Marrakech Noir

by Yasin Adnan

  The story no longer fired people up; it had come and gone in the flash of an eye. It was almost as though some kind of curse had afflicted people, turning Jemaa el-Fnaa Square from Shahrazad into a huge kitchen reeking of garlic and chopped onions. The only thing that managed to clear the block in his throat were the greetings he received by the door of the Mamounia Hotel—from taxi drivers to buses of tourists to travel-agent employees. When they asked him about the latest developments in the case, he emerged from his gloomy mood and started rebuilding the story with all the enthusiasm of someone who would not be deterred from finding a suitable conclusion—regardless of whatever may have actually happened.

  His real task was to bring all possibilities into the story, however likely or remote they may have been. Even the authorities had declared the matter closed. Not only that, but the reports written by the archaeological experts, the official medical doctor, and the head of the Sixth District described in detail what happened and how. But he just couldn’t find any link to connect the skeleton they’d discovered to the Syrian lute player who, according to her older sister, had disappeared sixty years ago. That detail was particularly significant, since a new report had reached the procurator-general. The report claimed that a French woman named Anais had also disappeared about sixty years ago, along with a necklace with a cross that she used to fiddle with while sleeping naked in the pasha’s arms.

  * * *

  When Patti arrived in Marrakech some forty-five years after her first tragic visit, her intention was to use the city to salve the wound that was infecting her life. For some years, she had developed the habit of constructing a blooming garden in her memory, one where leafy trees would brush against each other and no disruptive plants would grow between them. She always reckoned that the nasty things that happened to people stayed in the places where they first occurred, but also remained in their memories the very same way. The only way to get them out was to come to terms with the places that served as their original stage, thus erasing the painful traces that are associated with them.

  Patti used to recall all the moments in her life that were linked to specific places. Whenever she remembered Marrakech, the sting of that evening when the pasha took Anais into his private quarters would hurt her—and of course she had never seen either of them again. So she came back to Marrakech right after a serious heart operation, believing that a profound reconciliation with Marrakech would make all the places in her life seem like the blossoming cloud that hovered over her as she emerged from the anesthesia.

  She came back to Marrakech in the midnineties, and all she could remember of the city was the huge gateway to the pasha’s palace and the painted door that was shut in her face. She could still see herself leaving on the desolate train to Casablanca Airport, feeling tense and very upset. It wasn’t because of what had happened, but rather because the pasha’s painter had insisted on giving her a painting with no artistic value. In spite of that, she had no choice but to add it to the weight of her baggage, as though she were running in the opposite direction of her dreams.

  So here she was on her second visit, as her every sense soaked up the light and pungent aroma of the city. She came to realize that mankind was the tree that concealed the city’s own forest. When that handsome warrior led her to Marrakech, he was also the reason she didn’t get to see much of the city. From that moment, he didn’t constitute a wound, but instead became a distant tale, one that was almost laughable. She would devote herself to her own narrative, whether the occasion demanded it or not, if only to dazzle her companions with this romantic madness that once swept through her life like a heavy rainstorm, only to swiftly open up a space for serenity that no sense of loss could spoil.

  Patti bought a number of mansions in the golf course section of Marrakech, far from the alleys of the Old Medina and all their sad mystery. Her practical instincts made her feel like she could make large profits from this Marrakech dream—a dream that offered an entire mountain covered with snow, and a desert where mirages and expansive gardens bloomed as though recently arrived from Andalusia.

  From the very first day, she turned down offers from agents who were used to selling riads in the city to foreigners who imagined that The Thousand and One Nights would emerge from cracks in the mosaic. Patti termed this hankering after Old Medina riads the returning colonialist syndrome: a desire to rewrite the history of colonial occupation on the basis of touristic goodwill. But having no historical hang-ups, Patti bought five mansions linking the golf course area to the pools, palm orchards, and orange groves. She started selling her rich New York friends magical stays, without sex, soirées, or tacky folkloric performances.

  During Patti’s prolonged stay in Marrakech, she herself was subjected to trickery, rip-offs, and fraud of a wide variety, but she didn’t nurse any lingering resentment about it. Sometimes she would even let herself succumb to the tricksters’ maneuvers as a kind of entertainment, regarding it all as part of the spice involved in risky ventures. When she finished repairing the pulpit in the Koutoubia and saw it on display in the Badia Palace, she had a sudden inspiration, one that occurred to her fully formed: she would donate a museum to Marrakech—where all the works of art that she had collected from China, India, South Asia, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Bukhara, Tashkent, and elsewhere around the Orient would be put on display. This international museum seemed to be the sweetest possible gift that she could give to this city, which had been known to inspire thrilling journeys of its own.

  A Moroccan government bureaucrat had suggested to Patti that she might help finance the restoration of the pasha’s palace, which could then be the site of her amazing new museum. It gave her a jolt, and she felt as though she were hovering between the earth and the sky. For the first time since her return to Marrakech, she went to take a look at the pasha’s palace. Once again, she was transported right back to that hotel room from forty-five years ago, and the tears fell. She cried because, after everything that happened, she could envision a beautiful fate being woven for her by the pasha’s own hand, like a legendary warrior who bitterly regretted the way he had treated her.

  * * *

  With the discovery of the remains, the restoration work on the pasha’s palace had stopped. The remains weren’t particularly significant in and of themselves, but the story made them appear that way. Since the authorities were more worried about the story than they were about the raw materials involved, the entire restoration workshop was closed down. The young engineer who was supervising the project began to imagine all sorts of provocative ideas that poisoned Patti’s life. “An interest in anything linked to the pasha,” the engineer suggested, “would get on the authorities’ nerves.” They were worried about the pasha’s reputation, which was that of a vicious southern commander who had been an agent of French imperialism, a coconspirator against the crown, and a terrible governor—whose name alone was terrifying enough to make people wet themselves.

  Using a subtle strategy, the authorities had set about eradicating the pasha piece by piece. They started by sequestering all the properties he had appropriated when he had a free hand over the country and its population, and ended by erasing every vestige of his era. When the pasha welcomed European grandees to his eighteen-hole golf course—Winston Churchill being chief among them—he would drink champagne, organize soirées at the lido, and hold parties in the palace hall, at which Farid al-Atrash would sing, Samia Gamal would belly dance, and Egyptian and Syrian poets would praise him. All this happened in the thirties and forties of the last century—it was also a period when most Moroccans could barely afford to buy the most meager clothes.

  When viewed through the prism of the new museum permitting the pasha to return gracefully to the city, in the form of a new artistic foundation that would once again place him on the throne in Marrakech, then the entire project became an aggressive attack on the country’s symbolic security.

  When Patti heard these astute observations from the engineer, she had a su
dden panic attack. She envisioned the very thing that had happened to Anais happening to her as well. But al-Sharqawi soon arrived to calm her with his daily stock of stories about the city, about the film stars staying at the Mamounia, about the pasha’s restaurant and dance hall, an international chain which obviously had no connection with their particular pasha, and about riads in the Old Medina.

  “Do you love the pasha?” Patti asked al-Sharqawi as he was about to leave.

  “It’s you that I love,” he replied sincerely, with a sparkle in his eye.

  She guffawed loudly, and that encouraged him to go on: “You’re more remarkable than all the pashas in the world!”

  Patti said she knew nothing about the pasha. She had received a number of books about him from the engineer, but had not opened even one of them. Ever since the very first time she had glimpsed him in the newspaper, she had always regarded him as a dream beyond reach.

  Al-Sharqawi liked toying with this idea in particular, claiming that the pasha would emerge and visit people in their dreams. Getting out of bed, people would wander around the city’s alleyways until they passed by his silent palace. They would come to realize that he was no longer to be found, since he had died in the midfifties; all that remained was the terror that could bend people’s backs, and laughter that could make people cry.

  “The pasha used to live for the love of women,” al-Sharqawi remarked. “Everything else was a swamp of illusions. He had two wives from Turkey: one was from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and the other was the daughter of al-Maqqari, the Ottoman grand vizier. When his brother died, he already had ninety-six women in his harem, and he simply added another twenty-four that he expropriated from his brother’s harem.

  “He had his own hunters in Paris, Tangier, and Marrakech,” al-Sharqawi continued, “who would supply his bed with beautiful female tourists and other companions. He used to give them valuable jewels and rolls of silk. In addition to all this, he had European lovers, among them the wives of prominent diplomats who would spend days and nights in his palace. The diplomats all knew, but they received the most incredible gifts in recompense. There were so many births, both known and unknown, that hardly a day went by without a baby being seen who looked just like him. Both the elite and general populace thought the pasha was a father to enough children to fill an entire city. In every case, people looked at the child’s features and saw the pasha’s likeness. So, my dear lady, this is the man you dreamed of marrying. Had you done so, today you would be the most miserable woman in the entire world.”

  “But I still have the dream, even though I didn’t win the pasha’s heart!” Patti said with a laugh.

  * * *

  Not even a week went by after the discovery of the remains before amazing things started to happen across town. They all emerged from stories told by al-Sharqawi. He insisted that they were fresh and came from sources whose veracity could not be doubted.

  The story of the savage beating with no known assailant had now extended, and had claimed some new victims among the archaeologists and local authorities. Then the mummy escaped, and people started to see the dead corpse roaming the pasha’s palace, still wrapped in its shroud, by Bab Doukkala. The mummy vanished for a while then reappeared by the Telouet Kasbah. One of the restoration workers saw it playing golf without a club or ball at the course where dirt and dead trees were piled up. Patti and al-Sharqawi saw it in the Jacuzzi, warming its decrepit bones. Each time the rumors initially amazed people, but before long, popular enthusiasm elevated them to a level of unadulterated truth.

  As part of this general fever, al-Sharqawi grew moody and unpredictable, slamming doors at the Mamounia Hotel right in the face of visiting tourists, especially after people demanded to hear some of his amazing stories. These feelings grew more pronounced when Marrakech started preparing for the crowning of Jemaa el-Fnaa as a World Heritage Site. For many years, that square had been his square. As night fell, he would establish his circle of listeners, and they would grow and grow till they became a swarm of bees buzzing around his tales. At night’s end, he would send them all away. But what happened had happened, and he was no longer who he had been, and neither was the square itself.

  He used to recite from The Thousand and One Nights, from the sagas of Abu Zayd al-Hilali, Antarah Ibn Shaddad, and Sayf Ibn Dhi-Yazan; about the tales of the jinn, sorcerers, and also pious men of God. Then, a nasty worm made its way into his little mind and urged him to start including contemporary tales into his evening sessions. He discovered that the pasha was a very dynamic subject, one that the people of Marrakech listened to carefully. They were secret stories that had never seen the light of day:

  The pasha, alone at night in his palace, walking around his bed, using sweeping arm gestures to dispel the sounds of legions of people fleeing his fighters as they advanced in the High Atlas, while being fired at by a 77mm Krupp gun, the only one of its kind in the entire kingdom—the one that Hasan the First had given to al-Madani al-Klawi, so that he could exert complete control over the south, as far as the edges of the Sahara.

  Then there’s the pasha, left on his own and scared out of his wits in his dark room, as he goes through his daily ritual of experiencing visions of precisely the same kind of terror that people felt when thinking about his own tyrannical behavior. There would be a grisly hour of panic, weeping, and groveling as he imagined his brother al-Madani coming through a crack in the door, even though he was dead, and yelling at him: “You’re no use to anyone! France is stronger than you are and so is the tribe! The only thing bigger than you is what’s between your legs!”

  The pasha would listen, as his brother spoke to the French general: “It’s just a dagger. I’ll stab him and then put it back in its scabbard.”

  The pasha would prostrate himself at al-Madani’s feet and beg him to let him have just a little bit of his cunning, so he could feel something other than raw fear.

  The pasha used to dress the Syrian lute player in ten jewels, one for each toe. He would ask her to dance on his chest like Samia Gamal, as though she were dancing in a demon’s palm.

  The pasha frothed at the mouth in rage because the caid, Hmmu, would put on a big show of opposing the French while he was actually biding his time, never missing an opportunity to show his contempt for the pasha as an agent of colonialism.

  The pasha had dreams of liberating the Telouet Kasbah from the clutches of his brother and nasty brother-in-law who stuck in his craw.

  The pasha’s enormous harem consisted of Egyptian and Syrian dancers, Turkish lute players, and Chinese masseuses.

  Then the pasha was involved in a parade that he’d organized to welcome Theodore Staigh, Lyautey’s deputy, with the aim of providing proof that the deputy’s predecessors had been right about the pasha, and also to convince the people that the presence of France in this difficult country was something to which he was personally committed, no matter the cost. Up to that point, it had already cost France fifteen thousand deaths, while the number of Moroccan souls lost was 400,000.

  Al-Sharqawi was convinced that the pasha was one of Marrakech’s greatest miracles. He spared nothing in providing details of the huge parade, one in which Hmmu played a leading role in order to scare the newly arrived official, while the pasha’s goal was to impress him. He described the way the procession set out from Marrakech toward Mount Tichka, amid crowds of tribesmen who lined both sides of the road of melted ice. They were ready at any moment to pick up and carry the cars in the official procession across the valleys and muddy roadways. Once the French delegation reached the Tichka crossing, they found white goat-hair tents set up to receive them. Thousands of horsemen surrounded them, firing dozens of continuous shots under instructions from the pasha, as a way of greeting the newly arrived French official. The 200,000 shots fired left a cloud of smoke that lingered in the Tichka sky for a considerable time.

  Al-Sharqawi used to bind the people listening to him to what he referred to as the new eternity, and yet
the level of fear associated with the pasha’s name led people to ask themselves whether the authorities supported his remarkable tale.

  Then one evening the authorities arrived and grabbed al-Sharqawi from the middle of his circle. For several months, he was gone. When he finally came back to Marrakech, he was a broken man—and once again the doorman at the Mamounia Hotel.

  On the very first day back at his job, a shy passerby approached and asked, “Wasn’t it the pasha who killed Hmmu so the entire scenario with the French could be cleaned up?”

  “Yes,” al-Sharqawi replied. “He’s the one who killed him. There’s no doubt about that. But it had nothing to do with the French. He wanted to marry Halima, the caid’s wife, and get ahold of Hmmu’s harem, which included the gorgeous Mina, al-Haddad’s daughter!”

  Before the passerby moved on, al-Sharqawi stopped him. “Make very sure,” he cautioned the man, “that you don’t tell that to any other human being!”

  * * *

  Other stories later took over and replaced the tale of the mummy. But Marrakech never forgot stories, even though it may have pretended to do so. It left them burning in the ashes, but only in order to bring them out again at the right moment, to use them to provide warmth on chilly nights.

  Work began again on the restoration of the pasha’s palace and people went back to the old stories; and, indeed, the old stories returned to the old square.