Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  The restaurant, in an old palace, was furnished in the Moroccan style with low tables and chairs, rugs, decorative hookahs and brass vessels and drums, and elaborate tiles in a beautiful design without beginning or end, to illustrate the infinitude of Allah’s will or being. There was the inevitable plashing of a fountain. Someone immediately stepped up to me and greeted me with a bow—Colonel Barka, who had been waiting just inside the door, his wonderful silver mustache larger than ever.

  “So nice to see you, my ‘Angel.’ ” He smiled. “I’ve asked for a little niche to ourselves. I hope you won’t feel too compromised.” I did, slightly, as this was our first public meeting without Posy or someone else present, and his tone was suddenly intimate and melodious. We were taken to sit on divans at a table in a curtained alcove of a balcony, with a good view of the main room below. With great deliberation, Colonel Barka settled us, deployed social pleasantries, ordered a bottle of Moroccan wine, and suggested several items from the menu. I accepted his suggestions with my usual passivity when faced with Moroccan dishes.

  “I have a little something for you,” he said at last. “As you know, we are most vigilant here. The attempts to kill the present king’s father, Hassan II, can never be far from the mind of loyal Moroccans.

  His precious son is well-protected, as you can imagine. But it was his own officers that conspired against Hassan II. Chased his airborne plane with fighters…”

  “I’ve read about it, of course,” I said. I took him to mean, probably, that they, and perhaps we, were anticipating some attempt on Mohammed VI, or else they were planning to do it. Or they were thinking we were planning to do it—we have a certain track record. When he said, “I have something for you,” he of course meant, what did I have for him on this subject?

  “The new king is much loved, I gather.”

  “The military—the air force—is no longer a problem.”

  “Purged.”

  “Yes. And of course the climate is different today. This king is a reformer.” I had heard that this king was growing harsh, and even, as a symptom of covert antipathy, rumors that he was gay, but it didn’t seem tactful to ask about that.

  “Basically they’re all gay—that is, there’s a cultural difference about it,” Strand had said. “As long as you’re the active one, you aren’t really gay.”

  Just then, as the waiter came in with the wine, he drew the curtain back in such a way that we could for a moment glimpse into a curtained niche opposite, across the well where the balcony continued on the other side, draped in its turn but open enough to reveal an unforgettable tableau: Ian and Gazi Al‐Sayad having lunch and looking at each other with the limpid urgency of lovers. They were laughing, and as I watched, before the curtain fell back to hide them again, Gazi touched her fingers to her lips, then pressed her fingertips to the palm of Ian’s hand and twisted them, with the action of stubbing out a cigarette.

  At this astounding sight, I had the visceral feeling of dread you have at a doctor’s office when you just know he is about to announce you have leukemia, or in the rising headlights of a car in an intersection, or at the moment of falling, a sickening moment of fear when doom is imminent. Why hadn’t I seen this? How was I to get through life when I hadn’t understood the slightest things?

  Another line from the manual: “Intraspecific deception is generally observed in connection with the reproductive process.” I have often wondered about that. I suppose the translation is: Fucking and lying go together. Colonel Barka saw Gazi and Ian too. He touched my arm and gave me a pitying, surprised look and said, “Hmm.” Later I would wonder how surprised he could have been, how unlikely that we should just happen upon this by accident.

  “I am at your service,” said the waiter. “Will the lady also have wine?”

  “Did you know about this?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said to the waiter. “No,” said the colonel, looking pityingly at me. “I brought you here because it is a place nobody goes.” He laughed at the irony of this, and his hand on my arm became a restraint. “This is not the place, perhaps, to enact the scene you may envision.” But I wasn’t envisioning a scene. Did he expect me to fly like a tiger at Gazi? My mind was still ricocheting among explanations, all of them terrible.

  “Give us a few minutes before bringing the wine,” said the colonel to the waiter, and to me he said, “They must not see us.” This was the first time I realized that the colonel must have thought I was stupid. Of course they must not see us.

  Like lovers; that was my first impression of them, but less painful explanations soon began to line up in my mind: It was possible they, Ian and Gazi, might be talking about Suma. I had never discussed Suma with Colonel Barka; I knew the Suma situation had no bearing on the funding of a ring of martyrs or saboteurs or what ever we found in that line. Yes, they were there to talk about the Suma situation, Gazi’s little gesture was of solidarity, sealing their determination to protect the girl.

  Or she was planning a surprise for Khaled’s birthday. There was probably some simple explanation.

  “I think Khaled is having a birthday…,” I said. Gazi’s little gesture seemed to make believing that impossible, though, paradoxically, it was the gesture, thinking about it later, as the burning sight eased from my memory, that reassured me. It was the gesture of a conspirator; it wasn’t erotic.

  One of my manuals advised “studied unconventional thinking” for perceived events. It advised trying to look at things as would a cryptologist or game theorist, as would paranoids, confidence men, magicians, and financial swindlers. I tried to explain Ian and Gazi from these other points of view. But paranoids (me) and confidence men (Colonel Barka?) seemed apposite. A confidence man might try to convince me they were discussing ways of hiding Suma. A paranoid would suspect an affair.

  Second thoughts: I should have gone to speak to them. To have been there without showing myself was sneaky and wrong. Gradually, these self-reproaches began to damp my indignation, though I knew it would flare up and change to fury if I let myself think of, for instance, The Perfumed Garden. Arab women must read that book too. I thought of the ugly parts that show how Arab men hate women, hate women’s anatomy and hate their own need for women. Such thoughts led back to the natural fact that a Saudi wife would value an English lover, someone who liked women (though misogyny is relative, and Ian was still an Englishman, thus slightly less convinced than, say, a Frenchman of woman’s worth). Still, judging from its place on the bookshelf, Ian had also read in The Perfumed Garden such things as remedies for a wide vagina (the “greatest of evils”) or “Things That Take Away the Bad Smell from the Armpits and Sexual Parts of Women and Contract the Latter.” Naturally, my mind did not rise to extensive quotation at this moment; too much was spinning through it. Perhaps Ian partook of its sentiments.

  “The beautiful Mata Hari,” said the colonel, who saw spies everywhere and could not be talked out of his belief in Ian’s involvement in something sinister. Now he had Mata Hari to add to his pantheon of conspirators.

  I believed in the unlikeliness of an Arab wife being a spy: She wasn’t enough in the world, would never meet anyone; how could she operate? But I agreed I ought to be thinking clearly about what aspects of this new situation might bear upon Taft’s projects or upon my own reports, or upon the whole question of who were not what they seemed. I tried to separate the professional from the personal concerns, but it was hard just then.

  “The Saudis come here to find the freedom they do not find at home,” the colonel remarked. “We welcome them within the more comfortable precincts of a moderate Islamic society. We encourage them, for eventually it will lead to more liberal ideas of toleration and plurality for their own society.”

  “Or else the example of Saudi piety will shame the Moroccans into fundamentalism,” I said. “Isn’t that what usually happens?”

  “Sometimes, temporarily, the two forces struggle,” he admitted. “The secular will win eventually. The path of least res
istance.”

  “Or else the worldly people, like the Al‐Sayads, will be thrown out, as happened in Iran.”

  “Che sera, as the Italians say.”

  I wondered, as usual, if the struggle within Islam was Colonel Barka’s struggle, or if he was a patriot, or just an opportunist. It was all the same to me, but I wished I knew which. I had assumed all along that he was a Moroccan intelligence agent, but what did it matter anyway? At this moment I had eyes and thoughts only for my lover having an intimate lunch with the undeniably beautiful Gazi Al‐Sayad.

  24

  Visionaries work everlasting evil on earth. Their Utopias inspire in the mass of mediocre minds a disgust of reality and a contempt for the secular logic of human development.

  —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

  When I got home, I felt foolish to have had these extreme feelings, for everything was normal. Ian was there, drinking stingers on the patio with Robin and Posy. I had finally mentioned her drinking during pregnancy, and she had retorted that it was only harmful to excess, except during the first month, and during the first month she hadn’t known she was pregnant, so what was done was done. Stingers, and the day was sunny and cool, and the shadows of the palms were long and dark against the gleaming tiles, with their flowery ornament with endless entwined repeats. If they had been delft tiles, say, or Portuguese, there might be a little figure, or figures— lovers or sailors or gardeners on each tile, something to connect the artist to human life; but the Muslim designer was denied that impulse. Maybe that was what was wrong with them, I found myself thinking, that they were forbidden to represent humanity.

  For in my heart, I did think there was something wrong with Islam, and this led me to a renewed commitment to what I was doing. There are born fanatics, I guess, but I was not one; still something flamed in me. Maybe I was just upset about Gazi and Ian, that they were having lunch, that her fingertips had stroked his hand.

  That evening we dined with the Cotters. The other guests were a British film editor, the headmaster of the English school and his wife, and Dr. Kadimi.

  We sat on the Cotters’ roof to have cocktails. Ian seemed himself, expansive and cheerful. I almost thought I was wrong and could not have seen him that afternoon. If I met his eye, my brain swam with confusion, because he seemed the same—serene, guiltless, fond. I thought, I shouldn’t be thinking “traitor.” But then, I was never far from the thought, also, that when he looked at me, he could be thinking, Agent of a foreign power.

  The Cotters’ riad, in the medina, is an old and beautiful one dating from the eighteenth century, three stories high, with carved shutters of dark wood, and dramatic palms in pots, and floors of ruby mosaic tile. From the roof you see across the roofs of other buildings, shaded with canvas awnings or gauzy curtains, washing hung out, TV antennas, satellite dishes, and deck chairs. This is the universe for many Moroccan women, who escape up onto the rooftops, some perhaps forbidden to go out into the streets. I had heard that the men couldn’t come up to these sacred female precincts and that foreigners like us staring at them ruined it for them, disgusting them with our sunbathing flesh and alcohol-fueled revels. It made me sad to think we were spoiling their roofs; but I couldn’t help peering into these exotic worlds, if only for clues into their lives. We watched a woman hanging out clothes, a funny hour to be doing that. Cases of Coke bottles and an old T.V.s were stored up there.

  “Oh, the poor things,” Posy said, apropos of Moroccan women generally. “Some day they’ll rise up.”

  “The Moroccan woman is light-years ahead of Algerians and Tunisians,” said Marina Cotter. “The poor Algériennes, when they marry, they are locked away for life.”

  “Islamic men should just be nuked, or put on a desert island, and all the children raised by English nannies with sensible views, to start them out on a better footing,” Posy commented.

  As we sat in the light breeze of this attic veranda, we became aware of bustle and raised voices from the ground floor; the sound rose up two stories through the well of the courtyard; Neil leaned over the parapet to peer into the space below. “What is it?” he shouted down at the maid, Aisha.

  “This man,” she said. A man gazed up. “I want to see Suma,” he said in French. We all crowded at the railing to see who was shouting. A young man, maybe in his twenties, angry and ruddy with emotion or exertion, arms waving up at Neil.

  “Hold on,” Neil said, and headed down the stairs, the rest of us waiting politely above. Presently Marina went downstairs, then almost immediately reappeared and beckoned to Ian.

  “It’s Suma’s brother, and he wants to see her,” she whispered. “Only speaks French.”

  “Ma soeur, ma soeur,” he shouted, so we understood it was probably the one she was afraid of.

  We watched like an audience seated among the gods, watching the action on the stage, while Neil and Ian calmed him; then they all sat in wicker chairs below, discussing Suma. The brother was a compact, curly-haired man in his twenties, with the long head and good teeth you often see with North African men. I could see the family resemblance to Suma, a handsome family. Of course he didn’t look like someone subject to murderous rages or calculated killings; you would say a graduate student. He wore a jacket over a T‐shirt and Dockers, and carried a gym bag that he had stowed under his chair. He stood when the rest of us came down, as we soon did, and shook our hands. Marina was wearing an alert expression and a fixed hostessy smile. Posy and I greeted everyone in what must have seemed an insensitive interruption and were introduced. The brother was named Amid.

  Amid and the Cotters sat down again, the rest of us drifted into attitudes of noneavesdropping at the other side of the loggia, and Marina rang for tea for this visitor. He went on with an explanation in progress. Marcia, the Filipina nanny, came in with the children, then backed hurriedly out.

  “It’s all a misunderstanding, a mistake,” Amid was saying. “Un malentendu.”

  “Mistake, malentendu?” cried Marina, obviously upset and mistrustful behind her fixed smile. “The girl was terrified. She is in our care.”

  “My sister is nerveuse. She is intense and pious,” he said. “Pieuse. I think myself that she must have had a sexual experience with her boyfriend, then internalized a feeling of guilt, hence of jeopardy. She believed she would be punished for the loss of her virginity, so she ascribed to us the intention of punishing her. Of course there was no such intention. We are not Algerian villagers. We are not Turks. I suppose that something I said might have caused her to fear reprisal, but I can reassure her. Our father is calm, my brother is calm—I am the second brother.”

  “We can tell her all this, or let you talk to her by telephone, but obviously Sir Neil and Lady Cotter are responsible for her and couldn’t betray her whereabouts. It has to be her decision whether to see you,” Ian said in French. The Cotters nodded in support.

  “I have a right to see her,” the brother began in a hot tone, then changed it. “It is a mercy she is in your care,” he said, with a bow of his head. “I suppose there is no question of a child?”

  “A child?”

  “A pregnancy?” he explained.

  “Certainly not, good grief, man,” said Neil. “She’s a lovely, pure, young girl, we’ve all become very fond of her.” Marina didn’t echo this, but she did nod.

  “I am certain she wants to come home. Her letter to our mother says as much.”

  “You didn’t bring it, I suppose,” Ian asked.

  “Non, non.”

  “Are you in town for a few days, Mr. Amid?” asked Marina, rising to her feet to receive a tray of tea glasses from a maid.

  “Mr. Bourad,” her husband corrected.

  “Mr. Bourad,” she agreed.

  “As long as necessary,” he said with a wave, refusing the tea; his tone once again had begun to leak exasperation. He appeared to decide that the visit was over and stooped to recover his bag. A bit more conversation followed, but he had stood up again and began to move
toward the door.

  “I want to see my sister,” he said, his tone still seeming to risk betraying his anger. Then he again changed tack and modulated his tone: “I will so appreciate…”

  “We’ll tell her you’re here. Tell us where she can get in touch with you,” Ian said.

  “I will let you know,” said Amid, his face flushed. “I know she will want to see me. As it happens, I have business in Morocco. I may be here for some time—I will settle in and let you know where she can find me.”

  Marina and Neil moved toward him with polite good-byes, and promises to help, and qualifications, “in accord with Suma’s wishes,” etc. “I’ll call tomorrow morning,” he said. “I understand, of course, and I honor your respect for your promises to my sister. I wish you would tell her I am here, I’ll telephone to let you know where. It’s a shame to lose her studies, her life in Paris; she needs to come home. I honor you for sheltering her, however.” This final reasonableness seemed to weigh with the Cotters and Ian.

  “He seemed all right,” Ian said when Marina had come back from seeing him out. “It’s hard to know.” We all agreed that Suma herself was the one to decide on whether to see her brother or not, though Posy feared the authority this brother had over her. We went into dinner, lamb and red lentils, with a cucumber soup to start, discussing her fate.

  “It’s true,” Marina agreed, “battered women are notoriously apt to put themselves in jeopardy a second time.” But I couldn’t believe Suma would be that dumb.

  “If she did lose her virginity, it’s all up with her,” Posy said. “They have to have their hymens surgically put back before they can marry. You can’t believe the horrors the Islamic girls have to go through.”