Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “What did your fortune really say?” she then asked. My head was so full of other things, at first this allusion didn’t register. “I was thinking about the man in the medina with our fortunes. I know yours said something ominous, and it was intended for me, and you changed it, I understood that and appreciated it, but ever since, I’ve been wondering.”

  Of course I’d had many afterthoughts about what I should have told her then: “It said ‘You are beloved.’ ” I made up this lie under the calm eyes of Colonel Barka. I hoped he admired my facility. “So of course I wanted to keep it for myself.”

  It came to me later that it wasn’t a lie, it was the truth I wished for, to be beloved.

  “But you didn’t keep it,” Posy said, with a strange expression of mistrust. “You threw it away.”

  Robin Crumley retired for a few minutes while we prepared ourselves for his reading by shifting the chairs into rows as in a theater. He came slowly down the exterior steps that led from his lair, the writer’s workroom Ian had equipped with computers and TV, no phones, according to his own notion of what writers should and shouldn’t have. Robin spent many hours up there every day and, from his solemn, almost glassy expression, was evidently composing himself as he descended. I was impressed with the subtle change in his demeanor, ordinarily rather weedy and blinking. Now, soberly dressed in a dark jacket, he radiated calm affability—the word “magisterial” even came to mind as he approached, carry ing his papers and thin volumes, with becoming insouciance, with irreverent care, striking the right note between not taking them too seriously and taking his audience sufficiently seriously to do them the honor of approaching the question of their entertainment with appropriate gravity. He smiled, I thought stealing a glance at Posy that she responded to with a relieved settling in her chair. We sensed we were in an artist’s power.

  My heart had quailed a little when I saw the thickness of Robin’s sheaf of papers as he stood up to read, but the time went quickly enough, as he told interesting stories between each poem, about what the inspiration was or how long it had taken him. It was wonderful to see the expression of pride and fascination that stole over Posy as she listened, and the polite attentiveness on Amid’s face.

  Robin’s voice was not of the deep, booming, bardlike variety desireable for poets, but thinnish and even a bit quavery, so that we had to hush to catch every word, a technique for mesmerizing an audience that’s just as effective.

  “Of course I’ve fallen under the spell of the desert. So far from, so unlike, England—its alien and even repellent beauty explains so much about recent events. I think of T. E. Lawrence’s writings.…”

  His poems written in Morocco relied heavily, if I understood them, on the desert as a symbol of human abiding, futile and solitary but eternal, contrasting darkly with some lush, green, flower‐ filled English lanes, and made me wonder if he hated it here. I guess you’d categorize Robin as a nature poet, and nature is harsh in Morocco. I haven’t been to too many poetry readings in my life, but I recognized my own ambivalent response, caught between admiration and the wish it would be over. It was easy for my mind to slide off, between poems, to Gazi and Ian’s lunch.

  As Robin read on—this was perhaps no more than twenty minutes in, but it did seem longer—I was aware that Posy was stealthily weeping. I could see in the lantern light that her cheek was wet—I hoped from happiness that her husband could compel us all, and above all her, with his art. Once, irked by her complaints, I had snapped, “Do you love Robin or not?”

  “Yes,” she’d said, with no hesitation. “I do, really, though it’s not quite what I expected. Now I have sympathy for people I used to find irritating, like Nora Joyce. Or Frieda Lawrence; I used to just think she was a cow.”

  “You’ll have a lovely baby.”

  “Oh, God,” she cried, with sudden tears in her blue eyes, “I hope so. I think to myself, if I don’t fall in love with this bloody baby, I’ll kill myself.” It was scary to hear her say things like that because of the quaver of seriousness in her voice.

  “It takes a while to bond,” I had said, as if I knew something about it. I’d heard that it does. “More than one look—a month, months.”

  “Well, metaphorically, one look,” she said. “What if there’s something wrong with it? If we were in England, they could tell in advance.”

  “They can tell here, I’m sure, if you’d go to the doctor.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Think how they treat women here.…” And so she didn’t go to the doctor, which shocked me, and I had felt angry at Robin for not making her. However they had interviewed hospitals.

  Ian, across from me, when he rose with expansive thanks to the “great Robin Crumley,” seemed pleased as well, if only at having his generous hospitality so beautifully rewarded.

  28

  Most of the constitutional proscriptions we are operating under here are empty bottles. Phrases like “freedom of the press,” “unreasonable search and seizure” have no precise content. What is “unreasonable”? It depends on what society thinks is unreasonable.

  —Antonin Scalia, “Discussion of Legal Constraints and Incentives”

  A book I’ve read three times, The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, begins with the narrator saying his was the saddest story he had ever heard. It strikes me now as kind of presumptuous of anyone to claim that distinction—who has a claim on sadness? But this is a sad story all the same, or if not for me personally, the story I have to tell is sad at least for some of us. Well, and for me.

  Three days passed. Amid, watched by Taft and the others, seemed only to flâner, idly stroll, have coffees with other young men, and made no attempt to contact the Cotters again. On the third day, Ian’s car turned in to the compound midmorning, which was unusual, in that he had left for his office only an hour before. I guess I heard his car subliminally; I was reading on the porch. Posy was out walking in the driveway, ever more slowly these days, her hands pressed against her lower back. Her back was hurting her more and more, and walking relieved it.

  She saw Gazi Al‐Sayad stumble out of Ian’s car, and what was also unusual, Ian was bolting the large gates after them. They all came through the foyer into the courtyard of the house. I’d glanced up, then rushed over to help. Gazi had a large basket, and Ian carried a small suitcase. Gazi was somehow entangled in her abaya, flailing in it like a bear in a net.

  She was crying. Without going into the house, she flung herself onto a metal garden chair and tightened her scarves around herself, muttering or sobbing something. Ian set down the case and touched her shoulder. Her expression was of fear, really of panic, and of relief. She leaned her head a moment against Ian’s arm. Her speech had altered; she suddenly had a Middle Eastern wail, guttural and melodic, and tears filled her big, black eyes.

  “I’m sorry, oh, I can’t believe it, oh, God, be good to us.”

  Ian looked at me with a single glance of something indecipherable, perhaps apology or regret, something sorrowful on his face, and he held on to Gazi.

  “Gazi’s left Khaled,” Ian said. Posy and I said nothing. What do you say? “That’s great”? “Oh, I’m so sorry”? “What’s it got to do with you, Ian?” Of course, that was what I wanted to know, and yet I probably knew already. If I’d seen them, so had someone else; Khaled had found them out.

  There was almost no need to ask what for. It was easy to imagine, as obvious to Posy as to me; when she waddled up to Ian and Gazi, hands still clutching her back, she looked at me. It was clear we were seeing some drama of guilt and exposure being enacted in our own post-Shakespearean lives.

  “He can’t get in here,” Ian said. “It’s all right.”

  “May God be good to us,” Gazi said again. Her Americanized accent had melted into the Arabic of the indignant, frightened women who shout tearfully into American television cameras over the rubble of their homes. It seemed to me she was trembling. “Oh, God,” she said again and again. Thinking about it later, I’m sure she
said “God” and not “Allah,” and I wondered about that.

  Ian took her into the house, carrying her basket and the suitcase, and came back without her to talk to Posy and me by the pool, where we’d remained more or less frozen in uncertainty about how to behave. Posy said, “Marital woes?” She was looking at me as if to take the lead from me in how to react. I wasn’t sure myself. Were we sorry for Gazi, angry at her, indifferent to her plight? I wished Posy were not there. If she hadn’t been, I might have spoken more forthrightly. It was clear that Ian did not mean to identify himself as Gazi’s lover.

  “Khaled is a jealous husband, and that’s a deadly matter for a Saudi wife. Someone told him she’s having an affair,” Ian said. He was looking at me as if he thought I was the someone, the action of a jealous female scorned, and I couldn’t bear that, nor did I deserve it.

  “It wasn’t me, Ian, I don’t know anything about Gazi’s life,” I said, I suppose snappishly. I see now I shouldn’t have imagined he was accusing me. At the time, the charge infuriated me. Would I have been in a more furious rage if there hadn’t been a lie, a bunch of lies at the center of my life also?

  Some fumbling explanations followed, oblique and shocked that things had come to such a pass. “Her life in Saudi Arabia, a woman like that, confined like that,” and so on, his indignation making it as obvious to Posy, if she hadn’t known, as it was to me that he was the lover, that it was his and Gazi’s love that had been discovered. Still, he didn’t say so.

  The whole subject of adultery was apparently fascinating for Posy, a Brit after all, from a whole culture unusually obsessed with it (I had concluded from practically every British book I’d read), who pledged her support for the brave Gazi, defying the moronic mores of her Stone Age society, etc.

  “We must protect her, obviously,” Ian said.

  “Of course,” I agreed. “Having to wear those awful veils…” We rushed to condemn Gazi’s entrapment in Saudi Arabia.

  She had fled from her home at dawn, and called Ian’s office from her cell phone. She hadn’t been in any shape to say much. She’d been huddled at a bus stop for five hours till Ian got to his office and got her message. Why didn’t Ian have his cell phone? She didn’t know if Khaled was out looking for her. If they’d been in Riyadh, she’d be dead, but jealous husbands had to think twice in Morocco. On account of new protections for women, installed by the new king, it was no longer okay to kill your wife and her lover with absolute impunity; you went to jail for it, though maybe not if you were in a jealous rage, and anyway, when had laws stopped jealous husbands? It was a more primitive passion, territorial and irrational, some seemed to think forgivable. She believed someone had telephoned Khaled to hint that his wife was unfaithful. She didn’t know what he meant to do. She didn’t know whom Khaled thought her lover was.

  I thought of the colonel. The caller must have been he. But why?

  Later I wondered how she knew someone had told Khaled. Had there been a scene? Threats? Violence?

  I think I behaved rather well at first, sous le choc, as the French say, about Gazi’s escape and recent danger; but later, more hurtful aspects of it occurred to me. Maybe their affair had been going on awhile, a year or two, whenever the Al‐Sayads were in Marrakech, with some poor girl always unknowingly playing the beard for Ian—Nancy Rutgers and then me, and maybe women before Nancy and me. It was pretty cold-blooded of Ian, like the cynicism of the husbands in nineteenth-century French novels who slept with their wives often enough to pass along their syphilis but never loved them.

  When in an hour Gazi came down again she’d dried her tears and left off her veil, but she was obviously stunned and traumatized, and sat in the garden, staring into space. A maid brought tea for us all. Ian stood in the shrubbery, pointedly apart, as if it all had nothing to do with him or he feared making it worse.

  29

  If ye fear a breach / Between them twain / Appoint two arbiters / One from his family, / And the other from hers. / If they seek to set things right / Allah will cause their reconciliation.

  —Koran 4:35

  A few days passed with Gazi’s presence hanging over us. Like an unexorcised ghost, she was with us and not with us, nearly invisible at first, then, little by little, among us. We all understood that she couldn’t contact her husband, Khaled, and there was no sign from him. The two villas of Ian and Khaled were like two medieval fortresses on adjacent peaks, menacing and blind toward each other, Gazi like Helen of Troy, captured in the enemy’s camp.

  “I am the crying camel,” said Gazi. “The Prophet, peace be with him, found a camel cruelly tied up to a post; the poor beast was starving and exhausted, and the Prophet said to its owner, ‘Do you not fear Allah because of the way you’ve treated this camel? I gave him into your care.’ Well, the owner of the camel was sorry and said, ‘I have done wrong.’ Fine, in the Koran, but I know Khaled never will.”

  We were half afraid Khaled would come bursting into the compound brandishing a curved scimitar, so we had marshaled security— being careful to bar the gates, for example. Though Ian, the Crumleys, Pierre, and I went about our business, there was a sense that we were as entrapped as she, also imprisoned and oppressed by, in part, the torpor of a strange Indian summer of hot days and nights returning after some days in which the weather had been cooling. It was now December, with nights in the forties, rains beginning most afternoons, though as yet not heavily, and people were commenting that it was a drought.

  With Christmas approaching, it was strange and even sort of upsetting to get letters from my parents and sister, at various times, copied out in the unfamiliar handwriting of the mail-drop person, yet sounding so familiar in phraseology and message, especially in their concern for my morale. From my sister:

  “Hope you’re liking Morocco and things are working out on all fronts (!!). Is it funny to be away at Christmas yet again? You must be getting used to it. We miss you especially during the holidays.… Don’t get gloomy. Your present is on its way. I know it’s boring— I won’t say what it is because you’ll get this before it (coming by long sea). But useful…” I never did get the parcel, though.

  I thought quite a lot about what to get Ian for Christmas. It should be intimate but not embarrassing; it shouldn’t presume on the unspoken, but I wanted him to know it was a love present, now complicated by Gazi’s being here. By the twenty-first, I still hadn’t bought anything. I consulted everyone—Tom and Strand, Posy, and finally even Taft. This was before Gazi, of course.

  “What are you hoping to get for Christmas, Sefton?”

  “I will get the usual—socks and ties,” Taft said bleakly.

  Christmas would be in three days. It had been possible, amid the cactus, to forget the scenes of snowy beauty and cottage coziness with which Americans, even Californians, are imprinted—the decorated tree, the trail of smoke from the chimney, the yule logs, the growing mound of packages. Every person of right sensibility feels the gloom of it—the distant loved ones, the gap between the ideal and the real. You are not going to get what you want for Christmas. Especially if you want peace on Earth.

  Posy and I scrounged up two artificial Christmas trees, relatively realistic-looking, each about four feet high, one for the library and one for Ian’s, where it stood on the hall table opposite the front door. It didn’t occur to any of us that the religious significance of this holiday might be sensitive, because it didn’t seem to be. The kitchen staff and maids were well aware they were working in a Christian house hold, it was no big deal, and Gazi had certainly spent Christmases in America during her college years and had confronted the iconography then. Also, Marrakech was flooded anew with French people—the Mamounia bar was crowded and merry, and garlands of bougainvillea were draped around the mirror behind it. Tom and Strand brought an armload of poinsettias dug up somewhere in the Atlas foothills. Santa was everywhere in Morocco, in cardboard life‐ size versions in shops, in supermarkets, even on a street corner, where a skinny young Santa in she
epskin with a red hat and cotton beard posed with polyester-spangled children in their best clothes. Did they even know St. Nicholas was a Christian saint?

  I bought a cute dark green velvet dress for Amelie, Tom and Strand’s little girl, and a Moroccan ceramic bowl for Posy and Robin, but was still stuck on Ian’s present. It was also possible we weren’t going to celebrate Christmas, out of tact at Gazi’s plight.

  Mostly, Gazi stayed in her room. We still didn’t know if Khaled, or anyone, knew where she was, so when visitors came, she ran upstairs. She bewailed the absence of her children, so close by and yet forbidden. “I’ll never see them again, I just know. I know, I’ll steal them away—Fatima especially must come with me to a new life.…” Sometimes her voice, in complaint, took on a note of that ululating cry of grief of Arab women. She imagined a solitary life in some place like Kuwait, still Islamic, but where women were freer than in Saudi Arabia. At first, I was tempted to pass a word to Suma to let the children know that their mother was safe, but this raised too many problems. Who knew if Suma could really be trusted? We had no choice but to trust Ian’s servants and warned them that no one must know Gazi was there, but we were rather pessimistic that this injunction could be followed.

  Anyway, Gazi, suddenly passive, seemed content to sit around. She had an amazing ability to do nothing. She would sit in the garden or sometimes swim. She was a good swimmer. She braided her long, black hair in a pigtail that lashed behind her as she did furious laps, then undid it to dry as she sat by the side of the pool.

  There was no sign of special intimacy between her and Ian beyond the affectionate concern that everybody felt (professed to feel). It was explicitly understood that Gazi had burned a bridge and could never go back to Saudi Arabia to be divorced, publicly charged with adultery, or more likely, just disappear, or drown in her swimming pool, or tragically electrocute herself—these were the fates of women she had known or heard of. Just being suspected of adultery was all it took to doom you. We should not assume she was an adulteress, it was that all women were adulteresses or potentially so in the Saudi mind, not to be trusted for a second out of the gaze of a trusted servant or male relative, unable to master themselves, with the primitive urges of stoats.