Some of the streets were packed with furious activity—men bearing loads, women haggling for greens, and artisans creating tools for daily life; other streets stood in a state of suspended animation, with nothing more lively than a sleeping cat (I saw no dogs, but then, this was a Moslem country). Earlier, the rooftops had brought to mind a honeycomb; now, the streets around me evoked the life within a hive, some corners almost deserted, others bustling with the same sense of incomprehensible purpose.
I continued north until I came to the city walls, and another gate. There I spooned up a bowl of harira that tasted entirely different from yesterday’s, followed it with a bowl of spicy fava beans swimming in oil, made my dessert out of three sugary dried figs, then bought a handful of pistachios and perched on a bit of collapsing wall in front of a Moroccan druggist’s shop, tossing away the shells and watching the French guards.
Sitting before the gates brought an odd sensation. I did not think that I had ever been there before—certainly there was no sense of memory attached to the scene—yet it was deeply familiar: the wall, the gate, and the guards; the aged olive tree overhead, under which women sat with their children and rested before carrying their burdens to homes outside the walls. A water-seller with tiny tinkling bells filled cups with water from a swollen goatskin slung across his shoulder (the sight stimulated another sensory rush: taste of metal/mouth filled with warm and musty water/two dark companions and then it was gone). A fortune-teller drowsed on one side of the gate, waiting for customers; on the other side, a blind storyteller sat in a patch of sun against the wall with a dozen children at his feet. The storyteller was too far away to hear, but still a voice seemed to murmur in my ears, in another language …
Hebrew. In the square before the Water Gate … those who sit at the gate … at the threshing floor by the entrance to the Samarian gate … in the gateways of the city, Wisdom makes speech.
I found myself smiling at this transferred image of city gates where, since time immemorial, the people of a town gathered, for news and flirtation, sanctuary and entertainment, food, drink, and the dispensation of justice, all under the close watch of the guard.
And these guards were attentive, give them that. The soldiers eyed every person going in or out. Those with loads, on their heads or strapped to beasts, were examined more closely. A man with a donkey laden high with greenery from the fields—at least, I assumed there was a donkey beneath the green mountain, though all I could see were hooves and an ear—had to pull bits off before he was permitted to drive his beast onward. The only time the guards relented was when a weary and travel-stained family came to the gate: a pregnant woman, her mother, and a very old man, with three children, the oldest a boy of perhaps ten. The ancient man was balanced on a donkey that looked as old as he; the family’s worldly goods were carried in ragged bundles by even the youngest, a child no more than three. This group of travellers the guards treated gently, with a nod of respect for the ten-year-old head of the family, a pat on the head-scarf of the little girl. The family went by, their eyes locked into the faraway stare of those who have watched more than they could take in. Refugees?
After a time, as I sat shelling and chewing and watching the crowds, I became aware of a nearby conversation in French. Four young men, Moroccans in European clothing, were drinking coffee outside a nearby café. Two of the three facing my direction bore on their foreheads the distinctive dark circle indicating regular prayer, but apart from that, their dress, their manufactured cigarettes, and their attitude of studied indolence declared them representatives of the local intellectual class. The hive drones, as it were. They did not care much for the French soldiers, although French writers, artists, and philosophers seemed to be acceptable. Short of joining them at their table, I could not overhear all they said, but I heard enough to suggest a degree of political turmoil, even anger, amongst the Fasi intelligentsia.
The word reef (rif?) was used, the names Abd el-Krim and Lyautey, the Sherif and the Sultan: Lyautey was said with scorn (though lowered voices suggested a degree of authority there) and the Sultan with caution, while the Sherif and Abd el-Krim seemed equally divided between support and doubt.
One of the quartet in particular was growing increasingly hot under the collar. It came to a head when one of the others said something I did not hear, and he slapped his glass down on the table and made a loud declaration in which the only clear word was Raisuni.
The others instantly hushed him, glancing towards the gate. When they saw one of the soldiers looking their way, the four made haste to toss down some coins, and the little salon faded away into the city.
Political intrigue amongst the Mediaeval stone-work.
I finished my pistachios, and watched a trio of donkeys laden high with brightly coloured hides leave the city, as laden donkeys had been leaving cities for thousands of years. I studied the glimpse of land through the gate. There was no reason to believe that any French soldier cared a sou for my existence; on the other hand, walking through that carved archway might prove my final act as a free woman. Best to feel my way around the suq a while longer.
My clockwise route along the city walls was hit and miss, the public routes often losing sight of them entirely. As I turned south, the air began to smell less and less salubrious; indeed, had it not been for the studied nonchalance of the locals, the stench would have tempted me to cover my face.
It was a tannery, built along the river. A trio of peculiar-looking women went by, under the care of a French-speaking Moroccan, and only when they had passed did the reason for their bizarre appearance occur to me: They were Europeans. I turned immediately to follow, meandering along in their wake, where I thus learned that the stink was indeed a tannery, the source of all that gorgeously coloured Moroccan leather, and the reason for its stink was the pigeon droppings used as part of the process.
Or so the guide claimed.
But then, he also claimed that his very brother was the shopkeeper selling leather goods, and that the prices were especially low just for his clients, and that the Prince of Wales had bought a cigar-case of precisely that design, Madame.
But I ambled along within hearing for two reasons. First, their language. Since coming to this place, I had heard several tongues. Some were a closed book to me. My Arabic had been rusty, although it was improving rapidly, and in French I was relatively fluent. But the language these ladies spoke amongst themselves slid over me like a well-worn glove: English.
The other reason was a pair of names one of the ladies said after a couple of aeroplanes flew noisily over our heads, headed north like a pair of worker bees tracking a source of nectar.
“Oh look!” the stout grey-haired lady exclaimed. “It’s the French RAF!”
“Ivy,” the tallest of the trio said, “I don’t believe the French have a royal anything.”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Are they bombing someone?” she asked the guide. The tall one translated, then gave Ivy his answer. “He says, they’re not bombing yet, just watching. What they call ‘aerial surveillance.’ ”
“Oh, is it Raisuli?”
“No, Ivy, it’ll be that Krim fellow. Now, what do you say we ask the fellow to take us to lunch?”
“Here in the medina? Do we dare?”
“We should go back to the hotel, where we know it’s safe,” the third one worried.
But I did not listen to the debate. I wanted to seize the tall one and demand further information: the name Raisuli—or Raisuni—made the guide as uncomfortable as it had the three café intellectuals. But since physical assault on an Englishwoman was not a good idea, I had to make do with following—close enough to hear, but distant enough not to alert their guide.
Fortunately, they turned back towards the crowded parts, pushing past the big mosque and madrassa that swelled into the myriad of tiny lanes like a pair of queen cells distorting the rigid lines of the comb—I caught my thoughts. What was this fascination my poor brain had with bees?
In
any event, the mosque was banned to the three Unbelievers (indeed, even I would not care to risk an entrance, despite my present dress), although all three went past as slowly as possible, craning their heads at the forbidden land. While in those crowded lanes I decided that I had probably not in fact been a pick-pocket—or if so, a raw amateur at the game. Surely an experienced professional would not have been able to resist the rich pickings available, literally brushing her fingertips?
But I came out of these tightly-packed alleys with nothing more than one withered apple.
The trio, on the other hand, came out more than a little flustered. The worried one seemed not far from tears, and even the tall one was short-tempered. Time, she demanded, for luncheon.
The guide jollied them along to the establishment of a cousin, which turned out to be in a sort of plaza where two roads came together, very near the first gate I had seen on the previous afternoon. I thought, by the expressions on his clients’ faces, that his cut from the “cousin’s” business would have to be large to make up for the gratuity these three were no longer going to give him, but they entered the white-clothed café with the air of travellers lost for weeks amidst desert dunes, and the maitre d’ clucked over them like a broody hen.
I looked down at what I wore, and the state of my once-new yellow slippers, and knew that there was not a chance in hell that I should be allowed inside.
Still, I was loath to part entirely with such a valuable source of information. In an hour, maybe two, they might be sufficiently restored to their British indomitability, ready to plunge again into the fray, dropping nuggets of Intelligence behind them.
I wandered off, bought and ate various foodstuffs that, I was sure, were far tastier (and probably more hygienic) than the pseudo-French dishes my three countrywomen were being fed. I even dared to sit for a time, parked just inside one tiny establishment, eating scraps of spiced chicken from a skewer while the two men beside me argued politics in Arabic (neither the name Raisuli nor Krim came up, and the men seemed divided on the benefits of the French on trade). When I moved to an equally diminutive tea shop down the way, a similar argument held sway. And a leisurely purchase of some salted almonds gave me insight into the views of the two shopkeepers on opposite sides of the “street,” separated by ten feet of roadway and ten miles of opinion.
Yes, I found many things in the course of that day wandering the Fez suq—or rather, if the ladies were correct, medina. I found sights and smells and a world I’d never have guessed existed. I found enough distraction to make me forget for minutes at a time my impossible situation and even, occasionally, my headache. I found a Mediaeval city being whirled headlong towards the twentieth century, yet secure enough in its identity not to be frightened by that speed. I found a tight-knit and age-old community that opened affectionate arms to outsiders. I discovered patterns in its confusion, humour in its voices, beauty in its decay.
And dark trouble at its edges.
What the refugee family and quartet of intellectuals had made me wonder and the vigilance of the soldiers had underscored, what the opinions of the shopkeepers confirmed and the military aeroplanes emphasised—and the English ladies nearly stated aloud—was confirmed by that lunch-time hour amidst the hurly-burly of the medina.
Morocco was, it seemed, a country feeling the ugly stirrings of civil war.
With the Front just to the north of Fez.
CHAPTER FOUR
I wandered back towards the white-draped restaurant, pausing to take on a supply of sweetened almonds and dried mulberries, drinking another glass of mint tea, adding a small pen-knife to my arsenal, and a cheap cotton handkerchief. My path described a circle, and as I drew near the French café, a means of lingering occurred to me. I stopped at a fruiterer’s stand to buy five oranges. Across from the café was a deserted doorway with a step. I evicted a sleeping goat, spread the handkerchief before my feet, put two 25 centime coins in it, took out the oranges, and began to juggle. Three oranges became four, and then five—to my astonishment, a couple of white-draped ladies added coins—and then, when the stir at the front of the café proved to be the foreign trio, I dropped one, and the act collapsed. My audience, composed of one muleteer, a swathed lady, and three filthy children, dispersed as well, leaving me my coins but snatching two of the oranges.
I hastily gathered the remaining fruit and the money, and followed the ladies—who, as I’d anticipated, were restored and ready for more.
I listened to the English conversation drifting back—the café’s food, a trip outside the city they were considering—and felt as if I’d stepped inside my own home. My headache even receded.
“—do not think it advisable,” the worried one was fretting.
“But the driver said we’d be quite all right.” This was the tallest, horsey in type and in face.
“Ethel, he’s French.”
“Ivy, even the French don’t like to put paying customers in the path of danger. The Front is considerably farther north.”
“But the roads will be filled with soldiers. And you know how they can be.”
“I think we should go south instead,” Miss Worry insisted. “We might even have enough time to go to Erfoud, and see the dunes.”
“You and your sheikhs,” Ethel scoffed.
She pronounced it sheeks, but I hardly noticed, because when her friend said the word Erfoud, it had set off an echo, reverberating through my skull.
Erfoud: blonde curls/the grit of sand/ “Action!” /the dust-smell of baking canvas/vast blue sky—
Then it was gone, leaving me pounding on the closed door of memory.
I must have stood for half a minute, staring at nothing, before the urgent cries of “Bâlek! Bâlek!” penetrated, causing me to shift to the side an instant before the laden donkey shoved past. I hastened after it until I reached the ladies—but this time the guide caught sight of me. He frowned. I turned away, fishing one of the oranges from my pocket, and leant against a wall to peel it, to give a reason for dawdling.
The three continued to debate the advisability of visiting the outskirts of what my morning’s eavesdropping had convinced me was, if not a Front, at least the buildup to one. France, unhappy with the incursions of mountain rebels into the areas it controlled, seemed to be drawing a line in the sand—or rather, across the mountains. Fighting was sporadic, but the medina was certain that outright war was not far away.
Granted, those had been people who spoke in the same breath of spirits—afrits—and of the miracles of the itinerant holy men called marabouts; perhaps I should not be too certain of their judgment.
Then the ladies’ guide spoke a word that made me drop half my orange: horloge.
Clock.
Nothing about sorcerers, but it caught my attention, and I waited impatiently as the women crept through the lanes at an escargot’s pace.
When he gathered their wandering attention and directed it upward, I had to wonder if perhaps my assurance with French was misguided. On the wall overhead was a series of thirteen protruding beams, each of which held a low, wide bowl. A clock?
I drew out a second orange as he launched into an explanation that made it instantly clear that he had no idea what the object overlooking this scrap of bazaar was: Tradition claimed it was some elaborate Arabic waterclock, and thus it was known, throughout the ages, despite having neither mechanism nor display.
Ethel was not convinced, either. After she’d listened to his incoherent explanation, she pulled a face and said, “It looks more like a series of door-bells to me.”
Then Ivy noticed that the object brushing her shoulder was the lower lip of a camel’s skinned head, hanging before a butcher’s shop. The doorbell-clock was instantly forgotten, and the guide made haste to lead them towards a nearby madrassa—here it was pronounced madersa—that was open to English ladies. As they went past him, he shot me a hard glance. From here on out, following them would require a great deal more effort.
It was the middle of
the afternoon, and I would have given half of all I possessed—which, granted, was not much—to be permitted to curl up quietly for a few hours. The slippers did nothing to cushion my feet from the hard stones, my various bruises were clamouring, my head had begun to feel somewhat detached. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I needed to sit. I did not have to stand and wait for them to emerge from the madrassa.
I was folding the last-but-one segment of the orange into my mouth, preparatory to walking up the street to a stall selling various juices, when I became aware of a hand, thrust in my direction.
It came as something of a surprise, since the few beggars I had seen were old or leprous.
The importuning hand was small and dirty, as was the child to which it was attached. It was also stubborn.
As, judging by the expression on his face, was the child.
I put the final orange segment on the grubby palm. It vanished; the child did not.
“Be gone,” I ordered, an Arabic phrase that came readily to my lips.
To my amazement, instead of retreating or thrusting the open palm back at me, he reached to grab my hand.
I snatched it back. “No! Go away.”
He took a backwards step, then another. He was a handsome child, with black hair, light brown eyes, white teeth, and a face so open and innocent, I was filled with suspicion. The expression his appealing features wore seemed oddly expectant. I glanced behind me, wary of some partner in thievery, but none approached; when I looked back, he had not dashed forward to snatch my worldly goods. Now he tipped his head, as if inviting me to follow him.
Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 4