Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

  The foreman had been compelled to bring in helpers from the department of national restoration to undertake the task of transferring the coffin. They moved the casket from the wall to the police vehicle, preparing to show it to the archaeological experts whom the government had brought in from France and Egypt—these experts would examine the mummy and probe its shriveled entrails.

  The next day, a helicopter transferred the foreman to a university hospital in Rabat, where they would examine the severe wounds caused by the inexplicable beating, which apparently had no human source.

  * * *

  Patti loved al-Sharqawi’s stories. Even though he didn’t have a regular group of listeners in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, to whom he could hold out his skullcap to receive donations after every tall tale, Patti still considered him to be the quintessential modern storyteller. She believed he was someone who deserved all sorts of gifts and recognition. Patti usually gave him something when he came to narrate one of his wonderful stories—stories that remained fresh from his time at the Mamounia Hotel, where al-Sharqawi had been a doorman ever since the seventies.

  At first, al-Sharqawi had latched onto the legendary tales of the hotel itself, with its world-famous visitors: Churchill, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, and de Gaulle (in his case, for just a single night, and they had to make a special bed that was long enough for him). Soon enough, al-Sharqawi had complete command of all the secret worlds inside the hotel—scandals, spectacular soirées, and many love affairs. From all these intimate threads he would weave his stories; he always had a role to play in their construction, even if that required him to skip or blend time frames or to mix facts with nebulous claims. Then he organized a network of hotel workers, suppliers, and taxi drivers to provide him with news about the city as a whole—sporting events, lavish weddings, Don Quixote–like confrontations, newly opened restaurants, and swank apartments. News of prostitutes, demons, gay people, sex clubs, hideaways for disobedient minors, and pornographic shoots were also welcome. He would fuse all these true details together and end up with tales about the city as it really was, and as it might be—cloaked in legend.

  He had no qualms about raising the dead and dispatching them to the city’s markets and quarters; his sole purpose in doing so being that he got to meet them himself and put them willingly or unwillingly into his stories, which he wove together using dreams and illusions. Patti loved it all, and her weary eyes would tear up—her whole body would laugh with gusto. She told herself that the best thing she could do in her own life was to place her destiny into the hands of this magician. He could then incorporate it into the city’s very soil, till it became part of its reddish clay or the dark green of its palm trees. After all, the best way to be integrated into a recalcitrant city is through wonderful tales.

  * * *

  There was no one else in the world that al-Sharqawi loved as much as Patti. He loved her more than his own mother, who it was said gave birth to him twenty months after his father’s death. With the innate intelligence of an embryo born into sorrow, he’d sensed that life in the dusky old city without a father would be unbearable. So he’d decided to remain inside his mother’s womb till he almost turned into a piece of stone.

  He didn’t love the old American woman just because she was so generous with him (she had even been thinking about buying him a house in one of the Imran Company quarters), but also because she listened to his tales so meekly. When he finished a story, she’d shed a few tears before her entire face lit up with a burst of laughter. Once in a while, he would think about the charitable acts that this good American woman did for the street kids—and she wasn’t even a Muslim. Patti also took time to teach the suburban girls. This woman has to be a Muslim, he would tell himself. If it were up to me, I would make her head of the Scientific Council of Marrakech and its precincts. Patti was unmarried, but with her good heart, she was the one who paid attention to the ancient pulpit at the Koutoubia Mosque. It was originally made in Cordoba in the eleventh century, then was transported in pieces over the sea and by camel from the north of Morocco to the south. For centuries, the Friday sermon would ring out from its iconic tower, but then, inevitably, its engraved woodwork began to fall apart. It was pushed to a remote corner of the Koutoubia Mosque, with a disconsolate jurist seated alongside it. He chipped off small bits of tracery and claimed that they were effective treatments for people who had migraines and toothaches. Patti was the one who saved it from turning into a false sort of aspirin.

  She, along with the Metropolitan Museum, made a very generous donation which saved the woodwork and gave it new life—as a one-of-a-kind example of Islamic art. So, here was this sensitive lady, who continued to lay a place at her table for her life companion, who had died a quarter of a century ago. She always included his favorite meat and a glass of his most-cherished wine. She would ask, with a smile, if he was going to eat his lunch, because these days he ate hardly anything at all! Al-Sharqawi loved all this—and Patti too. And he loved Marrakech, the city that gave its inhabitants such wonderful stories and provided for its citizens, who were so sincere.

  * * *

  Al-Sharqawi could not believe the stories about the mummy. If it were one of the pasha’s enemies, as the gossips claimed, or one of his soldiers, or even a runaway slave, then the pasha would certainly not have gone to all the trouble of wrapping up the corpse, embalming it, and putting it in a coffin of stained wood—just to make sure that worms didn’t eat away at it inside the wall. The pasha would simply have done what Moulay Ismail did when constructing his capital city of Meknes: bury the exhausted construction workers alive inside the building itself to make them an intrinsic part of the structure’s defenses.

  It was basically impossible to fabricate a mummy out of anything but the distant past, and the whole idea of murder was ridiculous. That at least was the conviction that led al-Sharqawi to make use of every means possible to get information from the research team that was examining the mummy. He even abandoned his post at the Mamounia for the first time since he had started working there to hurry over to Patti’s place in order to tell her the story of the mummy.

  Patti was still in the Jacuzzi, bubbling water soothing her limbs. She immediately realized that al-Sharqawi’s early arrival implied that some urgent matter had come up, something that could not be delayed for a single instant. Much to the astonishment of her servants, she gave instructions that al-Sharqawi was to be admitted without delay. She was completely naked as she welcomed him, her aging body sagging somewhat. She paid no attention whatsoever to his total shock.

  Al-Sharqawi saw that she was a woman. Yes, a woman indeed—a woman who’d been murdered by a severe blow to the base of her skull which had occurred last century—or, in other words, almost sixty-five years ago. That was all there was to it. “This is the way it has to be,” said Patti, with a devilish glint in her eye.

  Al-Sharqawi went back to his post—doorman to the world, as he called it. He kept thinking about her naked body, and her flashing eyes. He told himself that when the eyes of an eighty-six-year-old woman gleamed in that way, she could still be a veritable cauldron of desire. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel any kind of revulsion toward the aged, foreign female guests at the Mamounia Hotel. He could remember well the way that they would regularly grab handsome young men by the arm, play coy, and then dance as though they had just emerged from the grave.

  * * *

  When Patti sat down to breakfast, she was still thinking of the news that she had heard. It disconcerted her. Her mind kept moving between her table in the present and another one far away—the one where she’d sat with her friend Anais in Paris back in March of 1938. The two girls had decided to go to Marrakech after a crazy week that had started when Patti opened an old newspaper and found a picture of the pasha riding horseback on the first page. He was wearing a white suit and staring up at the sky. He looked like a prince who had just sprung out of a fairy tale.

  Patti told
Anais that she was going to marry that pasha. She knew that he gazed at her in his magical way in order to seduce her. Anais had done her best to convince her friend that his violent passion was only romantic extravagance; after a noisy night in Paris it would dissolve. Still, Patti couldn’t stop herself from running all over Paris searching for details about the pasha and his life. Eventually, she learned all there was to know about his palace, his harem, his campaigns, his wealth, the nights he spent in Paris, and his piercing magical gaze, something that made him as much in vogue in Paris as jazz and cubism. No one could claim to be a man of the world if he had not sat down with the pasha at least once. Patti had gathered all these precious details, then persuaded Anais to accompany her on the scary journey into the African jungle, where the magic commander still hung severed heads on city gates, shot tigers and lions in the bush, and returned from combat to his harem of beauties, all of whom competed for his virile powers.

  * * *

  That evening, al-Sharqawi returned to Patti’s home, eager to see what effect his news had on her and whether his eyes had affected her when he’d encountered her in the Jacuzzi. He found her relaxed, her complexion blooming with total self-satisfaction, but the cause remained a mystery. All of which encouraged him to open his story box: The mummy was a woman whose identity remained unknown. Whoever entombed her had put a message into the coffin, which consisted of a gold necklace with a cross at its center.

  At this point, Patti jumped up. She would have said that she knew the woman in question and the necklace too, had al-Sharqawi not been too distracted with telling his story: “I know the lady in question . . . the youngest of three sisters brought from Syria by the pasha. She played the lute, and her two sisters danced. The pasha adored the lute-playing sister and took her with him to Paris, escorted her to a soirée at the Lido, and dressed her in clothes purchased at the finest department stores. In a single week he decked her toes in ten spectacular rings from the very finest jeweler in Paris. But then she vanished, as though the earth had simply swallowed her up. No one dared ask about her, regardless of whether the pasha was present or not. The middle sister was still alive and, with the pasha’s permission, married a merchant from the old quarter. She gave birth to the most famous singer in the city. These days, she stands by Bab ’Amala, yelling at the top of her lungs that the authorities need to hand over her sister’s body, so she can be buried and her soul laid to rest, instead of hovering between heaven and earth.”

  “What about you?” Patti asked, a sudden frown across her face. “What do you think?”

  “Me?” al-Sharqawi replied. “I don’t believe a single word of it!”

  * * *

  When Patti and Anais reached Marrakech in March of 1938, the city was bathed in an enchanting light; palm trees and orange all blended together. The city’s aromas were steeped in spices, coupled with roses and lemon blossoms, which made everyone glide as if their feet weren’t even touching the ground. It all imbued the city with an indefinable allure, one that made people fall in love in a heartbeat. So Patti didn’t even wait until she reached the pasha’s house before revealing her heart to him, offering it up in sacrifice to the sheer magic of the place. But things went awry, as they sometimes do.

  They had arrived at the pasha’s reception hall just before sunset, attended by his personal portrait artist. The entire courtyard was teeming with European guests, a few army generals, administrative officials, and grandees; the whole meeting resembled a welcoming reception like the art openings in Paris. The salons surrounding the courtyard hosted small groups of the pasha’s most important guests. In one of the salons was the pasha himself, looking well dressed as always, with a determined glint in his eyes. Patti and Anais had moved forward to greet him on a signal from the painter; the pasha had beamed a smile and held Patti’s hand in his own, while Anais finished introducing her friend. Anais then translated Patti’s description of her work to the pasha, telling him that Patti collected European paintings for museums in New York. With that, he had grabbed ahold of Anais’s hand.

  “So young?” the pasha had asked Patti.

  Patti could not reply. She had stared in amazement at the pasha’s figure, as he bent over slightly to put his arm around Anais and took her on a tour of the palace—beginning with the huge cedarwood door at the entrance, then turning right toward the doors made of inlaid wood, with carved arches painted in natural extracts of saffron and anemone. Once in a while, the pasha pointed out the gilded ceilings and the way that their leafy patterns matched the geometrical shapes on the walls. He paused in front of the lions’ claws decorating the columns and the patterned mosaics that covered them. He then brought her back to the reception hall with its own splendid columns, pointing out details concealed by the wonderful structure—wickerwork, clusters, and miniature crowns, all exquisitely proportioned. From the hall, he took her out to the Andalusian courtyard, the harem rooms, and his study. Eventually, the couple reached the private quarters, where they passed through a huge engraved doorway. The pasha escorted Anais inside and two guards closed the doors behind them.

  Patti and the pasha’s painter were left to wander around the palace until someone arrived to take them back to the hotel. Patti then spent an entire month in her room doing nothing but crying, eating, and sleeping. She didn’t see either the pasha or Anais again. The painter came to visit her every day. He spent long hours with her, painting her and talking to her about the pasha. As he began to seduce her, she started paying closer attention to him. Every time he tried to get her in bed, she told him to bring Anais first, and then he could have what he wanted. In response, he told her that it would be much easier to bring her a lion in a hemp sack.

  And then, one steaming hot day, Patti suddenly decided to go back to Paris—and then to New York. Later, she married a young man whom she had gone out on innocent strolls with. They spent many years together, traveling to remote spots to acquire rare works of art. Patti’s only search was for those obscure feelings that had overwhelmed her on the day after the mirage. Through this marriage founded on profound mutual understanding and an equally profound misunderstanding, the couple shared the experience of enormous wealth, and collusion unaffected by the ebb and flow of life. She hadn’t told her husband about her emotional collapse in the past, until the very last day of his life, when he asked her why she always cried when looking at the ugly painting she had kept—the one that had been made by the pasha’s painter. She told him that she was actually crying for Anais, whom the pasha had snatched away from her. When her husband did not seem completely convinced, she told him the whole story.

  * * *

  When al-Sharqawi told Patti about the lute player from Syria, he sensed that something bad had happened. She looked flustered and angry, and terminated their session with an insulting curtness. To get rid of this bad feeling, he headed straight for the café where his closest friends would spend many hours sipping mint tea and indulging in the kind of laughter known in Marrakech as tamshkhir. They would laugh at each other, at the city that sold itself to foreigners, at those same foreigners who sold themselves to the city, at the disputes over palm trees being destroyed by apartments, at other apartments where intimate soirées took place, at Tangier—and at laughter itself; laughter being the most stubbornly historical feature of Marrakech.

  Al-Sharqawi reached the café, where everyone was talking about the mummy. One of his friends asked him in a disgusted tone what all the fuss was about over some neglected bones in a wall. Al-Sharqawi told him that they were not just bones, but rather a long-forgotten crime.

  “All of Marrakech is full of dead men’s bones,” his other friend said. “Just dig under your own pillow and you’re sure to find a forgotten skull, or one of the bodies that the pasha used to hang in the Old Medina’s alleyways—”

  “Why dig under his pillow?” another man interrupted. “The only skull under the pillow is his own.”

  “Whose?” al-Sharqawi asked.

  “Th
e person in front of you,” the man answered.

  Al-Sharqawi turned to his friend. “Why do you put your head under the pillow?”

  “I’m scared! All the people who were beheaded come out in the dead of night,” his friend roared, his disgust turning into hysteria. “They wander around the neighborhoods and houses while people are asleep. Bodies are looking for heads, and heads for bodies!”

  “That’s all from smoking bad grass,” al-Sharqawi assured him. “You’re mixing hash with Marlboros, and it’s affecting your minuscule brain so that you’re scared to death. That’s what happens to people who abandon the old ways of clipping kif they inherited from fathers and grandfathers, and start using the kinds Christians use.”

  Al-Sharqawi told them all about the woman whose body had been found in the wall, and that caused a general commotion.

  “Which woman? God forgive us, and you! Were they a woman’s bones, a man’s, or a gremlin’s?” his hysterical friend inquired.

  “Religious scholars will grab everything. Root and branch,” al-Sharqawi replied dismissively, “while some stray remains are involved.”

  “But we’re only prepared to acknowledge flesh. So go ahead, esteemed sir, and put some flesh on those bones!”

  But al-Sharqawi insisted that there was a murder victim involved. He wanted the whole of Marrakech to know of this event, and to be aware that a crime had been committed one year, or maybe even sixty years, earlier.

  “It doesn’t matter,” his other friend said.

  “Yes, it does matter!” al-Sharqawi protested. “Sixty years ago the pasha and others were killing people just as easily as we’re drinking tea here. Those who kill suffer an incredible, never-ending punishment for it.”

  * * *

  Al-Sharqawi experienced for himself the extent of people’s involvement in his stories, as he left his house the next day and walked for over an hour deliberately through the alleys and markets of the Old Medina. Two people asked him with a snide tone what God had done with the bones in the wall. He corrected them first, by saying that it was not just a few decaying bones in the wall, but rather a complete mummy, and that on its neck was a gold necklace with a cross. Secondly, he called them heretics, and told them that Marrakech had its own mighty pharaoh whose dead were embalmed. “If he had indeed survived,” he explained, “maybe you wouldn’t be so stupid and arrogant, like the mustaches on vain and ignorant people!” And with that he’d continued on his way, the notion sticking in his throat that a significant transformation had taken place in the city.