The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  But it was in Marrakech that we gave in to all temptation. The medina there is an emporium of art and craft like none other; the narrow streets are packed through the long dusty days with a frenzied tangle of life. There are donkey carts piled high with pots, armies of vendors laden with silver lamps, and an ocean of small boys touting rough wooden toys. There are blind men soliciting alms, sunburned tourists with cameras in hand, pickpockets and undercover cops, bicycles and scooters, fortune-tellers and snake charmers, madmen and hustlers. We pushed forward into the fray, wondering how we would ever escape.

  Every inch of space was taken up with goods for sale—trays of fresh nougat glimmering in the afternoon light, heaps of pistachios and dried apricots, roasted almonds and shelled pecans. There was saffron, too, mountains of it, and pickled lemons, figs, and slabs of beef carved from the bone.

  The moment before we were all sucked down and suffocated, a finger beckoned us into a shop. Inside, it was cool, calm, and filled with an alluring blend of wares. The owner slammed the door shut behind us, bolted it, and served mint tea.

  “Welcome to my oasis,” he said.

  Half joking, I asked if we were being kept prisoner. The shopkeeper, a skeleton of a man, passed me a glass of tea.

  “I am not keeping you in,” he said, “I am keeping them out.”

  We drank our tea and explored the treasures stacked on open shelves. There were terracotta pots adorned with zigzag motifs, camel headdresses from the Sahara, and mats made from the fibers of esperto grass. There were kelim rugs, too, woven in vibrant reds, yellows, and greens; silver brooches, calligraphic pendants, and ancient Berber marriage contracts inscribed on cylinders of wood. On the back wall was a bronze fountainhead in the form of a gazelle and, beside it, a clutch of brass divination bowls etched with cryptograms.

  My eye was caught by a fabulous cedar door propped up in the window. It was adorned with the Star of David and with lines of Hebrew script. The shopkeeper noticed me inspecting it.

  “You are surprised, are you not? Surprised at seeing a Jewish door.”

  I said that I was. The merchant straightened his back.

  “There may be tension between Arabs and Jews,” he said, “but without the Jews, Morocco would be a far poorer place.”

  I said I had heard that the king retained more than one key Jewish adviser, and that I had read about the country’s Jewish heritage.

  “My ancestors were Jews,” the lean merchant said. “We came here from Andalucía seven centuries ago and we are proud of our traditions. For generations we practiced our Jewish faith and lived alongside the Muslim Arabs. But then, two hundred years ago, the Sultan of Morocco charged terrible taxes on Jewish families. There was no choice but to convert to Islam.”

  Before leaving the sanctuary of the shop, we bought a divination bowl, a kelim, and a small silver box. The merchant eased the bolt back in the lock, wished us well, and slipped me his business card. I glanced at his name. It was Abdul-Rafiq Cohen.

  BACK AT CASABLANCA, A black-and-white postcard was waiting for me. The picture showed a group of camels and Saharan women huddled in a stark caravanserai. It was from Pamela, the well-read American woman who was living at my grandfather’s villa on Tangier’s rue de la Plage. She wrote: I am traveling in the south of Morocco. The meals have been wonderful, all except for one, at Sidi Ifni. We were served a very suspect steak. God knows what kind of meat it was. It was inedible. It was even rejected by my traveling cat.

  AT THE END OF May, I flew to London for three days, for the launch of a film I had made. It was one of those dull trips filled with forced conversation and solitude. Every moment I was there, I missed the children, Rachana, and the Caliph’s House. I met an old school pal who was still trapped in the cycle of zombie commuting and pseudo-friends. We laughed about English life, the terrible blight of flat-packed furniture and of information overload. He seemed impressed that I had moved to Casablanca. We had always conspired to break free together, but something had held him back. As I left I joked that he would put up with the chicken tikka sandwiches and the dreary weather until the end. His expression faltered.

  “It’s all I know,” he said.

  An hour after I arrived back at Dar Khalifa, there was a knock at the door. I told Rachana it would no doubt be Hicham in search of some postage stamps. But it wasn’t him. It was his wife. The whites of her eyes were the color of beets, as if she had been weeping. I asked her to come inside, but she said she could not stay.

  “My husband died two days ago,” she said. “His heart stopped.”

  I expressed my great sadness.

  “He said if something happened, I should give you this.”

  The stamp collector’s wife, Khadija, held up a box. I took it into my study, switched on the desk lamp, and opened it. Inside was a stack of stamp albums. Hicham had taught me a great deal about Morocco, and about life. I sat down, depressed by the loss of a wise friend. At the same time, I was happy, happy that our paths had crossed at all, and that we had shared so many fine conversations, paid for in postage stamps.

  THIRTY DAYS AFTER THE exorcism, Osman said he had something to show me. He led me down to the stables, where he and the other guardians tended to lurk, drinking mint tea. I asked him what it was. He told me to wait and to follow him. There are four stables at Dar Khalifa, arranged in an L shape. One was the guardians’ room; the others were full of old ladders and rope, gardening tools, barbed wire, and broken chairs.

  Osman pushed the door of the stable on the left. There was so much clutter inside that it hardly opened at all. Again, Osman pushed.

  “Can you see that?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The doorway? The old doorway,” he said.

  I peered in. All I could see was a tangle of ladders and chairs, fence posts and pots. I couldn’t see a doorway, I told him. The other guardians appeared, and after an hour of struggling, they managed to haul the doorway from the stable. They laid it out on the lawn.

  It was crafted from cedar and was the shape of a keyhole, the front side painted with geometric designs.

  “It’s wonderful and so old,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

  “We didn’t know it was there,” said the Bear.

  “Don’t you know what’s in the stables?”

  “Of course,” Hamza exclaimed, “but it wasn’t there before.”

  “It was hidden,” said Osman, under his breath.

  “Hidden by the Jinns,” said the Bear.

  The doorway was restored by Rachid the bodyguard and was put as the entrance to our bedroom. I was thrilled. It was like getting something for nothing, like finding money on the street. Hamza took every opportunity to describe the advantage of living in a house newly recovered from the Jinns.

  “Things become visible,” he said, “things that were hidden for years.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Treasure,” he said. “All old houses like Dar Khalifa have treasure.”

  I said I didn’t believe him.

  “The old door proves it,” he replied. “It was not there and then it was there.”

  “Do you really think a treasure is going to materialize?”

  “Of course it will,” Hamza explained. “You can sit back and wait.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I took a stroll down to the ocean before breakfast. It was a clear day. The beach was deserted, except for a man riding his Arab stallion through the waves as they broke on the shore. I took off my shoes and walked into the water, staring out at the horizon. I remember thinking it odd that my bare feet were on the same latitude as Atlanta.

  On the way back, I walked very slowly through the bidonville, taking in the usual morning bustle. There was a man calling out for knives to sharpen, a vegetable seller arranging his wares, and a woman winnowing her family’s grain. Children were hurrying to the school at the whitewashed mosque, where the stern mistress awaited them with her flexed orange hose. I was going to pok
e my head in the door and greet the teacher, when the imam came up. I expected him to ask for money.

  “Thank you for your generous donations,” he said.

  I didn’t know what he meant. I had given nothing except for the school supplies.

  “The things for the school?” I said.

  “No, no,” the old imam replied, “thank you for all the money you have given.”

  “Money?”

  “Yes, Hamza has brought us the donations,” he said. “We have used it to repair the roof and to install electricity.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t given Hamza any money to give to the mosque.

  “It wasn’t from me,” I said awkwardly.

  “You are as modest as Hamza said you are,” the imam mumbled. “He told me the money was from you, but that you would deny it if I ever mentioned it.”

  The imam ducked his head and kissed my hand. I strode back into Dar Khalifa, washed over in shame. I later realized that every Friday after they had been paid, Hamza, Osman, and the Bear would visit the mosque and hand the imam a third of their wages in a donation on my behalf.

  I WAS OVERCOME WITH guilt at benefiting from the death of Hicham Harass. His widow was left with almost nothing, while I had inherited a lifetime of valuable stamp albums. She was too proud to take handouts, and whenever I called on her, she insisted that God was taking care of her. Each time I visited the shack behind the mosque, another precious possession was gone—the carriage clock, then the radio, after that the prized Qur’an. Rachana came up with the solution—to take the stamp albums to Europe and sell them to a collector there. I sent them with a friend who was going to London. He brokered a deal and wired back a considerable sum of money in return. As soon as it arrived, I hurried over to give it to Hicham’s widow. I passed her the envelope of banknotes and explained that the albums were a kind of insurance policy, the kind that could be cashed in. She straightened her headscarf, wiped a tear from her eye, and said:

  “Up in heaven there is an old man cursing you for what you have done. But down here on Earth there is an old woman who is very thankful.”

  AS OUR FIRST YEAR in Morocco drew to a close, I found myself thinking a great deal about the move. The learning curve had been severe. I concluded that a life not filled with severe learning curves was no life at all.

  Live in a new country and you find yourself making compromises. Make them, and you are rewarded many times over. Morocco has an antique culture, one that’s still intact, with the family at the core. For me, the greatest thing about living here has been that Ariane and Timur can play against an inspiring backdrop, teeming with a full spectrum of life. As a parent, I have escaped the sense of guilt that drowns all parents in Britain, where the Victorian conviction persists that children should be seen and not heard. I encourage Ariane and Timur to be loud, to shout, to dance in the streets, to be themselves.

  Renovating Dar Khalifa has been a rich, vivid expedition. At times I have shouted, ranted, or fallen on the ground in defeat. But the secret was to get up and carry on, however harsh the situation. I have gained so much from escaping England, but most of all I feel proud to be myself again.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER the death of Hicham Harass, the guardians crept into my study while I was writing at the Spanish table. I had stressed again and again that when I was sitting there, no one was to disturb me. The only exceptions were if the children were in trouble or if the house was on fire. From the guardians’ faces, I could see there was no emergency. I looked up and waited for their excuse.

  “We need to speak to you, Monsieur Tahir,” said Hamza, pushing ahead of the others.

  “Is it important?” I asked.

  The three men nodded. “Yes,” they said together. “Yes, it is important.”

  I put down my fountain pen. “What is it?”

  “The Jinns have gone,” said Osman.

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” I said. “Now we can live in peace.”

  The guardians edged closer.

  “We have better news for you,” said Hamza.

  “What could be better than having a house without Jinns?”

  The Bear stepped forward. He was holding a tatty dossier.

  “The Jinns were hiding this,” Osman added.

  “What is it?”

  “The treasure,” he said.

  Hamza took the dossier from the Bear and placed it on the table. I untied the ribbon and pulled the folder open. Inside there were a number of browned pages and a scale plan of our land.

  I asked what it meant.

  Osman pointed to the plan. “You own the gangster’s house,” he said.

  HICHAM HARASS WAS BURIED on a hillside shaded by poplar trees on the southern edge of Casablanca. His grave was marked by a stick in a mound of freshly dug earth. All around there were other graves, a great rolling quilt of them, white stones glinting in the evening light. I would go there and sit at Hicham’s mound and watch the shadow thrown by his stick inch to the east. There was a silence in the cemetery, the kind I had rarely encountered in Casablanca, the silence of peace.

  The guardians begged me not to visit the old man’s grave. They said there was no place in Morocco more perilous to be than a cemetery, especially at dusk.

  “When the sun goes down,” said the Bear, “the Jinns rise up from the graves and search for fresh-faced men.”

  ON THE FIRST DAY of July, Kamal arrived from the port with the container full of my books. By some amazing sleight of hand, he had humored the censorship police and had sidestepped the charges. As ever, I had no idea what lies he had told, if he had told any at all.

  That night Rachana and I moved upstairs into our new bedroom, and the children into theirs across the hall. We had spent almost an entire year squashed up in a small room downstairs. Living in the main house was like reaching adulthood—a little daunting, yet so full of possibility. Words couldn’t describe the joy of lying in bed, knowing that the building work was over.

  My head was heavy on the pillow that first night we spent upstairs. Rachana and I lay down on the bed and both burst into laughter. It seemed too good to be true, to be in our own bedroom. Rachana put her hands behind her head and stared up at the ceiling.

  “We could sell this house and do it all again,” she said.

  I didn’t answer at first. I was in shock. I thought of all the trouble we had had with the architect, the workmen, and the Jinns.

  “Are you absolutely out of your mind?”

  “It’s been hard,” she replied. “But we’ve lived.”

  It seemed as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Of course there would be problems ahead. We were adrift on an ocean of problems. But there was a feeling of genuine achievement, that by embracing the challenge we were stronger, and in some way more complete. Most satisfying of all was the sense that we had at last been accepted by Morocco, by our guardians, and by the Caliph’s House.

  GLOSSARY

  Agaz: a cactus found in Morocco, the fiber of which is used to make sabra silk cloth.

  Aissawa: a brotherhood of exorcists originally formed in the sixteenth century, hailing from Meknes, famed for their spiritual music.

  Arabesque: the style of intricate patterns of interlaced lines used in Arab art.

  Arabian Nights: a large collection of stories of unknown authorship originating in what is now Iraq and beyond. Famously translated by Sir Richard Burton in the nineteenth century; also known as A Thousand and One Nights. Used to refer to the style or atmosphere of the medieval Middle East.

  Baba: literally “father,” used as a term of endearment by children in place of “Daddy.” Also used as a term of respect for an old man.

  Baksheesh: money given as a bribe or as a reward.

  Baraka: literally “blessing” or “blessed.”

  Barboush: popular sharp-toed goatskin slippers worn by men and women in Morocco, in yellow or other colors.

  Bejmat: handmade terracotta tiles, glazed or unglazed, used
for the floors of houses and verandahs.

  Bendir: traditional goatskin tambourines of Morocco.

  Berber: one of several original non-Arab tribes.

  Bidonville: French word for shantytown.

  Bismillah: Arabic, literally “in the name of God”; said by Muslims before starting or finishing many actions, such as eating, driving, and so on.

  Bistiya: Moroccan dish made with sweet pastry, beneath which lie wafer-thin layers of pigeon (or chicken), almonds, and egg.

  B’saf: Moroccan Arabic, literally “a lot” or “much.”

  Café noir: literally “black coffee” in French, referring to the extremely strong coffee served without milk in most Moroccan cafés.

  Caftan: a loose-fitting garment for women, often embroidered.

  Caliph: the successor of the Prophet Mohammed; used also to refer to a governor or man with considerable political power.

  Couscous: a dish of steamed semolina, extremely popular in Morocco, usually served with stewed vegetables, meat, or both.

  Dar: Moroccan Arabic word for house.

  Dari: one of the languages of Afghanistan.

  Darj: a shape of hand-cut zelij mosaic.

  Datura: a plant of the potato family with long, trumpetlike flowers, brought from the New World by the Spanish conquistadores, used as a hallucinogen by European medieval witches and others.

  Dirham: the currency of Morocco; there are about 8 dirhams to the U.S. dollar and 16 dirhams to the pound sterling.

  Douane: French word for customs.

  Eid: Eid al-Fitr, the “small” Eid, marks the end of Ramadan. Eid al-Kabeer arrives about a month later, and that larger one marks the sacrifice of Abraham, who killed a ram in place of his son Isaac.

  Esperato: a rough natural grass woven into floor matting and so on.

  Fantasia: a display of horsemanship popular in rural areas, in which participants charge and fire their antique weapons as they ride.