The Caliph's House (14 page)

“What's that?”

“This is the boiler that heats the hammam,” Kamal said. “All day and all night a guy crouches here, throwing handfuls of sawdust into the fire. The sawdust is brought each morning from the carpenter we just met. We've been buying it from his family for fifty years.”

Again, Kamal warned me about taking my eye from the ball.

“We used to own dozens of buildings in Casablanca,” he said. “We had factories, too, and farms. But now all we have is this hammam.”

“What happened to the rest?”

“After the accident,” Kamal said, “my father lost interest in life. His wife and his only daughter were dead, so he took a backseat and everyone walked over him. When they saw he didn't put up a fight, they took everything. It was like wolves ripping a carcass apart.”

Kamal led me back up to the street.

“Beware,” he said, “the same could happen to you. There are wolves all around you. Blink once and the Caliph's House will be gone.”

         

THE ONLY PROGRESS AT
the house was the fishermen's net. There was miles of it. Hamza and his fellow guardians considered it a needless expense. They said I could have spent the money pleasing the Jinns instead. By doing so, they insisted, the house and all who lived inside it would be protected by a cloak of invisible energy. To the Western mind, it sounded like lunacy—rely alone on prayer, offerings, and tokens of superstition. But if I did so, the guardians promised, I could live without any safety features at all.

“You mean I wouldn't even need locks on the doors?” I said.

“No,” replied the Bear.

“What about fire insurance?”

“Not that either,” quipped Hamza.

“If I indulged the Jinns and got their protection,” I said, “then surely I wouldn't need guardians.”

Hamza, Osman, and the Bear fell into line, shoulder to shoulder. A great fear descended across their faces. It was the fear of unemployment. I could feel them fumbling desperately for an answer.

“You do need guardians,” said Hamza at length.

“Why?”

“Because it's us who communicate with the Jinns.”

         

BY THIRD WEEK OF
Ramadan there was still no sign of the new team of artisans frequently promised by Kamal. Whenever I asked after them, he would caution me. Hurry to find craftsmen and, he said, the mess would get even worse.

“These people are not like builders,” he declared, “they are artists. Hurry an artist and he'll chop you in two with his knife.”

“But I don't want any more psychos,” I said anxiously. “It's bad enough already.”

Kamal waved a finger at my face. “You have it quite wrong,” he replied. “In Morocco, the more insane the artist, the better he knows his craft. It will take time to find a truly disturbed team to work here at the Caliph's House.”

         

FRANÇOIS HAD TOLD ME
that Casablanca's old quarter of Habous was the place to find real craftsmen. I didn't believe him for a minute, but forcing Kamal to drive me there on the Friday morning was a way of exacting my authority.

The last Friday in Ramadan was a day when no work at all was done. For three weeks I had been ever more scathing about the artisans' output, but I hadn't seen anything yet. People should have been thinking about prayer, but their minds were all on the same mirage—a giant plate of couscous and lamb with all the trimmings.

Kamal didn't speak on the drive to Habous. He was barely functioning. The lack of sleep, nicotine, and alcohol, and the adrenaline overload, had taken a heavy toll on his system. The last thing he wanted was to chauffeur me to the stone-built bazaar in search of workers. Fortunately, his weakened condition made it easy to take control. Unlike him, and everyone else, I was eating three meals a day and sleeping seven hours a night. By the final days of Ramadan, I felt like king of the world.

Habous was quite different from the ritzy French villas and the apartment blocks more normally found in Casablanca. Its buildings were crafted almost entirely of granite, rather than concrete, so favored elsewhere. Pointed arches led to dozens of small shops, set back off stone colonnades. It looked as if the neighborhood had stood there for centuries, and so I was all the more surprised to learn that Habous was constructed by the French in the 1930s.

The shops were packed with wares—colorful jelabas edged in silky brocade, tarboosh hats made from fine red felt, yellow
barboush
slippers, caftans embroidered with sequins, and wedding regalia lavish enough for any bride. One entire street was devoted to Moroccan furniture, while another sold only brassware, and a third perfumes and beauty products—rose water and antimony, jasmine oil, sandalwood and musk.

We searched for craftsmen, but could find none. Everyone we asked either scowled or suggested returning after Ramadan. They thought I was mad to be thinking of such things on the final stretch of the fast. As we wandered through the porticoes, I spied a courtyard behind one of the arches. Inside was a cluster of antique shops. Each one sold the usual assortment of Art Deco bronzes and prewar furniture and prints. Everything in Casablanca's antique stores, without exception, dates from the first half of the last century, a legacy of the French.

But there was an exception. At the back of one shop, I set eyes on an exquisite dining table. It was veneered in walnut, with gently bowed sides and cabriole legs. The detailing, the choice of wood, and the style suggested it was not French, but Spanish. To my inexpert eye, it looked as if it dated to the early nineteenth century, long before the French annexed the kingdom of Morocco.

I pushed Kamal forward and urged him to ask the price.

The shop's owner was too ravenous to bother with a sales spiel. He sat doubled over in an old wicker chair, as if his stomach was giving him pain. His head was in his hands. Kamal inquired the price of the table.

“C'est cinq milles dirhams,”
he said.

“Five hundred dollars,” said Kamal. “That's far too much.”

“We can bargain,” I said brightly.

Kamal led the way out of the shop. “Ramadan has made the shopkeepers greedy,” he said.

“That man's starving,” I said, “he's putty in my hands.”

“We are leaving,” said Kamal sternly.

         

OUT ON THE STREET,
I noticed a woman begging. She was elderly, her face a maze of shadowed wrinkles, her bent form shrouded in a dark green jelaba. She caught my attention not because of what she was wearing, or the way she looked, but because of what she was holding.

In her basket was a collection of the very finest fruit I had seen in Casablanca. I took a moment to watch as she went from stall to stall. The shopkeepers would spend time selecting the very best apple, orange, or plum, before handing it to the woman with their blessing. I was surprised, for in the West we reserve second-rate goods for people without the money to pay for them. I stepped up to one of the fruit stalls and asked the owner why he had presented his very best peach to the beggar. The shopkeeper groomed his beard with his hand.

“Just because someone is begging,” he replied, “does that mean they should be given items of low quality? We are not like that here in Morocco.”

         

TWO DAYS MORE AND
the holy month was at an end. The severity of Ramadan was suddenly replaced by the excess of the Eid celebration. There was a palpable sense of delight on every Moroccan face. Teenagers raced their parents' cars up and down the Corniche, hanging out the windows, horns blaring, hands waving. Middle-class families strolled up and down, fathers smoking, children slurping pink ice cream. Music blared from every restaurant and café, each one overwhelmed with a tidal wave of customers.

I gave the guardians a week's pay as a bonus. Their mouths grinned wide, and they hurried home to hand the cash over to their wives. That night the shantytown was bursting with life. On the main track sheep were roasting on low charcoal braziers, sparks shooting like tracer fire up to the stars. A group of musicians were weaving down the alleyways, the soft lilt of their tune rising over the rusting tin roofs. In the middle of the main street, the imam was making the most of the season's charity. Across from his mosque, the white trailer was shut up for the night. Its resident fanatics had disappeared.

At midnight, Osman knocked at our bedroom door. His three small children had been coaxed forward, bearing homemade gifts for Ariane and Timur. Their father poked them in the shoulder blades, and, reluctantly, they hummed a Moroccan nursery rhyme. In the West, nothing is so sacred as the ritual of putting kids to bed on time; while in the East, no evening is complete unless the children have been stirred from deep sleep and cajoled to entertain.

When Osman had gone, and our own children were snoring loud, I went down to the verandah and sat on a wicker bench. The bidonville's celebrations were still raging on, the sound of music and laughter warming the night air. Around me, the Caliph's House was sleeping. I thought about what Hamza had said—that only the house could give up its secrets, only it could tell me about its past.

As I sat there, I sensed very strongly that Dar Khalifa had a soul of its own. It seemed far more than the stone and mortar in its walls, as if it knew clearly who we were and why we were there. Maybe, I thought to myself, it wasn't the spirit of the house I was sensing, but Qandisha and her fraternity of Jinns.

         

TWO DAYS AFTER THE
end of Ramadan, Kamal arrived. He was bright-eyed and confident again.

“I have found you a
moualem,
a master craftsman, to lay the terracotta tiles,” he said.

“How do you know he's good?”

“Because he's a madman,” said Kamal.

That night I slept well. It was as if we had turned the corner on our bad luck. I had talked my bank in London into loaning me some money, and Ramadan was now a distant memory. I nestled my head into the pillow and thanked God for good fortune, and the Jinns for leaving us alone.

At that moment, as I drifted into a deep, pleasing slumber, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I jerked upright.

“Who is it?”

“It's me,” said a voice.

“Who?”

“Me . . . Kamal.”

I fumbled for my watch. “It's three
A
.
M
.”

“I know.”

“Well, what's your problem?”

“Put on your clothes,” said Kamal, “we have to go and buy sand.”

In any other country in the world, people buy sand when the shops are open. This doesn't usually include the middle of the night. I drew this point to Kamal's attention as we drove out through the suburbs and along the coast road.

“No one ever got a good deal buying anything in a store,” he said.

“Why do we need sand anyway?”

“For the bejmat.”

Another feature curious to Morocco is the purchasing of building merchandise. Anywhere else, the builder buys what he needs for the job and then bills you for it. But as Kamal explained, in Morocco only a fool would let someone else buy sand, cement, metal girders, pipes, or wood.

“But the architect bought all that stuff for me,” I said.

Kamal lit a cigarette and sucked at it hard. “Then you're a fool for letting him,” he said.

The first reason to buy your own merchandise was to get a good price. The second was to ensure quality. When we had driven for more than an hour, Kamal showed me what he meant. His contact was waiting in a turnout. His truck was old and wounded by years on the road. It was leaking oil, and its lights were all smashed. The driver was a silhouette in the cab. It appeared he wasn't alone. As we approached I made out passionate groaning sounds.

“Is there a woman in there with him?” I said.

“He's a trucker,” said Kamal.

“So?”

“So he's doing what truckers do best.”

“What's that?”

“He's whoring.”

T
EN

Trust in God but tie your camel well.

KAMAL TAPPED HARD ON THE DRIVER
'
S
door. There was a rustling inside, sounds of commotion, then of fear, followed by urgent clambering. The passenger door was flung open and a girl of about fifteen leapt out. She was veiled in black and ran very fast.

An oily, bearded face appeared at the window.

“It's me,” said Kamal hoarsely.

The man inside glared out at us with anger. “I paid for her in advance!” he shouted.

“We've come for the sand.”

Kamal pulled the tarpaulin back and pointed to the load. “Feel that,” he said.

I did. It was slightly moist, cool to the touch.

“Top quality,” said Kamal, “and half the going price.”

         

WHEN HE SET EYES
on the sand, Hamza said it was the lowest quality he had ever seen. He boasted that he'd been born in the desert, a fact that enabled him to tell good sand from bad merely by the smell. The other two guardians were equally scathing when they saw the giant dark mound now sitting outside the house.

“It will give you trouble,” said the Bear.

“And it'll bring bad luck into the house,” said Osman.

It was obvious the guardians were disparaging because Kamal had brought the sand to Dar Khalifa. As far as they were concerned, anything my assistant did was part of a grand scheming plan to relieve me of all I owned. They hated everything about him. Most of all, they hated that I listened when he spoke.

For my part, I really could not work Kamal out. He was an impossible person to pigeonhole—capable of brilliant thought one minute, and utterly reckless behavior the next. While I had him working, I valued his know-how, his ability to get difficult things done. At the same time, I was still unsure of his real motives.

         

ONE MORNING IN EARLY
December we drove back out to see the carpenter. It was the middle of the week, and we went to check on the windows he was making. The carpenter kissed Kamal's cheeks, praised his ancestors, and ushered us to seats in the shade. A pot of mint tea was brought, glasses poured out once, then poured back into the pot before being poured out a second time. A team of boys fetched the windows and held them up like oils at a fine-art sale. They looked very good. The carpenter was pleased when I praised the work. He exclaimed something in Arabic.

Kamal translated.

“He said, ‘Through these windows, your eyes will separate reality from illusion.' ”

I pondered the comment as we drove back toward Casablanca. It was a dazzling morning, far cooler than previous days. The road was lined with hawkers selling cactus fruit and plums. Kamal didn't say anything on the way home. His mouth was clenched tight. He breathed through his nose, huffing like a stallion before the race, as if he were overcome with anger. I asked if something was on his mind. He didn't reply. Then, suddenly, he swerved off the main road onto a dirt track, dust enveloping us. I was taken by surprise.

“Where are we going?”

“Shortcut,” he said.

We drove for thirty minutes in the opposite direction from Casablanca. On either side of the track, there was open farmland, rich red African soil, peppered with crows. I kept silent. As far as I was concerned, it was the middle of nowhere.

At a place where the tracks converged and then crossed, Kamal hit the brakes. The Jeep skidded to a halt, sending dust sideways like talc cast into the wind. Kamal got out of the car. He said he wanted to check the exhaust. At that moment, two men appeared from behind a bush. They looked like laborers from the city. Kamal greeted them as if they were old friends. A surge of adrenaline welled through me. For the first time, I was frightened of Kamal. I thought he was going to kill me right there and then. The car key was still in the ignition. I was about to jump into the driver's seat, throw the car in gear, and charge away. But at that moment, he ambled back to the car, started the engine, and headed for town.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“They wanted a ride to Casa,” he said.

“It looked like you knew them.”

Kamal turned to face me. His distant brown eyes locked onto mine. His mouth was tight shut, jaws clenched. He stared at me for so long as to make me uncomfortable. It was not the time for speaking. He could feel my fear, I was sure of it. I hoped he would burst out laughing, slap me on the back, or let me in on a secret. But he didn't speak.

         

IN THE SAME WEEK,
I received another postcard from Pete. The writing was more obscure this time, as if it was written by someone who had come to know pain. It said:
Had the chop. Now I'm learning the Path to Allah
. The note was followed by an address in Chefchouen, a small town south of Tangier. I showed it to Rachana.

“I think you better go and see if he's okay,” she said.

“But I hardly know the guy.”

“So what?”

There was a far stronger reason to venture north. I wanted to track down the house in which my grandfather had lived for the last decade of his life.

Kamal's team of artisans were about to turn up at Dar Khalifa. I couldn't face them. I don't know why, perhaps because I was so sure they would create more problems than they solved.

I took the morning train from Casa Voyageurs and was soon trundling north along the coast. Leaving Casablanca and the Caliph's House behind filled me with new energy. It was as if a burden had been eased from my shoulders. I stared out at the groves of cork oaks and breathed long and hard. If I could keep standing a little longer, I thought to myself, we would have a chance at weathering the storm.

I planned to go straight to Tangier, to spend a night or two ferreting out the riddle of my grandfather's last years. After that, I would head down to Chefchouen, to find the newly circumcised American.

         

MY GRANDFATHER WAS SIRDAR
Ikbal Ali Shah. He was the son of an Afghan chieftain, raised in a tribal fiefdom in the Hindu Kush. As is traditional in our family, he was encouraged to master many fields of study, to live many lives in one. He was a medical doctor and a diplomat, a professor of philosophy, an expert on folklore, mysticism, and political science. He was an adviser and confidant to half a dozen heads of state, and the author of more than sixty books—on poetry, politics, biography, literature, religion, and travel.

At twenty-three he was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine. He was very taken with Scotland, and wrote later that the mountains, the castles, and the strict system of clans reminded him of his Afghan homeland. It was 1917, and the Great War raged on. A generation of young men were being slaughtered in the trenches of Flanders and France.

One spring day, my grandfather was invited to a charity tea, where a group of young women were raising funds for the war effort. Across the crowded room, he spotted a prim Scottish girl standing alone, china cup poised to her lips. Her nickname was Bobo, and her family came from the Edinburgh elite. She was only seventeen. Her brother had just been killed fighting in France, and she was distraught at his loss.

Bobo spied Ikbal gazing across at her. She stared back with nervous anticipation, and they fell in love. The next day, she asked her father if she might meet the Afghan chieftain's son for tea. The request was refused, and she was locked in her room. Allowing her heart to rule her mind, Bobo escaped, eloped with Ikbal, and together they traveled to his ancestral fortress in the Hindu Kush.

Their marriage endured more than forty years, until the day of Bobo's death. They lived in Central Asia, the Middle East, and in Europe. Then, in 1960, Bobo died suddenly of cancer, weeks before her sixtieth birthday. My grandfather could hardly contain his grief. He vowed that he would not return to any place they had been together, or look at anything that would remind him of his beloved wife.

Morocco was a country where they had never traveled. My grandfather had heard of the kingdom's mountains, its kasbahs, and the proud tribal traditions. The sound of such a place was alluring. So, that summer, he packed his sea trunk with some books and a few clothes and set sail for Tangier.

         

THERE IS NO BETTER
way to travel through Morocco than by train. The journey from Casablanca to Tangier takes about six hours, sometimes longer, depending on whether the driver takes a long lunch or a short one at Sidi Kacem. In the winter, the travelers are bundled up in heavy woolen jelabas worn as overcoats, as if a searing arctic wind is about to tear through. But it never does.

The man sitting opposite me in the compartment noticed the calfskin amulet around my neck. He was in his sixties, dressed in a pale jelaba with black trim, and brown barboush on his feet. His face was swollen, scattered with patchy beard and sores. I explained to him that the amulet was given to me by a friend.

“What for?”

“For the Jinns,” I said.

The man scratched his face. “Let them into your head and you'll have trouble,” he replied.

“They're not up here,” I said, tapping my temple, “but in my house.” I laughed. “Anyway, it's not the Jinns who are a problem,” I said, “but the people working for me.”

“What's wrong with them?”

“They believe in the Jinns,” I explained. “That's the problem.”

The man didn't say anything else for a long while. I stared out the window at the plowed fields edged in cactus plants. I thought our chat was at an end. But a traveler's conversation can be disjointed, strung out along miles of railway line. The man cleared his throat.

“Across from me,” he said, “I see a sheet of white paper. There is no writing upon it, nothing at all. The paper has just been made. It's new. There's great hope for it. A beautiful poem could be written on it—something inspiring, something wonderful. Or a fabulous picture could be drawn on its surface, the face of a child perhaps.”

I looked at the man, and took in his sores and his tired face, and I wondered what he was going on about.

“But the great shame is that the sheet of paper will never know beauty,” he said. “Why? Because it doesn't believe.”

         

MY ONLY CLUES WERE
a few letters written by my grandfather to my parents during the last years of his life. They were always composed in dark blue fountain pen on lightweight writing paper, in a precise, sensible hand. They spoke of a life of solitude, of modesty, a life waiting to be reunited with Bobo. At the top of each was printed an address at 21 rue de la Plage.

Once in Tangier, I bought a street map from a tobacconist and found rue de la Plage running inland from the port. The nearest hotel was Cecil's. I was acquainted with it from my grandfather's letters. He waxed lyrical about the place, suggesting it was palatial in the extreme, an outpost of true luxury. I walked from the train station down to the waterfront. A group of children were playing marbles on the pavement, in the yellow light of afternoon. I asked them for the direction of Cecil's. Without looking up, one of the boys pointed over his shoulder.

I had not noticed the whitewashed hotel perched there behind him, set back on the far side of the esplanade. It was easy to see its original appeal. The building was wide but not high, two stories clinging to the ground floor's roof. There were steps up from the street, a sheltered entrance, above it an expansive balcony. All the windows had slatted jalousie shutters; some were blown open by the wind, others bolted shut. The place resembled one of those solid, compelling gems found in the novels of Graham Greene.

Time had not been kind to Cecil's. Even in the sugar-sweet light of late afternoon, it was hard to lavish praise on the current condition. Washing lines crisscrossed the balconies, and the whitewash was dirt gray and blistered with damp. I walked up to the entrance and climbed the steps.

Inside, the receptionist was watching television with his left eye; the other was covered by a homemade patch. He was holding the TV antenna in one hand, jiggling it to make sense of an Egyptian soap opera. Beside him, a squat man was smoking hashish. Both figures looked up in amazement. It was clear that no one had ventured there in years.

The entrance was gloomy, the walls waxy and damp. The only decorations were tourist posters from the 1970s and a cardboard cutout of an Aeroflot stewardess. There was a sense that at one time, perhaps long ago, something very evil had taken place within the walls.

I inquired if there was a single room, for a night or two. The hashish smoker cackled with laughter; his friend dropped the antenna and shuttled over to a desk diary. His fingers began in January, turning over a week at a time. They made their way through many months of blank paper, until they arrived at December.

“
Oui,
monsieur,” he said hesitantly, “I think we have space.”