by Tim Kindberg
Shadows of Marrakech
by Tim Kindberg
Copyright © Tim Kindberg 2013
For Gene
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
Robert Bresson
PART ONE
Seeing the Unseen
CHAPTER ONE
RIPPED FROM ITS mother, the baby cried and pushed blindly. Its father’s arms were hard and without comfort. His pounding step jarred the baby’s frame as he strode down dim corridors, across courtyards, and eventually out of the darkness to a lit room with cushions and a low dining table in the middle. Black boxes sat in disorder on the shelves to one side, a scattering of perfect closed cubes inlaid with mother of pearl. Holding the baby, now exhausted, in one arm, he pushed some of the boxes aside with his free hand. There was a faint clattering from them, then a clattering in response from the boxes he had not moved. He ignored the familiar sounds. A tattered book lay revealed. Flipping it open, he took a key from a square hole within it that had been made by cutting every page in the middle.
Outside, it was almost time for the pre-dawn call to prayer. All the good citizens of Marrakech were asleep, oblivious in their beds. The night’s chill clung to the area within the old city walls known as the medina. And in the heart of the medina lay the souks, the markets whose jumble of narrow streets, alleys and stalls was silent and still before the chaos of buying and selling began.
A creature bound to the souks, he never slept. Neither did he ever pause to consider the lives around him. He moved swiftly outside, crossed the courtyard, and unlocked a heavy door with the key from the book. The stone slabs of the passageway inside were worn by centuries of feet. He unlocked another door at the end, with the same key.
The chamber lay in candlelight. Heavy furniture stood around without any particular order, as though someone had taken it there for storage but had been stopped from stacking it. And, spread out in a large gap in the middle, lay the reason he had come: a carpet of woven shadows. There was shadow on shadow of people and creatures, wafers of blackness with a pattern of cold beauty stitched around each of them, a tracery of golden threads that glinted in the candle’s flickering.
None of the shadows’ owners were to be found, not in this world.
He stood by the carpet’s edge. The baby was kicking again. Its scream barely penetrated his consciousness. He laid his baby boy on his back on the carpet, and took several paces away. The baby struggled helplessly. The carpet seemed grateful to receive him. Black threads appeared, as he knew they would, and multiplied. They whipped up all around the baby and criss-crossed him, weaving over, binding him. Soon there was a baby-shaped lump, which gradually disappeared as the threads tightened. At last all that remained of his son in this world was a perfect shadow-shape of him: a little flat outline sewn in deepest black, distinguished from the crowd of gold-edged shadows beneath. This was the first stage. Soon the stitches would melt to pure flat blackness, and the glinting pattern of gold would shift and trace around his shadow like the others, as though sewn by an invisible hand.
For centuries, the carpet had subjected whoever stepped upon it to the same treatment. All, that is, except one.
He turned and strode back the way he had come, shutting but not locking the door behind him.
CHAPTER TWO
“IBTISSAM. IBTISSAM! COME here you monster! I’ll tell you-know-who to cut you up for scraps if you don’t come back. He’ll raise his cleaver and chop you in two.”
Chemchi knew it didn’t make sense. If Ibtissam couldn’t be found then she could hardly be subjected to the butcher’s terrifying attentions. But, in her exasperation, it was all she could think of. She didn’t know why the butcher had been so much in her mind lately, except that he might be able to help — and, preposterous though it was, that she might ask him.
The tabby cat had been missing for over two days; no appearance at breakfast the day before yesterday, or at any time since, when Chemchi wondered around the riad and beyond with a saucer of food for her. She hadn’t known the cat meant so much to her. She had gone all around the souks but searching was hopeless in such a hectic maze. Now she was looking closer to home again.
She stopped in a long narrow alleyway, which was empty and silent. Suddenly something happened that was very unusual for her, but which seemed possible while no one else was around: a tear fell. It slipped from the corner of a wild eye, beneath the single black braid that hung from her headscarf and across her forehead. The tear ran down the side of her broad nose to the crest of her upper lip.
Ali had told her to be patient, in his infuriatingly patronising way. “Who knows,” he said before she left the house, “what there is to distract a cat living so close to the souks. It’s not the first time she has strayed, only to return eventually for her saucer as though nothing had happened. Perhaps a tourist has noticed her – maybe Ibtissam has been helping them find whatever they are looking for in the souks.”
Ali had winked at her and taken a sip of his mint tea. “She is such a beautiful cat with her long body and tail. Maybe she has befriended one of the other souk cats. Perhaps they have gone together to find a mouse or sparrow for supper.”
As always, he sounded like a children’s book — one of the stories read to her by a woman he’d had brought in to teach her Arabic and to steer her away from her native Berber. He just didn’t get it. Chemchi knew her Ibtissam, and sensed that something was different this time. Ali wouldn’t understand. But she had to admit that he could be right about one thing: Ibtissam might well be in the souks. The cat accompanied her when she shopped there, darting by her feet and then sitting beside her with her tail curled when she stopped, examining the purchases to see if they might prove to be a meal.
She wiped the tear away. The old walls around her stood in complete silence. There was not a movement. Less than two hundred metres away, on the Rue Mouassine, the multitude shopped. Tourists ambled and stopped at the stalls, and the locals marched swiftly or buzzed on mopeds between them. You could hear none of that where Chemchi paused. The ancient places stopped the market sounds from reaching beyond them, as they had for centuries.
“Ibtissam,” she whispered to herself, “I will never scold you again. If only you would come back from your hiding place.”
Ibtissam’s name in Arabic means “smile”. Ali had insisted on it, and sure enough it had proved not to suit her. For Ibtissam was a serious cat who did not suffer fools gladly. And she was stubborn: the immovable object to Chemchi’s irresistible force. Chemchi was descended from the tuareg, a tough Berber people of the Atlas mountains and the Sahara south of Marrakech. Yet she could shed a tear over a cat. Sometimes she didn’t understand her own feelings.
She turned the corner, heading inevitably for the ferment of the souks. And there was Rime the beggar-woman, crouched with her knees to her chin, a tiny tattered figure by the wall with her hand outstretched for a coin. Her look was vacant until she saw Chemchi approaching out of the corner of her eye, when a smile lit her face.
“Rime, have you seen Ibtissam? You must have seen her. Were you here yesterday?” Rime was always there. But Rime’s smile stayed fixed, for, as Chemchi knew, whatever Rime had seen would remain locked inside her muteness for the rest of her days.
Chemchi steeled herself. Sixteen years old and almost six feet tall, a stature that was not so rare among her people, she cut a proud figure in her white robe and trousers. A woven shopping basket, big enough to hold a stroppy cat, hung on her arm. At the thought of meeting the great public of Marrakech, a feistiness filled her like a magic liquid. Who, she thought, were they – and by ‘they’ she meant anyone who might now meet in her hunt for Ibtissam – who were they to mess wi
th her? They had better co-operate. They had better answer her queries directly. She did not have time for any nonsense.
And so she left the quietness in which she lived and where she had given up hope of finding Ibtissam, and entered the Rue Mouassine by the great mosque. For a few seconds she stood amid the insect swarm of bicycles and mopeds, and the people all bumping through like daddy-long-legs. They carefully picked their way around her as she looked to right and left. To the left it would be. She couldn’t face looking hopelessly around the souks again. She knew who could help her, even though she resisted the thought of turning to him with every bone in her body.
CHAPTER THREE
MORCHID WAS SHARPENING his cleavers. He must have known she was standing right in front of him, but he paid her no attention. His moustache, barely more than stubble, twitched and glistened with sweat as his arms worked like a machine on the blades, sliding them backwards and forwards on a stone. Muscular and wild-haired, he loomed above her inside his raised stall, surrounded by his meats.
“Morchid,” she spoke clearly, her heart beating. But the schling-schling, schling-schling of the metal blades continued.
“Morchid,” she raised her voice.
Schling-schling, schling-schling. Still he had not looked at her.
“I seek your help, Morchid.”
“How is Ali?” he said.
“I’m not here about Ali. I’ve lost Ibtissam. She’s gone.”
At last he stopped, examining something on his hand.
“Ibti-who?” His mouth curdled after everything he said, a crooked shape accentuated by the stubble above his lip. Everyone knew, whenever anything unfortunate happened in the souks, that Morchid was the man to come to — if you dared. He had been here for longer than anyone could remember. But the souk-dwellers turned to him only as a last resort, when all other options had been used up. People who received his help seemed troubled afterwards, as though one burden had replaced another.
But Chemchi must have her Ibtissam back.
“Ibtissam, my cat.” She kept her voice clear and closed her lips with resolution. Her green eyes could take on a fierce look, lined in black, the black of the braid across her forehead.
When he finally looked at her, there was a tiny ratcheting of a cog in Morchid’s brain, appearing as a tic in one corner of his mouth. He went back to examining his hand as though nothing had happened.
“If I tell you where to look and you find her then you must agree to something.”
“Very well,” she replied. What had she got to lose, anyway?
“But I won’t tell you what you must do in return, not until you have found your Ibti-whatever. Do you swear to comply?”
Her good sense rebelled. She turned to leave, to trawl the labyrinth one more time to find her Ibtissam. But her heart was heavy. Hundreds of alleys lay all around her; a thousand nooks; a million crannies. All she knew, however she knew it, was that Ibtissam was alive. She stopped herself and turned back to face Morchid. He was staring straight ahead from his stall as though transfixed. Whatever it was that he required in return, Chemchi told herself that Ali – Ali whom everyone loved because they saw him as cheerful and amiable and didn’t know what she knew about him – Ali would have to deal with it.
The sweat trickled over Morchid’s eyebrows, down his cheeks and into the stubbly moustache, where it hung. He would say no more. A queue was forming behind her.
“Next!” said Morchid.
“No, wait, I’ll do it. Just tell me where I can find Ibtissam.” Morchid stopped the next customer coming forward with a hand.
“If you’re sure, little one,” he said, as though she were not so tall in front of him.
“You are a wicked man.”
“Next!” he said again.
“No, you must tell me!” This time Chemchi stopped the customer, a bewildered lady with her purse in her hand. By this time the queue was murmuring and cross.
Morchid leaned down and whispered. She could feel his warm, meaty breath on her ear.
“Every cat likes a carpet to sleep on. Go to the Criée Berbère, where a thousand carpets are spread for the tourists. But only one of them is woven with shadows. Take a torch, shine it in the light and you will see what is unseen.”
“A torch? Any torch? And in the light? I don’t understand. How will this help me find Ibtissam? I’ve never heard —”
“Searching is a serious business. What matters most is who it is that searches, who it is that seeks. You’ve given up or you wouldn’t have come to me. And maybe you need a little prop to help you. But something tells me you are a serious searcher. True, not everything – or everyone – wants to be found. But all the lost places, all the lost people, and all the lost things are there for the finding. So tell me: what can never be found?”
“Only whatever lacks the right person to find it.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself. Next!”
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PLUMBER SCRATCHED his old head. He couldn’t understand what this girl, the girl from Ali’s riad, was on about.
“You’re not doing any plumbing are you?” he said.
“No, no, of course not,” said Chemchi.
“Then it’s for Ali.”
“Not for Ali, for me. I have a project. A scientific project. It’s become a little more complicated than I had first imagined and Ali said you could help.”
He scratched his head again and turned the torch around as though looking at it for the first time.
“It’s served me faithfully for many years. But I’m retired now, I’ve not used it for years.”
“It looks a good one, with that big battery.” It was old and battered. All those pipes that twisted under old Marrakech and all those cubby holes he must have shone it into — it bore the scuffs and scratches of countless bashes and falls onto tiles.
“Better for a youngster like you to make use of it, I suppose. But you’d better bring it back.”
****
The Criée Berbère is a shaded part of the souks where, Ali had told her, until about one hundred years ago, slaves were sold openly, in defiance of the anti-slavery movement. Nowadays it was full of rugs and carpets for sale, covering the walls and floors of the stalls. The stallholders proudly unrolled their wares, each run through with a different geometric pattern, for the passing tourists.
The overall illumination was low relative to the searing sun outside; but each stall’s interior was bright with electric lamps. Chemchi felt so foolish shining her torch into them.
To add to how silly she felt, the stallholders pointed at her and laughed, discussing her with their neighbours. Might Morchid be chuckling now at her expense? The torch beam was of course invisible everywhere she shone it in the stalls. But, as Morchid had said, cats like to sleep on carpets, and where else were carpets to be found in such numbers? Would Ibtissam appear if the torch beam fell on her? Is that what Morchid had said? None of it made sense. She doubted herself and she began to doubt Morchid. She could bear the humiliation no longer. She went home.
When Chemchi was agitated she would gesticulate passionately, raising her arms and then cupping her hands together. Ali leaned back in his chair and regarded her.
“Calm down,” he said. “You’re making me dizzy. I told you who to get a torch from. What more do you want from me?”
“Ibtissam is nowhere to be found. I am so worried about her. And what I am I doing? Wondering around with this … thing.” She picked up the clumsy torch and pointed at it. “Trying to believe, for her sake, what Morchid has told me. But it makes no sense, it’s just an old torch, and I’m shining it in the light so everyone in the Criée Berbère is laughing at me.”
Ali poured some mint tea for her and motioned for her to sit. When she ignored him he added a small turn of his head. She complied and put her head in her hands. He was all she had. The very man who had ripped her away from her mother.
“I told
you already, I don’t know how the torch will help,” he said. “But if Morchid says to do it then you do it. I have heard many stories about his methods and workings, all of them strange and many of them, to be frank, unpleasant. But you went to see him. You knew what that meant. Now don’t be an even more stupid girl and throw his advice away. You want to go back to searching without any idea where she could be?”
“I’ve already looked everywhere in the Criée Berbère, never mind the silly torch. I even asked those men while they laughed at me whether they had seen her. You know what they said? They said: are you kidding? Every cat in Marrakech visits us at one time or another, to come and sleep on our carpets, woven by the finest weavers in the Atlas Mountains. Cats even come in pairs, one trying to distract us while the other finds a nice snug corner. Do you know what we do? We take a broom and we make damn sure those cats never visit us again!”
“Whenever we search,” said Ali, “we feel sure we know where to look and stick to it even though we’re wrong. That’s why we can’t find it: because we’re so sure. Open yourself up.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t start with all your ‘wisdom’.”
“No, no. Listen. We have to open ourselves to discovery; to leave open our doors so that one day an ordinary, unremarkable stranger will emerge from the throng, step up, and before we can ask what he is doing here, we will see that this stranger is exactly who we have been seeking.”
“Do you even know what you are talking about? What about my mother? What about finding her, eh? Tell me where my mother is.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Well then you have nothing of interest to say to me.”