Rocks, The

by Peter Nichols

  “Amber necklace! Silver!”

  “I guide, I guide you, hippie!”

  Shedding the boys, they found the entrance to the souk, a street that quickly devolved into a rutted path that led between buildings and descended in crooked tacks beneath sagging strips of canvas strung overhead, throwing bars of sun and shadow below. Stall-sized shops, filling narrow alleys between stuccoed walls lit with bare hanging bulbs, lined both sides of the path. Alleys of carpets and kilims, alleys of djellabas, leather bags, saddles, belts, alleys of sorbet-hued leather Berber slippers with pointed upturned toes. In almost every shop a transistor radio sat on a shelf or the floor, with a crude wire antenna snaking toward the low ceiling. Out blared Moroccan torch songs: ululant waves of female lamentation.

  “Shirts!” said Aegina, grabbing Luc’s arm.

  They’d reached shirt alley. Shop after shop filled with shelves of soft cotton shirts, shirts on hangers in front of each little retail space. Several styles and colors were displayed but the predominant shirt was white, with a round collarless opening to mid-chest, fastened with multiple small thread buttons.

  Aegina fingered a white shirt hanging out in the alley. The proprietor, a short, plump, clean-shaven man wearing a white djellaba and yellow slippers, quickly plucked the hanger from aloft and laid the shirt out across his arm before her.

  “Best quality,” he said, looking up from the shirt to Luc and Aegina with limpid eyes, as if proffering his firstborn for consideration of a scholarship at a music conservatory.

  “That’s what you’re looking for, right?” said Luc. “It’s like yours?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “But this material around the collar is really a piece of trim sewn around the edge—”

  “Very fine,” said the proprietor. “Best-quality stitching.”

  “Yes,” said Aegina, smiling at the man. She pulled her black shirt out of her bag. “I want it like this, do you see? The fancywork, whatever it’s called, round the collar, is embroidered into the shirt material, not stitched on afterward.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I understand,” said the proprietor, hanging the shirt up. “Come.” He beckoned them to follow him with a quick repetitive downward motion of his hand. “Come, I show you.”

  “Do you have black shirts?” Aegina asked him.

  A brief, tolerant exhalation. “Of course. Plenty black.”

  They followed him into the back of his shop, the small space overstuffed to the ceiling with piles of shirts. He pushed through mounds with practiced bursts of force. He rooted through cardboard boxes. He turned and held a black shirt up before Aegina. “Especial shirt,” said the proprietor. With fat fingers he drew their attention to the embroidery around the collar, at the hem, the cuffs. “All make by hand. No machine. Especial. Very best quality. Much time.”

  “Right, that’s more like it,” said Aegina. “Do you see, Luc?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to buy a hundred,” Aegina said to the proprietor. “How much per shirt for one hundred?”

  “One hundred shirt?” said the man. “You want one hundred?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is fifty dirham shirt.”

  “Fifty dirham?” said Aegina, clearly surprised.

  “Of course. One person working, by hand, very careful, all day. Sometime two day.”

  She looked at Luc. “That’s about six pounds. I can’t do that.”

  “For one hundred shirt I make best price, thirty dirham one shirt. Three thousand dirham, one hundred shirt,” said the man.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just nowhere near what I can pay.”

  “How much you pay?”

  “I’m looking for shirts for no more than ten dirham,” said Aegina.

  The man carefully folded and smoothed the valuable black shirt, gazing down at it, smiling. “I have shirt for you for ten dirham.” He placed the black shirt down and moved toward the front of his shop. He pulled another black shirt from a pile and held it up to Aegina. “Very fine quality. One shirt, ten dirham. One hundred shirt, I make best price, six hundred dirham.”

  Aegina looked at the shirt, and glanced at Luc. “See, it’s like the white shirt. All the trim is sewn on.”

  “But black thread,” the proprietor noted sagely.

  “Black thread?” said Luc.

  “Of course.” He pantomimed trying to rip the trim off, conveying that it was practically riveted to the shirt and would never come off. “Strong.”

  “Black thread is strong?”

  “Stronger.”

  • • •

  At sunset they emerged from the souk, exhausted, disoriented, as if out of a circus tent, into the Djemaa El-Fna. They’d heard the sound of it inside the alleys as they drew closer, like the ocean approached through buffering dunes. The number of people in the square had increased many times since they had passed through it in the afternoon. Countless men were drumming and clashing cymbals to a single aggregate rhythm. Smoke from braziers, from oil drums, mixed with spice and savory particulate, hung in oily blue wreaths over the crowd. Crippled dogs loped in skewed diagonals.

  “I’ve got to sit down,” said Aegina.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  They climbed steps to the second-story balcony of the Café des Palmiers, which overlooked the square. The tables on the balcony, bathed in the light of sunset, were all taken.

  A deep, heavily accented, recently familiar voice penetrated the ambient din, in English:

  “The little Renault people.”

  A man, seated with a woman at one of the tables, stood up and drew out two empty chairs. “Eat with us.”

  He was in his mid-thirties, medium height bolstered by Spanish boots to not quite six feet, studiedly dressed as a Barbary pirate: beneath an embroidered blue Berber vest, his cream linen djellaba glowed pink in the crepuscular light, a tasseled leather satchel of genuine antiquity hung from a strap across his chest like a bandolier. Sheaves of long blond hair hung below the folds of the black cloth he had wound around his head into a turban. A red walrus mustache obliterated his mouth.

  The woman smiled radiantly and stood to greet them. She was about ten years younger than the pirate, and taller in white espadrilles. She too wore a turban, more loosely wrapped than his, of rust-colored silk, the same color as her hair. A long plain white shirt hung over white dhoti trousers gathered at her slim ankles.

  “Hello!” she said warmly, as they approached. She stood and embraced Aegina and kissed both her cheeks, and then did the same to Luc. Her hair, pungent and slick with some oil, flopped against his face and mouth.

  They had drunk beer together on the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier. Rolf, a German, was shopping for Moroccan merchandise for his boutique in Munich. He’d introduced Minka as his Yugoslavian girlfriend. “I’m Montenegrin,” she’d said in nearly accentless English. She looked more like a Pre-Raphaelite muse, with mahogany-red hair, large green eyes, and long milk-white, blue-veined neck. They spoke English, also the lingua franca between Rolf and Minka, who did not appear to speak much German.

  When they’d returned to their cars on the ferry, Luc and Aegina to their stonewashed Renault, Rolf and Minka to his mud-flecked black Jaguar sedan, Rolf had admired their pluck at heading for the hinterland of Africa in their meringue of an automobile. “You are braver than me to drive this little Renault,” he said, with a suggestion of mirth somewhere beneath his inscrutable mustache. Rolf’s every statement sounded as if it were enunciated in unison with a Berlitz language course record.

  Now he said, “So you make it in the little Renault?”

  “Yeah, it was great,” said Luc.

  “Did you find any shirts yet?” asked Minka.

  “No,” said Aegina. “We just spent hours looking in the souk. We’ll go back t
omorrow. It wasn’t encouraging.”

  “Of course,” said Rolf. “They show you the tourist shirt with the tourist price. You have to find the manufacturer.”

  “That’s what we’ll try to do tomorrow,” said Luc, irritated by Rolf’s implication that they were witless rubes who would be taken for every dirham. Luc knew that already.

  “It’s incredible, Marrakech, no?” said Minka, tossing her hair and gleaming at them both. “Did you get here last night?”

  “No, this morning,” said Aegina.

  “Look!” She waved a hand toward the balcony. “The Djemaa El-Fna! It’s the most amazing scene, isn’t it? Like a fairy tale.”

  “You drive all night?” said Rolf.

  “Yes. One of us drove while the other slept,” said Luc.

  Rolf said: “We spend the night in Tétouan. We make it in four hours straight today. Now we got a fantastic room at the Mamounia. Winston Churchill’s room. He always come here.”

  “I’m so glad we found you,” said Minka, briefly touching Aegina’s arm, and looking at Luc. “I missed you both after we left Tangier.”

  They ate couscous and tagine and dense unbleached Moroccan bread and drank two cold bottles of white Moroccan wine. After the sun dropped below the minareted backdrop, Rolf pulled a small wood and brass pipe from his satchel and lit it. A cloud of sweet smoke rose over the table and then flattened in the light breeze and drifted away.

  “It’s cool to smoke dope here?” asked Luc.

  “I think it’s cool, man,” said Rolf. He passed the pipe to Luc, who took a drag and held it out to Aegina. She sucked gently and passed it to Minka.

  “Is it Moroccan?” asked Luc.

  “Of course. Kif from the Rif. I always buy from my dealer in Tétouan when we come through. It’s fresh, just the tip of the leaves. No stalk.”

  They were all tired from the driving and soon fell into a sleepy, giggling stupor.

  “We’re going to go,” said Luc, as Aegina’s head fell onto his shoulder.

  “Please come have dinner with us tomorrow at the Mamounia,” said Minka.

  • • •

  They behaved as easily as step-siblings when they got back to their room, although they’d shared only the Renault until now.

  Each went to the bathroom down the hall in turn. Aegina returned smelling of toothpaste and got into one side of the bed wearing a T-shirt and underpants. The light in the room was poor, and Luc turned it out. He undressed to his underwear and got in the other side of the bed. The dim ambient light of the nighttime street came through the shutter louvers.

  “Luc?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you so much for coming with me.”

  “Oh, well . . .” He groped for a suitable reply, something neither too casual or enthusiastic, rather than tell her it was already the most exciting thing he’d ever done in his life. “It’s fun.”

  Very tentatively, he put his hand on her shoulder. Her move now. Then he heard her breathing: she was asleep.

  It took him longer.

  Five

  Shirts?” said their concierge the next morning after he’d asked them what they were looking for in the souk.

  “Yes.” Aegina opened her bag and pulled out the black shirt. She held it up. “I want to buy shirts like this one. Do you know where we can find them?”

  His head lolled backward and he emitted a high quavering note, a private giggle of sorts. “How many shirts you want to buy?”

  “Maybe a hundred. It depends on the price,” said Aegina.

  “One hundred shirts?”

  “Yes.”

  The hotelier motioned with his hand for them to sit at the table by the fountain in the courtyard. “In twenty minutes I will have someone take you to the shirts. Sit, I bring you tea.”

  “We’ve been through the souk and seen most of the shirts there,” said Aegina.

  The hotelier waved a finger and clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Not souk. You will see.”

  Fifteen minutes later, he reappeared with a boy of about twelve. Not a scrofulous street urchin but healthy and clean, neatly dressed in blue shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt that looked like a school uniform. “This is Yusef. He is my son. He will take you to see shirts.”

  “Thank you so much,” said Aegina.

  Yusef, shy but full of the gravity of his mission, nodded at them. They followed him outside.

  The boy led them along indistinguishable streets, away from the Djemaa El-Fna. He walked steadily ahead, looking over his shoulder occasionally to see that his charges were following him. When Luc and Aegina tried to come alongside him, he walked faster. They reached a district that was not the souk, not picturesque: trash-strewn lots filled with carts, oil drums, toppling shanty sheds cobbled together from scraps of wood, corrugated leftovers; carpenters’ shops drifted up with sawdust; upholsterers’ yards windblown with cotton flotsam; sheds housing ironworks, stacks of rusted plate.

  “Luc,” said Aegina, tugging at his sleeve, “it’s the polígono.” The Spanish word for the industrial park at the edge of large towns in Spain. As a child, Aegina had often gone with her father to the polígono at Manacor when Gerald took some broken piece of mechanical contrivance to be welded or bought paper bags full of nails or galvanized screws.

  “I guess,” said Luc. He’d not been much of a polígono-goer himself.

  Yusef, following his nose as unerringly as a dog padding home to dinner, led them through a warren of smaller alleys. They passed long sheds holding bolts of cloth, poles draped with dripping bundles of vegetable-dyed variegated yarn. Luc and Aegina trotted, almost stumbling with distraction, after him.

  The boy slowed and stepped into the doorway of an unmarked shopfront. They followed him into a room that might once have been a small travel agency. Pinned to the walls were sunbleached TWA posters: one showing the Liberty Bell, PHILADELPHIA above, FLY TWA below; in another, cartoon saguaro cacti and golf clubs erupting out of a fat, cartoon cowboy boot, with the legend: ARIZONA—FLY TWA. Small models of Air France jets and Royal Air Maroc DC-3s sat on the room’s single desk.

  Yusef spoke with the woman wearing a head scarf and a long, primly buttoned gray robe, who sat behind the desk. She looked briefly at Luc and Aegina, then rose and went through a back door.

  A man came into the room, followed by the woman. Luc thought he looked like Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother. Large-framed, pepper-and-salt-bearded, his mostly white hair crew cut, his intelligent face set in repose. He and Yusef formally shook hands, and then the boy spoke to him. He shook hands with Luc, touching his hand to his breast afterward. He didn’t shake Aegina’s hand, though he nodded to her with courtly acknowledgment.

  “Je m’appelle Rachid,” he said.

  Luc and Aegina gave their names.

  Rachid and Yusef spoke in Arabic for several minutes, Rachid glancing occasionally, with polite brevity, at Luc and Aegina. He questioned Yusef with close interest, the boy responding with assurances and a great deal of knowledgeable information, Rachid nodding at possibilities.

  “What on earth can they be saying?” said Aegina quietly.

  Rachid turned to them and said, “What is it that you are looking for?”

  Aegina produced her shirt. Rachid took it and examined it closely, the cloth, the hems, the embroidery at the neck. He handed it back to her without expression. “Only black, you want?” he asked.

  “I’d like to see white too.”

  “Come.”

  They followed him through the back door. On through a dark, hot storage room full of wrapped bundles and cardboard boxes. Through another door.

  They emerged into a long shed, with a low corrugated roof, brightly lit by windows and white fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling beneath trails of electrical wire. About twenty people, from children
to withered husks—they might have been four generations of an extended family—sat at tables and on the carpeted floor. Most were sewing. Four men were cutting cloth with heavy shears at long shiny tables. It was hot, fans blew at the ends of the room and at strategic points between.

  “It is my factory,” said Rachid. He led them to a pile of white shirts on a table and picked one up. It was similar to the shirts they had seen in the souk, with the trim sewn on in long strips, but the cloth was finer, and the work neater.

  “It’s very nice,” said Aegina. “But I’m looking for shirts that are embroidered around the neck”—she held up her black shirt again—“like this.”

  “Of course,” said Rachid. He led them to the other end of a shed where four middle-aged women, all wearing diving mask–sized bifocal glasses, sat on the floor. Their voluminous robes were indistinct from the piles of cushions they sat on, so that they appeared to be shapeless beanbags with bespectacled faces atop swathed mounds of cloth. A large fan was blowing across the group, producing a soft breeze humid with rank body odor and a miasma of cheap perfumes. The women smiled shyly at Luc and Aegina. They smiled back. Rachid picked up a mauve garment and showed it to Aegina. It was a long shirt, the sleeves and hem finely embroidered with a dark purple thread. The work was intricate, in a pattern of tight interlocking complexity, like lace.

  “This is beautiful,” said Aegina.

  Rachid raised his eyebrows and said simply, “Yes.”

  “Would you be able to do this around the neck of a shirt”—she held up her black shirt once more—“like this?”

  “Yes,” said Rachid. Then he added kindly: “But it will be better than this. Please, leave your shirt with me, and you will come back tomorrow.”

  Six

  The Renault cruised for a parking spot among the sleek monochrome Peugeot, Citroën, and Mercedes sedans parked beneath silvery palms in the moonlight beside the Mamounia hotel.

  “I don’t see the Jag,” said Luc. “Maybe they’ve forgotten.”

  “After three hours?”

  They’d run into Rolf and Minka again in the souk, and Minka had again invited them for dinner at their hotel.