. “If they could, they would slit our throats,” he said. He scooped a stamp album from the floor and opened it.

  “Would they kill us all?
”

  “Yes, that’s why we protect ourselves!” he exclaimed. “We say Bismillah, ‘in the name of God,’ before beginning an action.”

  That explained why I heard the phrase a thousand times a day. Moroccans utter it before getting into a car, before eating, drinking, even before they sit down.

  “Our Jinn is called Qandisha,” I said. “He’s got the guardians terrified. It’s making life difficult.”

  “They have a good reason to have fear,” said Hicham, arranging his stamps. “I’ve heard Qandisha’s very strong, and likes human children. Your children are not safe. They could be snatched at any moment. That is why the guardians are so frightened.”

  Hicham said Jinns were known for stealing human children in the night, sometimes substituting a Jinn-child in place of the one they take.

  “The Jinn-child grows up like one of your own,” he said. “You don’t suspect anything. Then one night he shakes off his human disguise, rears up as a hideous creature three hundred meters high, and swallows your family whole. Believe me, I tell you the truth.”

  “What can you do to prevent it?”

  The old man put the stamp album down. “There’s one way,” he said in a grave voice.

  “How?”

  “You can trick the Jinns. You put mannequins in the children’s beds, and tell your children to sleep in the oven each night. Do that, and you will all be safe.”

  WHENEVER I BEGGED KAMAL to take me to the bath shop, he would insist I was in far too much of a hurry. A bath was a finishing touch, he would say, and we were nowhere near ready for finishing touches. He was right. Throughout the renovations at the Caliph’s House, I had a hard time with perspective. I am good at grasping details, but find it near impossible to envisage a project as a whole. I had filled an entire storeroom at Dar Khalifa with finishing touches. They were ready and waiting. There was a championship tennis net, although the tennis court was wasteland covered in rubble, broken bottles, and rotting rats. Beside the tennis net stood a stack of thirty framed paintings of Indian maharajahs ready for the dining room walls, and near to them was a trunk full of cushion covers, and a second brimming with light fixtures, bath soaps, and telephones. But the worst finishing touch of all was a twenty-foot container of Indian furniture I had ordered a few months before. It was on the high seas en route to Casablanca.