The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  Whenever I’m in an Internet café, my eyes stray away from my screen. Everyone else’s e-mail is far more interesting than my own. I try to concentrate but I can’t help myself.

  As usual I found my eyes veering to the side, where they locked onto the screen beside me. A woman was having a chat conversation in English with a Canadian man. She was wearing a yellow headscarf with a paisley motif. I couldn’t see her face. She was oozing passion for her Internet admirer, describing how she longed to be crushed in his arms, kissed by him, married in white, and to live in a small house with flowers around the door. Eventually, she logged off and stood up to pay. It was then that I caught a glimpse of her face. It was Zohra.

  I jumped up.

  “Hello,” she said calmly, “I was expecting to meet you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, Amina said you would come.”

  I asked her for the money she had taken. “You owe us more than four thousand dollars,” I said. “I need it back.”

  Zohra pushed a strand of hair under her scarf. “I’m leaving,” she said. “If you come after me, you’ll have a lot of trouble.”

  I followed, asking why she had told the police I was a terrorist, why she had run off with our money. She didn’t answer. Instead, she walked faster and faster, until she had broken into a run. I ran after her down Boulevard d’Anfa. I was gaining on her, about to catch her. Then a car startled me with its horn. I turned sharply to the right, then turned back a moment later. But Zohra was gone.

  THAT AFTERNOON I RECEIVED a pink slip of paper from the postman, informing me that a package had arrived for me at the central post office. I showed the docket to Kamal. He groaned.

  “Your nightmare is about to begin,” he said.

  The central post office of Casablanca was a great white hulk of a building, constructed by the French in the days when imposing white structures were all the vogue. The moment we entered the main door, I understood what Kamal had meant. There must have been four hundred people inside, each one clutching a similar slip of pink paper. The tension was driving ordinary people to revolt. One group were waving their slips frantically, shaking their fists at the same time. Another had climbed onto the clerk’s desk and were demanding to be served.

  Kamal told me to relax.

  “Why doesn’t anyone in Morocco ever form an orderly line?” I said gruffly.

  “Because that’s not their way,” he said.

  We piled in. Kamal showed me how to get to the front by moving sideways, kicking shins with hard thrusting movements. Within minutes we were standing before the clerk. I handed him my pink slip. He glowered at me.

  “Fill in this form,” he said.

  When I had, he handed me three more forms.

  “Now these.”

  Forty minutes later, a slender brown cardboard tube was brought out from the storeroom. It was battered and marked along one side with a row of red crosses.

  “Red crosses,” said Kamal. “It means the censorship people don’t like what they’ve found.”

  I recognized the cardboard roll. It contained some wall posters I had ordered for the children’s bedroom. There was one of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, an illustrated poster of the alphabet, and a wall map of the world.

  “I can’t believe that the Cat in the Hat is going to offend the censorship police,” I said.

  “You may be surprised,” said Kamal.

  The cardboard roll was thrown down on a long inspection table. All around it ebbed a sea of ripped packaging and weeping Berber women with tattooed chins.

  The posters were removed from the tube by the inspection officer. He was a well-built man with close-cropped hair and a week’s stubble on his face. He looked like a bulldog. I smiled at him. He leered back.

  “Cat in the Hat,” I said. “We love him.”

  The officer looked at the cat and his red-and-white striped hat.

  “Good, clean fun,” I said.

  The alphabet was the next to be inspected. The miniature illustrations were checked carefully for impropriety. The bulldog put it down and opened the world map between his outstretched hands. He regarded it meticulously, examining each continent.

  He said something in Arabic.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Kamal seemed nervous. “You can’t have this one,” he said. “The censorship police are taking it away. They’re gonna incinerate it.”

  I felt my back warming with anger. “It’s for my kids,” I said. “How could a world map be offensive?”

  “Western Sahara isn’t in the same color as Morocco,” said the clerk.

  “So what?”

  Kamal slipped me a pained glance. “Keep quiet,” he said. “This is serious.”

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about. It was like a sketch from Monty Python.

  “They’re not going to take it!” I said.

  My eyes scanned the inspection desk. There was a roll of packing tape, a couple of pens, and a modeling knife. Without a thought, I grabbed the knife, pushed out the blade, and excised the affected region. The clerk blinked, the map still grasped tight between his outstretched hands. I kissed the kingdom of Morocco and Western Sahara and handed them to the clerk.

  “Do-it-yourself censorship,” I said.

  AFTER WEEKS OF BEING becalmed with no work done at all, the wind lifted and the workers returned. Mustapha the mime’s tadelakt team found new energy and even learned to smile. They mixed up a new vat of plaster and thrust trowels of it at the walls, swishing it smooth. Before the tadelakt was dry, the second team would score a pattern into the plaster. Within days they had finished the dining room and the salons, the children’s playroom, and the bedrooms above. The plumber turned up in overalls instead of the gray suit he usually preferred. He took out his biggest hammer and started smashing one of the floors. I would have questioned what he was doing, but I was so delighted that I ran up and shook him by the hand. A new mason started work, too. He finished off the staircase and fitted the balustrades. Then a sculptor arrived with a fountain I had ordered five months before. The house echoed with the sound of hammers, saws, and singing.

  We even managed to get the tiles on the verandah clean. When I told Kamal I needed an army of people to scour them with acid, he sent five men to our house. They proved to be expert scrubbers, despite the fact that they refused to wear goggles and kept getting acid in their eyes. I asked Kamal how he had ever found a team of men so skilled in scrubbing.

  “They better be good at it,” he said. “They work in our hammam as masseurs.”

  I was so overcome that the work was on the move again that I asked the bejmat craftsman, Aziz, to build a mosaic fountain for the wall in the children’s courtyard. Kamal would have vetoed the idea if he had got wind of it, so I waited until he was out of the house.

  Moroccan mosaic work, known as zelij, is the pinnacle of the kingdom’s traditional design. Unlike mosaics in the West, which tend to be square, zelij come in hundreds of shapes and colors. It takes years to learn to cut them, and as a result, the craft comes at a price.

  I took Aziz aside. He spoke no French, and I no Arabic, and so I mimed the idea with my hands. I wanted a classical Moorish arch with a waterspout, sending water tumbling into a lower trough, which would, in turn, feed a large basin in the middle of the green tiled courtyard. The children could play in the water, I hoped, paddling in the long, hot summer afternoons.

  Aziz said he could prepare the fountain, Inshallah, if God willed it, in a month. He scribbled a price on a scrap of paper—seven thousand dirhams, about seven hundred dollars. For once, it sounded reasonable, considering the fountain would feature five thousand mosaics, each one cut by hand.

  A little later Kamal turned up. I didn’t tell him about the fountain. He disapproved when I communicated directly with the craftsmen, as it endangered his own position. Instead, I asked why the workers were striving so feverishly to get all the work done. Kamal smiled wryly.

  “I pa
ssed a rumor in the shantytown,” he said. “I whispered it to the vegetable seller. It looks as if word got around.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That the king’s coming to visit you,” he said.

  WE PLANNED TO TRAVEL to Azrou in search of black-market wood. The town, south of Meknes, is set against a backdrop of cedar forest. Low-level contacts had hinted of a thriving black market. It was just a matter of finding it. Kamal liked nothing more than ferreting out the black market. He shunned established shops. Whenever I went toward one, he caught my collar and led me away. “You can’t go in there,” he would say, “that’s a rip-off joint.” I couldn’t remember the last time I had bought anything from a shop. If we needed anything for the house, we would go to Derb Ghalef, the sprawling shantytown of stalls on the southwestern edge of Casablanca. It sold everything, from endangered reptiles in cages to antiquities from France, from red balls of Dutch edam to children’s clothes, satellite receivers, and giant-screen TVs. Much of it was contraband, smuggled in from Spain or across the border from Algeria.

  “Why don’t the police raid the stalls?” I asked.

  “Are you crazy?” Kamal replied. “They own most of them.”

  The trip to buy a black-market cedar tree was put back because of problems with our Jeep. The engine had developed an alarming rattle. A mechanic was called. He looked under the hood and gasped.

  “It’s a very big engine,” he said.

  I nudged Kamal. “Are you sure this guy’s up to the job?”

  “We can trust him,” he said. “He’s the second cousin of my aunt’s husband. He’s practically family.”

  While the Jeep was being fixed, I suggested we line up a new carpenter.

  Kamal repeated his caution that Casablanca’s carpenters were the last men on Earth you could trust.

  “There must be one trustworthy carpenter in the city.”

  Kamal looked at his watch. “There is one,” he said pensively. “He should be up and running by now.”

  We took a small red taxi to the nearby suburb of Hay Hassani. The cab veered off the main street and trundled down a succession of smaller and smaller alleyways, until it reached a dead end. The lane was only a few inches wider than the car. We had to get out through the windows.

  Kamal tapped on a rusting blue steel door. A bolt inside slid back and a frightening figure stepped out. He was about six foot five, as round as a barrel, and had no neck at all. He looked like Bluto from Popeye. I swallowed hard. The taxi driver gulped. Kamal strode up and kissed the man’s cheeks. They hugged, then kissed cheeks again.

  “This is Rachid,” he said. “He was my bodyguard in the old days when I used to get into fights.”

  Rachid the bodyguard was the kind of man you wouldn’t want to meet in an alleyway on a dark night. But, as I soon discovered, his looks were deceiving. He was gentle as a kitten. He said he had never liked fighting, that it was bad for his nerves. That’s why he had taken up carpentry instead.

  He led us into his workshop. There were two cumbersome cutting machines; both bore the word “Leipzig” in ivory-white lettering. They looked about a hundred years old. They were made back in the days when corners weren’t cut and everything from toasters to teapots was made from cast iron.

  On the workbench was an unfinished coffee table. Its edges had been expertly tooled, its uppermost surface detailed with a pattern of concentric octagons. The craftsmanship was very fine indeed.

  Rachid tapped the dust off a half-finished chair and invited me to sit. Then he served us mint tea, and cracked his knuckles until Kamal told him to stop. In the silence that followed, I explained about the library. I said it was to fill a room eighty feet by seventeen, that it was to have shelves rising from the floor to the ceiling.

  “I want cedar,” I said.

  Rachid the bodyguard bit his upper lip anxiously. “That’s expensive.”

  “Black market,” I whispered, tapping my nose. “We’re going to get it on the black market.”

  “You will have to line the walls in cork,” he said, “otherwise moisture will come through and damage the books.”

  I smiled at Rachid. He glanced at the floor meekly. I liked his attention to detail.

  “You can have the job,” I said.

  IN THE FOURTH WEEK of February, Countess Madeleine de Longvic dropped in. Dar Khalifa wasn’t ready for visitors, and I encouraged people ferociously to stay away. Most of them took my advice, warded off by the shantytown, the mud, and the sea of evil boys who threw stones at anyone they did not recognize. But the countess, who had no fear of the shacks, the dirt, or the boys, was lured by her curiosity of the past.

  I was standing on the upper terrace when I heard the sound of a car approaching, splashing through the puddles. It was so rare for a vehicle to penetrate the bidonville that we always rushed to see who it was. The countess’s royal blue Jaguar was purring down our lane. It came to a halt at the garden door. A liveried chauffeur stepped out and pulled the passenger door back with a gloved hand. From above, I saw the hat first. It was turtle-green velvet, as wide as the wheel of a men’s racing bike, and crowned with a single ostrich feather.

  The countess rang the bell. Hamza lunged for the door. A moment later I was in full apology mode. I apologized for the state of the house, for the noise and the cold. When Rachana had been introduced, I apologized for the way her hair was tied. Countess de Longvic stooped down and kissed Ariane on the cheek.

  “You do not see the perfection around you,” she said.

  It was a chill bright day. The garden was a thousand shades of green, cheered by the winter rain. We sat on the lawn and drank darjeeling tea. Ariane laid her dolls out on the grass and pulled off their heads.

  “I remember the house as being darker inside,” the countess said at length. “I seem to recall several more walls.”

  I explained about the army of hammer-wielding masons.

  “They were very enthusiastic,” I said. “In fact, they were unstoppable.”

  “It’s much improved,” said the countess, “you can see all the way through to the garden. I think the masons did you a service.”

  I steered the conversation to where our last one had closed—to Sergey, the Russian spy.

  “Ah, yes,” she said in an unhurried tone, “I seem to recall he rented the house from a Frenchman. It flowed with Stolichnaya. All the rooms stank of it. Sergey had it shipped in every month, crates and crates, brought through the diplomatic pouch. There was caviar, too, and Russian pickles. That was all Sergey ever served—caviar and pickles, washed down with neat vodka.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “As the British say so diplomatically,” she said, “he was found to be engaged in activities incompatible with his status.”

  “Spying?”

  “Of course.”

  We stopped talking, and watched Ariane struggle to do cartwheels on the grass. Hamza and the other guardians crouched nearby, watching us through a hedge.

  “This is an oasis,” said the countess. “There’s no other villa like it in Casablanca.”

  “Someone told me it belonged to the Caliph of Casablanca,” I said. “But I can’t find out anything about such a man.”

  Countess de Longvic held out her glass as I poured more tea. She sat in silence, staring at the first spring flowers.

  “The Caliph owned all the land around here a century ago,” she said, after a long while. “It was a sizeable estate. There were rolling fields all the way down to the sea and out toward Tamaris. His family lived on these lands for three hundred years. They were powerful, rich beyond imagination, and had great influence.”

  “Who was the Caliph of Casablanca?”

  “He was a member of your family,” said the countess airily. “He was a Sharif, one of the Prophet’s descendants.”

  “Why did he leave Dar Khalifa?”

  “The Caliph died in the 1920s,” said the countess, “and the estate was inherited by his oldest s
on. He gambled the family fortune away and was left with nothing. I heard that he shot himself when his debtors took the house.”

  “Do you think he killed himself here at Dar Khalifa?”

  The countess sipped her tea.

  “I suspect that he did,” she said.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, THE clatter of a machine woke me. I checked the clock. It was three forty-five. The engine’s growl was deep and irregular, unlike a passenger car. I assumed it was the bulldozer returning to the shantytown. But the sound grumbled through the bidonville all the way up to the house.

  I went down expecting trouble. Kamal was at the door.

  “I’ve got the container,” he said.

  In a way known only to himself, Kamal had managed to get the paperwork cleared and the Indian furniture released from the port. We had escaped without paying anything at all. The container was unloaded by a dozen burly men. They were nightclub bouncers whom Kamal had picked up en route. Their shift had just finished and they were willing to work for a tip.

  The container doors were pulled back and the furniture was hauled into the salon. It was elaborately packed, each piece wrapped in twenty layers of cardboard, then packed into crates.

  “Why do we have to unload it now, in the middle of the night?”

  “Because you don’t want people to see!” Kamal hissed.

  He said he had learned the habit of secrecy from his father.

  “But I’ve got no secrets.”

  “Everyone has secrets,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Every beetle is a gazelle in the eye of its mother.

  IN EARLY MARCH, SICKNESS struck the Caliph’s House. We all went down with it, the children first. Vomiting was followed by diarrhea so severe that there were moments I feared for our lives. Not since taking a shaman’s brew of ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon had my digestive tract been thrown into such disarray. When the doctor arrived at Dar Khalifa, he found us crouching around toilet bowls.