Jemaa
Dusk came early that evening. The sun congealed on the horizon in a thick red clot, and dark, low clouds added to its intensity. Spirals of woodsmoke rose from the clustered roofs of the souks, and the calls of the muezzins rang across the square. It was the hour of prayer, of ablutions, when shopkeepers shutter their stores in the souks and head homewards. So it was on that evening two or perhaps five or ten years ago, just as it is tonight. I had set up on the south-eastern side of the square, near where the Rue Moulay Ismail leads into the Jemaa, past the pink stone steps of the post office, past where the Chleuh boy dancers perform their sexual routines and offer themselves up to clients, their movements leaving nothing to the imagination. I say this neither as a moralist nor as a prude, for I am not easily shocked, but I must admit that sometimes I have to look away, even as I benefit from the crowds that gather around the boys.
Since the events of the night of which I am about to speak, however, I no longer sit in my old location. It may be that I am superstitious, but the memories associated with the place are too painful. So nowadays I lay down my kilim on the other side of the square, next to the brightly lit citrus stalls and adjacent to the police station. It allows me to relate my stories in peace even as I keep a cautious eye on the goings-on around me. There are times when the sight of a young female tourist, often the merest glimpse of a shoulder, or a glint of dark eyes mirroring the sulphur lamps is enough to bring back that dreadful evening and throw off my concentration. Then I have to scramble to retrieve the threads of my lines and remember what it was that I was engaged in telling. But this happens only rarely. I am well known among the storytellers of the Jemaa for the ease of my narration, the strength of my lines, the versatility of my imagination, and for pausing only for queries from children. Or, at least, that is the way it used to be before those two unfortunates vanished into thin air, irretrievably changing the course of many lives, not least my own, and leading to the disgrace of my headstrong brother Mustafa’s arrest and imprisonment. But I’m getting ahead of myself, and perhaps I ought to defer for a moment to the fortuitous appearance of my friend Aziz, who was among the first to sight the strangers that evening before they ventured into the chaotic darkness of the square.
Riad
Aziz had brought a pot of mint tea and a few glasses. As he passed them around, a flock of pigeons swept over our heads to the far end of the square, where a group of brightly clad tourists was emerging from the souks. The birds advanced in a frenzy of wings, and Aziz stood watching them for a moment. The twilight air was rose-tinted and clear, and you could still see through the gathering darkness. The pigeons moved in a funnel across the square and one of the tourists, a young woman with long blond hair, ran after them, laughing. Aziz followed her with smiling eyes; then he took a seat in the middle of my circle of listeners and I suddenly noticed that he had on the same olive-green jellaba he’d been wearing on the evening of the disappearance. It induced in me an unexpectedly physical sensation of being transported back in time. I recoiled a little, which Aziz must have noticed because an uneasy look crossed his face. He was silent for a moment longer than manners merited, and when he began speaking, it was in an undertone of distress, even regret.
Thank you for inviting me to speak, Hassan, he said, and paused, his dark eyes glittering. What do you want me to tell your listeners? Perhaps I should begin with a word about myself? All right? Very well. My name is Aziz. I come from a small village near Laayoune, in the Western Sahara. I am a waiter in the restaurant of the Riad Dar Timtam, in the heart of the medina, and on the night that Hassan speaks of, I was nearing the end of my workday.
He paused again, searching for words, his gaze remote with the effort of remembering. I did not intervene but let him take his time, recognizing the importance of accuracy. His words softer than before, he went on: It was around seven in the evening. I was nursing a headache occasioned by the strange dream I’d had the previous night, of walls of sand advancing on the Jemaa and swamping everything in their path. It was terrifying, and I recall sharing it with you, Hassan, in an attempt to understand its meaning.
He did not look at me as he spoke, his eyes half-closed in concentration. Sipping his tea slowly, he continued: I was still thinking about that dream when they came in from the street – the two outsiders – from the direction of the Souk Zrabia, where, in the old days, the slave auctions were held in the hours before sunset. As they hesitated on the threshold, casting long shadows, I hurried forward to greet them. At once I sensed something different about them. The girl was a gazelle, slender, small-boned, with large, dark eyes, and considerably shorter than her companion. She did all the speaking, accompanying her words with graceful gestures and appearing to anticipate perfectly his wishes. The boy was darker, his skin the colour of shadows cast on sand. He reminded me of an Arab nobleman, tall, with thin limbs and black hair, with something in his erect carriage that suggested otherworldliness. They seldom looked at each other, but when they did, their eyes seemed transfixed by the other’s presence.
Aziz took another sip of tea and I glanced at our rapidly growing audience. They sat quiet and attentive, their faces thoughtful in repose. The moon had just come out, the air was soft and luminescent, and Aziz threw off his blanket and straightened his back, obviously growing in confidence as he recalled concrete details.
They asked for a quiet setting, he continued, and since it was crowded inside the restaurant, I escorted them to the courtyard, where there was a scattering of tables amid citrus trees and flowering shrubs. They chose an especially dark spot in the corner – they seemed to gravitate towards darkness. I brought them water, and when they looked at me, their eyes shone like candles. That disconcerted me, and when the slender youth asked me a question, I couldn’t meet his gaze. His companion’s eyes had the equally unnerving quality of seeming to rest on me and on something else at the same time. That was when it occurred to me, with a kind of guarded premonition, that Death had entered the Riad in the guise of that beautiful youth and maiden.
Unsettled, I pleaded a sudden bout of fatigue and asked my friend Abdelkrim to attend to them instead. He agreed that there was something exceptional about them. He told me later that even as they ate, he recalled, abruptly and without reason, the flowering trees that had greeted him many years ago when he’d first come to Marrakesh. It was the strangers’ gentleness that most moved him, he said, unlike the effect they’d had on me. I found his equanimity reassuring, and when the couple had finished eating, I returned to serving them myself. They asked for mint tea, which the youth drank thirstily, without looking up from his glass, while the maiden gazed at him with a tenderness that set my own heart racing. The winter night fanned a cool breeze. There were no other guests. I went back to my station and let them be with their thoughts amidst the courtyard’s lanterned silence.
Aziz had spoken in a level, restrained tone and now he glanced at me as if to seek my approval before continuing. I nodded, and he resumed speaking, but in a higher voice that betrayed a note of anxiety:
These were my thoughts as I watched them leave that evening. They went out as quietly as they’d come in. She held his hand while he walked erect like a sentinel. The streets breathed darkness; they were swallowed up by it. I recall glancing up at the sky: the clouds had formed a double ring around the moon, which was a peculiar shade of red.
When I returned to the courtyard to clean their table, I saw that their glasses were ice cold, with condensation forming around the rims, even though I had served the tea steaming hot. I brought it to Abdelkrim’s attention and his eyes grew wide in disbelief. Then he pointed to the ice inexplicably encrusting the mint leaves at the
bottom of the teapot.
Aziz shook his head slowly, his gaze fixed on the ground.
I went out into the street to smoke a cigarette and calm myself. The night had turned hazy and cold. Most of the shops in the souks had shuttered their doors. Only a few shafts of light from lanterns pierced the shadows. I sat on a stoop, nursing my cigarette and attempting to convince myself that there is simply no explaining some things.
Truth and Method
Aziz sighed and looked about the square as if trying to find some escape from the memory. He moved his shoulders uneasily, glancing at me in the hope that I would offer some explanation. But I said nothing. What could I have said? His experience had been of the same order as everything else that evening.
Aziz sighed again. Without trying to convey the association of the ideas behind the words, he said: I suppose there is always the expectation that telling others will help in understanding.
Understanding what? I asked, and he flushed as if I had posed a particularly obtuse query. Why, what happened to them, of course, he said.
I felt the need to reassure him. I hadn’t realized the memory of his encounter was so fraught with misgivings. Rising to my feet, I walked over and embraced him. In a reassuring tone of voice, I said: Those two young unfortunates weren’t visitors from the netherworld, my dear Aziz, they were human in every sense. To contend otherwise would be to give way to errant superstition, and there’s been enough of that already concerning the events of that evening.
Aziz shook his head and said mournfully: What you fail to see, and what I have probably failed to communicate adequately, is the great distraction those two strangers have been for me. Unlike you, I’m no teacher of life; I’m a humble man, a waiter in a café, and a modest devotion to duty is all I can offer to complement your storytelling expertise. When something happens for which there is no explanation, it unmoors me.
I understand, I said.
He cast a despondent glance at me. Do you, really? Perhaps you do. After all, you’re a master of memory. More than most, you know about these things. All the same, can anyone truly know what it means to be human in this day and age? Is it possible to know what darkness resides in the heart of man? I ask these questions because it seems to me that there are times when the truth hardly matters any more, though of course one cannot dispense with it. It’s what makes sense – what really makes sense to oneself – that counts for me.
I’d been standing next to him; now I moved away and addressed my circle of listeners. I didn’t speak to any particular member of the group, but my gaze fell on each in turn as they sat cloaked in their blankets and hanbels, rapt absorption in every line of their faces. Speaking slowly, in an even, unhesitating tone, I said:
Certainly it is possible to know what elements constitute a man. Consider me, for instance. You know me as Hassan, the storyteller, for that is how I’ve chosen to introduce myself. I come from the highlands, and I am here to entertain you, because that is my calling, as it was my father’s and his ancestors’ before him. All around me the city spreads out its wares – its many narratives – and I survey them as if from a high place and determine which are worth the telling and which must remain untold, consigned, perhaps with good reason, to the darkness of oblivion. You have gathered around me in the expectation that my imagination is what it used to be, that you can rely on it and on my powers of narration. Tonight, however, I have set up things differently. Tonight I invite you to marry your memories with mine and trace an event altogether unlike any other in our experience. What will that entail? More than anything else, our trusting one another, because it is this element of trust that will give our investigation its freedom, its boldness and tenacity. But who can be the guarantor of its truth? And who among you will stand up and testify that there was indeed a story such as the one that we are now engaged in telling? For each of us carries deep within ourselves a chamber filled with secret memories, and it is a place we would rather not reveal.
The Crow Tree
I paused for a moment to catch my breath, and as I did the moon crested the ramparts of the medina, its light bringing the houses surrounding the Jemaa into relief. A chill came with its ascent. I put on my cloak, and some of my listeners, loosening the blankets tied around their jellabas, drew them over their heads. One of them, a heavily bearded cleric, now raised his hand and spoke quickly and with an intensity that commanded attention. He was a swarthy man of middle age. Although he wore rustic clothing, his voice was remarkably sophisticated, and I felt in him a keen and discriminating intelligence.
Of course what you say sounds reasonable, he said quizzically, but there’s a plan behind it. It’s patterned to a particular end, and that is the absolution of your brother from the crime he freely admitted to committing.
I gazed calmly at him.
If a pattern does exist, I replied, it is aimed at one thing only: the investigation of the truth – the simple, vital truth at the bottom of all experience. As for my brother, I will not conceal my hope that if each of us can be true to our memories of that evening, if we spare no pains and recount everything thoroughly, we will end by lighting on what now lies concealed. And we’ll do much better work if we return to the same starting point, if we dig deeper every time and go a bit further in understanding.
My interlocutor remarked politely and non-committally that he found my faith in imagination touching.
It isn’t as much imagination as memory, I answered.
Which is nothing but imagination, he countered, isn’t it? Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases rivers of longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.
I refused to be provoked.
I am driven by the need for truth, I replied firmly. My brother is in prison for a crime he did not commit. I want to find out what put him there. It is a difficult task, I agree, but it isn’t impossible.
His smile was sceptical.
You don’t seem to realize that your truth is a paradox, because memories can be imagined, he said. Armed with your arsenal of intentions, you are setting out to explore the events of that evening – but as fiction, not as remembered fact. Where is the centre, the point of orientation, in this game of shadows?
The centre is where the heart is, I replied determinedly.
His mouth turned down. He drew his blanket around himself.
You’re weaving a mythology around a crime. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that is how it seems to me. Faced with the terrible fact of your brother’s guilt, you are attempting to spin a web between yourself and reality. When the memory is indistinct, the imagination becomes infinite – and the beautiful illusion is always preferable to the truth, especially if it is ugly.
I am not weaving anything, I responded. If it is a spider’s web, it isn’t one of my making. My endeavour is different. I want to unravel it.
For a moment he stared at me with a disconcerting intensity. The rest of my audience might not have existed for all the sign he gave of acknowledging their presence. Abruptly he bent his body in a stiff bow and a faint smile of irony seemed to crease his lips. When he straightened up, he waved his hand and said coolly: You have great faith in language and its ability to communicate.
One must believe in something, I said quietly.
But what if the narrator is flawed and his motives unreliable?
I hesitated for an instant, aware of the danger of alienating my audience before the evening had even begun. Deciding to qualify myself, I said conciliatorily: I’m sorry. Perhaps I haven’t explained myself well. Surely the evening’s narrative will assuage your suspicions?
He did not acknowledge the apology but said instead, all the while maintaining a stand-offish tone: Inshallah, we shall see.
I returned his courtesy, my head held high.
After a short pause, I resumed speaking:
Allow me, then, to take you back to that evening. Although it seems unlikely that we should lose our way on t
his journey, rest assured that, given the nature of the event, we will. Our varying recollections will erase every familiar landmark: the mosques and the minarets, the souks and the qaysarias, the square speckled with pigeon droppings and the maze of alleyways leading into it. Beneath our feet, the very ground will crumble to dust, while overhead, the red sky of Marrakesh will undergo so many metamorphoses that we will consider ourselves fortunate in the end to have any sense of orientation left.
But all that is in the future. For the moment, our point of departure is the needle of the Koutoubia Mosque as it casts its shadow in the direction of the Jemaa. We commence tentatively as in a dream, following the needle as it inches across the Avenue Mohammed V and past the row of calèches that wait patiently for customers through the heat of the day and the coolness of the evening. Between the seventh and eighth carriages, in the shadowy darkness of the Place Foucauld, a noble cypress dwarfs its neighbours, mirroring, as it were, the mosque’s towering minaret. I call that cypress the Crow Tree, owing to the multitude of desert crows that nest in its branches. It was the latter that alerted me to the unusual nature of events that were to follow that evening, their agitation a sure sign that something was amiss.
There were other signs. The city smelt of ashes. The rose-carnelian moon was full, with a ring of light around it. An unnaturally damp wind blew down from the mountains, soaking the head in chill. Later, a red fork of lightning dried up the air, its splatter of light flaying the streets.
Despite all these omens on the evening of the strangers’ disappearance, I set up in my usual place, with an obtuseness that still surprises me, and prepared to begin my session of storytelling.
The Acrobat
Who was it that first drew my attention to the streak of lightning? Or to the disconnected clap of thunder at twilight which preceded the lightning rather than the other way around? Was it Tahar, the trapeze artist? Let me think; this imperfect memory will be my failing.
The Storyteller of Marrakesh Page 1