Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see her.” Even this small effort of mendacity made my head rage, and I prayed she wouldn’t mention her brother. What could she read in my expression?

  Miryam came in with a plate of tea cakes and with her most diffident manner asked Suma if she would like some tea. “And monsieur?” She said to Pierre Moment.

  He refused. “Je n’aime pas la menthe,” he said to me. “Mohammed, tu veux du thé?”

  “Merci, non, monsieur,” said the boy, shifting and squirming. Probably he didn’t want to prolong the sitting.

  “Suma, you should not be over there in Mr. Al‐Sayad’s house hold when Madame Gazi isn’t there, your brother will freak out. The way it looks, I mean,” I said.

  “There are a dozen women there; someone has to supervise the children. Anyway, we ‘servants’ don’t count.”

  Miryam passed the plate of little cakes to Mohammed, and he hungrily took several.

  “My dear Lulu,” said Robin Crumley, walking down the stairway from his study. “Are you better?” His tone suggested that maybe I shouldn’t be down here infecting everyone, something I hadn’t thought of.

  “I think I am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure.

  “I must go,” Suma said. “But what should I do? I must do something. She is only thirteen.”

  “What do the police say?”

  “Only that they are far too busy to notice the wanderings of wayward adolescent girls.”

  I wondered how she had come to look to me for opinion and advice. Did her dependence imply that she knew I had some responsibility? Some competence? Did it involve Amid? I must be careful not to seem competent. I remember my aunt saying to me when I was little, “Never tell anyone you can type.”

  “Her mother should go talk to the police,” I said. “I’m surprised she hasn’t. Or else ask Monsieur Al‐Sayad to do it.”

  I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t raise my thoughts enough to decide, whether to tell her about Desi.

  “Was she interested in religion, that sort of thing?” I asked.

  “Was? What’s happened to her?” cried Suma.

  “Is she religious? I’m sure she’s fine, I just wondered…”

  “Yes, she’s a good girl, very pious.”

  “But jihad? That sort of thing?” I was remembering the coat; maybe it was just an adult coat, too big for her. I had to talk to the colonel. “Suma, I might have seen something. There was an incident at the concert, a young woman was taken outside. We’ll try to find out.”

  This was the worst thing to have said, for Suma now began to cry, wailing that it was all her fault, and I could see how close under her taciturn surface were her fears.

  “Depuis son enfance—since she was only three years old, she has had to mind chickens and goats, only a little child, but she was so smart and she wanted to learn, and she loves music. I should have gone with her, but I was afraid to, because of Amid. Things are much worse here, mademoiselle, for girls.”

  “What have you done with the attestation about you?”

  “Mailed the original to my parents. I believe they will call him off. But only if they can find him, and they wouldn’t have had time to do that.”

  We agreed this was all she could do, for now, and that I would try to find out about the incident at the concert. But she was still in tears as she left, not reassured.

  When Suma had gone, without knowing any more about Desi’s fate—and indeed what had been her fate?—I foundered with dismay (again) at the poignance of the catastrophe: a poor little girl at her first concert—and probably no one but Suma had ever noticed her brilliance—now thrown into some terrorist holding tank. I tried to imagine what the Moroccan police would do with a girl of thirteen. My imaginings led to horrors of rape and torture, though reason suggested that unless she had been involved in bombs, they would send her back to her mother. So where was she? My sense of how long it had actually been since the concert was weak—four days? Three days? Only two!

  The Cotters had been invited to Saturday lunch, maybe by Robin. The others had a kir in the salon, and I struggled along with them to the dining room. They were aglow with gleeful gossip, and if I looked ill and strange, the visitors seemed not to notice.

  “Ian still not back! No wonder!” Neil Cotter began, delegated to carve the roast of lamb in Ian’s absence. “I had the most extraordinary visit from George Ward, the British consul. This is jolly good, you will laugh, if you didn’t know already.”

  “It’s as we thought—you’ve probably known all along,” said Marina, with a note of reproach that we’d been holding out on them.

  “George had a visit from the Saudi ambassador,” said Neil. “My word, intervention at the ambassadorial level! Complaining about Ian on behalf of Khaled Al‐Sayad. About Ian having gone off with his wife. It seems he’s jolly ticked off. Ian eloped with Gazi Al‐Sayad! You must have known all along!”

  We were silent a few seconds, people I suppose wondering what to say in front of me.

  “Yes, he seems to be involved in rescuing Gazi,” Robin said. “She took asylum here. We were locked down in an atmosphere of utter secrecy.” The Cotters continued to look at us reproachfully.

  “George had been looking everywhere for Ian—trying his office and such, wondered if I knew anything. I said, ‘not a thing.’” Again, the faint note of reproach for having kept him and Marina in the dark in this cruel way.

  “In Saudi Arabia, it seems these things are managed with—if not death by stoning, then a payment of goats at least. Sheep? Camels? Reparations of some kind. In Khaled’s case, he apparently would accept money. He’s trying to do the modern, Western thing. This is what George told me.”

  “It’s delicious, in a way, but—” Marina stopped, probably thinking of me. “Does it really help them, their women being educated in England and America? I think it just confuses them.”

  “I’m not sure it’s cultural confusion—it’s old-fashioned lust. Gazi is very beautiful,” Neil said.

  “In a Semitic, overblown way, I suppose,” Marina conceded. Robin said, as if to change the subject from their tactless allusions to Gazi’s beauty in front of me, “If Ian doesn’t turn up soon, I suppose we should ask Lord Drumm what we should do about things around here.” It was the first I realized that Robin might like me, to be so caring of my feelings. Usually I felt myself as invisible to him as Posy was.

  “Ian isn’t dead, Robin,” I said.

  “Still, it would be useful to know what the time frame is.”

  “The long and short of it is,” said Neil, “a British subject has robbed a Saudi of his wife—that is the nature of it: a diplomatic incident! Well, we know what we know.”

  “What did you say to Sir George?”

  “I said I didn’t know anything about it. True enough, as far as that goes, though a half truth, since we knew Ian had vanished.” They went on hashing this over. News of it had spread everywhere in the English community and probably among the French: Ian had run off with a Saudi wife.

  “Some say we shouldn’t interfere in Muslim marital affairs, but I defend Ian,” Marina said. “She was obviously desperate to get away. He had no choice but to help her. We saw them socially, after all. We sent them Suma. I wonder if it was a question of a second wife.”

  Eventually I pleaded my illness, excused myself, and went upstairs, followed by their sympathetic glances.

  40

  How is the gold become dim! How is the most fine gold changed! The stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street.

  —Lamentations 4:1

  How repetitious these protestations of dismay of mine! Yet it seemed there would be no end to new demonstrations of my misjudgment and culpability.

  “Lulu, do you think Ian would object if we had a few people in tonight?” Pierre had said as I left the lunch table. “I’ve asked a few people over.”

  I said I was sure it would be fine and went up again to my room, feeling
sicker than ever and sure it was all in my head. In my room, I e‐mailed “Sheila” and telephoned the colonel: Somehow we would have to find that little girl. Really, I had no confidence we could. At one point during the evening, I dressed and tottered downstairs to look at the party I could hear going on. There was Pierre handing around a plate of something—hash brownies, judging from the expressions of the people helping themselves.

  The atmosphere of frivolous sin did reinforce my impression that everyone I had met at the boozy but otherwise staid occasions (Europe an and Moroccan both) in Marrakech was here in the thrall of some unacknowledged vice or taste practiced outside of my view. For that matter, this had been my whole life experience, to radiate some inadvertent primness, to be sheltered from what everyone else knew, me only noticing belatedly, if ever, the hanky‐panky to which everyone else was drawn as horses to water. Alas, this credulity was not a good profile for someone in my profession, and, for that matter, may explain why I was drawn to it, in compensation, seeking the feeling of being for once in the know. Here were the clank of ice cubes; animated music in the French‐Moroccan idiom; strong smells of grass and whiskey, patchouli, sandalwood; light young voices speaking Arabic; a steady underlying drumbeat accelerating the pulse; couples, mostly male, draped in corners and on sofas; a few rather hard-looking European women; servants I’d never seen before passing drinks. Here was Robin Crumley, alone, his wife and new baby still in the hospital, standing pale and slightly boiled-looking, goofily waving his glass amid a crowd of dark young men, declaiming, I believed it was Yeats.

  There’s something almost enjoyable about a scene of depravity, for the feeling it gives of being in the know, even though the real depravity is happening somewhere else offstage. Hypocrisy is another matter. That seems omnipresent. It also came to me again what doubtless other people have always known, that Islam like other religions has its share of the worst people masquerading as the best. Muslims took the same amount of dope as others and sold children into prostitution the same as in Thailand or Bucharest.

  An odd moment: Into the party came George Ward, the British consul, wearing a white suit, though we were in winter, and an astonished expression as he beheld this transformation of Ian’s tranquil living room. People lounged, smoking; two boys stood up to dance in a jitterbug fashion I associated with 1950s films, people pushing and catching each other and twirling around to “Jail house Rock” played rather fast. The drums became deafening.

  He made a beeline for Robin Crumley, they spoke a minute, and he left, obviously not there for the revelry.

  Next, just as I was thinking, What if Ian came home now, Ian did come home—walked into the hall carrying a small suitcase. I wondered if he had met Sir George in the courtyard.

  “Ah,” he said, fascinated, peering into the salon at the festive guests. He soon seemed more or less pleased that people like Pierre felt enough at home here to invite others—not disturbed, anyhow— and wore a bemused, welcoming expression, like someone returned from the dead to watch mortals frolic. I hurried over to welcome him; I wanted him to know I was forgiving him for his leaving me at the concert—and what ever else he had been up to in the ensuing days.

  “We’ve missed you,” I said, striving for a light tone.

  “Hello there. I was in Spain.” He didn’t kiss me.

  “Where’s Gazi?”

  “In Marbella. I’ll tell you about it, but I’ll take my stuff up.” He nodded at Pierre, whose eye he caught, and went off upstairs with his suitcase. I went up in a minute, not especially to be following him, just wanting to lie back down, still feverish, and unprepared for how happy I was to see him and for the swell of dependence, the feeling of wanting to dump everything in his lap, a feeling I couldn’t indulge. I felt again what a burden it is to have the poisonous and omnipresent weight of a seriously guilty secret. Maybe it was truly Amid who was making me ill after all.

  41

  The Stream of Consciousness is the river of hell.

  —Elémire Zolla, Archetypes

  When I’d flopped down on my bed, still woozy and confused about how to behave to Ian, he tapped on my door and came in, beginning with the time-honored way of heading off recriminations: “Lulu, before you say anything—”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything.” I wasn’t; I could barely raise my head.

  He sat on his usual chair across the room, not tugging at his collar. He launched into a speech: “I know I haven’t been candid with you, but I didn’t intend not being candid, I intended, I sincerely tried to… you don’t want to hear this right now, do you?… Lu, are you all right? You look sick.”

  “Yes, no, I have the flu,” I said. “I just need to sleep. I’m sorry, I think I have a fever.”

  He put his hand on my forehead. “You feel hot.”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll just talk—you don’t need to say anything. No, I’m sorry. Do you need the doctor?”

  “I think it’s just flu,” I said.

  I couldn’t raise my head, but I could think. As I lay there, I couldn’t stop thinking, in fact, thoughts whirling around and pulsing in my ears, not very coherently. Of Ian, of Gazi, but mostly of Amid. How sorry I was that I didn’t believe in being forgiven. I didn’t know how that worked. Amid would just sit with me forever, not, eventually, a wracking guilt, probably, but an uneasiness forever. Maybe I would do even worse things, next to which Amid’s fate would sit lightly. That was certainly one way out.

  I was aware that Ian stood there a long time. He touched my face, tenderly, almost amorously, it seemed. I heard him tiptoe out.

  Would I have let him stay? No! Fresh from Gazi’s bed—he wouldn’t have dared. Anyway, I was probably communicable, and I wouldn’t have allowed him to stay, if I had had the strength to prevent it.

  42

  Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

  —Sir Walter Scott, Marmion C.VI, stanza 17

  By Sunday morning, I couldn’t ignore that I was truly better and had to get up and set about doing things, beginning with a visit to Posy. Posy was still in a posh little clinic, a complex of low buildings in Guéliz where, I gather, most Europeans and well‐off Moroccans gave birth. She lay against her pillows, looking exactly the same size as before around the middle, but flushed and feverish. I kept my distance because of my recent illness and could only peek in from the doorway. The baby was not in the room, but a nurse brought her past me as I stood there. She was the smallest of creatures and, despite the great bulk Posy had attained at the end, weighed only six pounds, with a furze of marigold-colored hair on her pink scalp. Her wide, bright eyes, already seeming to track and focus, were a tentative blue. Maybe it was too early for them to reveal their ultimate color. She was called Marigold.

  “Robin insisted on that,” she said. “It’s a nice name, but a bit silly with Posy. Posy and Marigold.”

  “He’s envisioning a Rose, a Daisy—a whole bouquet to come,” I said.

  “I thought you’d never come; you were sick, I heard,” she said.

  I hoped she would think that my illness explained my not coming with her the night she went into labor. “Yes, I’m sorry, I don’t know what it was. I was afraid to come when I felt it coming on. I have a sort of fear of hospitals besides.”

  “Sod this place, I want to come home,” she said. Marigold was already three days old, she was eating, and Posy felt fine, but Morocco viewed European women as fragile and obliged them to stay in child‐bed for days, resting and eating.

  The room had the milky baby smell. Maybe I wasn’t immune to babies, for I fell under the charm of this smell. But Posy was stiff and frightened when she took her baby up and seemed unsure of how to hold her to the breast. The hospital women found this funny, and good‐naturedly mimed comfortable nursing positions and piled pillows on Posy’s lap to prop the baby on. The clinic seemed chilly to me, and they had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and around Marigold.

  She tol
d me Ian had come to visit her already this morning. “He was going on as if he hadn’t been away,” Posy said, “but I came right out and asked him about Gazi. She’s in Spain, that’s all he’d say.” She was trying to suckle, but the baby kept breaking loose and whimpering. “I don’t know what it is; I have plenty of milk, that’s what they say—the woman, the nurse,” she complained desperately.

  “Do you think the Cotters would take Suma back, if she left the Al‐Sayads, even just for a few weeks?” This question seemed to divert her from her anguished struggle with little Marigold.

  “Probably. What, does she want to leave?”

  “I haven’t actually talked to her about that,” I admitted. “But it must be awkward for her there, and her terrible brother will assume the worst has happened, her having been alone with Khaled like that. I think she should get out right away.”

  “The downside is the brother could find her more easily at the Cotters’.” Thus we discussed the pros and cons of Suma’s situation and her options, without hitting on anything just right for her. I said she’d be perfectly safe in France. If the family accepted the virginity test, they’d call off her punishment.

  “Sod it all, I want to come home.”

  When the nurse had taken Marigold, I ventured close enough to kiss Posy before taking my leave, and could see the deep panic in her eyes.

  The same afternoon, I had a rendezvous with Taft, who had responded to my anxious e‐mail with the suggestion we meet at the Mamounia. Rashid took me there after lunch. Ian had not been seen for lunch or breakfast.

  Taft startled me. We were in the Mamounia bar, and he was wearing a djellaba and the white cap the local men wore. I almost didn’t recognize him sitting at a table near the door, he looked so natural. Most non-Moroccans look too pale for this comfortable costume. Now, for the first time, I noticed Taft’s eyes and hair were as dark as those of most of the men there. I wondered if he was going to carry this disguise to the point of refraining from alcohol, but he ordered a vodka tonic, and a glass of white wine for me.