by Tahir Shah
“It may be madness,” I said, “but it’s brilliant madness!”
“Do you really think so?”
I squinted.
Kenny’s spirits perked up. The glint returned to his eye. “I want to share something with you,” he said.
“Okay.”
“It’s my dream. You see, I’ve got a dream.”
“Oh.”
“I think about it from the minute I wake up,” he said eagerly, “till the minute I go to sleep at night.”
“Oh,” I said again.
Kenny nodded. His glasses fell off his nose. “You’ll never guess what it is,” he said.
“I’m sure I won’t.”
“It’s a theme park—right here in Casablanca.”
“I see,” I said.
“It’s got a difference. It’s gonna be the Casablanca Theme Park!”
Kenny outlined the details of his dream. The idea was to build a focal point for worldwide aficionados of the greatest movie ever made. There would be Rick’s Café Americain complete with gaming tables, song-and-dance spectaculars, themed rides, and trivia quizzes, a museum of original props, Casablanca candy, and back-to-back screenings of the movie itself.
“It’s going to be expensive,” I said.
“Ten million bucks.”
I took the last gulp of my coffee. Kenny reached over and tugged my wrist.
“I’ve only just met you,” he said, “but you seem strong-willed, honest—like the kinda guy we could do with onboard.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“Yes!” said Kenny, leaping to his feet. “Yes! I’m saying I’d like you to come in with me.” He swallowed hard to clear the residue of tarlike coffee from his throat. “Give it a thought,” he said. “Will you come in as my partner?”
ON THE WAY HOME I made a detour to Habous to take another look at the Spanish table. I tried to get Kenny and his dream out of my head. Previous experience had taught me you can’t let an idea like that take root. Once inside you, it takes over. Before you know it, you get sucked in and you’re suddenly as obsessed as the person who came up with it. There’s nothing you can do.
Habous was deserted, so much so that I grew worried there had been a bomb threat. All the shops had their shutters down. There was no one on the streets and nothing for sale. I don’t know why I bothered, but I went into the courtyard where the table had been on sale.
The shop’s shutter was firmly closed. I peered in through the window. The mélange of Art Deco clocks and desks, paintings, lamps, and magazines was still. I turned around to leave. A man was standing in front of me. He had appeared from nowhere. He greeted me, and only then I recognized him as the shopkeeper. I asked if I might see the table.
“This is the tenth time you have come,” he said.
“Looking at it makes me happy.”
The shopkeeper unfastened the padlock and rolled up the steel shutter. “You know where it is,” he said.
I waded back through the artifacts and gazed at the table. The rear of the shop was gloomy, but somehow a stray shaft of sunlight had broken in. It was illuminating the walnut veneer. At that moment, I understood that it was a matter of destiny. The table was meant to be mine.
The shopkeeper had gone to sit down in his wicker chair. I strode through the clutter charged with adrenaline.
“I am a writer,” I said energetically. “And I am going to write books on that table, books about Morocco. They will be read all over the world, and they will inspire people to come to your country. The people who come will have money, plenty of money. They will rush here to Casablanca and will pour into your shop. Before you know it, you will be a rich man, all because you were wise enough to give me a good price for the table.”
The shopkeeper’s eyes sparkled as if he had seen a vision. There was a lump in his throat. He didn’t say anything at first, but sat staring into space.
“My friend,” he said after a long pause, “to anyone else the mirage you have painted would be worthless, but its value to me is great. Indeed, it is as great as half the value of the table. You can take it for half price.”
A HERD OF BLACK rams were steered through the shantytown by a boy of about ten. He had broken plastic sandals and was waving a pointed stick. Every so often a man would step forward and inspect one of the sheep. He would open the mouth and peer at the teeth or jab his fingers into the animal’s back.
“The celebration of Eid will be here in a few weeks,” said Kamal as we drove through. “People are already preparing. Every family buys a ram and slaughters it at their home.”
“That boy’s very young to be looking after sheep,” I said.
“Hah!” said Kamal. “By his age I was working full-time.”
“Weren’t you at school?”
“Yes,” he responded. “That’s where I was working. I used to buy candy wholesale and sell them in the playground. Then I got other kids to sell my candy at other schools all around Casablanca. By the time I was eleven, I was making a hundred bucks a week. And candy was just the start.”
“What came after the candy?”
Kamal raised his eyebrows. “I hired a garage near my house,” he said, “got four or five guys working for me, and started all kinds of lines. I made cheap perfume and sold it to the girls, and I bought grease from a hardware store and sold it to the boys for their hair. As long as the packaging was right, they’d buy anything. Then I bought and sold chickens and eggs, and even sheep. Eid was my busiest time,” he said. “I bought two truckloads of black-market rams from Algeria and sold them to all the parents at school. Whenever I had a spare minute, I used to put up a stall during break time.”
“What did it sell?”
“Advice. I used to teach guys how to pick up girls, and the girls how to pick up guys.”
“How did you make time for class?”
Kamal snorted. “School was my marketplace,” he said. “I only ever went there when I had something to sell.”
With his natural knack for making money, I couldn’t understand why Kamal was working for me. He could have been earning ten times his salary if he was in business for himself. The point only strengthened my fear that he had a secret agenda, one that involved relieving me of the Caliph’s House.
Almost every week he came to me with a business proposition. First it was an apartment block in the heart of the Art Deco quarter.
“There are seventeen apartments,” he said. “We buy the place, give it a coat of paint, and sell them off one by one.”
“What’s the catch?”
“There isn’t one. The owner’s an old Spanish guy with no kids,” Kamal said. “He’ll die soon. Maybe very soon. A little pressure and he’ll give it to us cheap.”
We went to look at the building. It was wonderful. The façade was lined with rounded balconies and fine azulejo tiles from Andalucía. Inside, the ceilings were high, the floors laid with parquet, and bathrooms retained all their original fittings. The only drawback was that the entire building reeked of horse meat. The reason for this became apparent when we inspected the ground floor, where an angry-looking butcher had a shop specializing in cheval, horseflesh.
After the apartment block came Kamal’s scheme to sell Moroccan dates to the Gulf Arabs, and then to start a private ambulance firm; after that he suggested building a blood bank for women only, and he then came up with the idea of exporting Bedouin goat-hair tents to Guatemala.
I had never come across someone so skilled at sourcing a product. He may have shunned the classroom, but in his childhood he had developed lateral thinking, an invaluable skill when you need to buy something on the cheap.
The best example was when we had to buy five thousand eggs.
WITH THE FLOORS PROGRESSING well, we started to turn our attention to the walls. I was eager to use tadelakt, the plasterwork from Marrakech made from albumen and marble dust, and polished with a flat stone taken from a riverbed. The plaster was originally developed for use in hammams, steam bat
hs, where it could endure the blistering vapor for years on end. More recently, it has moved from the bathroom into the salon, and is a favorite with the new European gentry of Marrakech. The deep reds and blush pinks of traditional tadelakt are complemented by dozens of new colors, achieved by adding a few drops of synthetic dye.
Good tadelakt is notoriously difficult to apply, and hence, most foreigners end up with badly cracked walls and plaster that crumbles to the touch. We had sixteen thousand square feet of wall space to cover in tadelakt, most of it in the time-honored pink of Marrakech.
Kamal sent a scout to the south to search for craftsmen skilled in plastering. He bundled me into the Jeep.
“Where are we going?”
“To a little village near Rabat,” he said.
“Why?”
“To buy eggs.”
The walls of the Caliph’s House were old, and old walls cause havoc for the tadelakt teams because of their hairline cracks. The way to prevent cracking is first to prepare the walls well, applying a coat of rough white cement, to which the plaster can take hold. Then, when the tadelakt has been applied and smoothed, it is varnished with egg white. The albumen binds the surface together, and becomes ever stronger over the months as the plaster dries out.
Kamal had calculated we needed at least five thousand eggs. If we had gone to Casablanca’s Central Market, they would have cost a fortune. But through his network of cousins, uncles, and distant aunts, he had traced a long-lost member of the family who owned a battery chicken business—a million birds crammed into vast egg-laying barns.
TWO DAYS AFTER WE came home with the eggs, a tall, thin man with bright eyes and a central parting turned up at the house. I noticed his fingers were extra long, as if they had been stretched. He hardly moved, and didn’t say a word until I asked him his name. He leaned forward. When his mouth was only an inch from my ear, he whispered, “Mustapha,” followed by “tadelakt.”
My limited experience in Moroccan house renovation had taught me to mistrust anyone who talked or smiled too much; the best people to back were the quiet types with cheerless faces. Mustapha the plasterer was the quietest, glummest craftsman I had encountered. He almost never spoke at all, and he always looked as if his world were about to collapse. He was as silent as a mime artist. When inspecting the job to be done, he didn’t ask any questions, so I ranted on with all the information I thought he would need.
He started the next day with a team of five men. They all had the same extra-long fingers and the same sullen, hushed manner. I watched them through an open window as they began work in the salon. They would gesture to each other, using spoken language only when absolutely necessary. And when they walked across the room, they trod softly so as to make no sound at all.
Hamza was impressed by their quiet unhappiness.
“They are good men,” he bellowed, clapping his hands together noisily. “They will bring harmony to this house.”
A MOROCCAN FRIEND TOLD me that to understand his country, one had to understand the kingdom to the north. The cultures of Morocco and Spain, he had said, are linked by history, by tradition, and by blood. So in the middle of February we planned a trip to the Alhambra in southern Spain, where the great palace-fortress of Moorish kings still stands at Granada. It seemed the perfect time to visit what must be the finest Islamic palace ever constructed.
Another reason for the journey was to get away from Casablanca. I fantasized that when we came back a week later, all the work would be finished. To ensure the craftsmen would toil day and night, I asked Kamal to stay in the house until our return.
Living in Morocco, it is easy to forget that Europe is no more than a few miles to the north, albeit on another continent. We took the train up to Tangier and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to Algeciras. The ferry was low in the water, listing to the port side. She was called Isabella, the name of the queen who routed the Spanish Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula eight centuries ago. The straits may only be eight miles across at their nearest point, but they divide two continents, an ocean, and a sea.
We stood out on the deck in the breeze, watching as Africa slipped away. The minarets of Tangier grew smaller and smaller, until they were no more than specks on the horizon. Gulls swooped across the stern, where a dozen crates of fish were packed in ice. We strolled along the guardrail to the bow, where we found Europe approaching.
ANYONE WHO HAS TRAVELED in Andalucía has been touched by the spell of Morocco. The Moors retreated to African soil, but their legacy endures throughout Iberia. Their invasion of Spain took place in 711 of the Christian era, and the Islamic faith was practiced there for seven hundred years. Today you can find traces of the Moorish past in Spanish food and music, scholarship, folklore, and in the language itself.
The Alhambra palace at Granada is so exquisite that a visitor is at a loss to describe it. I was first taken there as a child. I remember walking around the gardens and through the great halls, my mouth wide open in awe. I had never imagined such beauty, such precision.
The chill winter air was perfumed with the scent of roses, lulled by the sound of water tumbling from fountains. Ambling through the courtyards again, this time with my own children, I was spellbound by the serenity, a ballet in stone. The lines and textures were easy on the eye, the sounds and smells equally pleasing. Like the ballet, there was a sense that such perfection had been effortless to create.
We stayed in a small guesthouse in the shadow of the palace. The nights were cold, the mornings glazed with frost. I was overcome by the tranquillity. I told Rachana that I wanted to stay there forever, and to walk away from the Caliph’s House. She laughed and then seemed very serious.
“You’re not joking, are you?” she said.
ON THE SECOND NIGHT in Spain, I received a call. It was Hamza. He was hysterical. It sounded as if he was crying.
“Monsieur Tahir! Monsieur Tahir!”
“Hamza, what’s wrong?”
“Monsieur Tahir, we are good men. We are honest,” he said, taking quick, shallow breaths.
“What’s the matter, Hamza? Why are you calling? Has the house burned down?”
“No, no, it’s not the house.”
“Then what is it?”
The guardian’s voice trembled. “It’s Kamal,” he said. “He’s a bad, bad man.”
“What has he done?”
“He’s . . . he’s . . .”
“He’s what?”
“He’s filled the house with femmes de la route, women from the road!”
Like a teenager whose parents were out of town, Kamal had launched into a day-and-night extravaganza of wine, women, and low-grade hashish. Hamza said the workmen had been sent away through the back door. The front entrance to Dar Khalifa had then been flung open. Every hooker in the city had been invited to the party of the century.
“They are doing wicked, wicked things in every room,” Hamza exclaimed. “May Allah be my witness. I have seen it with my own eyes!”
FIFTEEN
A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain.
KAMAL FREQUENTLY RECOUNTED TALES OF HOW he had exacted terrible revenge on anyone unwise enough to oppose him. He prided himself on meting out retribution, destroying the fortunes of those who dared to cross his path. As the months passed, he told of men he had had thrown into jail across Morocco. Two of his own cousins were languishing in Casablanca’s grimmest prison. Their mistake had been to think they could get the better of Kamal Abdullah. Others had been given more original punishments. He told me of one adversary who loathed the heat. He was lured into the desert and buried up to his neck in sand. Another had been videotaped in bed with his mistress, and the footage sent to his wife.
I once asked him how he decided what form of revenge to take.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “You have to give it thought. You mustn’t act too fast. If you hurry, you can mess up a good opportunity. There’s no point in jail if it doesn’t hurt someone bad.”
“Jail hur
ts everyone,” I said.
“No, no, it doesn’t,” he replied. “It doesn’t hurt the rich.”
“Then what does?”
“Tasting poverty,” he said.
I feared what Kamal would do if humiliated by being thrown out of the Caliph’s House. But I couldn’t allow his debauchery to continue unchecked. Then again, if I rebuked him and didn’t throw him out, I would appear to be as weak as I was. I contemplated rushing back from Granada to sort things out in Casablanca. I sat in front of the hotel’s fireplace, staring into the flames, pondering the situation. The problem was that Kamal understood the degree to which I valued his know-how.
At last I came up with a ruse. I called him and said that a close friend was about to arrive at Dar Khalifa from England. He was traveling through Morocco, I explained, and would be staying in our absence. He was about to arrive any minute, I said. Kamal listened calmly and promised to leave at once.
Five days later we arrived home. The guardians lined up at the front door, saluted, and spat out their reports.
“He’s brought shame on us all,” said the first.
“He has brought shame on our families,” said the second.
“And shame on our ancestors,” mumbled the third.
We entered the house. I was expecting the place to be ransacked, but the opposite was true. Our bedroom had been spring-cleaned. The kitchen was gleaming as if an army of maids had scoured it from top to bottom. The rest of the house, although a building site, was scrubbed clean, too. Hamza glanced at me as we toured the rooms.
“Kamal’s a magician,” he said.
SOON AFTER MY RETURN, I called on Hicham Harass. The winter rain had caused his shack to flood. He apologized for the disorder and flapped a hand at the mess.
“None of this is precious, really precious,” he said. “There are a few things I’ve grown fond of, but it’s all rubbish. My wife likes it, but she doesn’t understand what’s valuable and what is not.”