by Tahir Shah
Each day that the guardians and their families stayed in our outbuildings, word of their good fortune spread a little further through the kingdom. Within two or three days, all their close relatives had come, poked around, and gone back to their own shacks in the bidonville.
By the end of the first week, news of their improved lodgings had reached far and wide. A trickle of relations began. Four of Osman’s cousins arrived from Nador, a day’s bus ride to the northeast. After that, Hamza’s maternal uncle came from the High Atlas Mountains, and then Osman’s wife’s aunt turned up. A few more days passed, and word spread to all four corners of Morocco. The trickle of relations turned into a tidal wave. Every day dozens of distant relatives and friends came, lured by the myth of lavish lodgings. They traveled to Casablanca by rough country bus and by donkey cart, on the back of hay wagons and on foot.
The constant influx of guests meant the guardians had to provide board and lodging for them all. Not to have done so would have been a stain on their family honor. The flood of people affected not only the guardians, but their patron as well.
One of the unwritten rules of the Arab world is that an employer is expected to take care of his people. No great show of thanks is made or ever asked for. When the guardians needed to borrow money, they came to me and petitioned without embarrassment. It was their right to ask and their right to be given money on account. But now so many of their family members and friends had to be supplied with generous platters of food, they found themselves staring financial ruin in the face.
Days went by when I didn’t see the guardians at all. They were so occupied by attending to familial demands that they had no time to carry out their normal duties. The perimeter of our oasis was left unguarded. The leaves were not raked, and the German shepherd was left unfed. I didn’t say anything, because I had myself tasted the flavor of uninvited guests.
The same life that poses the problem tends to provide a solution. One glorious, dazzling morning in the third week of January, Hamza, Osman, and the Bear shuffled into the room I was using as an office. They announced that their fine new accommodation had attracted a growing stream of freeloaders.
“Word of Dar Khalifa is spreading far,” said the Bear, waving an arm at the distance.
“First our close relations came,” said Hamza.
“But now people we hardly know are arriving,” said Osman. “Our wives are very angry. They have to cook day and night for the visitors. We’re waiting on them like servants and have even given up our own beds to them.”
“So,” said Hamza. “We have decided to go back to the bidonville.”
“Our lives were quiet there,” said Osman.
“But you don’t have houses,” I said. “They were knocked down.”
The guardians clicked their tongues.
“Mishi mushkil, no problem,” they said. “We do not live in palaces. We can build new homes by nightfall.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I looked down from the top terrace to see that the guardians and their hangers-on had departed. It was as if the circus had rolled out of town, leaving a vacuum. Dar Khalifa was bathed in a rare and pleasing silence. Rachana and I ate breakfast on the verandah, wondering aloud if the previous two weeks had been a dream.
In the afternoon I walked out into the bidonville to see the guardians’ new houses. They had found a patch of land well away from where the bulldozers had begun clearing, and had put up three low rectangular homes. They were built from old bricks, doors, and tiles scavenged from Dar Khalifa’s junk heap. Osman was standing outside his new home. He was beaming.
“It’s very quiet now your relatives have gone,” I said.
“Thank Allah for it,” he replied. “There is pleasure in modesty.”
TWO OR THREE DAYS passed. Then, one evening, Kamal’s fist could be heard banging on the front door. I opened it and found him lolling there, his face pouring with sweat, his eyes scarlet. I feared he had been drinking again.
“I have news,” he said.
“Bad news?”
“No, no! It couldn’t be better.”
“What?”
Kamal kissed the fingertips of his right hand. “The Land Registry,” he said. “You remember the dossier was missing?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” said Kamal, “I knew a clerk had been told to hide or destroy the file. But he’d retired. So I went to find him. I only had his last name and the rough idea where he lived. I’ve spent the last four days searching for him.”
“Did you find him?”
“Wait, I’ll tell you.” Kamal mopped his face with a corner of his shirt. “Eventually I found his house, but the man wasn’t at home,” he said. “His daughter was there. So I left some flour, some sugar, and cooking oil as a gift. It’s a custom in Morocco to show you have come in peace. Then last night the clerk called me. We met and I asked what he knew about Dar Khalifa. As soon as he heard the name, his eyes lit up.”
“What about the file?”
“I’m coming to that,” said Kamal. “Today there was a strike at the Land Registry. The workers there are asking for more money. So the clerk took me over there. He was angry at being retired early, so he took a set of keys with him when he went. He opened the side door and we slipped in.
“He led me down into the basement, where all the files are kept. There are rows and rows of them—thousands and thousands—a file for every building in Casablanca. The clerk closed his eyes. Then he marched seven paces to the right and two paces to the left. He stopped, opened his eyes, and took out a small brass key. In front of him was a locked steel box. He put the key in the lock and turned it.”
“What was inside?”
“Dar Khalifa’s papers,” bellowed Kamal, “the dossier for the Caliph’s House!”
THIRTEEN
A stone from the hand of a friend is an apple.
THE ELATION AT FINDING DAR KHALIFA’S lost paperwork was intense but short-lived. It was followed by a new dilemma, one that the ordinarily calm Kamal said could wipe me out altogether.
“Residency,” he said anxiously. “Without the local papers, you’re an open target.”
“What’s the solution?”
Kamal cracked his knuckles once, then again. “Marriage,” he said.
“But I’m already married.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, wincing.
“Understand what?”
Kamal cracked his knuckles a third time, louder than before. “You’re going to have to take a second wife,” he said.
THAT AFTERNOON THERE WAS a violent rap at the front entrance. It was Madame Nafisa, the gangster’s wife. She was smoking a cheroot and sporting a long French-cut fox fur. The animals’ tails trailed behind her as she walked; a pair of miniature fox heads, replete with snarling mouths, had been sewn on as epaulettes. The gangster’s wife took a puff of her cigar.
“The shantytown is going,” she said. “It will be swept away.”
“Where will they go to?”
“To another gutter.”
“But they don’t have any money.”
“Who cares?”
I wondered where the conversation was leading.
Madame Nafisa dusted an imaginary speck of dust from the fox face on her shoulder.
“Once the vermin have scurried off,” she said, “this land will be valuable, very valuable. You can sell and you will be very rich.”
“We don’t want to sell,” I said. “We’re happy living here.”
The gangster’s wife tapped the ash from her cheroot onto the floor. “Morocco’s a dangerous country,” she said, “especially for someone who doesn’t know the system.”
“Is it?”
Madame Nafisa narrowed her eyes, an action that tightened the skin of her cheeks so greatly I feared they might split like overripe tomatoes. I was waiting for her to say something else, but she swiveled on her high-heeled boot and strode off, fox tails sweeping the ground behind her.
I DIDN’T LI
KE THE idea of getting married again, especially since I was already happily married to Rachana. It was a matter that so worried me I held back from mentioning it to her. I didn’t know how to bring it up. But then, as Kamal explained, marriage to a Moroccan woman would set me on a fast track through the ocean of bureaucracy.
“I’m sure we can find someone very beautiful,” Kamal said, “a girl from the mountains perhaps. Leave it to me.”
“You have to understand something,” I said. “Rachana won’t like the idea.”
“First wives never do,” he said.
“If I’m going to have a hope,” I whimpered, “the only chance is if she’s so incredibly ugly that Rach won’t see her as a threat.”
Kamal rubbed his nose. “Why waste such an opportunity?” he said. “You could do very well out of this.”
THE TERRACOTTA TILES ARRIVED in custom-made baskets, two hundred in each. They were dry, brittle, the blush pink of chilled rosé. Aziz shepherded the stock into the garage area. There must have been at least two hundred baskets, each one tenderly unloaded from a bright orange truck newly arrived from Meknes.
An army of apprentices started opening the baskets and sorting the tiles. They were square, a little more than three inches long, half an inch thick. Unlike regular machine-made tiles, handmade bejmat is anything but uniform. The exact color of each tile varied considerably from the palest pink to a deep, plum-color red. The apprentices soaked the first batch of tiles. Four 40-gallon oil drums had been rolled into the house and filled to their brims with water. The tiles were left to steep in the water for three or four days. In the meantime, the floors were leveled, laid with a veneer of cement, made ready for the terracotta.
The greatest distinction between building practices in the East and the West is the way tools are used. A century ago Western craftsmen had almost no power tools. Instead, they relied on dexterity and skill of sight, developed through years of apprenticeship. Power tools have enabled us to cut corners, to undertake jobs that would be near impossible without them. In Morocco, artisans are almost never seen working with an electric saw, a drill, a polisher, or anything else with a power cable. They rely on their ability alone. The end result may have had a lack of uniformity, but there was a sense that it was quite unique. I adored the subtle unevenness and didn’t regard it as a drawback. If there was one, it was that the manual labor took ten times as long.
Seeing Aziz’s team at work was like witnessing the reenactment of a medieval woodcut. Their methods had remained unchanged for five centuries. The same simplicity and attention to detail created the palaces of Granada, of Fès and Marrakech, and, more recently, Casablanca’s own great Mosque of Hassan II.
To ensure the floor surfaces were level, Aziz’s apprentices used a simple U-tube—a clear plastic pipe half filled with water. The tube was stretched across the floor, held up on adjacent walls, and the water level measured. A British builder would have probably used a laser for the same job.
Once the floors were level, a thin sheet of cement was put down, and they were tested again with the U-tube. After that, the apprentices laid the first patch of dark, moist sand, mixed with powdered cement, spread flat with a long wooden baton. Laying terracotta tiles and Morocco’s famous zelij mosaics calls for a level of precision that sets the craft apart as an art form. Just as the architect’s team had struck me by their inexperience, Aziz’s moualems, master craftsmen, impressed me by the sheer perfection they achieved with the simplest tools and materials. When I asked Aziz how such precision could be realized without electrical equipment and fancy gadgets, he said:
“If you want to kill a fly, you can make a poison gas from complicated chemicals, or you can develop a machine with a fast swatting mechanism. Or you can use another approach altogether. You can learn to think like a fly. It will take you years, of course, but once you understand how a fly thinks, you can control it in every way.
“Our tools are not impressive to look at, but they are used by moualems who have mastered how to use them. Like the man who learns to think like the fly, they have reached a level of advanced control. They can create perfection because they have inner knowledge.”
THE GREATEST PROBLEM WITH Kamal was his habit of disappearing. He would go missing for days at a stretch. Each time, I was racked with worry, like the mother of a teenage girl who hadn’t come home after a night out. My concern was not inspired by a great affection for him, but rather by a fear of being without him.
In the weeks he had worked with me, Kamal had demonstrated a rare originality of thinking. He could solve problems like no one I had met before, and he could tap into the dark underworld of Casablanca. When he was around, he would turn his mind to solving anything I threw in his direction—the need for cheap dog food, the problem of missing papers, a source for black-market sand. While he was beside me, I was calm and composed, assured that we could rise to any challenge. My great anxiety was that one day he would be gone—slain perhaps while driving home from a bar, drunk out of his mind, as he did on most nights.
With time, Kamal learned more and more about the paperwork of the Caliph’s House. He understood the details better than anyone else and used his network of underworld contacts to move its situation forward. More often than not, I didn’t know exactly what he was doing for me behind the scenes. He wasn’t the kind of person who gave information easily. Ask him a question and, more likely than not, you would receive another question in reply.
My fear that Kamal might disappear for good was equaled only by my fear that he might somehow snatch Dar Khalifa away from me. The more I got to know him, the more I realized he was a man not to trust.
TOWARD THE END OF January, he sent me a message to meet him at a café opposite the crumbling Hotel Lincoln. It sounded urgent. The café was smothered in the afternoon fog of cigarette smoke, a smell so pungent it drowned out the aroma of the dark Arabian coffee served automatically to all who came. I peered through the smoke at the rows of mustached men wearing woolen jelabas and pointed yellow slippers. No sign of Kamal. I checked my watch. I was on time, and he was always late, despite my regular pleas for punctuality. I sat down, drank a glass of café noir, and stared out at the street. An hour passed. Then another. I would have gone back to the house, but something kept me there, a sense that it was in my interest to remain seated.
As I gulped back my fourth espresso, Kamal barged in. He was leading a short veiled woman and was grinning from ear to ear. Most Moroccan cafés are patronized by men, and by men alone. Women avoid them, regarding them with contempt as pitiable bastions of imagined machismo.
So the sight of a heavily veiled woman pushing through the cigarette smoke was something of a sensation. All the regular mustached customers looked up. Some dropped their newspapers. Others thumped their canes on the floor in objection. Kamal sat down beside me and pulled over a chair for his guest.
“Here she is,” he said.
“Who?”
“The chica.”
“Which chica?”
“The one you’re going to marry.”
Before I could say another word, the veil was drawn back. The face behind it was so hideous that I jolted sideways in an involuntary reaction. The woman’s cheeks were scarred and emaciated, as if an illness had taken hold. Her nose was eroded; she was bald and was missing her right eye.
“Gosh,” I said, struggling to exude warmth.
“You said you wanted someone ugly.”
“I didn’t say I wanted anyone at all!”
“She needs you as much as you need her,” Kamal declared.
“What do you mean, she needs me?”
“She’s got little kids, two of them. How will she support them without you?”
The woman, whose name was Kenza, smiled. I smiled back, so as not to upset her.
“She likes you,” said Kamal.
“We are going to find another solution,” I hissed. “I’m not taking a second wife.”
“You’re forgetting the fast
track,” he said.
“I don’t care. I’ll take it slow.”
Kamal glowered at me, flipped the veil back across Kenza’s face, and led her home to her children. An instant later, I was alone again, peering through the smog to the street. The rendezvous with the unwanted wife had filled me with a sense of melancholy. I sat there until darkness fell, reflecting on how we judge a person by a few square inches of skin on the front of their head.
BACK AT THE HOUSE, Hamza and the other guardians had caught wind of Kamal’s plan for me to take a Moroccan wife. They gathered round, pinning me to the garden wall, eager for the details.
“Is she from the south?” Hamza asked. “Those women are best. They don’t talk too much, and they do as they’re told.”
“Hamza’s right,” Osman confirmed, “a woman from the south is best, because you don’t want to be nagged too much.”
“I’m not going to take another wife,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m already happy.”
“You must consider it,” exclaimed the Bear. “We would all take second, third, and fourth wives if we could afford them.”
“Would you?”
“Of course!” the three guardians said in one voice.
“But it’s so expensive,” Osman added.
“You must give each one a house,” said the Bear, “and a bed, blankets, pots and pans.”
“That’s just the start,” said Hamza. “You see, when you have more than one wife, they get jealous of each other. It happens all the time. If you give one something, you have to give the same thing to the others.”
“It sounds terrible,” I said.