The Caliph's House (19 page)

“That's just the start,” said Hamza. “You see, when you have more than one wife, they get jealous of each other. It happens all the time. If you give one something, you have to give the same thing to the others.”

“It sounds terrible,” I said.

“Oh, no, it's wonderful,” said Hamza, blushing. “If you had three wives, you would have six lips to kiss you good night.”

         

KAMAL
'
S APARTMENT DOOR WAS
always firmly bolted shut. Behind it lay a fraternity house of debauchery. The sitting room was large and empty except for a stack of inherited furniture and a heap of empty vodka bottles. Between the two there was a stained couch with broken springs. Every available receptacle had been used as an ashtray in times of drunken need—an egg cup, a soup spoon, an old tennis shoe. Kamal never opened the door to visitors, not even to his own family, who would call to him through the letter flap. The only people admitted were women, most of them of the professional variety, lured back from the alleys behind the Marché Central. The only way I ever got inside was when I brought him a set of green plastic chairs as a peace offering. He had often wished aloud how fine plastic garden chairs would look in his bachelor pad.

When they had been assembled, Kamal went into the bedroom to look for a match. I slipped in behind him, to his great annoyance. It is not easy to accurately describe the vileness of that room. Even though the curtains were drawn shut, I could make out the virulent growth of fungus sprouting from the far wall. The bed had no sheets and stank of excrement. Inside the door was a low bookshelf. I was surprised to see a cluster of books laid neatly along it. More surprising still were the titles. They were classics—the collected works of Aristotle, Plato, and Pliny, the Greek myths,
Les Misérables,
and an imposing biography of Einstein. I poked a finger toward the bookshelf.

“That's a bit out of place, isn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they're the only high-quality things in this dump.”

Kamal sniffed his nose in the air haughtily. “I use them,” he said.

“You read them?”

“No, of course not!”

“Then?”

“I use them for impressing the
chicas
.”

         

WITH THE NEW YEAR
had come a faint sense of hope. The weather had turned much colder, but at least it meant the flies had gone, as had the blight of cockroaches. The days were vivid, the sunshine dazzling, broken from time to time by a thunderstorm pushing in from the Atlantic coast. The sight of the craftsmen laying the floors buoyed my spirits like nothing else. I was euphoric that good work was at last being done.

Now that the guardians had built new shacks in the shantytown, they seemed much happier. They reported frequently their communal mistake of not marrying women from the desert. Their wives, they repeated over and over, were nagging, troublesome creatures, who deserved nothing at all.

It had taken a long time, but we were falling into a routine. Ariane would go to school each morning and return in the afternoon. Rachana would help me with chores in the morning and study French when she could find the time. Kamal blustered in and out, either drunk, hungover, or somewhere between the two. The gangster and his trophy wife were dormant, as were the fanatics in the shantytown. The guardians were quiet, too. They oversaw the craftsmen laying floors, raked leaves obsessively, and hardly ever mentioned the Jinns.

Then, early one morning, as the first strains of light tinted the clouds, Hamza thumped at our bedroom door.

“Monsieur Tahir, Monsieur Tahir!”

“What is it?” I whispered through the keyhole.

“You must come,” he said.

Pulling a raincoat over my pajamas, I went outside.

“The big courtyard,” said Hamza.

We paced down the long corridor, over the verandah, and into the courtyard. Hamza opened the door to the room he had always kept locked. I followed him inside. There was a scent of something citrus, tart on the nose. I sniffed it in once, then again.

“Look there,” said Hamza.

He was pointing to the wall above the steps that went nowhere. A patch of mysterious cherry-pink slime covered one part of the wall, high up near the coving. It was the size of a pillowcase and appeared to be dripping.

“It is not of this world,” said the guardian.

“There must be a scientific explanation,” I replied. “I'm sure it's coming from outside. Later on I'll take the ladder and have a good look.”

I expected Hamza to claim the slime was the work of Qandisha, that it was a sign of impending doom. But he didn't.

Instead, when I turned up at lunchtime, he was showing the patch to his two fellow guardians. By teatime their families had been smuggled in to have a look. I didn't approve, for the wall was part of our home and was not a tourist attraction. I went off to do some work. When I returned to the courtyard that evening, I found thirty or forty people milling about. Hamza was giving them tours of the room with the mystery slime.

The last thing I wanted was another invasion of the guardians' families and friends. I took Hamza aside and asked him in a robust tone to send everyone away. He seemed disappointed.

“Everyone is interested,” he said.

“In the pink slime?”

“Yes, you see, it's
baraka,
it's a blessing.”

         

NEXT DAY, KAMAL TOOK
me to meet his grandfather. He was an old man, in his mid-seventies, with a mane of white hair and the kind of face that once led empires into battle. Unfortunately, he had recently been afflicted by a stroke and was a shadow of his former self. We sat in the salon Moroccain at Kamal's family home, with lengthy fitted sofas set along three of the walls. Small silver-rimmed glasses of green tea were brought. We sat in silence, calm and respectful. Only when the old man had stretched out and fallen asleep did Kamal speak.

“To live in Morocco,” he murmured, “you have to understand it. And to understand it, you have to talk to the old people. Only they can teach you about the traditions.”

“But your grandfather's very quiet,” I said.

“He's had a stroke. He lost his voice.”

We sat in silence again. It was pleasant, as if the time really mattered.

“How can I learn about the traditions if I can't hear him talk about them?” I asked.

“Through osmosis,” said Kamal. “Sit close up to him and you'll feel it.”

So I pulled my chair closer and sat there. An old woman bustled in and refilled our glasses. A few minutes passed and a second woman, much younger than the first, entered. She put down a tray of biscuits.

“They are my grandmothers,” said Kamal at length. “See how well cared for my grandfather is—he was smart. He took two wives. It may have cost him more money, but he has known twice the joy.”

We left the old man to sleep, and went down to the Jeep. I told Kamal about the incident with the pink slime. I was sure he could come up with a plausible explanation if anyone could.

“Hamza thinks it's
baraka,
” I said, “a blessing from God. It's stupid, isn't it?”

“Where there is good there is evil,” said Kamal thoughtfully, “and where there is evil there is good.”

It sounded like a line from a third-rate Bollywood movie.

“It's nonsense,” I said. “It's pink slime and it's come out of the walls. I'm sure I can prove it.”

Kamal took a detour on the way to Dar Khalifa. He drove across railway tracks and into an area called l'Hermitage. There were rows of spacious villas dating back to the 1930s. Their lines were sleek, curved, the trees around them mature. We stopped outside one of the grander villas. It was encircled by a wall overgrown with tangled bougainvillea. The shutters were drawn down, the garden a mess of weeds.

“We own this house,” Kamal said.

“But it's boarded up.”

“There was a fear,” he said.

“A fear of what?”

“You will laugh.”

I promised not to.

“A fear of the Jinns,” he said.

I fought back a smile.

“One day when my aunt was reading in bed,” Kamal explained, “a Jinn came into her room, grabbed the book, and tore out all the pages. Then the bathrooms flooded and no cause could be found. After that, strange writing was found on the walls.”

“When did all that happen?”

“A long time ago, when I was seven or eight.”

“So why didn't they just sell the house?”

“Because there was no
baraka
,” he said. “No one dares sell a house with angry Jinns.”

“Then why not exorcise them?”

“It was not the right time,” he said.

As we drove back to the Caliph's House, I found myself wrestling with questions—How could Hamza be so sure that pink slime was a blessing? When was the right time to exorcise Jinns? How could such a modern man as Kamal believe in such nonsense? Had I been in Europe, I would have pursued these and other questions until I reached satisfactory answers. But the cultural divide ran deep. I knew now it wasn't the case that people were trying to deceive me by holding back the answers. Rather, it was that for some questions there were no answers.

         

THE ONLY WAY TO
be taken seriously in Casablanca is to buy yourself a four-by-four with black smoked windows and extra-wide wheels. The richer you are, or the richer you want people to think you to be, the bigger the vehicle, the blacker the windows, and the wider the wheels.

One morning a deep rumbling sound was heard in the distance. It was so loud that it set off the donkeys and the dogs at the far end of the bidonville. I was unloading bricks from our war-wounded Korean Jeep—just in time to witness the launch of the gangster's newest toy. It was sleek, shimmering black, and as vast as an oceangoing ship. The Cadillac coat of arms was shining on the front grille like a medal of valor. The car crawled forward and paused level with our own abominable vehicle. I felt my heart beating faster, the instinct of fight or flight. As I stood there, my face mirrored in the glass, the rear passenger window slid down very slowly. It was as if a veil had been lowered for the first time. I found myself staring into the dark Gucci lenses of Morocco's Marlon Brando. I rubbed my filthy hands down my chest and stepped up to introduce myself. The Godfather remained motionless, like a figure in wax. His face was smooth and confident, his nostrils flared at the ends. He held out a hand. I leaned into the car to shake it. But as I did so, the gangster's fingers clicked in a signal to the chauffeur. The sheet of black glass slid up as I withdrew my arm and lurched backward. A second later the Cadillac was gone.

F
OURTEEN

The fruit of silence is tranquillity.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE EPISODE WITH
the rose-tinted slime, I was overcome by a strong suspicion of conspiracy. Veiled threats from the gangster's wife, talk of
baraka
and Jinns, and the slime itself lured me into a state of paranoia. I was certain dark forces were at work against us. But rather than ghosts, I felt sure it was the people all around who were conspiring to evict us from the Caliph's House.

The three guardians must have sensed my unease. They came to us that evening bearing gifts. Osman's wife sent a loaf of hard, round
khobz,
home-baked bread flavored with aniseed. Hamza gave Ariane and Timur fresh new amulets to replace the old ones. He whispered that the children would live a thousand years. And the Bear presented me with a paperweight he had made from a polished stone.

After the gifts came the warnings.

“Kamal is bad, very bad,” said Osman, his ever-present smile fading for a moment.

“He is trying to take Dar Khalifa away from you,” the Bear said. “He understands the paperwork.”

“What about the Godfather?” I said. “Isn't he more dangerous?”

Hamza jabbed a finger in front of his nose. “A blind thief inside the house is worse than a one-eyed thief outside it,” he said.

When Kamal turned up, he warned me about the guardians. He said they were in league with the gangster in the bidonville and kept him informed of the intricate details of our lives.

“Hamza and the others are the Trojan horse,” he said.

         

I DIDN
'
T KNOW WHOM
to trust, so I decided not to trust anyone at all. The gangster and his wife, the guardians and Kamal, began to seem like different parts of the same foe. I was certain they were all somehow conspiring together.

In the meantime, I found solace in my grandfather's journals. His maid, Afifa, was his own Trojan horse.

She is like a Burmese cat,
he wrote.
Given food, shelter, and affection, you might think she would care for her master. But the opposite is true. The depth of her perfidy is unknown. She would take everything I owned if she could get away with it.

The irony was not lost on me. On my grandfather's death, Afifa chose her moment. She stripped the villa bare of his possessions. She even took a pocket watch presented to him in the 1930s by Atatürk. Then she made for the hills, and, of course, she did get away with it.

         

I BEGAN SPENDING MORE
time alone, away from Dar Khalifa. It was as if the house had too many eyes watching my movements, too many mouths whispering my news. Rachana couldn't understand what I was worrying about. She said she had never felt safer in her life. To calm myself, I would explore the Art Deco quarter downtown and seek out the lost jewels.

One old guide to Casablanca, written during the heyday of the French rule, swooned with praise for the Rialto Cinema. The playhouse had been put up in 1930, a time when Casablanca was a showcase of French modernity. My guide described it as “a brilliant-cut diamond whose radiance dazzles all North Africa.” There was a photograph beside the blurb. It showed a couple posing before the bright lights of the newly opened Rialto. The man was wearing a trilby cocked back on his head, and his date was wrapped from head to toe in mink.

The guidebook gave no hint where to find the cinema, as if everyone already knew where to find it. I expected the place to be destroyed, or in a derelict state if it was still standing at all. But one morning, while strolling through the streets across from the old Marché Central, I came upon it.

To my astonishment, the Rialto had recently been renovated and opened once again. It was as if the launch ribbon had just been cut and the opening delegation had just departed. The place was in pristine condition.

The front doors were polished teak, glazed with beveled glass. In the foyer, the lamps were hand-cut crystal, the walls veneered in chestnut-colored wood. The floor was laid with Carrara marble, and the faces of Hollywood's idols loomed down, Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin, James Cagney, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

After the relaunch, it was fitting that the first movie showing was
Casablanca
. The afternoon screening was about to start. I bought a ticket and slipped inside.

In the auditorium itself the lighting was dim, the atmosphere one of cozy anticipation. There were no more than a handful of viewers sitting on the newly covered crimson seats. I sat at the back near another foreigner. He was wearing a baseball cap bearing the word “Casablanca.” I was going to say something to him, but the houselights dimmed, and the curtains were drawn slowly back.

I had thought it would be odd to watch
Casablanca
in Casablanca, albeit dubbed into French. The guidebooks love to tell you that the movie, perhaps the most famous film ever made, was shot entirely in Hollywood. I found it strange that it should have attracted such a cult following, famous for being famous. As the first scenes came and went, I couldn't help but notice that the Casablanca depicted on-screen had very little to do with the city in which I was sitting. Indeed, I wondered if the two had ever been true reflections of each other. In the film, wartime Casablanca was a mysterious haven in which refugees heading for America would become stranded. Although the story line may have been founded on a fragment of truth, the city dreamt up on Warner Brothers' back lot was a suffocating blend of Arab styles, whereas Casablanca of the time was European from top to toe.

At the end of the film, the houselights came alive and the man with the Casablanca baseball cap began to scribble vigorously in a notebook. I leaned over and asked if he enjoyed the film. He looked at me squarely, his plump pink face confused.

“Of course I liked it,” he said in an American voice. “It's the greatest film ever made.”

“Do you really think so?”

The man tugged off his cap and scratched a mop of thin gray hair. “It's Hollywood perfection,” he said before putting out a hand for me to shake. It was cool and clammy, like the body of a snake.

“I'm Kenny,” he said. “I'm from the
Casablanca
Appreciation Group—CAG for short.”

I left Kenny to scribble his notes and I went out into the bright afternoon. Leaving the movie and entering the reality was like waking from a dream, one conjured by the mind of a madman. But for the first time in a long while, I was calm. A small red taxi pulled up. I opened the door to get in, but someone grabbed my arm. I turned back. It was Kenny.

“Have time for a coffee, do you?” he said.

         

WE SAT IN A
backstreet café a stone's throw from the Rialto. The waiter plonked a pair of ashtrays on the table, as if expecting us to smoke a pack each. Kenny asked for Dr Pepper, but had to make do with the ubiquitous café noir. It was as viscous as crude oil and coated your mouth, making it difficult to speak.

Kenny didn't wait for me to make small talk. He tapped the fingernail of his index finger on the tabletop. “I'm on a world tour,” he said. “It's a kinda pilgrimage.”

“Are you with a tour group?”

“No, no, I'm alone.”

“Where else are you going on the tour?”

Kenny took out his notebook and flipped to the back. “After this I go to Athens,” he said, “then to Cape Town, and on to Nairobi, then Kathmandu. Fifteen cities in all—five continents.”

“Are you visiting holy sites?”

“Not exactly,” said Kenny. “You see, I'm going everywhere
Casablanca
is showing.”

It took me a moment to comprehend the scale of Kenny's journey.

“You're going all over the world to see the same movie again and again?”

“Yup.”

“But . . . but . . .”

“But what?”

“But it's madness,” I said.

There was an awkward pause. I hadn't meant to upset Kenny. He put away his notebook, his ready smile dissolved.

“It may be madness,” I said, “but it's brilliant madness!”

“Do you really think so?”

I squinted.

Kenny's spirits perked up. The glint returned to his eye. “I want to share something with you,” he said.

“Okay.”

“It's my dream. You see, I've got a dream.”

“Oh.”

“I think about it from the minute I wake up,” he said eagerly, “till the minute I go to sleep at night.”

“Oh,” I said again.

Kenny nodded. His glasses fell off his nose. “You'll never guess what it is,” he said.

“I'm sure I won't.”

“It's a theme park—right here in Casablanca.”

“I see,” I said.

“It's got a difference. It's gonna be the
Casablanca
Theme Park!”

Kenny outlined the details of his dream. The idea was to build a focal point for worldwide aficionados of the greatest movie ever made. There would be Rick's Café Americain complete with gaming tables, song-and-dance spectaculars, themed rides, and trivia quizzes, a museum of original props,
Casablanca
candy, and back-to-back screenings of the movie itself.

“It's going to be expensive,” I said.

“Ten million bucks.”

I took the last gulp of my coffee. Kenny reached over and tugged my wrist.

“I've only just met you,” he said, “but you seem strong-willed, honest—like the kinda guy we could do with onboard.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Yes!” said Kenny, leaping to his feet. “Yes! I'm saying I'd like you to come in with me.” He swallowed hard to clear the residue of tarlike coffee from his throat. “Give it a thought,” he said. “Will you come in as my partner?”

         

ON THE WAY HOME
I made a detour to Habous to take another look at the Spanish table. I tried to get Kenny and his dream out of my head. Previous experience had taught me you can't let an idea like that take root. Once inside you, it takes over. Before you know it, you get sucked in and you're suddenly as obsessed as the person who came up with it. There's nothing you can do.

Habous was deserted, so much so that I grew worried there had been a bomb threat. All the shops had their shutters down. There was no one on the streets and nothing for sale. I don't know why I bothered, but I went into the courtyard where the table had been on sale.

The shop's shutter was firmly closed. I peered in through the window. The mélange of Art Deco clocks and desks, paintings, lamps, and magazines was still. I turned around to leave. A man was standing in front of me. He had appeared from nowhere. He greeted me, and only then I recognized him as the shopkeeper. I asked if I might see the table.

“This is the tenth time you have come,” he said.

“Looking at it makes me happy.”

The shopkeeper unfastened the padlock and rolled up the steel shutter. “You know where it is,” he said.

I waded back through the artifacts and gazed at the table. The rear of the shop was gloomy, but somehow a stray shaft of sunlight had broken in. It was illuminating the walnut veneer. At that moment, I understood that it was a matter of destiny. The table was meant to be mine.

The shopkeeper had gone to sit down in his wicker chair. I strode through the clutter charged with adrenaline.

“I am a writer,” I said energetically. “And I am going to write books on that table, books about Morocco. They will be read all over the world, and they will inspire people to come to your country. The people who come will have money, plenty of money. They will rush here to Casablanca and will pour into your shop. Before you know it, you will be a rich man, all because you were wise enough to give me a good price for the table.”

The shopkeeper's eyes sparkled as if he had seen a vision. There was a lump in his throat. He didn't say anything at first, but sat staring into space.

“My friend,” he said after a long pause, “to anyone else the mirage you have painted would be worthless, but its value to me is great. Indeed, it is as great as half the value of the table. You can take it for half price.”

         

A HERD OF BLACK
rams were steered through the shantytown by a boy of about ten. He had broken plastic sandals and was waving a pointed stick. Every so often a man would step forward and inspect one of the sheep. He would open the mouth and peer at the teeth or jab his fingers into the animal's back.

“The celebration of Eid will be here in a few weeks,” said Kamal as we drove through. “People are already preparing. Every family buys a ram and slaughters it at their home.”

“That boy's very young to be looking after sheep,” I said.

“Hah!” said Kamal. “By his age I was working full-time.”

“Weren't you at school?”