The Matrix

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  We arrived by train in the early afternoon, in a different sunshine, beneath another sky. The sea was far behind us now, we were on the foothills of the Middle Atlas, and already my heart was beating differently. I could sense that we had left Europe behind us completely now, even those last remnants that lingered on the streets of Tangier and Casablanca. This was another world entirely, and another century – or, rather, a place where time no longer had any meaning.

  Fez, like so many cities in North Africa, is divided into two main sections: the old city or medina to the north and the French-built Ville Nouvelle to the south-west. They are separated by more than geography. One is a world of hotels, cafés and drably smart shops, flat, ordinary, and squalid in its way; the other is darkness and light, a sprawling, dreaming maze of shops and mosques and houses, where the past is everything. And all around, the hills with their vast graveyards rise above the green roofs and the square minarets.

  A car was waiting to take us to the old city, a short drive away. We halted in an open area outside the Boujeloud gate; the driver said we would have to get out there, for cars could not hope to negotiate the alleys of the medina itself.

  Something strange happened as we waited for the driver to stack our bags on the ground. Taking us for tourists, a rabble of children and young men surrounded us, offering to act as guides. Duncan said nothing, and I followed his example. Moments later, the shouting voices fell silent. A young man dressed in a white jellaba had appeared by our side and taken Duncan’s hand.

  The would-be guides fell away like flies, drifting back into the crowd from which they had come. A few continued to watch us from a safe distance, eyeing us with what seemed a mixture of awe and contempt. It was as if word had gone out that we were not to be approached. I saw other tourists, surrounded by small gaggles of tormentors who would not be put off so easily, while we walked like old inhabitants through the gate and into the old city. Behind us, our bags were being strapped on a mule, ready to negotiate the steep, winding lanes between the gate and our destination.

  It was the city of my nightmares, that much I knew at once. Tall, windowless buildings crowded in from every side, at every corner, dark, forbidding doorways marked the entrances to a hidden life carried on behind high walls. We soon turned off the thoroughfare of the Talaa Saghira into a maze of progressively narrower and darker alleyways. From time to time, we would pass the open doors of mosques and madrasas, catching tantalizing glimpses of tiles and bands of swirling calligraphy. A veiled woman would come out and hurry past us, a trader leading a heavily packed mule would shout out ‘balak, balak’, warning us to cram ourselves into the nearest doorway while he passed, a gang of children would fall silent and break off from kicking a ball in order to watch us go by.

  The city folded its withered arms about us, very dark and very old, its walls crumbling, its paving stones cracked and misplaced, its noises and smells unutterably alien to me. Alien, yet in a horrible sense, deeply familiar. I kept close to Duncan, who walked along with the nonchalant gait of someone who has returned to a place he knows well.

  The old city is shaped like an elongated basin, sloping inwards from the edges towards the centre, where the Kairouyine Mosque lies, hidden behind high walls. Our steps were always downwards, taking us deeper and deeper towards the city’s ancient heart. At last we came to a plain doorway at the end of a derb, one of the innumerable short culs-de-sac that branch off the main alleys. I do not think it had a name, or needed one. Our guide knocked at the heavy door, and moments later it was opened and we were shown inside. A short, unlit passageway led into the sudden sunlight of a tiled courtyard, its stuccoed walls blackened with age, its intricately carved archways faded and crumbling in places. Passing through a second doorway, we entered another courtyard, larger and more gracious than the first, yet in an even greater state of disrepair. Ivy hung from the high wooden latticework, weeds pushed aside the tiles about the central fountain.

  I later learned that the house had been in the same family as far back as the twelfth century, since when it had undergone numerous changes. In the fifteenth century it had served as a palace for a succession of governors, in the sixteenth it had been the home of the celebrated qadi, Bu Slimane ibn Yacoub al-Fasi, and in the eighteenth it had enjoyed a reputation for sanctity as the zawiya of a dervish order. All this I learned later from Duncan, who knew the house’s history intimately.

  A curtained doorway led to a flight of unlit wooden stairs, at whose top we found a long, wood-panelled room. I could see very little at first. The only light came through the tall latticed windows that looked out onto the courtyard from which we had just come. It lay in puzzling geometrical shapes on all manner of unguessable objects, on faded carpets and brass lamps hanging by long chains from a ceiling lost in shadow, on tall candlesticks and ebony Qur’an stands, on low tables inlaid with ivory writing, on books and reed pens and inkstands.

  The young man who had led us here vanished, leaving Duncan and myself alone in this silent room. I felt suddenly afraid. Of the unknown, certainly, for everything familiar had been snatched away from me. Of my own ability to cope with the curious demands now being made on me. Of an irrational voice in my head that trotted out rubbish about the white slave trade, and murders of foreigners in North Africa.

  But there was more than that, and I knew it, even if I could not articulate it. The room reminded me of d’Hervilly’s cold temple, there was an identical sensation of dread seeping through the carpeted walls, the same realization that I was in the presence of a very old and very powerful force of evil.

  A voice came from the far end of the room, a thin, cold voice that I almost thought I recognized.

  ‘Taqarrabu, ya rufaqa’i.’ Come close, my friends.

  Duncan went ahead of me, confident as ever. He had been here before, he knew what to expect. And whom. I followed a couple of steps behind him, straining to see more clearly in the muted light. Slowly, my eyes were growing used to the dimness.

  On a low divan at the head of the room sat an old man. When I say that he was old, you must not think I mean seventy or eighty years old. He was visibly much, much more ancient than that. Later, Duncan told me he thought he might be as much as two hundred years old. I refused to believe it at the time. Now, I am not so sure.

  He wore traditional dress, and at first I thought he might almost have been a mummy wrapped in the robes of an eighteenth-century sheikh. Long desiccated fingers lay like claws on his lap. A thin white beard straggled down towards a narrow chest. The cheeks were hollow, the mouth devoid of teeth. But the eyes were as full of life as any I had ever seen. I flinched as they caught me and held me. They had more strength in them than a young man’s hands.

  ‘Tfeddlu, glesu,’ he said, falling into the colloquial. ‘Please sit down.’

  We sat on the carpet in front of him, crossing our legs. He took his eyes from me and looked at Duncan, smiling. It was an ugly, misshapen smile. I looked away, concentrating on a band of light that fell slanting across the wall behind the old man.

  ‘Vous avez voyagé longtemps pour me rejoindre ici,’ he said, his French stilted, almost as if he had not spoken the language in a long time.

  ‘Pas du tout,’ responded Duncan. ‘Cela me fait grand plaisir de vous revoir. Et de voir que vous êtes toujours en bonne santé.’

  ‘U-nta, kif s-shiha?’

  ‘La-bas.’

  They began to talk rapidly in Moroccan Arabic, excluding me. I could make no sense of what they said, picking up only obvious words in every other sentence. Duncan was clearly in awe of our host, yet at ease with him. Tea was brought by the young man we had met earlier, sweet green tea in silver pots stuffed with fresh mint. The young man poured it into thin glasses and left it with us, sending out clouds of mint-scented steam into the cool air.

  Duncan and the old man talked at length, and as they did the light moved across the wall and grew dim. Outside, the sun was dropping, and the city was returning to darkness. I heard my n
ame mentioned more than once, though I could not understand what they said about me. The old man looked at me each time, then away again. I did not return his gaze.

  There was a brief silence, then I heard the old man speak again, and I knew that this time he was addressing me.

  ‘Wa anta, ya Andrew,’ he said, shifting to classical Arabic. ‘Limadha hadarta amami? A-anta tajir aw talib?’

  I could not grasp all he said, and turned to Duncan for help.

  ‘He asks why you have appeared before him. He asks if you are a merchant or a seeker.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It is what he once asked my grandfather. Angus Mylne came to Fez to trade in cloth and left a seeker after true knowledge.’

  ‘What did your grandfather answer?’

  ‘He does not need you to tell him that. You must give your own answer.’

  I looked at the old man. His eyes had not once left me.

  ‘Ana talib al-haqq,’ I answered. ‘I have come in search of the truth.’

  ‘Mahma kalifa ’l-amr?’

  I did not understand. I looked at Duncan.

  ‘He is asking you “Will you carry on the search whatever the price?” ’

  I felt confused.

  ‘You know I have no money, Duncan. I can’t afford to . . .’

  Duncan frowned and raised his hand gently, quieting me.

  ‘He does not mean money. Perhaps I did not translate well. Whatever the sacrifice, whatever may be required – that would be nearer the mark.’

  I felt uneasy. What did the old man want from me? What might he demand in future? I did not even know who he was.

  ‘You must trust him,’ Duncan said. ‘You must put yourself in his hands if you are to find what you are looking for.’

  I turned to face the old man. There was so little flesh on his cheeks, he might have been dead but for the eyes.

  ‘Na‘m,’ I said, ‘mahma kalifa.’ Yes, whatever it costs.

  He looked at me and smiled. I felt a little sick, watching that little toothless mouth contort itself; but I had come this far, I could not turn back. The next moment, the mouth opened and the old man spoke again, except that the voice was not his voice.

  ‘Is this all there is, Andrew? Please tell me. Tell me there’s more than this.’

  It was Catriona’s voice. They were the last words she had ever spoken to me.

  TWELVE

  His name was Sheikh Ahmad ibn ’Abd Allah, and I saw him every morning for the next month. I would sit at his feet while he read to me from the works of the medieval Arab sages and elucidated them for me. His erudition was vast, his insight the result, not of knowledge, but of direct experience. I never lost my fear of him, nor my sense that in some way he meant me great harm.

  I put the incident of Catriona’s voice down to the strain of travel, or the effect of drugs I had been given in Tangier. When I mentioned it to Duncan, he merely said that in the sheikh’s house a man might see or hear whatever was in his heart. At the time, it seemed a reasonable explanation, and one that it suited me to believe, for to have thought it anything but a self-generated hallucination might well have sent me over the edge of madness. I was wholly uprooted from all that had been familiar to me, alone and effectively stranded in a strange city that seemed to belong to another century. In consequence, I found myself turning more than ever to Duncan as the one stable point in a world without fixed referents.

  He told me a little of the sheikh, explaining that he had been responsible for introducing his grandfather to the inner world of Arab occultism.

  ‘I can scarcely believe it possible,’ I said. ‘Unless your grandfather was very old at the time, and the sheikh very young.’

  ‘This was in 1898, when my grandfather was fifty-two, about the same age I am now. In the account he left of their meeting, he wrote that the sheikh was already an old man then. My grandfather spent seven years studying with Sheikh Ahmad. I have photographs of them together: you can see them when we get back to Edinburgh. The sheikh is younger in the photographs than he is now; but he still seems about eighty or ninety.’

  ‘And you’re sure it is the same man?’

  Duncan looked hard at me.

  ‘I have been coming here for most of my adult life. There is very little I would not believe.’

  When I was not with the sheikh or Duncan, I was permitted to make use of the library. This was a vast, disorganized room on the first floor, to the north of the chamber in which the sheikh lived. It was filled from floor to ceiling with printed and manuscript texts in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Persian, Greek, and Latin. There was nothing on the shelves that dated from later than the eighteenth century. Time, it seemed, had truly stood still here.

  It was wearying work, for the texts I was set to read were frequently stultifying, and the library, though full of shadows, remained hot for much of the day. I began to spend long hours at its latticed windows, gazing out onto a courtyard that was visited by small birds and at certain hours dappled with sunshine. It served to remind me that another world still existed outside this, that I had not been swallowed entirely by the darkness.

  At the end of the first week, I asked if I were to be confined to the house, or whether I might not profit by seeing the city for myself. Duncan told me I should not be foolish, I was of course free to go where I liked and when I pleased, provided I could be sure to return to Sheikh Ahmad’s house before it grew dark.

  And so I began to explore the lanes and alleyways of old Fez, mapless, guideless, with only my own wits to lead me through the maze. I became a sort of ghost, treading almost unseen down long, murky corridors of mud and cobble between blank walls, glimpsing what I could of a world that had changed little, or not at all, in centuries.

  I saw other Europeans, Americans, Australians, small parties of Japanese, all huddled together, twittering like birds of passage on this latest stage of their travels, bright, careless people for whom Fez was merely a stage-set erected for their amusement. I never tried to join any of them, never attempted to engage them in conversation, never so much as thought to leave with one of their parties and return home. I was by now wholly remote from whatever I had once been, I had been drawn deeply into realms no rational mind could encompass.

  Each day the city revealed a little more of itself to me, at the same time shutting something else away or making clear that it had secrets which I might never penetrate. I watched tanners and dyers go about their work, stood for hours watching metal- workers hammer trays, sat with carpenters as they turned cedarwood for beds and chairs and tables. At the butchers’ shops, flies lay like a seething film on the flanks of meat. Patches of damp appeared on the sides of buildings, like sweat. Open sewers lay unattended, filling the air with their stench. I walked for hours each day, lost among sounds and sights and smells I could only partially understand. And in the late afternoon, wherever I was, I would turn back to the sheikh’s house, hurrying through the lengthening shadows, pursued by my own echoing footsteps.

  One day, when we had been about three weeks in Fez, I entered a stationer’s shop in order to buy a fresh notebook and a few pens. When I say ‘shop’, I mean one of those tiny one-room emporia that form the basis of every souk, raised up about three feet above the ground. As I was paying for my goods, I noticed that there was a telephone on the wall at the back, and I remembered my plan to ring Harriet in order to ask about Iain.

  Edinburgh seemed such a long way away, and Iain and Harriet more like characters from a book than flesh-and-blood friends whom I had last seen not many months earlier. All the same, I felt terribly guilty about having let things slip for so long, and offered the owner of the shop enough money to enable me to make a call to Britain. Impressed by my use of Arabic, he readily agreed.

  I rang Iain and Harriet’s number and felt a wave of homesickness when the familiar ringing tone began. The phone rang for over a minute before anyone answered. An unfamiliar voice came on the line, a woman’s voice, plain and noncomm
ittal.

  ‘Gillespie.’

  ‘Is Harriet there?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Harriet’s away. She’s not in Edinburgh.’

  ‘I need to speak to her. Do you know where I can reach her?’

  ‘She can’t be reached. Who is this?’

  ‘I’m a friend. I’m ringing to see how Iain is. I had a letter from Harriet saying he was ill.’

  There was a pause. I could hear the line crackling as though we were about to be cut off.

  ‘Iain is dead,’ the woman answered. I could sense an emotion in her voice, quickly suppressed. ‘He died in hospital four weeks ago. I’m very sorry if . . .’

  I put the phone down. My hand was shaking. The stationer asked if I was all right. I nodded briskly and made my escape, leaving my notebook and pens behind.

  Once or twice, looking over my shoulder as I stumbled back to the sheikh’s house, I thought I caught a glimpse of someone walking behind me. A man in a dark jellaba, as though dressed for winter, with the hood pulled up high over his head.

  I did not sleep that night. Iain had urgently wanted to see me, and I had let him down. He had died without speaking to me, and somehow this made me feel guilty, as though I had been in some way responsible for his death. I tried for several hours to compose a letter to Harriet, but each time I tore up my attempt, until I finally accepted that anything I said would only make things worse. Perhaps I could visit her when I returned to Edinburgh.

  Somewhere across the city, a wedding was in progress. The festivities would continue into the early hours of the morning, even after the groom had been taken to his bride and her bloodstained undergarments produced for friends and relatives to see as evidence of her virginity. Loudspeakers droned out a mixture of traditional music and rai, and from time to time the voices of guests would be carried on the night air, raucous and excited.