Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  I plunged into my worries about Desi, maybe not emphasizing the real extent of my fears and feeling of responsibility, trying to be cooler than that.

  “We should be able to find out what they found on her,” he told me, seeming surprised that I should be worried about this. “They haven’t gotten back to us, but they’ve had a lot to occupy them, with bombs going off all over town.” This led to the subject that interested him more.

  “At least we have the satisfaction of being right, telling them things were heating up here,” he added of the bombings. “All directed at driving away tourism, driving away foreigners. Aimed at the French, I would think, as much as Americans.”

  “Nothing has happened in France lately,” I said.

  “Nothing since Toulouse. But it looks like something is coming down already on the subject of our late friend. It could be serious shit, Lulu, in Washington and in Paris.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Here was the official reproach, the finger of blame, coming closer. “Already?”

  “The disappearance of a French national in American custody. They heard about it right away, and the French are vindictive, like the Italians were. Encouraged by the Italians, probably—they’ll pursue it in the courts, they can make a serious international fuss. They don’t like us to begin with, and they really don’t like our cooperation with the Moroccans, what ever they say.”

  “Please, Taft, what are you talking about?” My stomach did a slow crawl. I didn’t see how France could know what happened to Amid, or anything that would connect me to it. I had thought about this pretty thoroughly; it was obviously someone from Ain Aouda—someone there, in our own facility, had reported the event to the French. It could be anybody who saw us at Ain Aouda, even Snyder.

  How did they find out? I asked. My dismay at this was less about my personal safety than at being let down by someone I had come to trust, had liked—say if the rat were Snyder. But I had no reason to think it was. Quite soon I would become concerned for my personal safety too, when it sank in that I could go to prison, even that they might have capital punishment in Morocco.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “It’s not impossible Amid was working for the French, NOC, infiltrating radical groups. We hadn’t heard that, though.”

  “And planning to kill his sister as a cover? That seems extreme.”

  “Separate issues. A side issue or part of his cover to help him infiltrate the local scene. This is speculation on my part. I haven’t heard this.”

  Could Suma be complicit? I thought about her right away. Could she and Amid both be some kind of French agents? Details of Suma’s behavior, including her move to the Al‐Sayads’, made sense both if she was spying on them, or helping Amid, and also if you assumed the opposite, that she was being protected from Amid by the Al‐Sayads, which would also imply that they knew something. Or maybe she was spying on them because they were the money launderers? But would they want to have anything to do with library bombs and Desi’s attempt at the concert? I couldn’t believe that.

  “They know you were there, in Ain Aouda. You’re noticeable, Lulu, especially in the context of a black site. Not a lot of girls around. My fault, I should have thought of that. Told you to wear a hat and shades.”

  “Shades, I did.”

  “Cover the hair.”

  “I did. Anyway, there are lots of blonde European women with driver’s licenses,” I said. “How could they identify me?”

  He sniffed. “Be on the lookout,” he said. “It seems clear someone outed you—us—to the French. I’m thinking about it. We’ll take care of it, somehow. We aren’t going to hang you out.” When Taft said this was when I knew he might. Though our agency had a reputation for sticking by its own, it often didn’t, when the convenient fall person was an alien of some kind, like the Iraqis after the first Gulf War or now, or the South Koreans, and I was an alien of some kind.

  Working bare. The significance came back to me now. Under some circumstances, we can’t know you. They’d warned me about that. It was hard for me to feel a sense of personal jeopardy—protected American law-abider I thought of myself as—but reason reminded me that working bare meant that if France pursued me, I’d be given up to them.

  “Why are you wearing those clothes?” I asked Taft, to conceal the panic that began to rise.

  “Comfortable. I like ’em. Less restrictive in the genital area, better for male all-round health. I’m taking some of these robe things back to Spain. I have some news: Peggy is getting a divorce, and she’s coming back to Spain with me.”

  For a moment I drew a complete blank. Peggy?

  “Dick Whitworth is a son of a bitch; it’s about time. She and Tarik and I’ll probably leave tomorrow. Walt Snyder has already gone. Best to get him out of here, he doesn’t have the handy… skill set you have to save his skin with. Have you decided what you’re going to do about the girl? The Arab girl?”

  I knew he meant Suma, not Desi. I’d about decided what to tell Suma: that Amid had gone back to France. She’d presume I’d given him news of the virginity certificate. Then she’d assume her parents were reassured and would call to find out more, and they’d tell her they hadn’t seen him. Meantime, we were on record as believing he’d left Morocco. I couldn’t see a hole in this, and it had the advantage of giving Suma less need to feel afraid that he was lurking around every corner.

  I also wanted to know from her about the state of mind, or the actual whereabouts, of Khaled Al‐Sayad. I had a moment’s fantasy that Gazi had gone back to him. We went over a few such matters, and then I left for my next appointment, hardly feeling up to it, now obliged to include in my worries the menacing scenario laid out by Taft, in which I’d take the blame for Amid’s death, what ever horrors that involved of punishment or prison.

  Snyder called me soon after this, from Cádiz.

  “Ciao, Lulu.”

  “Ciao, Walt.”

  “You’ve heard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve decided not to worry. Fuck it, we’ve got plenty of recourse.”

  “I’m happy to hear that. I wish I knew what.”

  “Something will turn up. This is a message of solidarity.”

  “Thanks, Walt.”

  “OK, ciao, Lulu, we’ll be in touch.”

  “Walt, do you ever have second thoughts?”

  A pause. “Yes. But it’s a job.”

  “I guess. Ciao, Walt.”

  43

  The label “surprise”… can be affixed properly to the unpleasant results of deliberate gambles.

  —Dr. Klaus Knorr, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

  The eerie sameness of the three days that followed seemed to efface the unreality of our situations. Pierre, Robin, Ian, and I shared game little meals without the company of poor Posy, still kept in the clinic. Apart from that we saw little of each other except in the evenings, when, the first night, Robin again read a few poems, paeons to fatherhood, and the next night when we kept a dinner invitation to the former American ambassador’s, now retired here. When invited, we had explained that Ian was away, and he had heartily urged us to come anyway; now we warned him that Ian was coming after all. Rashid asked no questions of any of us but ferried us hither and yon, to our visits to Posy and to see the wreckage of the library—which had been bombed rather ineptly, so that the front was blown off, and the table where poor Miss Pring had been reading while many shelves were intact at the back. I salvaged from the wreckage a few books, belatedly, that others had felt beyond reclaim. Those book corpses brought home the horror of explosions, indiscriminate fragmenting of reality, a vicious contempt for the material world I hadn’t understood before.

  Despite a strange lethargy that slowed my steps and made me feel sleepy all the time, I went each day to visit Posy, and so did Robin and Ian, at different hours. For the rest, Robin was working in his study. Pierre set up his easel in the courtyard to do some watercolor sketches of the maids and gardeners
, picturesque in their turbans and wrappings. Madame Frank came once to call and, I thought, to look around covertly. Maybe Ian was planning to sell her his villa too? The expat community telephoned one another to expostulate about the bombings, and Khaled’s lawsuit, and whether it was safe to go to the medina and the public gardens. Ian and I didn’t continue our conversation. Nothing more from Taft, Khaled, or the colonel; it was as if the past week had not happened.

  “I have a bit of news,” Habiba told me on the way to visit a village to the south. “Assan and I, after much soul-searching, are going back. For me, it’s forty years. I’ve got such mixed feelings.” I thought she meant going back to Mecca, where they used to live.

  “Isn’t it dangerous now?”

  “Probably. That’s why we feel we have a role, an important mission, actually, to further understanding of the Muslim religion. People like us—like me, anyhow, a mainstream Californian—can make ourselves heard, and Assan is a moderate imam who can be a force for good. We’ve hashed it over endlessly, and it’s the right thing to do.”

  I objected. “I’d think especially an American would be suspected.…” It took a while for me to grasp that she was talking about going to America, not Mecca. They were going to Connecticut, to a small town, where they would be visible good citizens. I remembered Habiba’s family money.

  With Ian’s return, I felt the dismay come back that had slowly been abating after Amid’s death day, for now I saw that nothing was solved or soluble and that maybe the answer to personal misery was to have no personal life or feelings at all. A solution a lot of people had arrived at before me, no doubt, maybe including Habiba.

  Ian and I didn’t have any more talks about our future. He was mostly at his office or somewhere, dealing with the death of Miss Pring. At night he would come in to embrace me tenderly, stirring my desire; but we didn’t make love. He never mentioned Gazi.

  At the end of the week, I went with him to visit, with a view to investing in, an experimental garden project in the foothills of the Atlases. The Moroccan farmer and his children greeted us, smiling and brown, a boy and two girls, barefoot, who ran out of a garden shed where they were stacking shrubby branches. The air was delicious, heavy with lavender and herbal scents of other kinds, mysterious and redolent of aromatherapy salons. With his planting, the farmer had made some effort to construct a pleasant garden, or maybe North Africans always think of gardens in this fashion, as needing to be delightful to meander in, formal in design, full of surprises of hedges and tiny ponds. In a little office, he showed us bottles of oils from the various herbal shrubs he had planted.

  “We sell these to a shop in Covent Garden, in England,” he said, “and we have many orders. We are exploring a soap made from this blend of herbal oil, and other products, perhaps perfumes. We are also replanting the argan tree. The precious oil of the argan tree…”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve been interested in the argan projects,” Ian said. “The women’s cooperative in Tidzi, for instance …”

  Ian knew a lot about it and was impressed, he said later, with the farmer’s ambitions. What promising developments lay in store for Morocco, what energy and intelligence among its people, what resources the country possessed.… And his hopefulness did give me a momentary glimpse of promise and peace lying within reach.

  All the more reason for our literacy work; I could look at it that way. I asked the farmer if his daughters went to school. His expression didn’t convince me, but he said, “Bien sûr, madame, they are good students.”

  All the more reason for Taft’s and my work too, I suppose. To protect the women’s cooperative, the schools, the optimism.

  Perhaps it was in the context of this hopeful expedition, with its promise of a productive future, that led Ian, as we drove back, to bring up the subject he had begun the night he came back. “I know when you came here, you didn’t expect any more than I did. That is, we were both hoping, I think, that what we had in Kosovo would continue to grow,” he said. “We like each other so much, we get along so well—we hoped for more. And I do feel more for you even than I did then—I love you very much.”

  And he went on longer in this vein. As you might at the doctor’s, getting a complicated diagnosis, I tried to concentrate but felt my thoughts exploding. This wasn’t what I expected, nor what I believed, and I was silenced by this tack, in what must have seemed an ominous silence, for he went on, almost more words flowing from Ian than I’d ever heard from him, about love, about compatibility. Finally he said, “I know I have to speak about Gazi.”

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  “We were in love for a long time, six years, only possible to meet when they were here in Morocco, of course, and only possible under the most ridiculous and clandestine conditions—her very life depended on me, if we were ever found out. Her life in Riyadh was impossible. Of course the very clandestinity made it exciting beyond all—”

  “Oh, Ian,” I found myself saying, “you don’t have to explain. I’m sorry you didn’t tell me sooner though. It might have saved me some tears.”

  “I hoped it was over. We both did. It was an impossible affair, with no future and the probability of ending in the worst way, we both always knew it. But Gazi was—is—reckless. Desperate.”

  “Why no future? She’s escaped. Where is she?”

  “In Marbella. She hopes to fade into the Spanish landscape. We’ll get her some papers somehow.”

  “How did you get her into Spain without papers?”

  “Through Algeciras. She hid in my car. The Spanish aren’t uptight— a respectable English man in a rental car, crossing to do some shopping, no problem at all.”

  I could think of all kinds of reasons it could have been a problem, but it was true there wasn’t a lot of trafficking in women out of Morocco, nor were middle-age, upper-class English men big people-traffickers. There was nothing about him to excite official vigilance.

  “What’s to stop the two of you, then?” I asked.

  Ian shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. What I’m trying to say is that my hopes for the future involve you, Lulu, and I regret what I know must have disappointed you and put you off, but I had to see it through with Gazi, and I just hope you and I can get through this and go on together.”

  Though this was what I had hoped myself, it was the last thing I expected from him now, and I had no idea how to respond. Something must have gone wrong with Gazi. He leaned over and kissed me in a somewhat brotherly way, and I didn’t object. I felt my body respond, but I told him I needed to do some thinking, and I did.

  “Gazi needs to understand freedom for a while. She’s been a captive her whole life,” Ian added.

  “Anyway, thanks for sparing me any hypocritical remorse,” I said.

  I lay awake well into the night, tormented by thoughts and lingering fever, wondering about what to do, especially about Desi, a frightened little girl in some cell or worse, but now also about Ian—about everything. Did Ian have any contacts among the Moroccan police that could give us information about Desi? I worried about losing my job, as a matter of course, having screwed up, Snyder and I. I mourned Amid, and if he had had to die, I was sorry to have looked at his penis.

  Probably Ian was thinking of marriage. We would be happy; I was sure of that, and he apparently thought so too. He’d had his fling with Gazi, and judging from his reticence now, something hadn’t worked out. It was the kind of issue in his life I couldn’t ask about if I didn’t want questions myself, though Ian didn’t seem curious or emotionally possessive the way some men are—the court‐injunctioned stalkers, the midnight phone-callers, the domineering fathers. I’d never be mixed up with men like that.

  Would he want to live forever in Morocco? I’d have to think about that, but I knew my resistance to it was crumbling. I could throw myself into female literacy. How easily I could be melted into wifehood, that time-honored refuge and slightly unchallenging calling—I even yearned for it deliciously. I could even s
tay in my job, could tell him about it.

  44

  And once we accept the fact that intelligence cannot always supply us with one “right” answer, our efforts can be more productively focused on preparing contingency plans and counter-surprises for the moment when the inevitable occurs.

  —Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

  I’d left a message for Colonel Barka, and there had been a message from him to meet him at the Restaurant Sidi‐Ali on Wednesday. I went straight there, without telling anyone at Ian’s where I was going or that I wouldn’t be home for dinner. When I got there, by taxi to elude Rashid, the colonel was sitting at the table we had sat at the day we saw Ian and Gazi there. He looked rakish in a conical red tarboosh with his usual military jacket, and rose slightly from behind the table, then sat back on the cushions, fatigued, it seemed, even distressed.

  “My angel,” he said. “What a trying time you’ve had. My colleagues are quite abuzz.” His urbane tone didn’t convince me.

  There was little point in sparring with the colonel. “That isn’t why I called. I have to know about the little girl who works at the Al‐Sayads’ and was arrested at the concert Wednesday night. Didn’t you see it?”

  “Yes, I saw you taking a young woman outside. What was that about? You went to dinner at the Franks’ afterward; I supposed it was not important. Unfortunately, we did not get to the Franks’. My wife doesn’t like late European dinners.”

  “Yes, I hustled her out, I thought she might be planning—there was something about her coat, I thought… anyhow the security guards took her away immediately, and now she hasn’t returned home. She’s a thirteen-year-old who works at the Al‐Sayads’ and watches their children. I have to find her, I feel terrible, the mother, everyone’s upset, it looks like the girl was just dressed up for her first concert.”