The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  “Which one do you want to do first?” he asked.

  I looked at him squarely, my eyes glowing red. “We’ll do them all at once!” I said.

  THE ROAD TO MEKNES sweeps down across the farmlands of the Saïss Plateau and rolls up to the walls of the imperial city itself. The furrowed fields are the color of bitter chocolate and are so fertile that the people who live there walk tall with pride. Meknes and its sister city, Fès, form the cultural heartland of Morocco. The sorceress at the tomb of Sidi Abdur Rahman had been economical with her information. When asked for a source of exorcists, she had given me no more than the name “Meknes.”

  Kamal waved aside all questions when I asked how we might pick up the trail once we arrived. He claimed to know a man with the contacts to unlock the door. It was only a matter of finding him. I pestered Kamal for details, but as usual his lips were sealed.

  On the journey to Meknes, we stopped en route at the small town of Khemisset and ate merguez, piquant mutton sausages, at a roadside café. When the call to prayer sounded in the early afternoon, the owner of the place unfurled his rug and bent down in prayer. While he prayed, his son guarded the cash box that held their takings. The boy rapped his hands together in a slow clap throughout the time his father was praying toward Mecca. When the man had finished, he went back to the counter, and his son put his hands in his pockets again.

  Kamal noticed me wondering why the child was clapping while his father prayed. I had assumed it was an act of piety.

  “Can you understand it?” he said.

  “Understand what?”

  “The father needs his son to guard the money,” he said, “but he doesn’t trust him. He thinks the boy will grab some cash when his back is turned.”

  “So?”

  “So he tells the boy to clap,” Kamal said. “If the clapping stops, it means the boy’s hands are stealing the cash.”

  ONCE AT MEKNES, WE parked the Jeep near the magnificent Bab Mansour gate. Kamal opened the back door and ferreted about in a cardboard box he kept in the car. It contained an assortment of filthy mildewed clothes stinking of stale cigarettes and discotheques. I had asked him frequently to chuck the box out. But to Kamal its contents were far more than grubby old clothes. They were indispensable disguises. He threw me a crumpled jacket and pair of slacks.

  “Put those on,” he said.

  Ten minutes later we were sitting at a café inside the medina, stinking like drunks after a night out, waiting for the low-level contact to arrive. Kamal wouldn’t reveal the reason for disguises. It was his way of controlling the information. But when I asked about the exorcists, he was abnormally forthcoming.

  “They’re a brotherhood,” he said, “called Aissawa. They come from Meknes and can suck Jinns from the walls.”

  “Will they travel to Casablanca?”

  “If you pay them enough, they’ll go anywhere,” he said.

  An hour later, the contact arrived. I thought it was going to be him as he approached from across the square. He was talking on two cellular phones at once, in a crude display of elevated status. I hoped desperately that he would walk past. But he reeled over and kissed Kamal’s cheeks. He looked like a pimp. His face was confident and brash, with a flat nose and small devious eyes. I disliked him the moment he slapped his moist, spongy palm onto mine.

  “This is Abdullah,” Kamal said. “He knows all the exorcists in town.”

  “I don’t like the look of him,” I whispered.

  “Looks aren’t important,” Kamal snapped in reply.

  Abdullah the pimp swiveled a chair around and sat on it back-to-front. I am not certain, but I think it was his way of showing he was top dog, at ease with himself. He took out a pea-sized fragment of kif resin and conjured it into a joint. Kamal ran through the formalities of greeting, talk of old times and shared memories. Then he cleared his throat and I heard the word “Jnun.”

  The pimp’s beady eyes seemed to shrink in size, until they were no larger than marbles. He jabbed the end of the joint into his clenched teeth and sucked very slowly and very hard.

  Kamal told him about the Caliph’s House and its resident Jinns. The pimp slid his slippery palm down his nose. He said something in Arabic. I couldn’t understand the words, but I knew what he meant.

  “He’s talking about money, isn’t he?” I said.

  Kamal didn’t reply.

  Abdullah took another drag and blurted out a line of numbers.

  “What’s he saying? How much?”

  We sat there, dressed down in our grubby clothes, the air heavy with marijuana smoke.

  I asked about the exorcists. Kamal and the pimp were too busy to reply. They stared at each other, each waiting for the other to break. To anyone passing, they would have looked like two men sitting in mellow contemplation. But there was nothing mellow about it. They were doing battle.

  I excused myself and crossed the square to buy nougat from a makeshift stall. When I got back, Abdullah was gone.

  “What happened?”

  “He’s going to line the exorcists up,” Kamal said.

  “How many?”

  “The group’s fifteen, but he’s throwing in an extra ten for free.”

  NINETEEN

  The answer to a fool is silence.

  MOVE TO MOROCCO AND IT’S IMPOSSIBLE not to give in to delusion. However hard I tried, I couldn’t help but think on a grand scale. In London, we had lived in a microscopic apartment, and as a result, everything I thought about was small in scale. But living at the Caliph’s House changed the way I perceived the world. I began to plan enormous expeditions, to dream up subjects for obscure encyclopedias to write, and I became obsessed with using every inch of available space.

  Part of it was being in Africa. The sky was vast, the landscape severe and unrelenting. There was a sense that anything was possible, that I was no longer held back by the telescoped outlook of Europe. The danger was a motivator, too. One of the reasons to break free from Britain had been to shed the cozy sense of security, the safety net that trapped us and held us back. In Morocco, the lack of safety was an energizing force, but at the same time it was a constant concern. I had seen more accidents than I could count: car wrecks with people half dead lying on the ground, building sites where workmen had tumbled from scaffolding, children maimed by fireworks on a Sunday afternoon. For the first time in my life I became completely alert. In the West, you can drift from day to day in the knowledge that the society will protect you and your children. Any problems, and someone will pick you up and dust you off. But after five minutes on North African soil, I knew it was up to me to guard my family. No one else was watching them.

  KAMAL AND I DROVE south from Meknes to Azrou on the trail of black-market cedarwood for my library shelves. Everyone had warned me to take care. The cedar business, they said, was a trade abundant with thieves. Then there were the rumors to contend with. One informer had told me that all the cedar on sale in Morocco was afflicted by an invisible blight. It looked good on the surface, he assured me, but get it home and a plague of maggots would swarm out and eat their way through your home. The vegetable seller in the shantytown had said cedar was beset not by worms, but by spirits. Bring the ill-fated planks into the house and the Jinn inside them would slink into the walls. I reminded him we already had a profusion of Jinns. He looked very perturbed.

  “Then there will be a war,” he said anxiously. “Your house will be destroyed!”

  The small town of Azrou was perched on the brink of the Middle Atlas, at four thousand feet. It had the mood of a colonial hill station. The buildings were low, unmistakably French, their European roofs glistening against the cobalt sky. I suggested we start right away looking for dodgy characters who could lead us to the black market in cedarwood.

  “It’s not the time,” Kamal said.

  “When is the time?”

  “Midnight.”

  So we spent the afternoon sleeping in the Jeep. Every so often someone would tap on the win
dow with a coin and hold up a bundle of feather dusters, smuggled cigarettes, chewing gum, or ballpoint pens. Evening came and turned into night. I kept looking at my watch, counting the minutes.

  At ten-thirty I shook Kamal by the arm and made him wake up. We clambered out of the car, took refuge in a café, and ordered café noir. There was the usual crowd of long-faced men in jelabas and the clouds of black tobacco smoke. The waiter brought us a pair of clean ashtrays, served the coffee, and coughed into his hand. He asked for payment.

  “We will pay you when we are ready,” said Kamal.

  The waiter put out his palm and mumbled a price. “I can see you are from Casablanca,” he said. “And I don’t trust city men.”

  On the stroke of eleven Kamal got up, crossed the street, and ambled over to a boy who was selling Marlboros one by one. But he wasn’t buying cigarettes. He was searching for the key to unlock the black market. After a few minutes of conversation, the boy hurried away and Kamal slipped back into the café.

  An hour passed.

  Kamal was lighting a cigarette when a man sailed up through the smoke and paused at our table. He was short and nervous, with a shiny rust-colored face. He reached over, shook my hand gently, and sat down. There was something not quite right about the handshake. I glanced at his right hand. He was missing three fingers and a thumb. Kamal later told me that in Morocco a carpenter without fingers was respected as a man with experience. He said the best carpenters had no fingers at all.

  A whispered conversation in Arabic followed. There was talk of qualities and quantities, and of the police. The contact grinned a great deal and helped himself to Kamal’s Marlboros. Whenever the police were mentioned, he would scratch his chin with the lone finger of his right hand and crow with nervous laughter. Eventually, he led us out of the café and into the street. We met up with another man, also missing fingers, and ended up at a shop that sold used toilets. Despite the late hour, all the lights were on. I didn’t have a clear idea why we were there or what was going on. But as usual, I held back while Kamal made the arrangements.

  The nervous man pulled the lid off one of the toilets and fished out half a dozen samples of cedar. He slapped them on the table and drew our attention to the various qualities. They were graded, he said, by the amount of knots and by the dryness of the wood. The driest wood with no knots at all was première qualité. It came at a price—double that of second quality.

  I examined the samples and asked if the agent had enough of the first quality to make eight hundred feet of shelving. My question was greeted with much grinning. The contact strode over to the shop’s far wall and pulled back a stand featuring a display of pink imported toilets from France. A low entrance was revealed. Kamal and I were ushered through.

  We found ourselves in a warehouse filled with the pungent aroma of fresh-cut cedar. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I made out the stock—thousands of thick planks piled up to the roof, the size and shape of railway sleepers. In one corner stood a circular saw. It was stripped of any safety features, the butcher of countless careless hands.

  Three hours of negotiations followed. At the end of it, I was far poorer, but had secured enough first-grade cedar to build the library. The agent promised to have the wood delivered to Dar Khalifa as soon as he could. He pressed the remains of his right hand into mine, grinned broadly, and sloped off into the night.

  ON THE JOURNEY BACK to Meknes the next day, we passed rows of stalls at the side of the road, manned by an army of teenage boys. They sold avocados and chameleons, bouquets of roses and red ceramic pots. There were no villages or houses for miles around. I wondered how the boys got there and why they had selected such a remote setting for their trade. We had not planned to stop, but when I saw the chameleons being held up cruelly by their tails, I ordered Kamal to hit the brakes. I sent him to buy up their entire lizard stock—twenty chameleons in a range of sizes. They cost me five hundred dirhams, about fifty dollars. It was daylight robbery.

  Five miles after the stalls, the road was empty again, lined with eucalyptus trees and scrub. The sunlight was so bright that Kamal shielded his eyes with his hand as he drove. He said he couldn’t remember a brighter afternoon. The road curved to the left, then the right, and evened as it rolled on toward the north. For the first time in a long while we had a good view ahead.

  A man was waiting in the shadow of a fir tree before the horizon. He was bent over with age, his body shrouded in a hooded jelaba. I saw him first.

  “Let’s give him a ride,” I said, “and we can set the lizards free at the same time.”

  “Those people are nothing but trouble,” said Kamal.

  “What about charity? Please stop. You must stop,” I said.

  Kamal eased down on the brake and we slid to a slow, awkward stop. The man limped over with his knapsack. I called out to him in greeting and told him to climb aboard. He grunted thanks. While he staggered over, we got out and liberated the chameleons. A second later, we heard the sound of the engine starting. I swiveled round to see the Jeep driving off. It is a moment I will not forget. We dropped the lizards and ran up the road, shouting insults.

  It was no use. The car was long gone.

  “Bastard,” I said.

  “May Allah steer him into a tall tree,” Kamal quipped.

  “Don’t say that. I don’t want the car damaged.”

  “You’re not going to get it back,” said Kamal. “By nightfall it’ll be cut up in Meknes and sold for scrap.”

  We sat at the side of the road in disbelief, waiting for something to happen. He didn’t say it, but I sensed Kamal blaming me for buying the lizards. They had led to our downfall.

  “Poor lizards. Poor old man,” I said defensively.

  “Damn the lizards, screw the old man. He wasn’t even old. He was just pretending to be old,” said Kamal. “He was a thief.”

  After fifteen minutes of waiting, we heard a car approaching from the direction of Meknes. It was the first vehicle we had seen. The road was so straight that we caught sight of it long before it reached us. The car was moving very fast, sunlight reflecting off the roof. I screened my eyes with my hands.

  “It looks like the Jeep.”

  Kamal peered out to the distance. “It is the Jeep,” he said.

  “Is he coming back for the shirts off our backs?”

  “Let me handle this,” said Kamal.

  He picked up a sharp-edged stone and ran toward the car as the thief skidded to a halt.

  “Don’t hit him!”

  “Of course I’m gonna hit him!”

  The thief opened the driver’s door a moment before Kamal reached him with the rock. He was shouting something in Arabic. It sounded as if he was begging for mercy. Kamal’s expression was one of passionate anger. I had seen his wrath before. He was quite capable of killing if he wanted to. The thief shouted again, clambered out, and lay spread-eagled on the ground. I didn’t understand what was happening. He was pleading, repeating the same words over and over.

  “What’s he saying?”

  Kamal didn’t answer. He tossed away the stone, visibly moved. His fury melted away.

  “What’s he saying? Why did he come back?”

  The man begged for mercy.

  “Allahu akbar! God is great!” said Kamal.

  “What?”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “He says that he brought the car back to us because . . .”

  “Because?”

  “Because if he did not, no one would ever stop to help an old man again.”

  AT DAR KHALIFA WORK had begun on the fountain. A truck had arrived from Fès laden with baskets of square ceramic tiles. They were blue, white, red and green, yellow and turquoise, orange and black. A pair of zelijis, tile cutters, sat in the courtyard on wads of cotton padding. They were calm, circumspect, the kind of men who could spend an eternity in reflection. An apprentice heaved the first basket of tiles into the courtyard and
began marking out the mosaic shapes. Tracing with a bamboo stick dipped in white homemade ink, he sketched around a sample. On a single ceramic square, he would mark a number of shapes, and pass the tile to the zeliji to cut out the shapes.

  Two thousand mosaics were needed to make up the central medallion alone, and the entire fountain required more than twice that, each chip of ceramic cut at the house. Aziz had said that it would take a month to prepare all the mosaics. At first I thought it would take far longer. But as I watched the craftsmen’s hammers chipping, I saw there was hope. They worked at a furious pace, tapping the angles of each zelij with their sharp-sided hammers. The individual mosaics they created ranged from simple squares and chevrons to S-shaped curves, rhombuses, trapezoids, and eight-pointed stars. Each mosaic shape had a name. There were spire-shaped points called quandil, and gentle curved shapes known as darj, a triangle called taliya, and an octagonal shape that the zeliji said was known as kura.

  Moroccan mosaics differ greatly from their Western cousins, which tend to be made from vitreous glass. The fragments of glass are the same color throughout, whereas Moroccan mosaics are ceramic and are merely glazed with color on the upper surface. Cutting ceramic is far harder than cutting glass, which breaks in straight lines. When placed edge to edge, the ceramic zelij fit so snugly together that there is no space for grouting between them. Instead, the mosaics are set in plaster, with the underside edges cut at an angle so as to hold better in place.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER our return from Meknes, I walked past the Brazilian coffee shop across from the derelict Bessonneau building. It was a Friday morning, and the streets were unusually busy, the spring sunlight showering down. I noticed an old man sitting in the window. He was bundled up in a polyester blanket. His eyes were shut. I opened the door, went inside, and greeted the saleswoman. She asked how I had liked the coffee. When I praised it, she thanked me.