The Caliph's House (17 page)

We slalomed across Casablanca, back through the suburbs and the well-to-do new town. The modern sprawl was replaced by the Art Deco quarter. Kamal applied the brakes hard. The Jeep jolted to a stop. Wherever I looked, men were unloading nondescript boxes. There were thousands of them, all bearing Chinese characters. The area looked like the backdrop for a 1970s martial arts movie. I recognized it as the place I had bought the school supplies with Zohra.

Kamal disappeared and, a moment later, he reappeared clutching a flat cardboard box. There were Chinese characters at one end of the package. At the other was a skull and crossbones with almond eyes. We opened it up. Inside was the scruffiest, lowest-quality synthetic Christmas tree imaginable. Kamal threw his cigarette out the window.

“One spark,” he said, “and you'll have an inferno on your hands.”

         

ON THE WAY HOME
to present Ariane with her festive fire hazard, we stopped at Habous. I wanted to buy the children jelabas. The outfits are of universal use. You can wear them outdoors as overcoats, as daytime clothing, or even as bathrobes. We hurried through a row of jelaba shops, looking at colors and trying to gauge prices. Whenever I found one that looked good and was soft to the touch, Kamal would storm out, screaming insults at the shopkeeper.

“That man's a thief!” he would yell, or, “May his tongue be ripped out by demons for asking so much!”

In the East, the tradition of bargaining is an honorable one, and Moroccan society has one of the most developed bartering economies I have come across. I am usually satisfied with chipping in a few cents more if it saves time and secures the purchase. But to a native Moroccan, shirking on the bargaining front is seen as falling short of responsibility. There is honor at stake. Forget the bargaining and you are bringing shame on the shop.

The guidebooks always say it's best to take a local person with you when you go shopping in Morocco. But they don't tell you that the local is likely to veto all purchases, and even liable to get you into a fistfight with the shopkeeper as he strives to protect your honor.

Kamal refused to let me buy any jelabas that afternoon. He warned the stallholders that he would injure any of them who went behind his back and sold me a jelaba without his permission.

“Once I have beaten them up,” he said, “I'll go after their families. I'll attack them, and then I'll find their friends!”

I liked Kamal and found him useful, but he was becoming a control freak. I told him to relax.

“You don't understand,” he said. “This is the way our society's stayed on track for a thousand years. If you let one shopkeeper get away with overpricing, the whole country will collapse like a house of cards.”

Before we left Habous, I made excuses and slipped into the courtyard where I remembered seeing the fine Spanish dining table during Ramadan. I peered into the back of the shop and spied it sitting there piled high with junk. It was no good getting Kamal involved. He was in far too foul a mood. So I asked the price myself. The shopkeeper sat forward in his wicker chair and coughed.

“You like it very much,” he said.

“Oh yes,” I said, “owning it would make me the happiest man in Morocco.”

The tradesman rubbed the tips of his fingers together.

“Because you love it so, the price has gone up,” he sniffed. “It's now
six milles
dirhams, six hundred dollars.”

T
WELVE

The dog barked, but the caravan moved on.

NEW YEAR
'
S EVE WAS A DAY
filled with hope. Like a snake sloughing an old, tired skin, it seemed that we were leaving the problems behind us, pushing forward into a new year of possibility. My resolution for the coming twelve months was to be the master of my own decisions, and top dog in the Caliph's House. As the final few minutes of December ebbed away, I ranted at Rachana how I would no longer be pushed around by the guardians, by the imam, by Kamal, or any artisans.

Midnight came. We clinked glasses, swilled a mouthful of rough Moroccan wine, and said our prayers. I prayed for an uneventful year, with no surprises.

Ten minutes later we were ready for bed. I slipped under the duvet and closed my eyes. Outside, the bidonville was silent. Even the donkeys were hushed. All I could hear was the ocean breeze rustling through eucalyptus leaves and the sound of an owl pining for its mate. No one in the shantytown bothered with New Year celebrations. Such festivities are the preserve of people who already have too much.

Fifteen minutes into January, my cellular phone rang. It was Kamal. He sounded very drunk. There was a problem, he said.

“What is it?”

“The truck driver.”

“What's wrong?”

“He's been arrested.”

“So what?”

Kamal's voice trembled. “He's got our sand,” he said.

Nothing would normally worry me less than hearing of a truck driver and his load impounded in the night. But, as Kamal made clear, the driver was the linchpin to my life. It was he who was keeping everything on track. Without him, we would have no cheap sand, and without the sand we would have no bejmat laid. Without the tiles for the floors, we would not be able to do the walls, and without the walls we couldn't plumb the bathrooms. Very soon, Kamal slurred, the renovation would fall to pieces. If that happened, he said, my children would fall sick and Rachana would end up divorcing me. It seemed a radical deduction.

“There's only one thing to do to prevent your divorce,” he said grimly. “We have to get the truck driver out of jail.”

An hour into the New Year, Kamal and I were in the Jeep driving out of Casablanca on the empty coast road. It was dark and windy, the kind of night when evil takes hold. Kamal was far too drunk to drive, but he did anyway. He boasted of knowing every bend and said he could drive it blindfolded. As we zigzagged south of the city, he told me about the truck driver, Abdul Haq.

“He's been working for our family since he was a child,” he said. “His father worked for us, and his grandfather before him. There's a bond. If he's in trouble, we are bound by honor to help.”

“Why's he in jail?”

“The usual,” said Kamal.

“What's that?”

“Whoring.”

Kamal staggered out of the Jeep and into the jail. I followed him timidly. The officer in charge said Abdul Haq was to be locked up for a month. His driving license was going to be impounded, his vehicle auctioned, and the precious cargo of sand sold. The circumstances looked bad, but in Morocco ill fortune can be overturned in the blink of an eye.

By the second hour of the New Year, we had paid off the guards, freed Abdul Haq, and recovered the sand. It was a high moment and one I think back to often. I hoped the year's early success was an omen of good fortune to come.

         

THE SECOND EVENT THAT
faced us on New Year's Day surrounded Hamza. He and his family were now comfortably established in the outbuilding at the end of the vegetable patch. His wife spent half her time cooking up pots of stewed meat, and the other half slaving over a mountain of laundry. However hard she toiled, the mountain never seemed to decrease in size. Their five children ranged from about nine down to less than a year. All of them were boys, carbon copies of their father—minus the handlebar mustache.

On the night they first sought refuge at Dar Khalifa, I had strained to make it clear to Hamza that the accommodation was temporary, until he had built a new shack in the bidonville. He had promised to move out as soon as his family had regrouped. But as the days passed, it was obvious he regarded the stone guesthouse, with its electricity, flush toilet, and private garden, as a permanent new home. He knocked a door in the wall so his friends could visit more easily from the slum. Before we knew it, wild dogs, donkeys, rats, and waves of street hawkers were drifting in and out. Each day, osmosis brought a little more of the bidonville into the garden and into our home. I bit my lip and held back until New Year's morning.

Rachana and I were sitting on the balcony in bright sunlight. I was relishing January's peace. But then, through the silence came a wild commotion. There were shrill banging sounds first, then shouts, and cries of great anguish.

“What's that?” asked Rachana.

Before I could answer, Osman came running up to the house. Hot on his heels was the Bear.

“Come quickly,” they both said at once. “Our houses are being broken down.”

We went to investigate. A small crowd had gathered in the area where both guardians lived. They were milling about, almost as if they had been told to do so. There wasn't the sense of urgency or fear that had sounded the destruction of Hamza's home.

Osman led the way to the ruins of his house. “This was my home,” he said mournfully. “This is where I lived with my wife and four children. We were so happy here.” He pointed to a heap of stones, bricks, and corrugated iron.

“And that's where I lived,” said the Bear meekly.

I glanced over at an almost identical pile of debris. What struck me was the orderliness of both the heaps. They didn't have the random chaotic signature of a bulldozer strike. Rather, it looked as if the roof and walls had been taken down carefully, a piece at a time.

“Where are the bulldozers?” I said.

“Oh,” said the Bear, “they came and went.”

“I didn't hear them.”

“They came in the night,” said Osman. “It was terrible.”

“I was up in the night,” I replied. “I didn't hear bulldozers.”

Osman and the Bear exchanged troubled looks.

“They were special ones,” said Osman, after almost a minute of thought. “Their engines were wrapped in blankets so they wouldn't make a noise.”

Outside the supposed ruins of the guardians' homes were two neat piles of belongings. There were rudimentary pieces of furniture, blankets and pillows, pots, pans, and a huddle of children's toys. Beside the first heap, Osman's family were standing to attention, and next to them was the Bear's own entourage. The wives looked sheepish and expectant, the rows of small children hopeful, as if a new world were about to open up to them.

I asked where they were all planning to live. It was a question with a ready answer. The guardians' families had already divided the territory between them.

“The building at the side of the garden is empty,” said Osman.

“Yes, and so are the rooms near the tennis court,” announced the Bear.

“Our wives are both pregnant,” Osman said limply, drooping his head.

I looked hard at the two men, their families, and their worldly goods. Then I glanced over my shoulder at Dar Khalifa. The house seemed to rise up like a bastion of protection, a sanctuary for refugees. I cursed myself for being so weak.

“All right,” I said, “you'd all better come in.”

         

ON THE FOURTH OF
January, Kamal rolled up. His eyes were bloodshot, his hands shaking. He said someone had sold him a bad bottle of rum.

“I've been knocked out for three days,” he said feverishly. “Contraband from Spain . . . Casablanca's awash with it.”

“While you've been sleeping, we've been taking in tenants,” I said.

I took him up to the terrace. We looked down on the garden. There were children everywhere, boys fighting and throwing mud, and girls playing hopscotch on the shaded paths. The guardians' wives had turned the barbeque area into a communal laundry. They took it in turns to smash their lathered clothes onto the hearth. Nearby were an assortment of their extended families and friends. Some were peeling vegetables, others chatting or just sitting in the sun.

“What can I do?” I said anxiously.

“You have made a grave mistake,” said Kamal. “Now that they're in, they'll never leave.”

“But how can I get them out?”

Kamal rubbed his eyes and slumped on a chair. “I'll think of something,” he said.

         

THE FIRST WEEK OF
January was almost at an end when, at long last, I found the time to read my grandfather's diaries. Ariane was howling because the guardians' sons had taken her dolls and amputated their limbs. Rachana was furious that the house had been hijacked from under our noses. She shouted at me, scorning my guilt-fueled generosity. I crept from the Caliph's House, out through the shantytown, and took a seat in the nearest smoke-filled café.

I opened the first of the two cloth-backed books. The immaculate indigo script stared up at me, as if ready to impart its own cautionary tale. It began:

Afifa, the maid, is taking liberties again. She has been taking my vegetables home to her family, replacing them with her own meager groceries. For some reason she thinks I don't notice. That's the thing I find most insulting. I may be old and myopic, but I am not blind!

I read on, through pages of hypochondriac detail, endless lists of self-prescribed medicines, and more moaning about the maid:

I heard her boasting to her friend how she bosses me about. She said I was like a child who had to be treated firmly. Fancy that! I would dispense with her, but she would surely exact revenge.

There were more reports on his health, about the damp winter climate in Tangier. Then this:

At last I have found Afifa's Achilles' heel. Only one thing fills her with terror. True terror. I have found her trying to understand this diary. But thank God she cannot speak a word of English. She doesn't know that I know her fear—her fear of the Jinns.

         

IN THE SECOND WEEK
of January, our friends arrived from London. I had pleaded with everyone I knew to stay away, citing the appalling living conditions as the reason. I warned them about the deficiency of habitable bedrooms, the lack of hot water, the stalled building work, and the mud-stricken shantytown. And now, on top of everything else, we had the guardians' families and friends to deal with.

I had left Europe to escape our pseudo-friends. Everyone in London has them—people you don't really want to see, but who never leave you alone. I had hundreds of them. In their world, my stock value was high only because my face had appeared on television. Each month, we were trapped into a dozen or more unnecessary social engagements. I had made a list of random excuses and pasted it up next to the phone. But pseudo-friends have a sixth sense. They could always tell when an excuse was read off a list. Now that we had a large house and an exotic address near the sea, word spread at lightning speed.

Our real friends were far too well mannered to invite themselves. If they did ask to come, they always offered to stay at a local hotel. But the pseudos had no scruples. They tended to travel by road with a throng of offspring and suitcases, squashed into a minivan. They were all in search of the same ideal: free lodging with plenty of local food, wine, sun, sand, and sea. Worse still was that they expected us to put our lives on hold and attend to their every need.

The first of the New Year guests were Frank and Lulu. They had found me a few years before through my interest in shrunken heads, the handiwork of the Shuar tribe of Peru. Frank was a nervous Englishman, his wife a strict Bavarian woman with a limp. Together they had borne a crop of four blond daughters, all of them under the age of ten. They traveled everywhere in a Japanese-made minivan.

It was early morning and Rachana had gone shopping with the maid. Ariane and I were in the garden courtyard, hiding from the guardians' wicked progeny, when the sound of a Bavarian hausfrau could be heard above the din of the shantytown. A moment later, the sleek aerodynamic lines of the minivan turned onto our lane.

Lulu got out first. I opened the front door even before she had rung the bell. She pushed her way past me without any greeting, except to thrust a pair of baby bottles at my chest.

“Milk,” she snapped. “Make it warm. Blood temperature!”

I gave muffled salutations, but Lulu had vanished into the house, leading behind her a line of daughters decreasing in size, like Russian matryoshka dolls. Frank, the henpecked husband, didn't get out of the car. After driving through England, France, Spain, and half of Morocco with the pit bull at his throat, he was cherishing a moment of solitude. I opened the car door and he shook my hand.