The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

Kamal looked at the floor timidly. “Don’t ask me that question,” he said. “You know it’s Ramadan and I cannot tell a lie.”

  I HAD BEEN SO ready to fire Kamal, but having him back meant we could start solving problems once again. I scribbled down a new list of things to do. The first was to find a net to cover the swimming pool. A few weeks before, Zohra had managed to get a quote from the leading pool company in Casablanca. Their price was close to three thousand dollars. Kamal said he could get a net made for almost nothing. He asked for the second problem.

  “The staircase is a death trap,” I said. “It’s got no banisters. We need a mason to build some, and a carpenter, too.”

  Next morning, Kamal arrived at Dar Khalifa with two plump men carrying two plump sacks. They looked like brothers and were wearing thick rubber aprons and gumboots, the kind worn by fishermen. Kamal led them to the swimming pool and motioned to it. He took time to explain something carefully in Arabic. The men nodded, opened their sacks, and dumped out two heaps of brown nylon cord as thick as a child’s finger. They folded the sacks and sat on them, took a handful of cord, and started to knit.

  A few minutes later, there was a scratch at the front door. Hamza hurried over. In the frame was standing a tall, thickset man with rounded shoulders and a wild growth of beard. He looked like a hit man. I assumed he was in the employ of the shantytown’s gangster.

  “I think he’s got the wrong house,” I said.

  “No, no,” Kamal said, greeting the man, “he’s the mason.”

  “What about a carpenter? We need one to make doors and windows for our bedroom.”

  The winter rains had transformed the windowless hulk of a room into a lake complete with a family of ducks.

  “In Morocco, carpenters are all drug addicts,” said Kamal.

  “That’s a sweeping generalization.”

  “It’s not. They are bad men—all of them.”

  “There must be one honest carpenter. I’m sure we can find him if we look very hard.”

  Kamal suddenly tapped a finger to his temple. “Of course,” he said. “There is one.”

  THE FISHERMEN KNITTED AND knitted, and as they did so, a great brown blanket of net billowed out over the garden. They claimed there was no finer net in all Casablanca, that it was strong enough to catch a whale.

  “I don’t want it to catch a whale,” I said.

  The plump fishermen seemed displeased for a moment. They glanced at each other, and one of them said, “This net has baraka. It can protect life as well as taking it.”

  By the afternoon of the next day, they had knitted a net thirty feet long. They were halfway done, their nimble fingers knotting the nylon cord at an astonishing speed. I was admiring their work when Kamal rolled up in my Jeep. The vulture’s engine had been fitted.

  Wasting no time, we trundled through the shantytown and out to the open road, in search of the clean-living carpenter. Kamal recounted his exploits in America as we drove. Nothing gave him more pleasure than talking of the times he had spent in the bosom of Southern hospitality. He said that when he first got to Atlanta, he went to a supermarket and fell backward at seeing such packed shelves.

  “It was like a dream. There was such wealth. Such glamour.”

  “Glamour? In a supermarket?”

  “Yes!” said Kamal in an excited tone. “I met my first American love right then, right on that first day.”

  “Where?”

  “In Safeway, at the frozen peas.”

  The Jeep rattled southward out of Casablanca toward Marrakech. The villas were replaced by shantytowns, and then by open fields. Farmers were tending their crops of onions, melons, and maize. I asked Kamal about the girl.

  “She was beautiful,” he said, a hint of lost passion in his voice. “Her skin was the color of walnuts, her eyes green, like apples hanging in an orchard’s shade. We stood there, staring at each other at the refrigerator filled with frozen peas. It was love.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “You don’t believe me,” Kamal said desolately. “But it’s true. We had so much in common. She gave me her picture. I pressed it to my heart. By the time I left Safeway, we were engaged.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “What’s crazy about it? It was love.”

  “Did you marry her?”

  Kamal glowered at the road. “Allah did not want it,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I left her phone number in my jeans when I went to the laundrette. It was washed clean away.”

  Kamal eased the car into fourth gear.

  “There was only one thing to do,” he said.

  “What was that?”

  “I went back to Safeway and waited. I waited and waited, but she never came back.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “For a week.”

  “You wasted a week waiting for a girl you’d met for a few minutes at the frozen peas?”

  Kamal sniffed, as if he felt genuine pain at the loss. “You don’t understand,” he said. “We were engaged.”

  THE CARPENTER’S WORKSHOP WAS set off the road, opposite Casablanca’s main garbage dump. Refuse trucks from across the city would end up there day and night. A pack of scrawny dogs were picking their way through the trash.

  The workshop was a one-room shed with a wooden roof. There was nothing remarkable about it. A man inside had heard the car approaching. He was aged and crooked, like a warped old post of pine. His head was completely bald, his eyes small, as if they had been shrunk in some way by time. As we neared him, he squinted at us through a large magnifying lens held in his left hand.

  When he saw Kamal, the crooked man almost jumped for joy. He let the lens fall on its cord around his neck, and he staggered forward to press his old lips to Kamal’s cheeks.

  An hour of inquiries slipped by. The carpenter asked after each member of Kamal’s family. He knew them all—brothers, cousins and aunts, nephews, nieces, uncles, and grandparents. The name of each one was spoken, praised, and blessed. He begged our forgiveness.

  Were it not Ramadan, he said, he would have served us a banquet. Next time, there would be a couscous cooked with raisins and tender meat, trays of pastries flavored with orange blossom, and gallons of sweet mint tea.

  “Next time, inshallah, if God wills it,” I said.

  After two hours, we still hadn’t brought up the subject of work. I nudged Kamal.

  “The old generation can’t be hurried,” he whispered.

  Another half hour elapsed. I couldn’t stand waiting any longer, especially because the wind had changed and we were all choking on the air gusting off the garbage mountain. At last, when every relative living and dead had been praised once and praised again, the old carpenter fell silent. He prayed for a few moments, his hands cupped on his lap.

  Kamal explained that we had a favor to ask him. We needed a set of windows and a door to be made. The carpenter leapt to his feet. Pulling the magnifying glass up to his eye, he moved in close to me, the lens a window between us.

  “I will do the finest work that has ever been made!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “The wood will be fragrant and strong. I will sculpt it, lovingly, caressing it with my fingers.”

  “That sounds very good,” I said. “Just what we need.”

  The dimensions were scratched down on a splinter of pine. And, after more prolonged formalities, we made our escape. On the way back, I asked Kamal how he had come to know the carpenter. He said he would show me. We drove back past the open fields and the shantytowns, past the villas and the office blocks, into the center of Casablanca.

  Kamal stopped the car outside an apartment building. On the ground floor was a hammam, a Turkish-style steam bath, with an entrance for men and another for women.

  “I live in this building,” he said, “and my family own the hammam.”

  He opened a steel door on the street level and led the way into a dark basement. When my eyes had adjusted to the dimness
, I made out someone crouching against one wall, near a boiler. He was completely bald and had no eyebrows. Kamal called out. The figure opened a hatch on the side of the boiler and tossed a handful of something into the inferno.

  “What’s that?”

  “This is the boiler that heats the hammam,” Kamal said. “All day and all night a guy crouches here, throwing handfuls of sawdust into the fire. The sawdust is brought each morning from the carpenter we just met. We’ve been buying it from his family for fifty years.”

  Again, Kamal warned me about taking my eye from the ball.

  “We used to own dozens of buildings in Casablanca,” he said. “We had factories, too, and farms. But now all we have is this hammam.”

  “What happened to the rest?”

  “After the accident,” Kamal said, “my father lost interest in life. His wife and his only daughter were dead, so he took a backseat and everyone walked over him. When they saw he didn’t put up a fight, they took everything. It was like wolves ripping a carcass apart.”

  Kamal led me back up to the street.

  “Beware,” he said, “the same could happen to you. There are wolves all around you. Blink once and the Caliph’s House will be gone.”

  THE ONLY PROGRESS AT the house was the fishermen’s net. There was miles of it. Hamza and his fellow guardians considered it a needless expense. They said I could have spent the money pleasing the Jinns instead. By doing so, they insisted, the house and all who lived inside it would be protected by a cloak of invisible energy. To the Western mind, it sounded like lunacy—rely alone on prayer, offerings, and tokens of superstition. But if I did so, the guardians promised, I could live without any safety features at all.

  “You mean I wouldn’t even need locks on the doors?” I said.

  “No,” replied the Bear.

  “What about fire insurance?”

  “Not that either,” quipped Hamza.

  “If I indulged the Jinns and got their protection,” I said, “then surely I wouldn’t need guardians.”

  Hamza, Osman, and the Bear fell into line, shoulder to shoulder. A great fear descended across their faces. It was the fear of unemployment. I could feel them fumbling desperately for an answer.

  “You do need guardians,” said Hamza at length.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s us who communicate with the Jinns.”

  BY THIRD WEEK OF Ramadan there was still no sign of the new team of artisans frequently promised by Kamal. Whenever I asked after them, he would caution me. Hurry to find craftsmen and, he said, the mess would get even worse.

  “These people are not like builders,” he declared, “they are artists. Hurry an artist and he’ll chop you in two with his knife.”

  “But I don’t want any more psychos,” I said anxiously. “It’s bad enough already.”

  Kamal waved a finger at my face. “You have it quite wrong,” he replied. “In Morocco, the more insane the artist, the better he knows his craft. It will take time to find a truly disturbed team to work here at the Caliph’s House.”

  FRANÇOIS HAD TOLD ME that Casablanca’s old quarter of Habous was the place to find real craftsmen. I didn’t believe him for a minute, but forcing Kamal to drive me there on the Friday morning was a way of exacting my authority.

  The last Friday in Ramadan was a day when no work at all was done. For three weeks I had been ever more scathing about the artisans’ output, but I hadn’t seen anything yet. People should have been thinking about prayer, but their minds were all on the same mirage—a giant plate of couscous and lamb with all the trimmings.

  Kamal didn’t speak on the drive to Habous. He was barely functioning. The lack of sleep, nicotine, and alcohol, and the adrenaline overload, had taken a heavy toll on his system. The last thing he wanted was to chauffeur me to the stone-built bazaar in search of workers. Fortunately, his weakened condition made it easy to take control. Unlike him, and everyone else, I was eating three meals a day and sleeping seven hours a night. By the final days of Ramadan, I felt like king of the world.

  Habous was quite different from the ritzy French villas and the apartment blocks more normally found in Casablanca. Its buildings were crafted almost entirely of granite, rather than concrete, so favored elsewhere. Pointed arches led to dozens of small shops, set back off stone colonnades. It looked as if the neighborhood had stood there for centuries, and so I was all the more surprised to learn that Habous was constructed by the French in the 1930s.

  The shops were packed with wares—colorful jelabas edged in silky brocade, tarboosh hats made from fine red felt, yellow barboush slippers, caftans embroidered with sequins, and wedding regalia lavish enough for any bride. One entire street was devoted to Moroccan furniture, while another sold only brassware, and a third perfumes and beauty products—rose water and antimony, jasmine oil, sandalwood and musk.

  We searched for craftsmen, but could find none. Everyone we asked either scowled or suggested returning after Ramadan. They thought I was mad to be thinking of such things on the final stretch of the fast. As we wandered through the porticoes, I spied a courtyard behind one of the arches. Inside was a cluster of antique shops. Each one sold the usual assortment of Art Deco bronzes and prewar furniture and prints. Everything in Casablanca’s antique stores, without exception, dates from the first half of the last century, a legacy of the French.

  But there was an exception. At the back of one shop, I set eyes on an exquisite dining table. It was veneered in walnut, with gently bowed sides and cabriole legs. The detailing, the choice of wood, and the style suggested it was not French, but Spanish. To my inexpert eye, it looked as if it dated to the early nineteenth century, long before the French annexed the kingdom of Morocco.

  I pushed Kamal forward and urged him to ask the price.

  The shop’s owner was too ravenous to bother with a sales spiel. He sat doubled over in an old wicker chair, as if his stomach was giving him pain. His head was in his hands. Kamal inquired the price of the table.

  “C’est cinq milles dirhams,” he said.

  “Five hundred dollars,” said Kamal. “That’s far too much.”

  “We can bargain,” I said brightly.

  Kamal led the way out of the shop. “Ramadan has made the shopkeepers greedy,” he said.

  “That man’s starving,” I said, “he’s putty in my hands.”

  “We are leaving,” said Kamal sternly.

  OUT ON THE STREET, I noticed a woman begging. She was elderly, her face a maze of shadowed wrinkles, her bent form shrouded in a dark green jelaba. She caught my attention not because of what she was wearing, or the way she looked, but because of what she was holding.

  In her basket was a collection of the very finest fruit I had seen in Casablanca. I took a moment to watch as she went from stall to stall. The shopkeepers would spend time selecting the very best apple, orange, or plum, before handing it to the woman with their blessing. I was surprised, for in the West we reserve second-rate goods for people without the money to pay for them. I stepped up to one of the fruit stalls and asked the owner why he had presented his very best peach to the beggar. The shopkeeper groomed his beard with his hand.

  “Just because someone is begging,” he replied, “does that mean they should be given items of low quality? We are not like that here in Morocco.”

  TWO DAYS MORE AND the holy month was at an end. The severity of Ramadan was suddenly replaced by the excess of the Eid celebration. There was a palpable sense of delight on every Moroccan face. Teenagers raced their parents’ cars up and down the Corniche, hanging out the windows, horns blaring, hands waving. Middle-class families strolled up and down, fathers smoking, children slurping pink ice cream. Music blared from every restaurant and café, each one overwhelmed with a tidal wave of customers.

  I gave the guardians a week’s pay as a bonus. Their mouths grinned wide, and they hurried home to hand the cash over to their wives. That night the shantytown was bursting with life. On the main track s
heep were roasting on low charcoal braziers, sparks shooting like tracer fire up to the stars. A group of musicians were weaving down the alleyways, the soft lilt of their tune rising over the rusting tin roofs. In the middle of the main street, the imam was making the most of the season’s charity. Across from his mosque, the white trailer was shut up for the night. Its resident fanatics had disappeared.

  At midnight, Osman knocked at our bedroom door. His three small children had been coaxed forward, bearing homemade gifts for Ariane and Timur. Their father poked them in the shoulder blades, and, reluctantly, they hummed a Moroccan nursery rhyme. In the West, nothing is so sacred as the ritual of putting kids to bed on time; while in the East, no evening is complete unless the children have been stirred from deep sleep and cajoled to entertain.

  When Osman had gone, and our own children were snoring loud, I went down to the verandah and sat on a wicker bench. The bidonville’s celebrations were still raging on, the sound of music and laughter warming the night air. Around me, the Caliph’s House was sleeping. I thought about what Hamza had said—that only the house could give up its secrets, only it could tell me about its past.

  As I sat there, I sensed very strongly that Dar Khalifa had a soul of its own. It seemed far more than the stone and mortar in its walls, as if it knew clearly who we were and why we were there. Maybe, I thought to myself, it wasn’t the spirit of the house I was sensing, but Qandisha and her fraternity of Jinns.

  TWO DAYS AFTER THE end of Ramadan, Kamal arrived. He was bright-eyed and confident again.

  “I have found you a moualem, a master craftsman, to lay the terracotta tiles,” he said.

  “How do you know he’s good?”

  “Because he’s a madman,” said Kamal.

  That night I slept well. It was as if we had turned the corner on our bad luck. I had talked my bank in London into loaning me some money, and Ramadan was now a distant memory. I nestled my head into the pillow and thanked God for good fortune, and the Jinns for leaving us alone.