The Caliph's House (10 page)

I said I had felt something, a coldness, a danger.

“That's it,” she added. “It was danger. Pure fear.”

“I'm sure Hamza knows about that room,” I said after a long pause.

“He won't tell,” she replied, “at least not until he's ready to.”

I looked hard at Rachana, her long black hair framing the edges of her face.

“Are you frightened living here?” I asked.

She didn't reply at first, as if she was reflecting on the question.

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know.”

         

TWO DAYS LATER, I
received a postcard from Pete, the American who had fallen in love with the Moroccan girl he met in the Amarillo nightclub. The picture showed a grove of orange trees weighed down by fruit, and a dark-skinned man inspecting the crop. The black ballpoint script on the reverse read:
You will never believe it! Have found Yasmine! She loves me! See you. Pete. PS: Some problems with her family.

         

THE NEXT WEEK WAS
painfully slow to pass. The building team arrived at eight each morning. They were always dressed in suits and led into the house by their aged foreman. He would insist on smothering my cheeks in kisses while his men set about cooking an elaborate breakfast on a gas burner in the main salon. Whenever I drew their attention to the fire hazard, they would cackle menacingly. As far as they were concerned, safety was for wimps.

The extension of our bedroom was progressing at a snail's pace, but at least it was under way. A forest of wooden staves was now holding up the ceiling. Large quantities of low-grade bricks were being lugged up the homemade ladders by the apprentices.

“They're doing hard work,” I said.

“They must know pain,” said the old foreman gleefully. “Only a man who has tasted pain knows the value of life.”

Downstairs in the salon the giant holes in the walls, created by the efficient wrecking crew, were being sculpted into rounded arches. A man in a red felt hat was overseeing the work. Each archway took about a week to complete and involved an army of masons. The process was remarkably complex. A positive form of the arch was first constructed. The archway was laid in around it, and the positive—a kind of mold—was then removed.

The architect's grand plan to build a sweeping staircase from the new bedrooms upstairs to the salon below was in progress as well. The feature had necessitated destroying a pair of sizeable storage rooms and the laundry room. I had questioned why such valuable rooms had to go. All doubts had been brushed away by the architect's manicured hand.

“Why do you need those useless spaces?” he had sniffed. “They just collect dust.”

Once I had paid all the money in advance, the architect himself was an infrequent visitor to the Caliph's House. From time to time he would swoop down for fifteen minutes, roar at his workers, and reveal the next stage of his grand plan. None of them ever dared ask a question, and to my surprise, they were given no scaled drawings. There was no paperwork of any kind. I managed to collar the architect on one lightning visit.

“Don't your team need plans to work by?” I asked.

“In Morocco,” the architect said with confidence, “we don't do it like that.”

“Do you trust them so completely?”

Mohammed, the architect, opened the door of his vehicle and lit a cigar. “I don't trust any of them,” he said. “They are a bunch of thieves.”

“How do you know they're not robbing you?”

“Because I have a spy,” he said.

“The old foreman?”

The architect laughed. “Not him. He's the worst of all. The man with the red cap. He tells me what's really going on.”

The system of informants buoyed my flagging spirits. I went back into the salon and winked at the man in the red cap. He winked back, and was about to say something when the foreman slapped him on the back of the head and ordered him to get back to work.

The old man then strode over to the staircase, the curved form of which had taken shape. He pulled off his worn tweed hat and scratched his head. Five new walls had been constructed around the staircase, and the foreman gazed at them. He scratched again. Then he yelled at one of the apprentices. The boy handed him a hammer and chisel. With uncharacteristic care, the elderly foreman put the chisel to one of the walls and began to tap very gently. I was going to stop him from destroying the only satisfactory work the men had done. But as I opened my mouth to protest, the end of the chisel disappeared into the wall.

“What is it?” I asked anxiously. “What's there?”

The foreman peered into the opening, no larger than a keyhole. “There's a room in there,” he said.

“You seem surprised.”

“We didn't know about it,” he replied.

Someone passed me a flashlight. My stomach knotted in anticipation. I held up the light and I had a look for myself. It was like peering into Tutankhamen's tomb. The beam disappeared into what was a considerable space.

“It's huge,” I said.

“It was sent by God,” said one of the apprentices.

“Allahu akbar!”
cried another. “God is great!”

         

IN THE THIRD WEEK
of October the rain began to fall. It rained and rained in a chill North African monsoon. The God who had sent us the miracle of the lost room was now trying to drown us. Dar Khalifa leaked like a sieve. Water streamed in through the open doorways and the broken windows, and surged down into the salon from the roof. The room in which Rachana, the children, and I slept flooded. We were forced to move to higher ground.

The constant rain made mixing and pouring the concrete almost impossible. I was surprised that the team bothered to go on. One morning they knocked away the wooden staves that were holding up the roof of our bedroom extension. It was a wildly optimistic move. The concrete ceiling held for about thirty seconds before crashing down.

Another police raid followed, and after it came a string of new injuries. And the rain fell day after day. I don't know why I didn't throw in the towel and lead us all back to England. It wasn't that I was fearful of the sneers and the jibes. Deep down I knew that it was a question of endurance. If I could keep going beyond the point of reason, then, as I saw it, there was a faint glimmer of hope. So I resigned myself to keep standing, like a punch-drunk boxer who simply had to stay upright to win. Keep on my feet and, I hoped, the dark days would eventually come to an end.

         

THE GREATEST DAILY CHALLENGE
was trying to make myself understood. My French is not good. The guardians and some of the workers had learned to understand me, but a great deal of Casablancans spoke only Arabic and no French at all. So I decided to look for another assistant.

I placed an advertisement on a local website. It sought two qualities—the ability to solve problems and to be enthusiastic at all times. No one replied. I was going to drop the whole idea when a man called. It was three in the morning and the man wanted to know if the position had been filled. He had a composed voice, with the trace of an American accent.

“It's early,” I said, fumbling for my watch.

“Actually, it's late,” said the voice.

I saw the time. “It's very early!” I said coldly.

There was a silence.

“It's very late,” the voice replied. “When can you meet?”

We arranged to meet at noon, near Dar Khalifa, at Hotel Suisse. I turned up on time, having trudged through the shantytown's mud in the torrential rain. There was no sign of the job applicant. I scribbled a page of interview questions to pass the time. After half an hour of waiting, I assumed he wasn't going to show up, and I went home.

         

HAMZA WAS CROUCHED OVER
in the mud at the end of the garden, mixing a bag of sand with cement. Osman was standing beside him, holding an umbrella over them both. I went over and inquired what they were doing.

“It's a surprise,” Hamza said bashfully.

In the house the workmen were sitting on the floor eating couscous. When he saw me, the foreman got up, staggered over, and kissed my cheeks.

“You are a good man,” he said, kissing me again.

I thanked him for the compliment.

“May you have a thousand sons!” he exclaimed, with another kiss.

I thanked him again.

“May your feet always walk on rose petals!”

He stooped to kiss again. I covered my cheeks and narrowed my eyes.

“What do you want?” I said suspiciously.

The foreman tugged off his tweed cap and held it over his chest. “We want for you to like us,” he said.

         

IN THE AFTERNOON, THE
man with the American accent called once again. He said a drunk driver had smashed into his car on his way to the interview.

“Were you injured?”

“I wasn't in the car at the time,” said the man.

“Oh,” I said, confused.

We planned to meet at the same hotel in the early evening. Again, I waited for half an hour, and again, the man didn't turn up. I cursed him for wasting my time and trudged back through the mud.

It was dark but Hamza was still working at the end of the garden. The ochre-red mud was deep from all the rain. Hamza's clothes were covered in it, but he didn't care. He had made what looked like a section of wide concrete pipe. It was laid end down on the ground. Sitting across the top was a homemade turning mechanism and a rubber bucket.

“It's a well,” he said.

I peered into it. “There's no water in there,” I said. “There's not even a hole.”

Hamza brushed my concerns aside. “It's for the Jinns,” he said.

         

JUST BEFORE I GOT
into bed, the job applicant called again. I was going to shout something rude and hang up. But before I could say a word, he asked for our address.

“I'll be there in ten minutes,” he said.

“You'll never find it. We live in the middle of a shantytown.”

Precisely ten minutes later there was a rap at the door. The applicant stepped into the house calmly, shook my hand, and looked away as he did so. His name was Kamal Abdullah. He was thin, balding, and aged twenty-five. He looked at least ten years older. His eyes were deep-set and distant, his long face bisected by a pencil-line mustache. We sat in the salon on plastic garden chairs, listening to the downpour outside. I was waiting for an apology, but it didn't come.

“We're doing some building work,” I said, glancing at the mess.

Kamal scanned the walls and then looked over at the pile of sacks. “They're using thirty-five-grade cement,” he said. “They should be using the higher grade—forty-five. If they don't, the roof will collapse.”

“It already did,” I said.

I didn't demand Kamal's family tree. Instead, I asked him about his life.

“I'm from a small town in the east of Morocco,” he said in a quiet voice. “But I grew up in Casablanca. I lived in the States for seven years, mostly in Atlanta and New York. I did a thousand jobs—Arby's, Hardee's, Dairy Queen. Thought I'd never come back.”

“Why did you?”

“Circumstances.” Kamal moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue. “You never know what life's going to throw at you,” he said.

S
EVEN

An army of sheep led by a lion would defeat
an army of lions led by a sheep.

A GANG OF MISCHIEVOUS BOYS BEGAN
wreaking havoc in the shantytown. They stole smaller boys' homemade toys, threw stones at the limping dogs, jabbed sharpened sticks at the donkeys, and tripped up the old women as they stumbled home from the communal well. The schoolmistress said she would beat them senseless with her orange hose if she caught them. The furrow-faced imam slapped the backs of his hands together.

“If I catch them,” he said, “I'll hang them up by their ears.”

As he was the only applicant for the position, I took Kamal on. From the outset, it seemed to me as if there were an invisible expiration date tattooed on the back of his neck. I didn't expect him to last very long. After the debacle with Zohra and her Jinn, my expectations were very low.

To my surprise, Kamal was punctual on the first day. He arrived at the house wearing a charcoal gray suit and a bulky Italian-made diver's watch strapped to his left wrist. His lips were tight together. If I asked him anything, he responded with a carefully considered answer and closed his mouth again. He didn't seem fond of idle chatter. When presented with a problem, he thrived on it. My first impression was that he was a loner, someone whose eyes had seen too much.

I gave a string of orders.

“We need the garden sprayed for insects,” I said, “that old windmill above the well has to be dismantled, and the heap of wood in the vegetable patch taken away.”

Kamal didn't take notes. He followed me quietly, his mouth clenched shut, hands behind his back.

“What else?” he asked.

“Well, there's so much more,” I said. “For a start, we need to buy a bath, and a satellite dish, and someone has to fix the pool. We have to get safety railing made, to buy fire extinguishers, and to get the windows fixed.”

I had an appointment with an official from the British consulate, and so I left Kamal to it and traipsed through the shantytown's mud to find a cab. The Korean Jeep had ground to a halt. The engine had seized up.

When I got back to the house three hours later, there were people everywhere. More unusual was that they were doing things. Ten men were carting away the logs from the end of the garden; a team of soldiers had scaled the windmill with ropes and were dismantling it; an engineer was repairing the pool pump, someone else was installing a satellite dish, and another man was putting in new windowpanes. I called out to Kamal. His head popped up from the roof.

“Up here,” he said.

A moment later he was standing to attention before me, mouth closed, hands behind his back.

“How's it going?” I asked.

“It's under control,” he said. “I did a deal with the bakery in the shantytown. They are taking the wood for their oven. They'll pay two hundred dollars for the lot.” He asked if that was satisfactory.

“They'll pay us?”

“Of course.”

“What about the soldiers?”

Kamal squinted. “Everyone was going to charge a lot of cash,” he said, “so I invited the army to remove the windmill as a military exercise. I've done a deal with a scrap metal guy, too. He'll buy the metal for a hundred and fifty bucks. That pays for fixing the pool.”

“That's great,” I said.

“Not as great as this . . .”

Kamal picked up the television's remote. He pressed a button. There was the grinding sound of a satellite dish rotating on the roof. When it stopped, the screen came alive with what looked like the news from Peru.

“You've got two thousand channels now,” he said. “I had a guy hack them for you for free.”

“What about the bath?”

Kamal pinched his mustache. “We'll do that later,” he said.

The guardians were not impressed by the day's progress. I toured the place with them in tow, showing off the repaired swimming pool pump, the dismantled windmill, and the thousands of television channels. Their faces were long and cold, as if I had betrayed them.

“Monsieur Kamal is not a good man,” Hamza said scornfully.

“He will steal the clothes from your back,” added Osman.

“He'll steal the house from you,” said the Bear.

“Then I'll have to be careful,” I said. “But if he can get so many things done in a day, I can't do without him.”

         

THAT NIGHT, WE WERE
all kept awake by the sound of a donkey thrashing about in pain somewhere in the bidonville. The poor creature brayed and brayed, as if the end of the world had come. Suspecting the band of unruly boys out on a night journey, I crept into the garden and called to Hamza to go and chase them away. It was a dark night, no more than a sliver of moon hanging above in the cloudy sky. The guardian was down at his ornamental well. He was throwing handfuls of what looked like raw meat into it.

“It'll attract rats,” I said, against the echo of the donkey's pain.

“It will protect us,” he replied.

We both laughed. And, for the first time, I sensed a warmth between us. I did not believe in Jinns, but I respected the superstition as an expression of a mature culture.

“What are we to do about the Jinns?” I asked him.

Hamza tossed the last few chunks of meat into the waterless well. The sound of the donkey became muffled and then stopped altogether.

“They live at Dar Khalifa,” he said. “They have always lived here.”

“We could have an exorcism,” I said. “We could kick them out.”

“You do not chase your grandfather away just because he's old,” he replied.

We both stopped speaking. Silence was more appropriate than sound. I breathed in the nocturnal scent of jasmine and listened to the haphazard chorus of the wild dogs. We were both blinkered by our upbringings. I was restricted by the West's scientific ideals, and Hamza by the traditions of his culture. His certainty that Jinns existed was mirrored by my own conviction that they did not. I wondered if we would ever reach a middle ground, a no-man's-land in which one believed but did not believe.

The noise of stray dogs fell away, and the light breeze hushed. I could not recall a moment more peaceful at Dar Khalifa. I treasured it. In the East, silence is regarded as golden, and not the awkward space between conversations, as it is to us. For me, a break in speaking is a fearful thing, a thing to be extinguished as rapidly as possible. But for the first time in a long while, I cherished it.

Eventually it was me who broke the silence.

“Why is the room always kept locked?”

Hamza wiped his hands on his shirt. “I can't say,” he said.

“Why?”

“Some things we speak about, and others we do not.”

“What happened in there? Did someone die? Is that it? There was a coldness. A fear. A scent of death.”

The guardian sighed. “I cannot talk about those things,” he said. “If you want to know about Dar Khalifa, live here. The house itself will tell you.”

         

A DAY OR TWO
passed. Then one morning, as I staggered blearily down the long corridor to the kitchen for breakfast, I was accosted by a man wearing goggles, rubber gloves, and a chemical suit. On his back was a pressurized tank, and in his hands was a hose that ran back to the tank.

“Get inside,” he said calmly. “This is poison.”

He waved an arm vigorously at another man positioned at the far end of the garden. He was wearing the same outfit, with an identical tank on his back. The pair switched on their tanks, and greasy black gas billowed out. They aimed it low at first into the flowerbeds, then across the shrubs, and finally up into the trees. Within three minutes it was impossible to see anything at all. It was like being at the center of an industrial accident. The birds fell from the trees and lay stunned on the ground. I closed my eyes and fumbled back to our bedroom to warn Rachana and the children not to move.

After we spent an hour cowering there, Kamal arrived. He had got the pesticide team on the cheap, he said. They were government employees, but had dropped by before work to help us out.

Over the next few days, my new assistant solved one problem after the next. I found myself thanking providence for causing Zohra to run off. Her replacement was far more efficient. He treated me with formality, always called me “Mister,” and seemed quite unhappy when the day's work was at an end. “I learned to work hard in America,” he said one afternoon. “Over there people just get on with it. They don't sit about making up excuses, feeling sorry for themselves, or drinking mint tea all day long. If you work hard in the U.S., you can make good money and,” he added, “you can get respect.”

But all the while I knew it couldn't last. Such efficiency never does.

We were in a cab, stuck in Casablanca's gridlock traffic, when I asked Kamal what had taken him to the United States in the first place. His glance didn't leave the road. I watched his profile. He swallowed hard.

“There was an accident,” he said. “It was a bad one. My mother and my little sister were driving through Spain. A truck hit their car. They both died—my mother first and my sister a few days later.”

I expressed sympathy.

“When I was told the news by my father,” he went on, “I didn't cry or anything. I was too numb.”

“When did it happen?”

“Nine years ago.”

“And you left for the States?”

“My family was shattered,” he said. “Its heart was ripped out. I didn't speak a word of English . . . but I had to get away. So I took a flight to Georgia—home of Southern hospitality.”

         

THE RAIN BEGAN AGAIN,
while the architect's team floundered about like Lotus Eaters in the sun. I dreaded walking through the main body of the house. Nothing there ever changed. The floors were broken up, and the doors had been yanked from their frames; the light switches were smashed, electrical wires hung from the ceiling and walls, a hint at the chaos that lay beneath. Only half the arches were finished, and there was no sign the others would ever be done.

From time to time the foreman would buttonhole me as I hurried through the salon, my eyes covered by my hands. He would smack his lips to my cheeks and wrestle my right hand away to fondle it in his. When Kamal saw the old man greeting me, he barked at him in Arabic.

“He only wants to be friendly,” I said tenderly.

“He wants your cash,” he quipped. “The holy month of Ramadan starts next week. He's hoping his groveling will be rewarded with your generosity.”

Kamal asked about the architect. I said he was a good man with a fondness for fine Cuban cigars.

“Don't give him any money,” he said.

“I paid him everything in advance,” I muttered. “He asked for it.”

“Did he give you a receipt?”

“No, I wired the money into his Paris account.”

Kamal rolled his eyes. “Only pay a Moroccan,” he said, “if you want to see the back of his head.”

         

BEFORE I MOVED TO
Casablanca, my morning bath was typically occupied by the question of how I might escape the shores of England. I like to spend a great deal of time soaking in a tub, controlling the hot tap with my big toe, reflecting on life. Now that we had made the great escape, I wanted a bath in which I could steep myself long and hard and consider the future. It would have to be grand, well made, and built in a time when people understood the glory of soaking.

When I asked Kamal where I could get an antique bathtub, he promised to take me to the best bath showroom in town. I asked if it was in fashionable Maarif. He crimped up his nose.

“Maarif is for hustlers,” he said.

I took Kamal to see the Korean Jeep before tramping out in search of the bath. It had been shut up in the garage since the engine had seized. He opened the hood and examined the mechanics before checking the papers and the mileage. He sent for a mechanic—a well-built man with dark murderous eyes and a scraggly gray beard, dressed in overalls so covered in grease that it was impossible to make out their original color.