Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  Only one thing disturbed: From the perspective of my being here, now that I’d seen its comforts and luxe, in retrospect, it was Ian’s sojourn in Bosnia that seemed slightly odd. He had always said he was “wanting to give something back,” volunteering with Oxfam to do what amounted to rather simple work, loading and unloading things, passing out supplies, pretty much like the stuff we were doing at AmerAID. At the time, this had seemed a handsome, humanitarian thing for him to do, but now I could see that Ian was a highly skilled manager of things like factories—even if they did blow up—and had been considerably overqualified for his work there. I was willing to subscribe to theories about British eccentricities, however, and chalk his priorities up to those. But it was slightly odd.

  As we stood there, faces flayed by the mounting gusts of intense heat, something unlikely happened to me. I had been thinking of horrible things I had seen on television as a child, a house burning in Los Angeles, with people inside, and the voice of the announcer at the scene, quivering and tearful. I also thought of a reality police show I’d seen, watching a meth lab go up. With these thoughts, at the same time, a rising smell of ammonia became almost intolerable. The others cupped their hands over their noses or fished for Kleenex, but I was all at once somehow unable to raise my arms. I had never felt so strange, leaden limbs and nerveless fingers. The flames were lurid colors of purple and green, dazzling my eyes, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, with the others bending over me, fanning me with Posy’s scarf. People helped me up, me protesting that I was all right. Apparently I had fainted, with a sort of amnesia making me unable to remember hitting the ground and with no sense of how long I’d been lying there. Ian said, “We should get everyone away from here. There’s nothing to be done here anyhow.”

  “Right,” said Robin Crumley. “This can’t be good for Posy, or any of us. The baby.” They believed my fainting was some reaction to the smell, but as I thought about it later, I came to think I’d also fainted from from a sudden perception of the metaphorical significance of flames, the force engulfing the English man’s building, the country of Morocco, the region of North Africa, as if the poisonous vapors were coming up through a chink from a terrible netherworld.

  That seems melodramatic, but anyway, I now believe I was terrified at a sort of unconscious level, and I saw that I’d been scared ever since I got here, of something I couldn’t exactly explain. It had been scary enough in Kosovo, where people didn’t hide in baggy robes and veils.

  Ian instructed Rashid to drive Posy and me back to the Palmeraie in the car. They were obliged to wait for some sort of bomb squad from Rabat. Robin Crumley, the personification of uselessness, insisted on staying with Ian, his gangly arms flapping with almost Victorian officiousness as they stuffed us into the car.

  “You should both take showers; there might be fallout,” Ian said.

  So we left, worrying about Posy’s baby and the extent of the toxicity and wondering what had made me faint. I had no way of knowing whether this fire was the thing that Taft had heard might happen or if it was coincidence, or even some projection of my own will for a dramatic event.

  Posy and I had gone to bed before Ian and Robin came home, after midnight. I could hear their voices in the patio, evidently talking to Ian’s other female guest, Nancy Rutgers, and her friend, David, who must have been getting home at the same time. Then Ian came up. I heard him showering for a long time. Eventually he knocked, so quietly it wouldn’t have waked me unless I’d been awake. He came into my room and sat on the chair some way away.

  “I’m worried there may have been someone in there,” he said, his voice shaky with fatigue or emotion. “The watchman and maybe his little boy. No one has seen the little boy and he was there this morning.” His face was drawn with horror. “It has to be an accident. We just don’t have sabotage or arson in Morocco.”

  “Those bombs in Casablanca?”

  “There’s been no trouble in Marrakech. I keep asking myself, could it be personal, some revenge thing, but for what? It’s important that it not be deliberate, not just for the insurance, but think of what it would portend. The Moroccan security people are all over it already.”

  “You think it wasn’t an accident?”

  “No, no, I think it was an accident, a ghastly accident,” he said.

  “I think Rashid was dismayed that I was defying you by making him drive us up there,” I apologized. I needed to know if I was authorized to command Rashid or not.

  “I don’t remember saying he couldn’t,” Ian said. “Probably he just didn’t want to.”

  “We met his brother, the taxi driver; he could have driven us.”

  “ ‘Brother’ in a manner of speaking, probably. They often call each other ‘brother.’ Rashid’s real family is still in the Western Sahara, in the camps. He’s a Saharawi, poor bastard. He sends them all his money.” I loved Ian’s English pronunciation of “bahstard,” one of those irrelevant stabs of love that would insinuate themselves at inappropriate times.

  We talked a little more about this, then he said good night and went off to his own room. I stayed awake a long time, and when he had to have fallen asleep, I got up and Googled “Western Sahara” to learn more about depressing refugee camps where displaced Africans and Algerians have lived their whole lives, something like the Palestinians. Then I sent a message to Taft—“Sheila”—about the fire and asking him to confirm about Aladdin, asking for instructions.

  12

  Fight in the cause of Allah / Those who fight you / But do not transgress limits / For Allah loveth not transgressors.

  —Koran 2:190

  Two days later, Ian, Robin, and I drove up to the site with investigators to see the useless heap of ashes and tottering, charred rafters to which the strong smell, not quite ammonia, would cling forever. An investigation, or investigations, had been mounted at once into the causes of the fire, to figure out whether it was deliberate, an accident, or an act of terrorism—there were various scenarios. Ian walked around and around the ruin, like a dog getting ready to lie down, but the investigators only took a sample of rubble and some photographs. The Moroccans were determined to find evidence of arson or terrorism, and there remained a question as to whether anyone had been inside. It began to look like that had not been the case—they were reassured so far not to have found human remains.

  The principal investigator was a Commissioner Doussaq, from the OCP, Office Cherifien des Phosphates—a stout man in khakis and the white cap of a camel driver, who drove a car without license plates. “The Moroccan police are much more sophisticated and competent than I may have expected,” Ian said of Commissioner Doussaq at dinner later.

  “Their history as a police state,” said Robin Crumley. “In authoritarian regimes, the police are always efficient.”

  With Commissioner Doussaq I made yet another faux pas. I had come along for my own reasons and was dying to ask an expert about what they believed had detonated the ammonium nitrate. I had hastened to read up on the possibilities—it can be exploded by being mixed with fuel oil, put under pressure or confined in a close place, exposed to extremely high temperatures, or set off by a rocket or dynamite. Anyway, I asked the commissioner which he believed it was: “If the gas was only ammoniac, would anyone—as I was, in fact—be affected enough to lose consciousness?” I was saying. Standing behind the commissioner, Ian shook his head slightly, but I didn’t immediately understand this was an embarrassment. The commissioner stared at me and then looked at Ian, as if to say, do I have to answer her? But, instead of knowing enough to shut up, I persisted. “But if oxides of azote…”

  “Miss Sawyer has been following our talk,” Ian said, smiling. “I’ve explained that she was probably not harmed by the ammonia smell.”

  The commissioner’s expression turned almost to gladness; the little lady was only concerned for her health. Still too thick to understand that I was overstepping polite female behavior, I plunged on with questions about th
e storage conditions.

  “Mademoiselle s’intéresse à la chimie,” he said to Ian, approvingly, tolerantly. “They study everything these days.”

  Afterward, Ian said for me to meddle in the investigation was impossible; it was improper even to talk to the Moroccan inspectors. He used a gentler word than “meddle.” He may have said “get involved.”

  “No matter how modern they are, or we are, or how foreign, there would be no way he would be friendly with—well, our womenfolk.” He smiled, but it did cause me to wonder whether Ian had not absorbed some of the Muslim sense of the opposite sex (Posy and me) as being volatile and frail. Posy said later that I had blushed at Ian’s reprimand, but my true emotion was not remorse but chagrin.

  In the days that followed, the aftermath took much of Ian’s time, with delegations of police and government officials coming to the house or convoking Ian to the prefecture almost daily. What ever I’d known of him in Kosovo—that he was there to do good works and had a caring, charitable side—I hadn’t before observed his uniformly excellent manners and consideration to everyone. Besides running his industrial park, I had learned that he did various good works; gave money to local schools, literacy projects, and public works; and was a hero to his valet. Anyway, though I say “managed,” Ian micromanaged—he would troubleshoot a burst pipe or meet a need for more chairs; he obviously enjoyed his little empire and felt it to be a contribution to this beautiful and poor country. Of course I thought this bleeding-heart side of him was a strong point.

  He was polite to the investigators and to his servants, attentive to his guests—but especially to Posy, whom he did seem to regard as delicate, though she was a strapping English woman, and handed her up and down the stairs if he was anywhere near her with a sort of reverent anxiety her husband didn’t show. (Though Robin Crumley was absentminded, he didn’t seem indifferent to her; it was more that he seemed to remember her and their coming baby suddenly, from time to time, and snap into a solicitous mode. But not very often.) “Ian is very attractive,” she once remarked in a somewhat wistful tone. “He was Robin’s student when Robin was a young don at Oxford; that’s how we know him.”

  There was a mechanism for my getting mail from people who would be writing me, my parents and siblings, my carefully maintained magazine subscriptions, etc., addressed to my real self, care of an address in Rabat. In Rabat, letters were opened, retyped to Lulu Sawyer, and sent to me at Ian’s, with the names of the senders disguised if necessary. The path of my replies was the same in reverse. In writing my parents in California, I had found myself saying things I didn’t know I felt, about Ian and Morocco: I loved it here, I might have met The One. Partly that was what they wanted to hear, but it was true too, as much as ever one can be sure that something is true.

  One day, circling the ruins, Ian rescued a very young kitten, a creature of maybe six weeks old, with its eyes stuck shut from infection, at the site of the fire, not huddled in a bush as a prudent kitten should, but standing blindly in the middle of the road, hoping for the best. It was gallant; it would stumble around and purr when you held it. When we got home, we bathed its eyes and got some antibiotics from the vet. We decided to hold off naming it—him—till we were sure he would live, like people in the olden days with their children. I found Ian’s way with it touching. “Good chap,” he told it when it ate a little bit. Some people seem to disapprove of kindness to animals, as if it distracts from kindness to people; others feel there’s nothing much to do for people, since they are so hopeless, and we should concentrate on animals. I don’t see that one rules out the other—anyway, I found this yet another reaffirmation of Ian’s excellent character. My love for him increased. So did my resolve to be better at dissembling for my job.

  “I wonder what does the Prophet say,” Robin Crumley had said at dinner that night, which we ate inside in the dining room, “about stray cats, for example, and animal creation generally?” His tone held in check a note of rising aversion to cats, or to the Prophet.

  “Very little, I would imagine,” said Ian. “Are there cats mentioned in the Bible?”

  “I’m sure there would be the attitude that Allah, or God or Yahweh, created them for man’s use,” Robin went on. “Except, as is well-known, cats are of no use for anything.”

  “Man’s use, that is,” said Posy. “Not woman’s. Women would fall into the same category as cats, just property belonging to men.”

  I thought this was probably true, but it didn’t seem a fruitful topic. Later I Googled “cats in the Koran.” The Koran tells the story of a woman condemned to eternal hell for starving a poor pussycat, while in the Christian tradition, cats are the agents of Satan and witches.

  13

  Who can have conceived, in the heart of a savage Saharan camp, the serenity and balance of this place?

  —Edith Wharton, In Morocco

  A few more uneventful days passed, with Ian busy most of the time with various activities—the fire and business affairs, leading the life of a husband: He had an office, a jeep that he drove to building sites in the Atlas mountains, and a secretary—an English woman, Miss Pring, who lived in the medina and, on some mornings, if Posy and I were to be allowed the car for our excursions, picked him up in the jeep to drive him to his office in the more modern part of town. He showed up back in the Palmeraie at lunch most days and played the host each night to people he had invited, or drove me and the Crumleys to some riad to visit other expatriates.

  From our cloister, however, it was hard to meet Moroccans. “I wish you knew some,” I had once said. Ian had looked puzzled, made a loose gesture around him to include the world.

  “I mean socially,” I had said, and I saw from his expression that he feared this was going to be a tiresome American politically correct discussion, and was about to say, “Oh, please, this from the citizen of a country where minorities are still one step up from the slave market?” I had learned never to bring up issues of fairness or racial integration with Europeans if I didn’t want to hear about slavery, segregation, the American Civil War, Indians, Vietnam, the two Iraq wars—the whole panoply of reproaches our various leaders have let us in for. “I just wondered if you saw any socially.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll invite some for you.” After this, two plump, seriously urbane men would be included in many of the soirees—a military man and a doctor, Colonel Barka and Dr. Kadimi, who might be vying with each other for the mustache award. Colonel Barka’s was flowing silver and Dr. Kadimi’s a trim but wide reddish one. The former had an honorary title at the British Consulate, something like “Persona Grata.” Both either were unmarried or their wives did not go out, and these were our principal Moroccans. Most of Ian’s friends were other Europeans, especially other British people; even the great group of French were off our radar, except for a few, or when Ian made an extra effort to invite them. (I planned to invite my airplane companion, Madame Frank.)

  I could see real Moroccans from the distance, on the road into Marrakech we traveled almost daily. Rising out of the desolate landscape were several villages, or clusters of houses of mud and tin, organized around unpaved courtyards, where children tumbled in the doorways and women, their heads covered, leaned talking to each other as they looked out at the stony ground where the goats wandered and all the little boys were always kicking soccer balls, dodging the plastic bleach bottles that rolled under their feet. I never learned what cultural practice demanded this massive quantity of bleach.

  Ian’s guest Nancy Rutgers was polite but seemed to have arranged many errands and activities apart from Posy and me. She and her friend, David Someone—for I was never sure about his name (Talbot, Talcott?)—pretty much led their own lives, visiting the many people they seemed to know or taking expeditions to Fez and Essaouira, never including Posy or me. I was not sure of their status—if one or the other was an artist, it wasn’t apparent, and Ian was somewhat taciturn: “Nancy is an old friend” was the only explanation. David seemed to
be staying somewhere else but was always around.

  In just a few days roaming in the souk with Posy, we had nearly mastered its geography. I tried to learn all I could about my companions and wrote meticulous reports of them to Taft, in the guise of chatty notes to “Sheila,” or, more usually, I reported that I had nothing to report. Sometimes I telephoned, often to ask how to proceed, but telephoning was cumbersome, involving pay phones and absences that must have seemed mysterious to the others. I couldn’t believe that all I was expected to do was to be me, and yet that was pretty much all I was doing. Taft was probably used to people not having much to report; he ran a number of agents, and real information is rare even if you have much of an idea of what you are looking for.

  As for Aladdin, my contact, I wished he would be in touch again, but as I had nothing special to communicate to him, I did nothing about contacting him. Nothing had changed in Rashid’s manner to indicate he had any understanding of the little piece of paper with Aladdin’s message on it.

  Posy and I spent a lot of time together. Posy was the daughter of an English publisher, now dead, and her stepmother lived in a castle in France, or something like that. Her background was not unlike that of Ian himself, whose father I thought I had heard referred to as a “press lord,” though I was unsure if that meant he was called Lord Drumm or whether “press lord” was just a descriptive term, like “drug mule.” I had heard that pregnant women think of little else but their pregnancies—my sister was like that—but Posy seldom mentioned her clumsy shape and swelling ankles. She had read literature at Oxford or Cambridge and preferred to discuss arcane topics like water imagery in Moroccan poetry; that topic sticks in my mind because it had occurred even to me that for a country hard up for water, there was everywhere an oddly ambivalent obsession with it. There had been, for instance, the strange reluctance to expend it at Ian’s fire, yet there were fountains everywhere.