Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  31

  To what extent was the past, the history of the phenomenon under examination, understood? Were past trends identified and their origins and significance perceived?

  —David S. Sullivan, “Evaluating U.S. Intelligence Estimates”

  We kept closed the big wooden gates leading into the compound. These were ordinarily barred at night, but since Gazi came, they were barred in the daytime too, and the watch-boy who was always sleeping on the doorstep of the little shelter at the entrance began to wear an alert, pleased air of rendering an important service. When Ian left for his office or Posy and I went somewhere, it was with a great clatter of unlatching and the scraping of the doors along the gravel of the drive. Shut behind these gates, we were a nuclear facility, a radiation zone.

  This state of things lasted several days, until we inevitably relaxed our guard. We had braced for the arrival of an infuriated Khaled Al‐Sayad, but he didn’t appear. Either he wasn’t coming, or he hadn’t put two and two together yet, or he was content to let Gazi go. Ian and I, in my room at night, discussed the possibilities: Maybe he didn’t really care that Gazi had gone, maybe he was glad to be rid of her. It seemed unlikely that he didn’t know where Gazi was—she’d been at Ian’s nearly two weeks, apparently reassured by the thick walls and the care we took to bolt the gates, but surely a kitchen girl or a gardener would eventually tell someone despite Ian’s instructions. Other than closing the gates, we didn’t any longer go to unusual lengths to hide her.

  Ian, by his perfectly bland manner, still gave no sign of his relationship with her and facetiously expressed sympathy for Khaled. “What a handful,” he agreed. We were not having a private talk; this was before dinner, and the Crumleys were there. Ian avoided being alone with me even during the day, it seemed to me, though there was still the nightly perfunctory visit to my room. “However, when he gets back to Riyadh, how does he explain why she hasn’t come home with him? ‘Oh, I just lost track of her when we were in Morocco’?”

  “They’re used to that, in Riyadh,” was Posy’s comment. “Gazi told us, wives disappear all the time.”

  At dinner we often discussed Gazi’s passport. Without it, she was trapped in Morocco forever. The problem seemed insurmountable. She’d left without it, and it was locked in a safe at home, in Khaled’s office. Moreover, Khaled worked in his office all day long. I knew, of course, that I could get a passport for Gazi. We did it all the time. But how could I admit to having this power? And could I justify it to Taft? Now, looking back, I suppose I didn’t want to help her—yet I did want to get rid of Gazi, I wanted her to go away, wanted Ian to be as I had thought him, wanted love to reign.

  “Suma is the obvious person to get it,” Ian said. “Or one of your kids could get it, Gazi. Khaled must trust Suma. Maybe she knows the combination.”

  “No, how could she?” Gazi said. “Anyway, it’s a key.”

  These were terrible times for me, inopportune times for me, with Taft in town, and we were about to kidnap someone, and my thoughts kept veering to Ian when I ought to have been thinking about work. There were other things I had to do. Ian was applying for grants to rebuild the burnt factory and build some more. Since I had some experience with grant proposals, I was able to help him with writing these. His plans were ambitious and idealistic; I felt he should take an administrative fee—my suggestion and the usual practice—but he wouldn’t hear of it. I didn’t know the details of Ian’s apparently adequate finances: Where did his money come from and how much did he have? Again, I felt funny looking into it, even though it was germane to my mission—it was even my duty to look into it. I could certainly confirm in my reports to Taft about the general flow of development money and charitable donations in Marrakech that sending some of it to Islamic extremists would be easy and probable, innocent donors not knowing where their money went.

  Working on his grant proposals, thus did I morph from a mistress into a secretary.

  It had occurred to me before this that we had made love maybe only once a week for some time now, with me initiating it, and sometimes my provocative moves were ignored, leaving me with disagreeable feelings of longing and resentment, a frustrated need that was worse than forgetting about love altogether. I thought desperately of the occult, charms or potions, or beauty measures, or sexual arts—maybe of The Perfumed Garden: “If a woman intends to contract her vagina, she has only to dissolve alum in water, and wash her sexual parts with the solution, which may be made still more efficacious by the addition of a little bark of the walnut tree, the latter substance being very astringent.…”

  But I knew there was no way I could demand that somebody make love to me, or find a walnut tree either. I did remember a scene in Anthony Powell, where Jean, Nick’s mistress, greets him at the door in the nude, and how it turns him on, and I tried that. When Ian came in for his evening talk, I arranged, at his knock, to be naked.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, and began to back out.

  “No, come in,” I said. In fact, this worked very well. Men are such uncomplicated creatures, basically, I guess; I didn’t know how reliable this stratagem would turn out to be in the long run, though.

  My double life was also threatening to become more complicated when Taft thought of this or that for me to do at hours when I’d usually be at the library or having lunch with Posy. For instance, since he had assigned me to drive the van on the day we picked up our subject, he sent me several times on a practice route into the outskirts on a side road leading to the highway to Rabat, urging me to unsafe speeds along the dirt track where small children from the mud shelters on each side threatened to toddle into our path. “You must be the only woman your age in the world who can drive a stick shift,” he said, a tiny trace of approval in his voice at last.

  Most mornings, Posy and I left as usual with Rashid, Miss Pring came for Ian, and Robin Crumley and Pierre Moment went off to work at their respective arts. Gazi might be in the garden gathering the blossoms of the saffron or tangerines, or sleeping late. I found myself spending at lot of time at the Mamounia or working at the library, avoiding her. Pierre Moment, however, spent less and less time in his studio and more and more time with her. We all noticed that.

  “Quelle femme adorable,” he said. “Imaginez sa vie en Arabie Saoudite.”

  The night he came to dinner, Suma’s brother Amid had said, “My mother is not well. It’s important my sister knows this. Please, if it happens that you see her, tell her this.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear it. Maybe she’ll happen to call Madame Cotter,” Ian had said. “We’ll suggest that Marina pass that news along.” Whether Marina had or hadn’t, we now had four reasons for getting hold of Suma, to tell her about her mother, to get her to submit to a virginity test, to find out about Gazi’s kids, and now to get Gazi’s passport. Talking to Suma was of course made trickier since Gazi was with us, and so we’d procrastinated. Suma knew about Gazi’s flight, obviously, but for her to know where Gazi was could put her in a difficult position. What if Khaled asked her, or blamed her, or thought she was involved? When I did call Suma with news about Amid, we decided I was to pretend we hadn’t even heard that Gazi was gone. How would we, after all?

  It turned out that Suma didn’t know it either, had the idea Gazi was just traveling. Things seemed to her normal at the Al‐Sayads’. The children were fine. I had to decide then and there how to ask her to cooperate, and concocted the following story: Gazi was traveling in Morocco, but had decided to go to France and thus needed her passport. Could Suma get it out of the safe? As soon as I outlined this plan, I saw its flaw—why wouldn’t Gazi just call Khaled and ask him for it?

  And now, if Suma asked Khaled for the passport and said she’d been asked for it by me, all the dots would be connected in his mind—he would realize she was at Ian’s, and Suma would know that Gazi had fled instead of being away on a trip. I told her not to mention it after all.

  Gazi called Suma herself, in the morning, and in a wheedling
tone asked about the kids and whether Suma knew where the safe key was. I couldn’t guess what Suma was saying, but evidently a lot, because Gazi did more listening than talking, and eventually she said, “If you knew, you would not blame me.” We heard her say this several times, “If you knew what my life was like… ,” leaving us, as we hung on this conversation, to imagine that Suma was reproaching Gazi, which didn’t sound like the meek Suma we were used to. Gazi was starting to speak sharply, then modulated her tone and said, abruptly, “Goodbye, Suma.”

  Gazi turned to the rest of us and began to cry again, as she had the first day, sobbing bitterly into a thin shawl she had worn against the chilly morning and now pressed against her eyes. I think Ian wanted to take her in his arms to comfort her, but he didn’t. How could he, in front of me?

  On Christmas Eve, Gazi danced. As the weather was now cool, we’d eaten inside in the dining room and had gone into the salon for mint tisane (I always asked for coffee, though). But outside, tonight the night was strangely warm for this crisp time of year, and the candles were lit on the paths. Tom and Strand had been by earlier, but now it was only the Crumleys, Pierre Moment, Ian, Gazi, and me there. No one had been invited since Gazi’s arrival, though I had argued for keeping to our normal pattern of dinner parties and people visiting, which would seem more natural and not draw attention to us. I had had tea with Colonel Barka at least once during this time but didn’t tell him about Gazi. I had told Taft, of course, about Colonel Barka; he knew about it anyway, and he had told me to keep that relation intact.

  In the salon we had been listening to Handel’s Messiah, but now, maybe in the spirit of ecumenicalism, we had CDs of Moroccan music, soft, wailing dinner music that added ambiance without compelling attention, and then somehow the music had intensified; maybe someone turned it up. It developed a sort of bump‐ and-grind beat that couldn’t be ignored. Ian, joined by Robin, Pierre, and Tom and Strand, urged Gazi to show us a Saudi Arabian dance. Eventually, after the de rigueur disclaimers, she got up, laughing self-consciously, and rolled up on the balls of her feet, first one, then the other, and flipped one hip up and down.

  “There wouldn’t usually be men present,” she said, looking at the men. “All right, just for one minute.” The music, the ouds and what‐not, was dominated by the sonorous, insistent beat of the drums. She wiggled to get the time and pushed up her sleeves. Throb, thrum, thump—she measured the drums and the sound of sticks clacking against each other, then she began a strange progress across the room, arms extended, hips rising and falling, at half-time at first, then she caught the full beat and doubled her pulsations. She added a little shimmy of her shoulders, her breasts moving softly beneath her shirt, stopped it, tried it again, all the while pendulum hips in motion. The music seemed to speed up. Her eyes narrowed and lengthened, and she did this dance all around the room, and might have stopped but didn’t, into it now, another turn around the room. I couldn’t look at Ian, couldn’t watch him seeing her doing this sexy bump, grind, pelvic thrusts, exotic in her velvet pants, which were low-cut and showed her navel, so, belly dance. She was paying no attention to Ian or to any of us. I think she was dancing her freedom, another and another turn around the room before she stopped, laughing. We all clapped and cheered.

  “We can all do it, every Saudi girl,” she said. “I’m not very good.”

  I took this to mean she knew she was good. Women danced for each other at women’s parties, she said. Some perhaps for their husbands eventually. I wondered if she’d done this dance for Khaled. I could imagine his gaze, smoldering with desire, now turned to murderous rage, like Othello’s.

  Ian then surprised me. He’d been watching, like the rest of us, and now said, “ ‘You are the music ’til the music stops.’ Did you write that, Robin?”

  “T. S. Eliot. ‘You are the music while the music lasts.’ It’s a little different point.” He recited a few lines more:

  These are only hints and guesses,

  Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

  Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

  Prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action—this was a good mantra, I thought, for anyone in my line of work, or for anyone: prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action.

  32

  Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?

  —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  On Christmas Day, Suma appeared at the gate at lunchtime. We had planned a Christmassy lunch of turkey and yams, and plum pudding imported by Tom and Strand from England, and were about to sit down, a little subdued by the friendly indifference of Ian’s servants, which strangely intensified the religious significance of the holiday, as if we were Christians huddled in a cave, hiding from the Romans, with Gazi for a hostage. I had spoken to my parents, and my sister in Paris, lying to them as usual, and that made me sad too.

  The gate boy let Suma into the compound, and she rang at the door of the villa. Gazi, by agreement, was not in sight. I was in the dining room, but I could hear Suma come in, talking to Ian in her rather sweet, Frenchified voice.

  “Oh, monsieur, I came directly.”

  “Merci, Suma, I’m sure you want to help.”

  “If I can, monsieur. I’m not sure that I can.”

  It emerged that Ian had telephoned her too, to ask for her help in getting Gazi’s passport. I was surprised at that and asked myself if he would have discussed the wisdom of this with me before Gazi. Before Gazi, I think he and I would have talked over whether Suma was likely to help, wondering whether she instead would tell Khaled; we would have relished all the nuances of this question.

  “I’m sure you can help. Come in. You know it is a difficult situation, I hope not too difficult for you in any way.”

  “I am sorry, I mean, I just cannot help,” she said in a rush. “I’ve thought about it. It would not be right.” She spoke rapidly, and her cheeks were flushed. “I wish you would talk to Mr. Al‐Sayad. He is very upset, and so are the children. I am so sorry for them.” She explained in a torrent that she couldn’t steal the key to Khaled’s safe, it would be stealing, forbidden by the Koran, and she couldn’t help Gazi without stealing. Also, she could not condone a woman leaving her husband.

  “I cannot help Madame Gazi, peace be with her. I am so sorry.”

  This was so off the wall I could think of no reply or remonstrance. Docile Suma, French‐educated, a modern girl. Had she never seen a Feydeau play or read Les Liaisons Dangereuses? I went to join in the discussion.

  “Sit down, Suma,” Ian was saying. “You know we’ve seen your brother? He was here the other night.” Suma followed us into the salon, seeming unsurprised. “Of course we didn’t tell him where you are. He says your mother isn’t well.”

  “No, I telephone her often, she is a bit better.”

  “I was hoping you’ve thought again about helping Madame Al‐Sayad.” We sat in the salon, and Miryam, as if acknowledging that Suma’s status was above that of a servant, if not quite equal to ours, brought glasses of tea and served Suma along with the rest of us.

  “I would like to, absolutely, she is so nice, but it would be to put myself in a false position, with my religion, and with my employer too.” She looked at me as if I would explain this obvious moral choice.

  “I don’t know the details, Suma,” I said. “I think Madame Al‐Sayad was very unhappy.” And I said a bit more about unhappiness in marriage. It seemed hard that I should be urging her to help save my rival, Gazi, but I did, which must at least have allayed Ian’s suspicions that I knew about him and Gazi, if he cared. “A very abusive relationship.”

  “That’s not true. Mr. Al‐Sayad is a gentlemanly, mild person, very nice to his wife and children,” she said. It crossed my mind she could have fallen in love with Khaled herself, or some complication like that.

  No amount of persuasion weighed with her. We thought of getting Miryam to talk to her, or Rashid, since
they were Muslims, but how could they avoid betraying to Suma that Gazi was here? It seemed to me that Suma was combining some of the worse traits of both cultures she belonged to—Islam’s lack of humanity and respect for women, its excessive reverence for men, and an absence of sisterly feelings that can be very French.

  As we talked, all at once, Gazi herself, evidently listening to the whole conversation, rushed in and seized Suma as if to shake her. “Do you want me to die?” Rattled and surprised, Suma pushed her away. Gazi’s hair flowed over her shoulders, she wore some sort of little sleeveless shift and thong sandals. Suma seemed aghast. Maybe she had never seen her so undressed.

  “What have I done to you?” Gazi was demanding.

  “Do you want me to go to hell?” Suma said.

  This chilled me even more. I had not guessed that Suma was religious enough to believe in hell. Why hadn’t I seen her piety? What clues had I had? Could she really believe she’d go to hell for telling a lie? I hadn’t even known they had a hell.

  “Just a little key. It’s on his key chain. Take it when he takes his bath or goes swimming.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m afraid as well.”

  “You agree he’s dangerous, cruel,” insisted Gazi.

  “No, no, no.”

  “He has his bath at six, every day before dinner.”

  “I will not steal, or open his safe.”

  “He puts his keys on the dresser. I’ve seen them a million times. The bathroom door will be shut.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll get them myself then,” Ian said.

  “Won’t he miss them?” Posy asked. We stared at each other. Naturally he would miss them.

  Of course I knew how to take an impression of a key. It’s simple, using paraffin, or sealing wax, or even cold butter—my wax pencils are designed for such uses. My mind foraged for an explanation of how I might have come to have an esoteric skill like that, and I couldn’t think of any to give them.