by Tim Kindberg
"She's waiting for us to go. We must leave."
“She looks like you,” he repeated. “You have a cat-spirit within you.”
He kicked out at Ibtissam, who leapt easily away. When he chased her into the surrounding dimness she sprang onto bookshelves out of reach, and became a pair of glowing eyes taunting him. Chemchi followed them despite her misgivings, her shadow dancing over the disused furniture as she wound her way through it. Akimbe made a stair out of dusty books from a lower shelf so that he could reach up. As he did so a metal bracelet inlaid with turquoise stones clattered to the floor. Chemchi picked it up. He snatched it from her.
“My mother's! She was here!”
“I think it fell from your pocket, although I’ll admit I couldn’t see clearly. Anyway, even if it was already here, it looks common to me; there are many such bracelets in the souks.”
“Do you think I wouldn’t know if I had my mother’s bracelet in my pocket? And do all your ‘common’ bracelets have marks like these?” Akimbe pointed to a lion's head stamped inside the band.
“OK, maybe it was here,” she was losing all her patience, “and you knocked it down. Listen, I’m going. Are you coming or not?”
"It's hers, I tell you.” He turned it over several times, as though it wasn’t just a bracelet but everything he had lost. Then he placed it tenderly in a pocket. “My mother and father will find me, you'll see. If I don’t find them first. Let's begin.”
"We'll begin where I live, Akimbe. Something tells me you may find it strange in Marrakech so be prepared. Come, Ibtissam.”
The tabby's delight at being found had already worn off and she was back to her usual self. She gave a look that said she would come in her own good time. But Chemchi was not in the mood.
"I haven't gone to all this trouble to rescue you, only to leave you to more shenanigans.” She scooped her up and placed her in the basket, fastening it over the indignant cat’s head. “This is for your own good. And you?” She gestured to Akimbe, who followed reluctantly.
They walked down to where she had entered, Chemchi holding her torch to keep the threads back, with more confidence now. She felt an altogether new sensation, of being somebody who could do something others couldn’t do. Instead of being a maid. Every riad had a maid.
Akimbe was reluctant to go near her but every time he fell back the threads gained a hold around his ankles.
“Keep close behind me or we’ll lose you again, too,” she said.
The crack she opened between the velvet curtains was filled with swirling under-eyelid lights, as before.
“Jump through.”
“Through that? No, it’s a trick. You first.”
“Very well.” Once she was on the other side, she held the curtains open for Akimbe to follow. She could see his face all twisted up as he looked at the under-eyelid lights, trying to decide what to do, wondering whether to trust her. But the threads gave him little option. He jumped through, after what seemed an interminable delay, blinking as he met the daylight. Almost at once, a moped with a malfunctioning engine went past, weaving through the tourists and locals, spitting smoke behind it. The sound was intense after the muffled quiet of the chamber. His jaw dropped.
She came and stood beside him, next to the stream of humanity that was too busy to notice them. “You don’t know this place, do you? What do you think?”
“These are people, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are people, good ones and bad ones, most of them in between. Welcome to Marrakech, Akimbe. If you haven’t been here before. Now follow me.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY SAT IN the courtyard of Ali’s riad, a tall house in the traditional Marrakech style with its sun-streamed central atrium. Here Ali earned a modest income from the paying guests and Chemchi served as maid, living in one of the rooms on the floor above. She wanted to like this beautiful house, which was so much more refined than any home she remembered in the village Ali had taken her from. But it felt like a prison. Her videos and DVDs were all that prevented her from going mad.
Chemchi listened as Akimbe told his story to Ali, who they found drinking his mint tea. “Please, sit." Ali poured tea into a glass and pushed it towards Akimbe, who cautiously took a sip of the sweet green liquid and licked his lips. Ibtissam sat purring in Chemchi's lap.
“There was a bad-looking man,” said Akimbe. He opened up to Ali, quite the opposite of how he had been with her. “All of them looked bad but he was the worst – walking along examining us in a row, all of us brought from the same place. Pinching us. Making us show him our tongues, pulling the skin under our eyeballs. He was checking whether we were healthy, whether he wanted us. Now him, now her. He was choosing quite a few, this man in his fine robes and his face without a soul. The spirits had deserted him long ago.
“And there we were at the end of the row. But I was behind my father and mother, beside a wall. My poor sister was in front. The men had forgotten me. They had put shackles that were too big round my feet, without really caring. I could tell I could free myself. My mother heard me moving. She spoke under her breath, told me to stop, that I’d get us killed. One of the men wasn’t far away but someone was talking to him, they were looking at our women and girls, laughing. I took my chance and scraped my feet out altogether from the rough metal. My father whispered that I should go, back to the place where they had dumped us last night. He told me to save myself, to go without them. My mother didn’t agree. She was rigid, I could see a tear running down her cheek. But how could she argue? Anyway, I could never disobey my father. So I crept behind my people, back through the doorway in the corner, where they had thrown us as soon as we arrived.
“It was dark. I was so desperate to escape, I lost count of how many times I stumbled. On the other side were two doors, one of them the door they had led us through the previous night. I pushed against it and turned the handle as quietly as I could but it was locked fast.
“The other door, to the left of it, opened easily, but it creaked and the sound filled the room. I squeezed myself through just a crack of it so they wouldn’t hear. It was completely dark. I walked with my arms outstretched. After a few steps, I felt a tickling at my feet, then a tugging. It became harder and harder to walk. I wanted to run back – even all the bad men outside seemed preferable just then, and at least my family were there. I wanted to turn back. But my legs and arms were pulled down, until I was stretched out and bound so that I could barely wiggle. But there was nothing I could do.” He paused. “I don’t remember any more.”
When Akimbe had finished, Ali knew no more than Chemchi what to say to him.
“So, Chemchi went to find Ibtissam but came back with someone quite unexpected as well.”
Chemchi bit her tongue at Ali’s simple-minded response. Hadn’t he been listening?
“Young man,” Ali continued. “I still don't exactly understand: who are you?”
“I am Akimbe, son of Shango. Do you know him, and my mother? Have you seen them?”
Ali smiled. “Haven’t you seen the crowds? Perhaps everyone knows everyone where you come from. But this is Marrakech. Tell me again, who captured you?”
“We had never seen them before. They had guns and whips and clubs. They beat us. We fought hard but we had no guns. Many of my people were killed.” He looked close to tears.
“And what was all that about tickling and being pulled down?”
Akimbe glanced at Chemchi, who narrowed her eyes as a signal not to tell him.
“Oh, that,” Akimbe answered. “I don’t know. I was confused. I must have been knocked out because I remember nothing since then until Chemchi found me.”
“Why don't you get some rest,” said Chemchi, rising from her chair. “It’s late. I'll show you to your room.” She was relieved that he hadn’t mentioned the carpet or how she had rescued him.
Ali added, “You are most welcome in my home. I am honoured to have you here. Never let it be said that Marrakech fa
iled to offer the fullest hospitality” Chemchi marvelled, as she led Akimbe away, at Ali’s capacity to be so whimsically agreeable and not patronising with everyone except her.
When she returned, Ali was still at the table with his tea.
“You did well to rescue him. But I still don’t know what you did, exactly.”
“Praise? From you? I don’t even know what it was that I did, and it doesn’t matter. I'm going back there to investigate.”
“And what did you see?” She didn’t answer. “ Oh, never mind,” he continued. “I don’t even want to know. Anyway, you mustn’t look any further. I forbid it.”
“Akimbe thinks his family are still alive. We owe it to him to look, however futile it may seem —”
“No.”
“Ali, look at me. I cook and I clean this place. That is enough. You keep me here working for you most of the time but what I do in my own time is my business. You’re not my father.”
“Don’t talk to me of ‘enough’. I am good to you. Be grateful.” The kindness had disappeared from Ali's eyes. “You must leave that place to its own devices. You may put yourself in even greater danger if you return. You know as well as I do, what I’ve told you: the Criée Berbère has a terrible history as a slave market. That boy must be confused about where he was. But if he has escaped, then someone will come after him. Traffickers. And then what?”
“But…”
“I won't hear of it. You don’t know what I know about the souks. You’re just a girl. Now, you have chores to do.”
Chemchi stormed off to her bedroom and lay on her bed. How she hated him. Why would he be afraid of her getting into danger, except that he’d have to find someone else to mop his floors?
At moments like this, when he denied her, she felt like a nobody, a non-person. She cast her mind back. One day, Ali, a distant relative, or so he later said, had appeared at the door in the village in the Atlas mountains where she grew up. And without a word of explanation, he had taken her away in his tiny battered car, away from the mother who had brought her up alone. Just five years old at the time, she had cried through the days and nights after he brought her to what had been a terrifying, noisy city so different from where she had grown up. Then one day, after a few weeks, the phone rang when Ali wasn’t there. It had never rung before. Gingerly, she answered. It was her mother. But she spoke strangely, as though someone held a gun to her head so that she would say only what she had been told to say. She refused to answer Chemchi's imploring questions and simply told her that everything was all right and that she must be a good girl and do everything that Ali told her. Then she had hung up. That single call was the only contact her mother had made.
Ali said he had taken her with his mother’s consent. But that surely couldn’t be so. Her mother loved her, didn’t she? Chemchi had asked Ali nicely to explain everything so many times she had lost count, and asked him equally many times in anger when he brushed her off. He would shut his eyes and rock his head slightly, a sign that the matter was closed. Eventually, she had given up asking him at all.
Chemchi couldn’t sleep that night. She flipped backwards and forwards from being pent up about Ali to wondering about the boy. Tossing in her bed, she stared at the walls and the ceiling, and at the silver moon shade of the bedroom lamp that she eventually switched back on. Up to now, everything in her life seemed to have been in a state of suspension. Or rather it went round in a loop, each day filled with cleaning, shopping, cooking. There was the occasional guest who chatted to her, made a funny remark, but she could barely remember how to smile. She had left school aged ten and had seen none of the other girls since. Probably, she thought, they hadn’t wanted to see the strange girl anymore, even if they had been allowed to.
But this strange carpet and the strange boy - they had woken something in her. Did she have a special gift or was she just another maid in a Marrakech riad who had chanced upon some magic? She had to find out.
A battered old TV and piles of videos and DVDs stood on her dresser. Ali brought the films for her occasionally to keep her quiet, obtaining them from somewhere in the souks — probably as payment in return for favours. Many were in English and other languages she couldn’t understand. Chemchi watched them all anyway. She slotted a DVD into the player and returned to her bed to watch, turning off the lamp. There were mountains, her Atlas mountains, a village, a young woman arguing with a man. Chemchi had watched this film a hundred times, sometimes replaying the scenes that particularly captivated her, involving this young woman who defied everyone around her. But she was exhausted. Eventually she fell asleep with the light of the TV still flickering.
CHAPTER NINE
IN THE MORNING, she packed the plumber’s torch in her basket, withdrew some of the meagre savings from a jar beneath her bed, and headed to the souks to buy another torch. It was early, but not too early for the stalls to be open. The others were still asleep. Ali could look after Akimbe when they awoke, she wouldn’t be long.
“Which one would you like?” the stallholder looked at her as though she were a little girl and not a young woman of sixteen, although she was the taller by a head. It irritated her.
“A yellow one.” She made a point of not looking where he indicated on his shelves.
“But I don’t have a yellow one.”
“You call yourself a merchant of electrical paraphernalia, sir, and you don’t have a yellow torch? ”
“Why, I …”
“A blue one, please.”
“I don’t have a blue one either.”
“Then make it silver, and it had better be cheap since you don’t have anything I actually want.”
She took the brand new torch back to where the velvet curtains had been, and played its beam slowly around, sneaking looks back in case anyone was watching. The curtain appeared, and the edge of carpet peeking from beneath it, the blackness of the one and lustrous threads of the other contrasting like space and stars. And this was so wherever she shone this torch, the same as when she shone the plumber’s.
She found a small boy in the crowds nearby.
“Please help me,” she asked, with what she thought would be a big-sisterly look. He cast his eyes up and down as though she were a big sister, all right, one who could damn well do it herself, whatever it was. “For five dirhams?” She put the plumber’s torch in his hand as soon as he doubtfully agreed and told him to shine it at the wall and the ground just beneath it.
“Tell me exactly what you see,” she commanded. He looked up at her green eyes, and at the braid across her forehead, as though she were mad. “Even if it’s obvious, tell me exactly what you see.”
“Why, a wall and dust on the ground below it. Stones and dust and.. oh, a baby’s shoe: is that what you’re looking for?”
“You see nothing unusual — nothing soft, let us say, and nothing glinting?”
The boy gave the torch back to her at once, scared by her strange questions, and left rapidly without waiting for her to pay him.
Chemchi felt excited and special: the shadow carpet was clear as day wherever she shone it, but the torch had no power in the boy’s hands. And it didn’t seem to depend on which torch she used.
When the light rays come from me, she thought to herself, I can see what I couldn’t see.
What she hadn’t checked, though, was whether someone else could see what she saw when she shone it, when the invisible come to light. What on earth would the boy have thought if that were so? He’d surely have fetched someone else to see. No, she’d done the right thing: that experiment would have to wait. She could show Akimbe again, and find out what he saw exactly.
She pushed back through the crowds, taking in the smells of breakfast cooking and feeling the warming sun on her face and hands — the only parts of her not covered up. Around her, arabs and tall berbers in robes were mingled with one another and with tourists, mostly white, in their casual Western clothes, carrying cameras around their necks or in their hands
. These were three worlds in one, of different languages and cultures. And that didn’t account for all the variations within them. She had lived here for more than ten years. Yes, she was a berber and could speak the language but she rarely had the opportunity in Ali’s world of arabs and tourists. The carpet and the boy were none of these. Yet for the first time she felt the beginnings of a belonging.
CHAPTER TEN
THE DOOR TO Akimbe’s room was open. There was only a slept-in bed to be seen.
The fierce Marrakech sun was already heating the small roof garden, where she found him lost in thought. All around, the irregular rooftops stretched away, an airy realm so different from the bustle and noise of the sweaty alleys below.
She sat on a cushion across from him and they spent some minutes in silence. He doesn’t seem to belong here, she thought, in more ways than distance. If he was from a hundred or so years ago then, in all probability, his family, as slaves, would have died not long after he went through the carpet, living in wretched conditions. Perhaps there were exceptions, though. Maybe it depended what talents their slave master saw in them. Perhaps she could give Akimbe a little consolation with that thought, that their slave masters — they would have been separated — had found them worthy of more than grinding labour — or worse, in the case of the mother and sister. But how could she say any of this? It was just nonsense, wasn’t it — why was she even thinking such thoughts?
“You said you were the son of a warrior king, Akimbe.”
“Yes, and I grant you an exception in bowing to me, since you saved me. And I allow you to come close to me on the same grounds.”
She shook her head. “I won’t defer to you on any grounds, whoever’s son you are. Let that be clear. I’ll respect you as I would respect anyone who deserves my respect, and that’s all I can promise. We’re not in your land now, wherever that is. Not that I get along with all the Marrakech rules but I have to live here. Do we understand one another?”
After a pause, Akimbe finally looked at her, as though it were beneath him. “We’ll see. When I’ve found my father the king and my mother the queen then perhaps you won’t be so presumptuous. Anyway, which of the Marrakech rules do you not ‘get along with’?”