The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  One morning a donkey hauled a well-built trailer into the slum and deposited it opposite the mosque. It was painted white, with go-faster stripes on the sides. A crowd of children gathered expectantly to see what tempting sweetmeats would be offered. Two men jumped from the trailer and swished them away with sticks. They had long black beards, teaseled out at the edges, and they wore the flowing robes of the Arabian Gulf. I asked the secondhand shoe seller about the newcomers and their trailer. He seemed very agitated.

  “Go to your house,” he said, “lock the door, and don’t think about those men. They’re trouble.”

  “Who are they?”

  The man stuffed the assortment of shoes into a sack and staggered away. A moment later I saw the sweet-selling woman hurry off home. Ten minutes after that the bidonville had become a ghost town. I went back to Dar Khalifa and asked Hamza what was going on.

  “They’re bad men,” he said. “They’ll cut out your tongue and feed it to the dogs.”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  Hamza rubbed his coarse hands together. “We are not rich,” he said. “But we are Muslims, real Muslims. We read the Qur’an, and we understand it. The words of Allah are clear to us. But those other people . . .” The guardian stopped mid-sentence. He breathed in, then out in a deep sigh. “Those other people are hijacking our religion. They don’t understand the Qur’an.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “From the Arabian Gulf. They come here from time to time and try to win supporters for their vision.”

  “What is their vision?”

  “Islamic anarchy.”

  WITH NO CAFFEINE TO power his bloodstream, Kamal’s Ramadan mornings were almost unendurable. I could hardly remember ever seeing a man so despondent. But as a problem solver par excellence, he came up with an ingenious way of kick-starting the day. The secret was adrenaline. Each morning, after he picked me up, Kamal steered his cousin’s pickup to the top of Anfa hill and pulled over to the side to mutter a short prayer. There was a clear view down to Maarif and to the old city. I would take in the sights as Kamal prepared for the contest. Swelling his lungs with air, he would rev the engine until the car was consumed in a thundercloud of oily diesel fumes. Against a backdrop of noise and smoke, he would jerk out the clutch. The tired old pickup would be propelled downhill. Kamal’s method of producing maximum adrenaline was to swerve the wheel to the left. In an instant the odds of survival were slashed as we fought to dodge the stream of oncoming traffic. After a mile, Kamal would be drenched in sweat, panting, whooping with elation, ready to face the day.

  THE HOUSE WAS SILENT. I wandered through it, depressed beyond words. The workmen had broken everything their unskilled hands had touched. The wiring and the plumbing were a disaster, the arches were a mess, and the terracotta tiles looked as if a monkey had laid them. I didn’t understand. On television and in books, other people managed to renovate houses effortlessly. For them, there was nothing to it. They didn’t have problems with slothful, ghoulish workmen. Their laborers were always cheery, fresh-faced, and incapable of making a mistake.

  Kamal arrived in the evening. He said in Morocco only fools worked during the day, that all the serious employment was done at night, especially during the weeks of Ramadan.

  “What about office hours?” I said.

  “Pah! I never meet people in offices,” he said curtly.

  “Why not?”

  “Too many ears.”

  I asked him how we could get new workers, men with the skill necessary to turn the house around.

  “Don’t be in a rush,” said Kamal. “If you rush, you’ll fall into the hole.”

  “Where’s the hole?”

  “It’s all around you.”

  THE NEXT DAY, KAMAL borrowed the Mercedes limousine again. We drove across Casablanca in search of a new engine for my Jeep. It was a cool, bright day, with a strong breeze chasing in from the west. I could smell winter approaching. The only consolation was that by now London would be in the grip of black ice and freezing fog.

  Kamal told me that to get an engine on the cheap, we would have to tell the vultures. Only the vultures, he said darkly, knew where to look.

  “Tell them what you want, and they’ll get it,” he said.

  “How do they do that?”

  “They have their methods. If you have the cash to pay, they’ll run a car off the road and track what’s left to a scrap yard.”

  “That sounds illegal to me,” I said. “In any case, I don’t have much cash.”

  Kamal clicked his tongue. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I know a vulture with a conscience.”

  Far from the palm-edged avenues of the Corniche, we came to a fearful, ramshackle place. The sky was drab and gray, even though it was only late morning; the tin-roofed buildings were masked in decades of grime. The road had been torn up, and the smell of raw sewage hung in the air, a warning to the honest to stay away. The place was an automobile graveyard. They lay everywhere, carved up and contorted, ripped down the welding lines, despised heaps of steel.

  From time to time a man would descend from the mountain of wrecks, clasping a trophy—a steering wheel, part of an engine, a fragment of indescribable metal. He would hand it to another man, who would count out a stack of tattered bills and leave with the trophy. We approached cautiously. My eyes were streaming from the rank smell of sewage. Kamal asked one of the vultures a question. The man pointed to the left, to a squat shed made from beaten sheets of tin. We went over. Another man came out and kissed Kamal three times on each cheek. He was average height, with a thick mane of orange hair and long sideburns that met beneath his chin. He was the vulture with a conscience.

  Kamal described what we needed, stressing that the engine had to be in good condition. He didn’t mention our budget. When I asked him about this on the way home, he said: “In the States, the first thing they ask about is the price. How much is this? What does that cost? But in Morocco, the very last thing you talk about is money. First you choose the thing you want to buy. You make sure it’s just right. Then you fix the price.”

  The system seemed back to front.

  “How do you know if you can afford it?” I asked.

  “You don’t,” Kamal replied. “But that’s what bargaining’s for.”

  AT THE HOUSE, HAMZA and Osman were pacing up and down waiting for me. They said that there was something important for me to attend to.

  “Has there been another accident?”

  “No, no, not an accident.”

  “Thank God for that. Then what is it?”

  “Follow me.”

  We walked across the terrace and into the courtyard garden. Hamza extended an arm, jabbed his index finger to the top of the great palm tree.

  “See,” he said.

  I didn’t see anything abnormal. “It looks fine to me.”

  Hamza and Osman clapped their hands to their faces. “What do you mean?” they said at once.

  “Well, I can’t see anything strange.”

  Osman prodded a finger at the tree. “Up there!” he said.

  I looked up, peering into the afternoon light. I squinted, tilted my head. Squinted again. Then, gradually, I saw what they were pointing to. Hanging on a string by the cluster of dates was a small, lifeless, ratlike creature.

  “It’s a hedgehog,” said Osman.

  “What’s it doing up there?”

  Hamza ushered me from the courtyard, across the verandah, and out of the house. He led me through the shantytown, where the fanatics’ trailer was still parked, and down the hill toward the ocean. I asked again and again where he was taking me. He didn’t reply, except to say that we needed a safe place to talk.

  “Isn’t the house safe?” I asked.

  An expression of absolute fear swept across Hamza’s face. His tanned complexion seemed to turn ivory with fright. “No,” he said once, and then again. “No, Monsieur Tahir, it is not safe.”

  At the end of the main roa
d, Hamza crossed the Corniche and led the way down over the fence to the beach. Bitter winter waves were breaking on the sand. The guardian stopped and stared me in the eye.

  “There is bad news,” he said.

  “Is it with the workmen? That they left?”

  Hamza frowned. “No, no, not with the workers,” he said. “Something far more grave. Someone is trying to hurt you.”

  “Qandisha and the Jinns?”

  The guardian glanced down at his feet. “I will tell you,” he said quietly.

  We sat down on the sand and Hamza stared out at the waves.

  “Once there was a man who fell in love with the wife of another man,” he said without looking at me. “He would meet her secretly under a palm tree on the first night of each month. He would give her little gifts—a rose, a pastry, something like that. The woman fell in love with the man and they ran away together. The husband of the woman swore that he would kill them both. His family had been dishonored. He hunted them for weeks, then months, and years.”

  Hamza drew a square in the sand with his finger.

  “When he eventually found them,” he said, “they were living in a house near the ocean. They had a child, and were happy. The woman’s husband broke down the door. He was about to kill the couple when something stopped him. He turned around, went back to his own house, and killed himself.”

  I wondered what the story had to do with the dead hedgehog.

  “There was something that neither man knew about the woman,” Hamza said.

  “What?”

  “That she was a Jinn, and her name was Qandisha.”

  “Qandisha’s a female Jinn?”

  “Yes.”

  I asked where the hedgehog fitted in.

  “It’s a sign,” he said. “A sign that Qandisha doesn’t like people living in her house.”

  “Well, what should I do?”

  Hamza stared out at the water. He opened his mouth but no words came out. I repeated my question.

  “Tell me, what should I do?”

  “You should take your family, leave Dar Khalifa, and never come back.”

  I FOUND MYSELF TRAPPED in an awkward position. On my assistant’s orders I had fired my workforce, and lost a fortune in the process, with little hope of recovering any of the money. I had a gangster for a neighbor, a house marooned in a shantytown with no title deeds, and the weather was getting bad. And I was now being told that I should abandon the house because an invisible spirit was angry at us living there.

  The next day, I asked Kamal for his opinion. He was quite certain the dead hedgehog and tales of Qandisha were part of an elaborate ruse to scare us away.

  “Do you think the guardians were trying to take the house?” I asked.

  Kamal pondered the question for a while.

  “It’s not the guardians,” he said at length. “Someone else wants the house, not them.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Again Kamal felt silent.

  “Because,” he said at last, “Dar Khalifa means too much to them.”

  IN THE SHANTYTOWN, THE imam was looking worried. As I walked past the mosque he smiled fretfully, but for once, he didn’t ask me for money. It was then I realized something was very wrong. There was a tension in the alleyways and in the small shops that faced out onto the main track. I could feel it. Everyone could.

  At dusk on the second day after its arrival, the windows of the white trailer flapped down. The two bearded men were sitting primly in the window on stools. They had donned white crocheted skullcaps and were wearing matching blue sweaters over their robes. Anyone who walked past the trailer seemed to do so at speed, as if the bearded men were waiting to reach out, grab them, and slit their throats.

  “The bombers were men like that,” Osman whispered to me that night. “Having them here doesn’t do us any good. If the government sees them, they’ll tear down our houses. They’ll say that we support the radicals.”

  “Why don’t you all chase them away? This is your bidonville, not theirs.”

  Osman’s ready smile froze, then became a scowl. “If we throw them out,” he said, “they’ll burn our houses down.”

  RAMADAN CONTINUED. AS IT did so, the façade—that everyone was enjoying the strict routine of fasting—wore thinner and thinner still. Each day, Kamal would meet me at the house later than the day before, until one day he didn’t turn up at all. I was worried. I thought he might have been killed on his morning adrenaline run or knocked down by a nicotine-starved driver running amok.

  By late afternoon the streets of Casablanca were a terrifying place. Cars swerved about even more randomly than normal, veering from one lane to the next, as if the drivers didn’t care whether they collided or not. Everyone had their windows open. Not for air, but so that they could yell abuse at anyone they passed. By five o’clock, Boulevard d’Anfa, a main thoroughfare, was a carnage of crashes, scrapes, and feuding motorists.

  Another day slipped by, and still no sign of Kamal. I called his cell phone, but it was switched off. So I griped to Rachana, then ranted with anger, asking how anyone could be so irresponsible. Two more days passed, and with each, my fury mounted even more.

  By the fourth day I had decided to fire Kamal, if I ever saw him again. There was no question about it. I lined up the guardians and told them of my decision. They were delighted. Hamza said Kamal was nothing but trouble, that he was trying to get his hands on my money. The Bear broke with formality and slapped me on the back. Cackling to himself, he made for the stables to celebrate with the others.

  At seven that evening, I received a text message on my cell phone. It read: “Come to big police station on Zerktouni Blvd. Now.” I ran through the shantytown, my heart pumping, and took a taxi into the center of town. A policeman shooed me away from the gates of the precinct. He told me to wait at the corner.

  I waited and waited. Then, at nine-fifteen, Kamal appeared. He was dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing five days before. His head was low, his confidence broken.

  “Where have you been?”

  “In jail,” he said.

  NINE

  A one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind.

  THE WORST THING ABOUT RAMADAN WERE the thieves. They were everywhere. You couldn’t leave anything unattended for a minute without having it stolen. Thieves preyed on honest folk, whose hunger made them easy targets. Morocco is usually a safe country with very little crime. But as soon as the holy month arrived, everyone we met cautioned us to lock up or tie down anything we owned. We scoffed at their warnings. By the second week of Ramadan, my wallet was gone; so was Rachana’s, as well as Ariane’s schoolbag, my new camera, and even our groceries. The local newspapers were packed with tales of daring theft—of cars and donkeys; briefcases filled with cash; jewelry, furniture, and even household pets.

  The holy month was supposed to be a time of pious reflection. But, like Christmas in the West, it was tinged by commercialization. Every evening families spent fortunes on providing delicacies for iftour, the breaking of the fast. There were trays of macaroons and a hundred varieties of biscuit, pastries, and sweetmeats, and dates from oases in the south, juicy figs from the mountains, honeydew melons, fresh yogurt, and plums.

  Each evening as the day’s fast was broken by the muezzin, the guardians would nibble a handful of dates, sip a little milk, and rush out on patrol. For them, it wasn’t a time for gorging oneself on food; rather, it was the time to go hunting—for thieves.

  “They come while people are eating iftour,” said the Bear.

  “Yes, and they creep about like foxes,” Osman said.

  “Like young, cunning foxes,” Hamza added.

  “What would you do if you caught one?”

  The three guardians looked at each other furtively, then at me. Then they guffawed.

  “We would trap him in a corner and throw stones at him,” said Hamza. “Then we would beat him with long sticks, until he cried out like a woman.”
>
  “Would you give him to the police?”

  The guardians scoffed at the suggestion.

  “That would be no fun,” said the Bear, grinning.

  KAMAL DIDN’T SAY A word until after he had eaten his way through an entire dish of couscous piled high with pumpkin, potatoes, and succulent lamb. He wasn’t his usual self. For the first time, he was meek.

  “What happened?”

  “It was bad,” he said, picking at the lamb’s shoulder bone. “Very bad.”

  “Did you steal something?”

  “No!”

  “Then what?”

  He leaned back and lit a cigarette. “I was at a government office checking some papers,” he said, “and the clerk insulted me. It’s Ramadan and his temper cracked. He called me the son of a noseless whore!”

  Kamal paused to exhale.

  “No one calls my mother a noseless whore,” he said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I saw a big metal vase on a shelf. I picked it up and hit him with it in the face.”

  IT WAS TWO DAYS before Kamal was back to normal, although there was no such thing as normal in Ramadan. His eyes were circled by black rings, his complexion pasty and white. He said the clerk had dropped charges against him. They had come to an understanding of some kind. It was good news. But there was better news to follow. The vulture had located an engine. Kamal claimed it was pristine as the day it was built and had been ripped out from a freshly injured Korean-made Jeep.

  “What luck that an identical car to yours crashed just when we needed it to.”

  It sounded too good to be true.

  “Are you sure the car wasn’t hunted down on my behalf?”