Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “No women,” he came back to explain. “ ‘A woman may not gaze upon a dead man.’ ” He stood with me awhile longer, almost protectively. We watched through the car windows while the men loaded Amid’s body onto a stretcher and covered his face. Then they took him into the hospital building. I began to think about Suma and whether I could hint to her that her worries were over. I tried to tell myself the world was better off without a terrorist collaborator who’d kill his own sister, but would he really have?

  When the peculiar cortege was out of sight, I came out from purdah and insisted on going inside with Snyder. For one thing, I didn’t want to sit there by myself in the bleak prison courtyard. Also, I needed to pee. Snyder was looking at me as if he were seeing for the first time that I was more than merely his driver—I was a liability. At that moment, I tended to agree with him.

  As we went in, the Moroccan governor of the prison came out and issued orders to the smattering of men still there, but he seemed to have nothing to say to us. Was there reproach in his glances too? Stupid arrogant American bastards can’t drive a man two hundred kilometers without going to this extreme.

  We had no one to say sorry to. We were sorry, though. I, at least, was anguished—you can’t just go along killing people. I hadn’t planned on that. In our training, the suggestion was out there that target practice and elementary pharmacology were all “just in case” and that such things were almost never needed.

  We were in trouble, surely? Should Suma be told? His family? Or would he just disappear, never to be heard from again, they would assume vanished into Iraq or Pakistan? “I don’t know, Maman, he said he was going to Rabat,” she’d tell the poor mother, they would never know.

  Sometimes your life is just in a wreck. For the first time, I felt like I was in the wrong life. I could have done lots of other things—studied orangutans in Sumatra, gone to the Cordon Bleu. I was feeling this discontent, though, not for the first time, because in other lives I’d felt it too. I’d examine the question of my basic adjustment further at some more convenient time, for of course this wasn’t a time to think of myself, I knew, even though my thoughts kept sliding in an undisciplined way into a preoccupation with my own skin. Only unpleasantness lay in the future: an interview with Taft, an interview with Ian—for he must eventually come back to his large establishment, mustn’t he? An interview with Suma, necessarily mixed with lies.

  “Will they do an autopsy?”

  Snyder looked unsurprised, as if he hadn’t realized how dumb I was, to imagine he’d know. “I don’t know what kind of records the Moroccans keep. Probably have a category for tragic accidents. Who knows? I know the Koranic burial rules—they hustle them into the grave pretty quick.”

  As it worked out, we had an afternoon of reports and hanging around, in an atmosphere of Kafkaesque bureaucratic business, and didn’t get on the road back until after five. Snyder offered to drive, and, feeling sick, I would have been glad of it, but I didn’t want to shirk, so I drove in the growing darkness, on the lookout for un‐lighted carts, and had a couple of near misses. My feeling kept growing, of culpability, of having crossed over some impediment of dismay and reticence, and now I was a dangerous person myself.

  I had never before done anything really bad, not really, and now I had.

  Mostly, I kept thinking of the nice young man in the clean shirt who’d come to dinner and given no sign he was a fanatic, and maybe wasn’t. Had they—had we—snatched him from his prayers that morning? Another reminder of the scary unpredictability of life. What is the argument? That you should live as if dying daily. Montaigne? St. Augustine? Or that it’s dangerous to believe anything? He was killed for his beliefs. I wasn’t having any coherent thoughts at all, I was just in a turmoil of pointless agitation, of unfocused and unproductive sorrow.

  If only I had spoken up more insistently when it seemed to me he was lying too still. Instead of saying that, I’d asked what the drug was, the elliptical form of the question. Hadn’t wanted to seem to criticize— hadn’t meant to, was simply uneasy. Maybe that’s what Taft will say, that I should have spoken up; maybe this will officially be my fault, my responsibility as driver of the car.

  And, over and over, what were we going to tell Suma? I kept coming back to that. I knew we wouldn’t tell her anything. He will just disappear. She’ll never know what happened to him. She’ll always imagine he’s still stalking her; her life will be ruined. The parents will never hear from him, will wait forever, will assume he fell in distant Baghdad or Kabul, or Pakistan, or perished on some mountain pass.

  On the road, we telephoned Taft, who was angry but didn’t seem to blame us, just circumstance, cursing the loss of somebody who was going to be the key to us knowing a whole lot of things about North African terrorists. But he was also philosophical: At least there was one less bad guy in the world. He was surer of that than I was. It seemed on the drive back that Snyder felt as bad as I did. This came out in the way he would blurt out from his silence, from time to time, “Just one of those things,” or “These things happen.”

  “What will happen now?”

  “Many reports,” he said. “Many, many reports.”

  Taft was waiting at the Sheraton, up in the room, with a bottle of bourbon, and poured stiff portions for Snyder and me. He handed me half a glassful. He and Dom were already drinking. They had a sympathetic air, but Dom’s was slightly patronizing to the screw ups, or, at least, to me, to the point that, once, I blurted out that it was he who’d calibrated and administered the dose, not me. Like a whiny child, a tattletale, blaming others.

  “We’re not playing the blame game here,” Taft said. “There’ll be plenty of shit to go around.”

  We hashed it over and over. The recitation was a form of torture in itself.

  “When did you notice he wasn’t moving?”

  “We were almost to Ain Aouda.”

  “We weren’t looking for him to move,” Snyder said. And much more in this vein. Taft asked questions and Dom wrote down what we said. I was desperate to go back to Ian’s and somehow wash it off. But I knew I couldn’t, any more than Lady Macbeth could.

  It was almost two a.m. before I got home to Ian’s. As we had planned, Snyder drove me in the van as far as the road that led past the little shanty village where, I guess, the maids live, near the villas of their employers. He still had to wipe the van and leave it at the airport; I would walk from the village—the villagers asleep, no one on this road. I had brought one of Gazi’s abayas to wear for invisibility, and in the black night I did feel invisible as I slid past the small houses with their tin roofs and blue doorways. Somewhere a radio played a wailing voice, like a lament for Amid. Posy and I had walked this road before, only about fifteen minutes from Ian’s, yet now it felt menacing and long. My heart was frozen in an absence of thought, except about how dark it was.

  “I’ll be fine, Walt,” I’d said, getting out of the van, but now I was scared.

  At one point, a few houses had sprung up at a bend in the road across from the others, so that the road ran between the old and newer habitations, making it necessary to go for a few hundred feet through the village itself. I had thought that at this hour that stealing through unseen would not be a problem, but coming around the corner, I was stupefied to find a scene of life, men and boys in a ring around something I couldn’t see, maybe a cock or dog fight, though I hadn’t heard of those in Morocco. I was shocked; I had so banked on finding everyone asleep.

  I was in a fragile state of mind, unable to decide what to do, unfamiliar with whether a woman would be out alone and what would be concluded about her, unsure of the safest course. Did I walk confidently along the road? Run? Sneak around the periphery of the houses, off of the road, like a prowler or thief? But I hesitated too long and was seen—the group turned to stare, it moved together as if it had been swayed by wind, not hostile, necessarily, but awakened, shocked in its turn to see a black‐ robed woman crouched there. A figure darted out and
toward me, a boy. My impulse was to run, but I was mesmerized. He took me by the hand.

  “Mademoiselle Lulu, I will see you home.”

  Who could this be? I had no idea. I thought I was hallucinating or dreaming. This boy took me by the hand and led me down the road another hundred yards, me like a little donkey trotting at his side, my abaya sliding foolishly off my shoulders, a little woozy from Taft’s whiskey now. No one came after us. This boy must be someone we knew. It came to me eventually that it was the gate boy. I hadn’t recognized him—I had never really seen him, though he was always there, and now he had come to my rescue, if it was rescue I needed.

  “It is so dark,” he said. “Did you have problem with the car?”

  He left me at the gate and headed off toward his village again. It was lucky I had a key to the door next to the gate, for the place was locked down. There were still lights on in the kitchen, and the lights in the courtyard had been on, as if for me, but clicked off as I came in. Pierre Moment was sitting alone in the inner patio, though it was cold out. Maybe he’d just been saying good night to some little catamite. I looked to see if there was anything on the table, but it had been cleared except for two glasses and a bottle of red wine. I was starving, though it seemed paradoxical to be both hungry and sick at heart.

  “Is there any news of Posy?” I asked.

  “Oui! C’est très bien, une petite fille!” Robin had just telephoned but was not yet back, he said. Pierre was waiting up for him. “He ees complètement berserk.”

  “Posy’s okay?”

  “Très bien. Fatiguée. Tout s’est bien passé.”

  39

  And now you’ve aired all your smug Western views, probably even having a few laughs deep down at our expense… but by inflicting your own naive ideas on us, by rhapsodizing about the Western pursuit of happiness and justice, you’ve clouded our thinking.

  —Orhan Pamuk, Snow

  My restless dreams were not of Amid or death but of strange childhood things. My fears for my parents. Bandits stopping our car. Someone saying, “Take their skin,” and when I cry in fear, the bandits say, “Not you, little girl,” not understanding my terror is for my parents.

  My first thoughts in the morning weren’t of Amid either. These rushed in only moments later, with a sickening swell of despair at what had happened and couldn’t be undone. Where I had thought him a terrorist, now he seemed a handsome, promising young man taken (by me) before his time. I tried to tell myself some of the things Taft had told me—“Death doesn’t scare them; they’re transfixed by hate”—but I couldn’t see him otherwise than as a person with his life ahead.

  My very first conscious thoughts had been of Posy and were of a lightness and happiness I’d have liked to prolong. But then the events of yesterday came to me, and the earlier problems—Taft, Ian gone, Desi, the little boy on the stairs, the gate boy—all the ugliness and complication gave me the feeling I was caught in meshes of illegality and danger I would never escape from, but was only doomed to struggle against, and with struggle would tighten my bonds. For, looked at realistically, such was the case—my state was one I couldn’t get free of; I must forever thrash within the category of killer.

  I lay there a few minutes, dreaming backward into sleep, of being a young woman again, before college, hanging out and necking in cars, with no thought of the future. Then back to the present: contractual obligations, love, rage, guilt. I reviewed what I should do next: I should try to find out where Ian was—check his room more carefully, talk to Suma about her situation, find out more about the library bomb, and talk to Colonel Barka, not necessarily in that order. There was nothing to do about Amid.

  But I couldn’t seem to move. Gradually, I came to realize I was ill, probably had a fever. I got up and opened the shutters, but I swayed dizzily, and the light streaming in hurt my eyes, and the air seemed to me suffused with the same ammonia smell that had overcome me at Ian’s factory. I tottered back to bed and lay there longer, thinking I had a hangover from Taft’s whiskey or something monthly like cramps. Thoughts of illness had the power for a few moments to crowd out memories, but these soon enough came whirling back: Amid, vomit, the silent efficiency of the men at Ain Aouda and their haste to banish me from the sight of what they were doing, their conviction I didn’t belong there. Above all, what to tell Suma.

  A maid came in about noon, believing I’d gone out, and gasped a little when she saw me still in bed, then asked if I was all right and went to bring me some tea and hard bread, which must be what is prescribed for the Moroccan sick. I asked if she had heard about Posy’s baby.

  “Oui, madame. Allah bestows female children on whomever He wills,” she said.

  I spent the rest of the day in bed but tried to get up for dinner, only to fall back, not without a certain sense of satisfaction, believing this to be a psychological illness. I was satisfied to think I had moral compunctions that had made me sick. Perhaps it was the case. Robin Crumley tapped at the door and asked if I could be helped; later Pierre, and the maid—Aisha—again, asking if I wanted the doctor and food.

  “Suma was here asking for you,” Pierre Moment told me, standing delicately in the doorway. “The young woman from Paris.” Maybe I’d gotten sick to avoid Suma. I relished the Victorian suitability of falling ill in response to life. Yet I was ill, and could not get up, through the second night.

  On Saturday morning, I thought I was better, reluctantly, seeing that I’d have to go back to real life, beginning with a better look in Ian’s room. A guilty conscience is just a luxury in my line of work, and a self-indulgence; and mine, I now like to tell myself, was not so much a moral qualm—for I do believe in our side of things—as chagrin at having screwed up.

  Of course, there was nothing in Ian’s room, just the socks and shirts and cuff links of an orderly life. He had an office, he would naturally keep important things there; only women were obliged to tuck their flash drives among their pantyhose and business letters under their pillows. I knew I should go to the office, ostensibly because of Miss Pring’s death, and look through Ian’s business records.

  I telephoned Posy, apologizing for not coming to see her yet; I listlessly read my mail—communications from MEPI, the grants organization I was compiling my literacy reports for; a letter from my parents, them grumbling as usual that it was archaic to be putting pen to paper, what was the matter with my e‐mail; a strange letter from Ian’s father, in a heavy cream-colored envelope with the initials GPLD, which meant nothing to me. I opened it and turned right to the signature: Geoffrey Drumm. It was short, saying only:

  Dear Miss Sawyer,

  It was a great plea sure to meet you during my visit to Marrakech a few weeks ago, and I find I have often had you in my thoughts since then, and so have indulged myself with this note to say how pleased I would be to see you again, should you find yourself in London. I may be in a position, perhaps, to help you in some way if you thought, for instance, of relocating here. (Morocco not being much to my taste, I can imagine others coming to the same conclusion.) This is my private telephone, the best way to reach me: 207 392 2013.

  I send my best regards, and the hope of meeting again in the near future.

  Geoffrey Drumm

  How typical, I couldn’t but think, of successful and domineering men, to horn in on their sons’ friends and lives. Poor Ian; probably this had gone on always. I noted the phone number and threw the letter away, then retrieved it, in case. In case of what?

  I went down to the patio to sit in the chilly sun. Miryam herself brought me tea. Pierre, with his easel set up, was painting a boy of thirteen or fourteen, who sat on a chair shivering, in a light white bur‐noose and picturesque blue headdress, in the manner of the nineteenth century—though Pierre was an abstract expressionist of some evolved postmodern kind.

  “It’s a kind of an homage to Delacroix,” he said.

  Pierre painting, I lying on the chaise longue—and into this tableau came Suma, wearing jeans but
also the abaya, and a worried look.

  Me, the languid invalid: “Hi, Suma.”

  Suma: “Bonjour, mademoiselle. I hope you are better. They told me you were malade.”

  Me: “Yes, thank you.”

  Suma: “I came because I am most worried about my little friend Desi. She hasn’t come home for two days. Her mother is frantic. We have called the police. Little Desi the virgin?” She smiled at our secret, but then stopped smiling. “You were at the musical soiree—I was hoping—did you see her there?”

  This was really a hard question to know how to answer. If everyone (Suma) knew she was going to the concert, had she really been going to blow herself up? If I said “Yes, I saw her,” was I obliged to comment on her bulky coat?

  If I said no? “No,” I said. “Was she there? That seems—she seems young for a serious evening event.”

  “I had the ticket of Madame Al‐Sayad, and I gave it to Desi and organized with her mother. In the end, Monsieur Khaled didn’t go, and I could have gone with her instead; I should have.

  “She’s so young,” Suma said. “This is all my fault. She’s thirteen, and she didn’t understand about… the test, and she came away thinking something was seriously wrong with her, or that the test had damaged her. She was so upset. I explained and explained, but she is only a Moroccan village girl—they are way more simple than in France; she can read, though. There was a school there. Apparently lots of them can’t read. She was the only girl who went to the school. She has a good memory. I was amazed at her memory, she can recite the Koran and anything else she’s ever heard. She thinks she’s so fortunate to have a job in Marrakech in a house hold. Her mother found the Al‐Sayads, found her a job there.”

  Yet there was something insincere about Suma’s expression. What could she know? She knew only that nothing had blown up at the concert and that Desi had not come home.