The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  At that moment, as I drifted into a deep, pleasing slumber, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jerked upright.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s me,” said a voice.

  “Who?”

  “Me . . . Kamal.”

  I fumbled for my watch. “It’s three A.M.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, what’s your problem?”

  “Put on your clothes,” said Kamal, “we have to go and buy sand.”

  In any other country in the world, people buy sand when the shops are open. This doesn’t usually include the middle of the night. I drew this point to Kamal’s attention as we drove out through the suburbs and along the coast road.

  “No one ever got a good deal buying anything in a store,” he said.

  “Why do we need sand anyway?”

  “For the bejmat.”

  Another feature curious to Morocco is the purchasing of building merchandise. Anywhere else, the builder buys what he needs for the job and then bills you for it. But as Kamal explained, in Morocco only a fool would let someone else buy sand, cement, metal girders, pipes, or wood.

  “But the architect bought all that stuff for me,” I said.

  Kamal lit a cigarette and sucked at it hard. “Then you’re a fool for letting him,” he said.

  The first reason to buy your own merchandise was to get a good price. The second was to ensure quality. When we had driven for more than an hour, Kamal showed me what he meant. His contact was waiting in a turnout. His truck was old and wounded by years on the road. It was leaking oil, and its lights were all smashed. The driver was a silhouette in the cab. It appeared he wasn’t alone. As we approached I made out passionate groaning sounds.

  “Is there a woman in there with him?” I said.

  “He’s a trucker,” said Kamal.

  “So?”

  “So he’s doing what truckers do best.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s whoring.”

  TEN

  Trust in God but tie your camel well.

  KAMAL TAPPED HARD ON THE DRIVER’S door. There was a rustling inside, sounds of commotion, then of fear, followed by urgent clambering. The passenger door was flung open and a girl of about fifteen leapt out. She was veiled in black and ran very fast.

  An oily, bearded face appeared at the window.

  “It’s me,” said Kamal hoarsely.

  The man inside glared out at us with anger. “I paid for her in advance!” he shouted.

  “We’ve come for the sand.”

  Kamal pulled the tarpaulin back and pointed to the load. “Feel that,” he said.

  I did. It was slightly moist, cool to the touch.

  “Top quality,” said Kamal, “and half the going price.”

  WHEN HE SET EYES on the sand, Hamza said it was the lowest quality he had ever seen. He boasted that he’d been born in the desert, a fact that enabled him to tell good sand from bad merely by the smell. The other two guardians were equally scathing when they saw the giant dark mound now sitting outside the house.

  “It will give you trouble,” said the Bear.

  “And it’ll bring bad luck into the house,” said Osman.

  It was obvious the guardians were disparaging because Kamal had brought the sand to Dar Khalifa. As far as they were concerned, anything my assistant did was part of a grand scheming plan to relieve me of all I owned. They hated everything about him. Most of all, they hated that I listened when he spoke.

  For my part, I really could not work Kamal out. He was an impossible person to pigeonhole—capable of brilliant thought one minute, and utterly reckless behavior the next. While I had him working, I valued his know-how, his ability to get difficult things done. At the same time, I was still unsure of his real motives.

  ONE MORNING IN EARLY December we drove back out to see the carpenter. It was the middle of the week, and we went to check on the windows he was making. The carpenter kissed Kamal’s cheeks, praised his ancestors, and ushered us to seats in the shade. A pot of mint tea was brought, glasses poured out once, then poured back into the pot before being poured out a second time. A team of boys fetched the windows and held them up like oils at a fine-art sale. They looked very good. The carpenter was pleased when I praised the work. He exclaimed something in Arabic.

  Kamal translated.

  “He said, ‘Through these windows, your eyes will separate reality from illusion.’ ”

  I pondered the comment as we drove back toward Casablanca. It was a dazzling morning, far cooler than previous days. The road was lined with hawkers selling cactus fruit and plums. Kamal didn’t say anything on the way home. His mouth was clenched tight. He breathed through his nose, huffing like a stallion before the race, as if he were overcome with anger. I asked if something was on his mind. He didn’t reply. Then, suddenly, he swerved off the main road onto a dirt track, dust enveloping us. I was taken by surprise.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Shortcut,” he said.

  We drove for thirty minutes in the opposite direction from Casablanca. On either side of the track, there was open farmland, rich red African soil, peppered with crows. I kept silent. As far as I was concerned, it was the middle of nowhere.

  At a place where the tracks converged and then crossed, Kamal hit the brakes. The Jeep skidded to a halt, sending dust sideways like talc cast into the wind. Kamal got out of the car. He said he wanted to check the exhaust. At that moment, two men appeared from behind a bush. They looked like laborers from the city. Kamal greeted them as if they were old friends. A surge of adrenaline welled through me. For the first time, I was frightened of Kamal. I thought he was going to kill me right there and then. The car key was still in the ignition. I was about to jump into the driver’s seat, throw the car in gear, and charge away. But at that moment, he ambled back to the car, started the engine, and headed for town.

  “Who were they?” I asked.

  “They wanted a ride to Casa,” he said.

  “It looked like you knew them.”

  Kamal turned to face me. His distant brown eyes locked onto mine. His mouth was tight shut, jaws clenched. He stared at me for so long as to make me uncomfortable. It was not the time for speaking. He could feel my fear, I was sure of it. I hoped he would burst out laughing, slap me on the back, or let me in on a secret. But he didn’t speak.

  IN THE SAME WEEK, I received another postcard from Pete. The writing was more obscure this time, as if it was written by someone who had come to know pain. It said: Had the chop. Now I’m learning the Path to Allah. The note was followed by an address in Chefchouen, a small town south of Tangier. I showed it to Rachana.

  “I think you better go and see if he’s okay,” she said.

  “But I hardly know the guy.”

  “So what?”

  There was a far stronger reason to venture north. I wanted to track down the house in which my grandfather had lived for the last decade of his life.

  Kamal’s team of artisans were about to turn up at Dar Khalifa. I couldn’t face them. I don’t know why, perhaps because I was so sure they would create more problems than they solved.

  I took the morning train from Casa Voyageurs and was soon trundling north along the coast. Leaving Casablanca and the Caliph’s House behind filled me with new energy. It was as if a burden had been eased from my shoulders. I stared out at the groves of cork oaks and breathed long and hard. If I could keep standing a little longer, I thought to myself, we would have a chance at weathering the storm.

  I planned to go straight to Tangier, to spend a night or two ferreting out the riddle of my grandfather’s last years. After that, I would head down to Chefchouen, to find the newly circumcised American.

  MY GRANDFATHER WAS SIRDAR Ikbal Ali Shah. He was the son of an Afghan chieftain, raised in a tribal fiefdom in the Hindu Kush. As is traditional in our family, he was encouraged to master many fields of study, to live many lives in one. He was a medical doctor and a diplomat, a
professor of philosophy, an expert on folklore, mysticism, and political science. He was an adviser and confidant to half a dozen heads of state, and the author of more than sixty books—on poetry, politics, biography, literature, religion, and travel.

  At twenty-three he was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine. He was very taken with Scotland, and wrote later that the mountains, the castles, and the strict system of clans reminded him of his Afghan homeland. It was 1917, and the Great War raged on. A generation of young men were being slaughtered in the trenches of Flanders and France.

  One spring day, my grandfather was invited to a charity tea, where a group of young women were raising funds for the war effort. Across the crowded room, he spotted a prim Scottish girl standing alone, china cup poised to her lips. Her nickname was Bobo, and her family came from the Edinburgh elite. She was only seventeen. Her brother had just been killed fighting in France, and she was distraught at his loss.

  Bobo spied Ikbal gazing across at her. She stared back with nervous anticipation, and they fell in love. The next day, she asked her father if she might meet the Afghan chieftain’s son for tea. The request was refused, and she was locked in her room. Allowing her heart to rule her mind, Bobo escaped, eloped with Ikbal, and together they traveled to his ancestral fortress in the Hindu Kush.

  Their marriage endured more than forty years, until the day of Bobo’s death. They lived in Central Asia, the Middle East, and in Europe. Then, in 1960, Bobo died suddenly of cancer, weeks before her sixtieth birthday. My grandfather could hardly contain his grief. He vowed that he would not return to any place they had been together, or look at anything that would remind him of his beloved wife.

  Morocco was a country where they had never traveled. My grandfather had heard of the kingdom’s mountains, its kasbahs, and the proud tribal traditions. The sound of such a place was alluring. So, that summer, he packed his sea trunk with some books and a few clothes and set sail for Tangier.

  THERE IS NO BETTER way to travel through Morocco than by train. The journey from Casablanca to Tangier takes about six hours, sometimes longer, depending on whether the driver takes a long lunch or a short one at Sidi Kacem. In the winter, the travelers are bundled up in heavy woolen jelabas worn as overcoats, as if a searing arctic wind is about to tear through. But it never does.

  The man sitting opposite me in the compartment noticed the calfskin amulet around my neck. He was in his sixties, dressed in a pale jelaba with black trim, and brown barboush on his feet. His face was swollen, scattered with patchy beard and sores. I explained to him that the amulet was given to me by a friend.

  “What for?”

  “For the Jinns,” I said.

  The man scratched his face. “Let them into your head and you’ll have trouble,” he replied.

  “They’re not up here,” I said, tapping my temple, “but in my house.” I laughed. “Anyway, it’s not the Jinns who are a problem,” I said, “but the people working for me.”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “They believe in the Jinns,” I explained. “That’s the problem.”

  The man didn’t say anything else for a long while. I stared out the window at the plowed fields edged in cactus plants. I thought our chat was at an end. But a traveler’s conversation can be disjointed, strung out along miles of railway line. The man cleared his throat.

  “Across from me,” he said, “I see a sheet of white paper. There is no writing upon it, nothing at all. The paper has just been made. It’s new. There’s great hope for it. A beautiful poem could be written on it—something inspiring, something wonderful. Or a fabulous picture could be drawn on its surface, the face of a child perhaps.”

  I looked at the man, and took in his sores and his tired face, and I wondered what he was going on about.

  “But the great shame is that the sheet of paper will never know beauty,” he said. “Why? Because it doesn’t believe.”

  MY ONLY CLUES WERE a few letters written by my grandfather to my parents during the last years of his life. They were always composed in dark blue fountain pen on lightweight writing paper, in a precise, sensible hand. They spoke of a life of solitude, of modesty, a life waiting to be reunited with Bobo. At the top of each was printed an address at 21 rue de la Plage.

  Once in Tangier, I bought a street map from a tobacconist and found rue de la Plage running inland from the port. The nearest hotel was Cecil’s. I was acquainted with it from my grandfather’s letters. He waxed lyrical about the place, suggesting it was palatial in the extreme, an outpost of true luxury. I walked from the train station down to the waterfront. A group of children were playing marbles on the pavement, in the yellow light of afternoon. I asked them for the direction of Cecil’s. Without looking up, one of the boys pointed over his shoulder.

  I had not noticed the whitewashed hotel perched there behind him, set back on the far side of the esplanade. It was easy to see its original appeal. The building was wide but not high, two stories clinging to the ground floor’s roof. There were steps up from the street, a sheltered entrance, above it an expansive balcony. All the windows had slatted jalousie shutters; some were blown open by the wind, others bolted shut. The place resembled one of those solid, compelling gems found in the novels of Graham Greene.

  Time had not been kind to Cecil’s. Even in the sugar-sweet light of late afternoon, it was hard to lavish praise on the current condition. Washing lines crisscrossed the balconies, and the whitewash was dirt gray and blistered with damp. I walked up to the entrance and climbed the steps.

  Inside, the receptionist was watching television with his left eye; the other was covered by a homemade patch. He was holding the TV antenna in one hand, jiggling it to make sense of an Egyptian soap opera. Beside him, a squat man was smoking hashish. Both figures looked up in amazement. It was clear that no one had ventured there in years.

  The entrance was gloomy, the walls waxy and damp. The only decorations were tourist posters from the 1970s and a cardboard cutout of an Aeroflot stewardess. There was a sense that at one time, perhaps long ago, something very evil had taken place within the walls.

  I inquired if there was a single room, for a night or two. The hashish smoker cackled with laughter; his friend dropped the antenna and shuttled over to a desk diary. His fingers began in January, turning over a week at a time. They made their way through many months of blank paper, until they arrived at December.

  “Oui, monsieur,” he said hesitantly, “I think we have space.”

  He led the way up an attractive double staircase, no doubt quite a feature in its day. On the first floor were yet more mildewed posters of Moroccan highlights and innumerable ice buckets on stands, filled with cigarette ends.

  After wrestling with a Chinese padlock on door number three, the manager swung the door inward. He winked with his one good eye, as if to prepare me for the opulence inside. I stepped across the threshold. Not since my travels in search of India’s underbelly had I seen such impressive wear and tear.

  All the windows were cracked or missing entirely, half-concealed behind rotting curtains. The linoleum floor was mottled with dark spots where previous guests had stamped out their cigarettes, and the bed was a ramp, collapsed at one end. There was no bathroom. It was explained in a mumble that the hotel had a problem with its water supply.

  “There are no toilets at all?”

  The manager replied in the negative. He suggested the place was far better off without the toilets, sticking his nose up at the very thought of them. Then he held out a palm and asked for payment in advance. I counted out some banknotes and passed them over.

  “Where can I take a shower?” I asked.

  “In the kitchen of the restaurant next door.”

  THE LAST TIME I had come to Tangier was thirty-five years before, aged three. My strongest memory of the city was the scent of orange blossom. I can smell it now. It was pungent, intoxicating. I had spent days running through the public gardens, dressed in my itchy camel-wool jel
aba, sniffing the air. I remember, too, the warmth of the sun on my back, the crowded cafés, and the people. There were so many people then.

  In the 1960s, Tangier was famed for the foreign writers who took refuge there, away from the more rigid conventions of Europe and the United States. The most celebrated was author Paul Bowles, who moved to Tangier after the war and resided there until his death in 1999.

  Wandering the streets, it seemed to me that the vibrancy of Tangier had been replaced with gloom, a melancholy, as if the party had moved on elsewhere. The buildings reflected it. They were no longer loved. Fabulous villas and theaters, hotels and cafés, were all boarded up, or fallen into a limbo like Cecil’s.

  It was dusk by the time I reached rue de la Plage. I stood at the bottom of the hill, staring up at the narrow street. I admit it—I was apprehensive. I was fearful, too. I am not certain why. Sometimes it’s like that, when you have traveled far to be somewhere or to meet someone very special. You pause at the last step. There was a temptation to turn on my heel and take the next train back to Casablanca. My grandfather had been a figure of inspiration, an example, as well as a myth. And this was reality—the place where he lived, and where he died.

  Keeping well to the side of the road, I started walking up the hill. There were small shops on both sides—each one offered the same selection of knickknacks and razor blades, toothpaste, boot polish, and canned cheese. I checked the square enamel numbers outside the shops. As I did so, I felt my heart in my chest. There was 17, then 18, 19, and after it 20 . . . one more to go . . . 21 rue de la Plage.

  I had arrived. My feet were pressed together outside the doorway, on the very spot my grandfather had been struck by the reversing Coca-Cola truck back in 1969. The road was two-way then, astonishingly, as it was barely wide enough for a single car. It was so steep that vehicles were challenged to get all the way up to the top. The local taxis had perfected a way of revving their engines, racing headlong, swerving from side to side so that their bald tires could maintain traction.