by Tahir Shah
“You are a man who likes good things,” she said, “I can see by your shoes.”
I glanced down. I was wearing an old pair of black brogues.
“They shine like mirrors,” said the woman. “The mouth and the feet are far apart, but they both have good taste.”
I pointed to the old man asleep. “Is that your grandfather?” I asked in a whisper.
“Yes, that’s him.”
“It’s a pity he’s sleeping,” I said.
The saleswoman pulled out the drawer of the cash register and slammed it shut. The old man opened his eyes.
“Nadia,” he croaked. “How much?”
“Sit down beside him,” said the woman. “I will serve you a cup of Bourbon Santos.”
I sat down and a silvery-gray cat leapt up onto my lap. The old man peered out at the street.
“Do you like Brazilian coffee?” he asked.
“It’s the very best,” I said.
The man smiled, nodded, and rubbed his glasses with the corner of his shirt.
“My grandfather used to like it, too,” I said. “He came to Casablanca to buy it once a month.”
“Was he from Fès?” asked the man.
“No, he was an Afghan.”
The man pushed his glasses up his nose and leaned forward. “I knew an Afghan once,” he said faintly. “He lived in Tangier.”
I breathed in sharply. “That may have been him,” I said.
“He was a Sufi. He was a wise man.”
“Was he called Ikbal?”
The man’s tongue ran over his cracked lips. “Yes, that was his name,” he said.
I didn’t say anything or show emotion, but inside I was dancing.
“He used to come every few weeks,” the man said slowly. “Then he stopped coming.”
“He was knocked down by a Coca-Cola truck,” I said.
The elderly coffee seller seemed disheartened. He removed his glasses and wiped his forehead.
“Hussein was lonely without him,” he said.
“Who’s Hussein?”
“He was the reason your grandfather used to come to Casablanca,” he said.
THE GUARDIANS WERE NOT pleased when the cedarwood arrived. They stood in the lane and told the truck driver to go back to Azrou. He would have done as they ordered had I not been walking in from the shantytown.
“What’s going on?”
“This man has brought cedar from Azrou,” said the Bear angrily.
“Excellent, let’s get it into the house.”
“You can’t do that,” said Hamza.
“Why?”
“Because cedar is a cursed wood. It is favored by Jinns!”
“It can’t all be favored by Jinns,” I said.
Osman pointed at the sky. “Yes, it can, and it is,” he said knowingly.
I am more sensitive to local folklore than almost anyone I know, but there comes a point when you have to draw the line. The guardians had long since passed that line. They ruled the house by a regime of invented fear. I was sick of them dictating what was cursed and what was not, how to do something and whom to trust. I pushed them away and signaled the timber truck to unload.
“You will regret it,” Hamza said menacingly.
FOR THREE WEEKS HICHAM the stamp collector was confined to bed. I called our doctor to attend to him. He tramped through the shantytown’s knee-deep mud, listened to the old man’s heart, peered down his throat, and announced he had life-threatening flu. He was ordered to stay at home in a blanket, to rest, and to receive no visitors at all.
Our conversations had become the cornerstone of my week. I looked forward to them, as I did to hearing Hicham’s straightforward take on the world. During his illness, I kept away from the old man’s home on doctor’s orders. I would often see his wife buying vegetables opposite the mosque. She would give me a report on her husband’s health.
On the Monday of the third week, she waved to me as I walked through the bidonville.
“He wants to see you,” she said.
Hicham was sitting in bed when I found him, in the middle of the one-room shack. He was wearing his old tweed coat, flat cap, and socks on his hands. I asked how he was feeling.
“Like a prisoner,” he said. “Like a cold prisoner.”
“I’ve brought you some stamps. There’s one from Mongolia, and a few new ones from Afghanistan.”
The stamp collector tugged the socks off his hands, thanked me, and snatched the postage stamps. He arranged them in lines and inspected each one with his magnifying glass. He nodded to himself, muttering in Arabic as he squinted through the lens. When he had examined the last stamp, he put the magnifying lens down and peered over at me.
“You have made an old man very happy,” he said.
MY FANTASY OF TRANSFORMING the guesthouse into a pleasure pavilion was inspired by the Moroccan tradition of building menzeh. Devoted to occasional moments of leisure, they are in their own way a Moroccan version of the European folly. Many of the kingdom’s royal palaces have such pleasure pavilions hidden in a garden, veiled from the main building by a screen of trees. They are decorated with samples of the very best bejmat, roofed in green tiles called qermud, and furnished with simple chairs, cushions, and rugs.
Turning the guesthouse from a derelict ruin into a Moroccan pleasure pavilion was remarkably easy to do. The place needed to be gutted first, the rusting iron roof removed, and electricity and water plumbed in. Then the walls would have to be replastered, the floors surfaced with bejmat, and the crown of green tiles laid on the roof.
Work was due to start in the middle of April. I had sketched out the general idea on the back of an envelope and given it to a builder from Ouarzazate. He gave a quote that was so low no one believed it, least of all me. I hired him all the same.
There were problems from the start. Osman caught wind of the project and declared it would end in failure. He said the outbuilding had been abandoned for a reason. When I asked him what the reason was, he walked off in a huff. Hamza was equally disapproving. He pulled me aside.
“Do not make this mistake,” he said.
“Can’t you tell me why the guesthouse was abandoned?”
“It is not your business,” he replied.
“If it’s a matter of the Jinns,” I said, “you don’t have to worry anymore. The exorcists are coming to Dar Khalifa.”
The guardian’s face froze. “When? When are they coming?”
“When they are ready,” I said.
LATE SPRING EBBED INTO early summer, and the smell of the air changed. It was more fragrant, balmy, as if good things were on their way. With the winter far behind us and long, hot days ahead, my spirits were lifted a little more. I would roam around the empty rooms looking forward to the time when we might occupy them. The bulk of the decoration had been done, although enough details remained missing to prevent full-scale habitation of anywhere but the temporary bedroom we all shared on the long corridor.
One morning I was writing letters at my Indian-made campaign desk when the telephone rang. It was before eight. I wondered who would call so early. The voice on the line was deep, loud, and spoke excellent English. It asked if I was related to Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah. I said that I was his grandson.
“We must meet,” said the voice.
“Can you tell me who you are?”
“I will explain when we are face-to-face.”
That afternoon I was twenty minutes early at the agreed meeting place, a café off Boulevard Hassan II. I supposed the Countess de Longvic had passed on my number to the mystery caller. I had tried telephoning her, but the maid said that she had left for the West Indies.
I ordered an espresso and pulled out my notebook. On the surface, Moroccan cafés are all the same—a blur of cigarette smoke and elderly men dressed in long jelabas and yellow leather slippers creased at the toes. But peer a little deeper and a world of unexpected interest is revealed. At the table beside me, a man in thick glasses and a Fès hat
was carving matchsticks with a razor blade. Next to him, a tall suave figure was leaning back on his chair, drawing deep on a water pipe. The waiter swaggered over and slipped him a wad of banknotes from under his tray. The customer stuffed the money under his jelaba and glanced to the left and right.
My mystery caller was fifteen minutes late. I ordered a second espresso and filled a few pages of my notebook. A cold black shadow fell across the lines. I glanced up. A bearded man was standing over me. He was slim, in his mid-fifties, and was dressed in a gray linen suit. He stretched out a hand.
“I am Hussein Benbrahim,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say. I fumbled to put the notebook away, and motioned to the seat beside me. The man sat down. He had a dark face, much of it masked by the graying beard. His shoulders were broad, his posture unnaturally good.
“The coffee merchant told me about you,” he said.
“And me about you,” I replied.
“So you know already about our connection?”
“No, no,” I said, “I don’t. All I know is that you exist . . . that my grandfather came to Casablanca because of you.”
Hussein asked the waiter for a café crème. He nodded.
“Yes, he used to come here because of me.”
“Why?”
“Ikbal was a friend to my grandfather,” he said, leaning toward me. “He was more than a friend. He was a brother.”
“A brother?” I didn’t understand.
“Not a brother as you understand it,” he said. “A Masonic brother. You see, my grandfather and your grandfather were Freemasons.”
“I knew my grandfather had belonged to a lodge in Edinburgh,” I said.
Hussein leaned a little more forward, rested his elbows on the table, and pressed his hands together.
“Exactly,” he said. “They met at Edinburgh Medical Infirmary during the First World War. Ikbal was an Afghan and my grandfather was a Moroccan, and so they were natural friends. They became Masons together and stayed in contact throughout their lives.”
“When did your grandfather die?”
“In 1963,” Hussein replied, “three years after Ikbal moved to Tangier. My parents died when I was a small child, and my grandfather brought me up. With his death I had no one to take care of me. We have no close relatives, and so I would have been sent to an orphanage. But Ikbal rescued me. He had promised to see to my welfare if something happened to my grandfather.”
“A Masonic duty?” I said.
“A duty between brothers.”
“But you didn’t go and live with him in Tangier?”
“No, I stayed at a boarding school in Casablanca,” Hussein explained. “Ikbal came to see me every month. He would bring me books and food. It was only later I learned that he was paying my school fees. He left a bank account for my further study. It’s because of him that I became a surgeon.” Hussein paused for a moment. “He always told me I had steady hands,” he said.
“But why didn’t he mention you? He didn’t even talk of you to his close friends here in Casablanca.”
Hussein stared over at me very hard. “Real charity is given anonymously,” he said. “Speak about it and the meaning is lost.”
FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE first mosaic was cut, the job of laying out the fountain’s pattern began. A new moualem arrived at Dar Khalifa. He was fine-boned and fragile, like a figure crafted from Meissen porcelain. Hamza led him into the house and through to the courtyard where the zelij cutters were sitting. The master craftsman unfurled a sheet of sackcloth on the green tiled floor and set to work.
The central medallion was sketched out first. Then the sixteen outer rosettes were drawn and, after that, the background. The moualem used tweezers to position the smallest hand-cut mosaics for the central medallion. So adept was his skill that he laid out all five thousand mosaics upside down, without any need to see the actual pattern on the reverse. His hands moved at the speed of light, plucking individual mosaics from the assorted piles and dropping them into place. I asked how he could do the job without seeing the colors.
“Only a blind man knows the weakness of the eyes,” he said.
While work on the fountain continued, in the library, the cedar was prepared into eight hundred feet of shelves. The wood was fabulously aromatic. Its scent filled the entire room. Rachid and his team of four helpers stripped down to their underwear and tied cloths round their mouths. There was so much sawdust that anyone enticed by the smell of cedar was blinded by the blizzard. The guardians paced up and down outside. They were still agitated that I was using cursed cedarwood and furious that I had overruled them. The wood may have been jam-packed with Jinns, but there was no sign of them. The house was still standing.
THE ONLY WAY TO deal with the rising tension was to escape from Dar Khalifa. I spent more and more time downtown, working in cafés, watching the bustle. Kamal would know to find me at the Café Rialto, opposite the cinema. I acquired a fondness for its tarlike coffee, which tasted of almonds.
One afternoon, he parked the Jeep outside the café and marched up to the table where I was sitting. He had the latest news about the gangster’s plan to rob us of the Caliph’s House. He sat down and started spreading a dossier of papers out on the table. We were discussing the boundary line when a uniformed policeman strode up. He flicked his hand at the Jeep.
“What’s this doing here?” he said.
I berated Kamal for parking illegally.
“We’re about to move it,” I said.
“I don’t mean the car,” responded the officer heatedly. “I mean the badge. How did you get it?” The policeman jabbed a thumb at an official-looking sticker on the driver’s side of the windscreen. It had the green five-pointed star of Morocco on a background of red.
“How did you get that, the Chief of Police badge?” the officer demanded again.
Kamal leapt up. He stepped over to the car. “If you want to know how I got the badge,” he said arrogantly, “then give me a ticket.”
The policeman chewed the end of his pen.
“Come on, give me a ticket!” Kamal shouted.
“Take this car away or I will take you to the station,” said the officer.
“Give me a ticket, you coward! You’ll be posted to the Sahara before you know it!”
I bent down to pay the bill. When I looked up, the policeman was gone.
“Where did he go?”
“He ran away.”
“Have you got a relative on the force?”
“No,” said Kamal. “I bought the badge in the bazaar for a buck.”
COUNTESS DE LONGVIC TELEPHONED on her return from the Caribbean. She said that her daughter’s mansion on the island of Martinique was very lovely but extremely damp. The greatest moment of a long journey, she declared, is the one when you arrive home.
I said that I had discovered the real reason my grandfather came to Casablanca every month.
“For the coffee?” said the countess.
“No,” I replied. “To keep a promise he had made to a fellow Freemason.”
I heard the rattle of pearls on the other end of the line.
“You know about Hussein Benbrahim?”
“I do now,” I said. “But if you knew, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I may not be a Mason,” said Countess de Longvic, “but when I make a promise to keep a secret, my lips are sealed.”
ONE MORNING A FEW days later, I found Rachana slumped at the kitchen table. Timur was nearby on the floor, screaming.
“I was mad to listen to your promises,” Rachana said softly without looking up. “I am a prisoner here in this madhouse, in your madhouse, in your fantasy!”
“It’ll get better,” I said. “It must get better.”
Rachana raised her head and looked through me. “You escape it—you spend the afternoons in your smoky, macho-man cafés.”
“That’s research,” I said defensively.
“Well, I want to do research, too!”
/> I had no choice but to promise Rachana I would find her an assistant of her own. She was sick of all the squabbling between the legions of staff I had hired to make life easier. Almost all her time was taken up with settling the minor disputes and the bickering between the cook, the nanny, the maid, the gardener, and the guardians. Now she was calling for someone to stand at her right hand, to keep all the others at bay. I hoped Rachana’s attention would be diverted as it usually was, and that we could continue on our rocky course. Days passed. I did my best to distract her, but she did not forget. In one outburst after the next, she called for liberty, to be unshackled from the Caliph’s House.
ON MOST AFTERNOONS, ARIANE would toss the remains of her favorite dismembered doll into a wicker basket and go and sit with the guardians while they worked. She would play for hours and listen to their repertoire of stories—tales of honor, courage, and revenge from the Arabian epics. Within weeks of her arrival in Morocco, she had picked up French and some Arabic. Despite her young age, she became an invaluable translator. Sometimes she would push little Timur into the garden, where the two of them would prevent the guardians from doing any work at all. One afternoon I found the Bear rocking Timur in his arms while he recounted a folktale to Ariane. I apologized to him.
“They are wasting your time,” I said.
The Bear looked deep into Timur’s eyes. He breathed in, then out, and sighed very hard.
“Children are life,” he said.
RACHANA’S LIBERTY ARRIVED AT the house early one evening in the form of a fleshy, well-built woman called Rabia. She regarded the world through a pair of large gogglelike glasses strapped on with elastic round the back of her head. In sign language, she made it known that word had reached her ears that a job was up for grabs. On the face of it, Rabia lacked the qualifications needed. She spoke no English and no French and had only arrived in Casablanca the previous week, from a remote village in the desert. There was, however, something that did make her appealing—the fact she instilled terror in everyone she met. Had I been braver, I might have opened the door at that first meeting and pointed to the street. But neither Rachana nor I had the guts. Two days into her reign at Dar Khalifa, Rabia had subdued everyone, including Rachana, the children, and me. We tiptoed around hoping not to fall into her magnified range of vision. The cook, the nanny, and the maid went about with glazed eyes, as if they had been whipped. As for the guardians, they locked themselves in the stables and refused to come out.