The Caliph's House (20 page)

“Yes,” he responded. “That's where I was working. I used to buy candy wholesale and sell them in the playground. Then I got other kids to sell my candy at other schools all around Casablanca. By the time I was eleven, I was making a hundred bucks a week. And candy was just the start.”

“What came after the candy?”

Kamal raised his eyebrows. “I hired a garage near my house,” he said, “got four or five guys working for me, and started all kinds of lines. I made cheap perfume and sold it to the girls, and I bought grease from a hardware store and sold it to the boys for their hair. As long as the packaging was right, they'd buy anything. Then I bought and sold chickens and eggs, and even sheep. Eid was my busiest time,” he said. “I bought two truckloads of black-market rams from Algeria and sold them to all the parents at school. Whenever I had a spare minute, I used to put up a stall during break time.”

“What did it sell?”

“Advice. I used to teach guys how to pick up girls, and the girls how to pick up guys.”

“How did you make time for class?”

Kamal snorted. “School was my marketplace,” he said. “I only ever went there when I had something to sell.”

With his natural knack for making money, I couldn't understand why Kamal was working for me. He could have been earning ten times his salary if he was in business for himself. The point only strengthened my fear that he had a secret agenda, one that involved relieving me of the Caliph's House.

Almost every week he came to me with a business proposition. First it was an apartment block in the heart of the Art Deco quarter.

“There are seventeen apartments,” he said. “We buy the place, give it a coat of paint, and sell them off one by one.”

“What's the catch?”

“There isn't one. The owner's an old Spanish guy with no kids,” Kamal said. “He'll die soon. Maybe very soon. A little pressure and he'll give it to us cheap.”

We went to look at the building. It was wonderful. The façade was lined with rounded balconies and fine azulejo tiles from Andalucía. Inside, the ceilings were high, the floors laid with parquet, and bathrooms retained all their original fittings. The only drawback was that the entire building reeked of horse meat. The reason for this became apparent when we inspected the ground floor, where an angry-looking butcher had a shop specializing in
cheval,
horseflesh.

After the apartment block came Kamal's scheme to sell Moroccan dates to the Gulf Arabs, and then to start a private ambulance firm; after that he suggested building a blood bank for women only, and he then came up with the idea of exporting Bedouin goat-hair tents to Guatemala.

I had never come across someone so skilled at sourcing a product. He may have shunned the classroom, but in his childhood he had developed lateral thinking, an invaluable skill when you need to buy something on the cheap.

The best example was when we had to buy five thousand eggs.

         

WITH THE FLOORS PROGRESSING
well, we started to turn our attention to the walls. I was eager to use tadelakt, the plasterwork from Marrakech made from albumen and marble dust, and polished with a flat stone taken from a riverbed. The plaster was originally developed for use in hammams, steam baths, where it could endure the blistering vapor for years on end. More recently, it has moved from the bathroom into the salon, and is a favorite with the new European gentry of Marrakech. The deep reds and blush pinks of traditional tadelakt are complemented by dozens of new colors, achieved by adding a few drops of synthetic dye.

Good tadelakt is notoriously difficult to apply, and hence, most foreigners end up with badly cracked walls and plaster that crumbles to the touch. We had sixteen thousand square feet of wall space to cover in tadelakt, most of it in the time-honored pink of Marrakech.

Kamal sent a scout to the south to search for craftsmen skilled in plastering. He bundled me into the Jeep.

“Where are we going?”

“To a little village near Rabat,” he said.

“Why?”

“To buy eggs.”

The walls of the Caliph's House were old, and old walls cause havoc for the tadelakt teams because of their hairline cracks. The way to prevent cracking is first to prepare the walls well, applying a coat of rough white cement, to which the plaster can take hold. Then, when the tadelakt has been applied and smoothed, it is varnished with egg white. The albumen binds the surface together, and becomes ever stronger over the months as the plaster dries out.

Kamal had calculated we needed at least five thousand eggs. If we had gone to Casablanca's Central Market, they would have cost a fortune. But through his network of cousins, uncles, and distant aunts, he had traced a long-lost member of the family who owned a battery chicken business—a million birds crammed into vast egg-laying barns.

         

TWO DAYS AFTER WE
came home with the eggs, a tall, thin man with bright eyes and a central parting turned up at the house. I noticed his fingers were extra long, as if they had been stretched. He hardly moved, and didn't say a word until I asked him his name. He leaned forward. When his mouth was only an inch from my ear, he whispered, “Mustapha,” followed by “tadelakt.”

My limited experience in Moroccan house renovation had taught me to mistrust anyone who talked or smiled too much; the best people to back were the quiet types with cheerless faces. Mustapha the plasterer was the quietest, glummest craftsman I had encountered. He almost never spoke at all, and he always looked as if his world were about to collapse. He was as silent as a mime artist. When inspecting the job to be done, he didn't ask any questions, so I ranted on with all the information I thought he would need.

He started the next day with a team of five men. They all had the same extra-long fingers and the same sullen, hushed manner. I watched them through an open window as they began work in the salon. They would gesture to each other, using spoken language only when absolutely necessary. And when they walked across the room, they trod softly so as to make no sound at all.

Hamza was impressed by their quiet unhappiness.

“They are good men,” he bellowed, clapping his hands together noisily. “They will bring harmony to this house.”

         

A MOROCCAN FRIEND TOLD
me that to understand his country, one had to understand the kingdom to the north. The cultures of Morocco and Spain, he had said, are linked by history, by tradition, and by blood. So in the middle of February we planned a trip to the Alhambra in southern Spain, where the great palace-fortress of Moorish kings still stands at Granada. It seemed the perfect time to visit what must be the finest Islamic palace ever constructed.

Another reason for the journey was to get away from Casablanca. I fantasized that when we came back a week later, all the work would be finished. To ensure the craftsmen would toil day and night, I asked Kamal to stay in the house until our return.

Living in Morocco, it is easy to forget that Europe is no more than a few miles to the north, albeit on another continent. We took the train up to Tangier and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to Algeciras. The ferry was low in the water, listing to the port side. She was called
Isabella,
the name of the queen who routed the Spanish Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula eight centuries ago. The straits may only be eight miles across at their nearest point, but they divide two continents, an ocean, and a sea.

We stood out on the deck in the breeze, watching as Africa slipped away. The minarets of Tangier grew smaller and smaller, until they were no more than specks on the horizon. Gulls swooped across the stern, where a dozen crates of fish were packed in ice. We strolled along the guardrail to the bow, where we found Europe approaching.

         

ANYONE WHO HAS TRAVELED
in Andalucía has been touched by the spell of Morocco. The Moors retreated to African soil, but their legacy endures throughout Iberia. Their invasion of Spain took place in 711 of the Christian era, and the Islamic faith was practiced there for seven hundred years. Today you can find traces of the Moorish past in Spanish food and music, scholarship, folklore, and in the language itself.

The Alhambra palace at Granada is so exquisite that a visitor is at a loss to describe it. I was first taken there as a child. I remember walking around the gardens and through the great halls, my mouth wide open in awe. I had never imagined such beauty, such precision.

The chill winter air was perfumed with the scent of roses, lulled by the sound of water tumbling from fountains. Ambling through the courtyards again, this time with my own children, I was spellbound by the serenity, a ballet in stone. The lines and textures were easy on the eye, the sounds and smells equally pleasing. Like the ballet, there was a sense that such perfection had been effortless to create.

We stayed in a small guesthouse in the shadow of the palace. The nights were cold, the mornings glazed with frost. I was overcome by the tranquillity. I told Rachana that I wanted to stay there forever, and to walk away from the Caliph's House. She laughed and then seemed very serious.

“You're not joking, are you?” she said.

         

ON THE SECOND NIGHT
in Spain, I received a call. It was Hamza. He was hysterical. It sounded as if he was crying.

“Monsieur Tahir! Monsieur Tahir!”

“Hamza, what's wrong?”

“Monsieur Tahir, we are good men. We are honest,” he said, taking quick, shallow breaths.

“What's the matter, Hamza? Why are you calling? Has the house burned down?”

“No, no, it's not the house.”

“Then what is it?”

The guardian's voice trembled. “It's Kamal,” he said. “He's a bad, bad man.”

“What has he done?”

“He's . . . he's . . .”

“He's what?”

“He's filled the house with
femmes de la route,
women from the road!”

Like a teenager whose parents were out of town, Kamal had launched into a day-and-night extravaganza of wine, women, and low-grade hashish. Hamza said the workmen had been sent away through the back door. The front entrance to Dar Khalifa had then been flung open. Every hooker in the city had been invited to the party of the century.

“They are doing wicked, wicked things in every room,” Hamza exclaimed. “May Allah be my witness. I have seen it with my own eyes!”

F
IFTEEN

A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is rain.

KAMAL FREQUENTLY RECOUNTED TALES OF HOW
he had exacted terrible revenge on anyone unwise enough to oppose him. He prided himself on meting out retribution, destroying the fortunes of those who dared to cross his path. As the months passed, he told of men he had had thrown into jail across Morocco. Two of his own cousins were languishing in Casablanca's grimmest prison. Their mistake had been to think they could get the better of Kamal Abdullah. Others had been given more original punishments. He told me of one adversary who loathed the heat. He was lured into the desert and buried up to his neck in sand. Another had been videotaped in bed with his mistress, and the footage sent to his wife.

I once asked him how he decided what form of revenge to take.

“It's not easy,” he said. “You have to give it thought. You mustn't act too fast. If you hurry, you can mess up a good opportunity. There's no point in jail if it doesn't hurt someone bad.”

“Jail hurts everyone,” I said.

“No, no, it doesn't,” he replied. “It doesn't hurt the rich.”

“Then what does?”

“Tasting poverty,” he said.

I feared what Kamal would do if humiliated by being thrown out of the Caliph's House. But I couldn't allow his debauchery to continue unchecked. Then again, if I rebuked him and didn't throw him out, I would appear to be as weak as I was. I contemplated rushing back from Granada to sort things out in Casablanca. I sat in front of the hotel's fireplace, staring into the flames, pondering the situation. The problem was that Kamal understood the degree to which I valued his know-how.

At last I came up with a ruse. I called him and said that a close friend was about to arrive at Dar Khalifa from England. He was traveling through Morocco, I explained, and would be staying in our absence. He was about to arrive any minute, I said. Kamal listened calmly and promised to leave at once.

Five days later we arrived home. The guardians lined up at the front door, saluted, and spat out their reports.

“He's brought shame on us all,” said the first.

“He has brought shame on our families,” said the second.

“And shame on our ancestors,” mumbled the third.

We entered the house. I was expecting the place to be ransacked, but the opposite was true. Our bedroom had been spring-cleaned. The kitchen was gleaming as if an army of maids had scoured it from top to bottom. The rest of the house, although a building site, was scrubbed clean, too. Hamza glanced at me as we toured the rooms.

“Kamal's a magician,” he said.

         

SOON AFTER MY RETURN,
I called on Hicham Harass. The winter rain had caused his shack to flood. He apologized for the disorder and flapped a hand at the mess.

“None of this is precious, really precious,” he said. “There are a few things I've grown fond of, but it's all rubbish. My wife likes it, but she doesn't understand what's valuable and what is not.”

Hicham leaned back into his comfy chair, knocked off his shoes, and called his wife to make the mint tea.

“Women don't know, do they?” he said. “They try hard but they can't understand the things that are important to a man. Take postage stamps,” Hicham continued. “Find me a woman who likes postage stamps!”

         

IN THE WEEK WE
had been away, Mustapha the mime had begun the walls. His team applied the tadelakt with arched sweeping movements. The plaster itself was prepared in a vat they had built on the terrace. It was more than ten feet in length and four feet wide. As they swished the flat trowels of plaster onto the walls and arches, the team would sing very softly—tenor voices echoing through the house. They would take it in turns to chant a verse, the others filling in with the chorus. They only sang when they were actually plastering, as if the rhythm gave consistency to their work.

They would start on walls of a room only when the floor had been tiled and sprinkled with sawdust from the cedar mills. The bejmat team spent so much time at Dar Khalifa that they moved into the house. One glance at their work and I knew that I would never have to inspect again. It was faultless, created by an ancient knowledge, a fusion of mathematics, chemistry, and fine art. The bejmat masters didn't sing. They were concentrating too hard.

The children's playroom, off the main salon, was to be the only room with glazed tiles. That way even if they covered the place in paint and glue, it could be easily wiped clean. The craftsmen spent days laying green and white tiles in a simple checkerboard design. They reached the final line, only to find the room more irregular than they had calculated. Without a word, they lifted the entire floor and laid it again, rotating the pattern by three degrees. The second time it fitted perfectly.

Every day, Aziz would accost me, and beg me over cups of mint tea to allow him to demonstrate his skill. He said he had spent his life mastering complexity and, given the chance, he could transform the Caliph's House into a labyrinth of design. Worn down after weeks of pleading, we agreed that he would lay patterned border tiles on the walls around the rooms.

Once the decision had been reached, Aziz put down his tea, got to his feet, and kissed me on both cheeks. There were tears in his eyes.

“You will weep when you see the beauty of the work,” he said.

The next day a new craftsman arrived at Dar Khalifa. Aziz had sent him to excise the pattern into the plain glazed border tiles. In one hand he carried a
manqash,
a heavy sharp-edged hammer; in the other he held a cushion. A basket of ruby red squares was brought in by an apprentice. He laid the cushion down and began to chip.

If there is any memory of the Caliph's House I shall carry to my grave, it will not be the beaming faces of the guardians, or their constant talk of Jinns. Nor will it be the din of donkeys braying in the night, or the smell of honeysuckle at dusk. It will be the
ching! ching! ching!
of the master's hammer, chipping away the cursive pattern with an accuracy only a long apprenticeship can provide.

He sat there day after day, week after week, chipping with the hammer. I would watch him, mesmerized that a man could have learned to perform such a skill with a single sharpened tool. In our world we would have dreamt up a machine to do the job. The result would be a pattern that was uniform, lifeless, devoid of any meaning. His work was fluid and animate. It had a soul.

         

MY CONVERSATIONS WITH HICHAM
Harass calmed me down. I would arrive at his shack choking with rage at being forced to pay ten times the going rate for nails, brass hinges, or tubes of Chinese-made glue. The old stamp collector would call for tea, rub his swollen feet, and talk. Our conversations did far more than fill in the gaps of a new culture. They lowered my blood pressure and acted as a kind of therapy. After an hour of Hicham's acumen I would float back to Dar Khalifa, my mind cleansed of its troubles.

One afternoon Rachana made chicken curry with her grandmother's recipe. There was so much of it that I filled a serving dish and took it through the shantytown to Hicham Harass's shack. The old man was one of the few Moroccans I have known with a taste for extremely spicy food. Two men were standing in the narrow lane outside his home. It was obvious they were not on a social call. One was waving a notebook and shouting insults. The other was holding the stamp collector's old portable television. Hicham's wife was pleading with them, her face blushed from tears. She ushered me inside.

“Damn them,” the old man said as soon as he saw me. “They will take the shirt off my back next.”

I offered to lend Hicham money if he needed it. He thanked me.

“The Prophet said moneylenders were lower than thieves,” he said. “They are stupid, but I am more stupid for borrowing from them.”

         

ONE MORNING I SAW
Hamza sitting alone in the garden, near the fake well he had built. His head was in his hands, as if he were in tears. I was reluctant to disturb him and decided to leave him in peace. When I met Osman in the afternoon, I asked if there was anything wrong.

“Hamza is going to die,” he said.

“What's wrong with him? Is he sick?”

“It's worse than illness,” he said, sliding a finger horizontally across his throat.

“Do you mean someone's going to kill him?”

“Perhaps.”

It was by any standards an Oriental conversation. As an outsider, I feared I had no real hope of understanding. I asked Osman if he could elaborate.

“Hamza had a dream,” he said. “He dreamt of a man riding a camel into the desert.”

“And?”

Osman looked at me quizzically.

“Isn't that enough?”

“I'm not sure if it is.”

“Everyone knows,” said the guardian sharply, “someone who has this dream will soon breathe their last.”

The next morning I saw Hamza again. He was in the garden courtyard, raking leaves somberly. I told him I had heard about his dream.

“What will my family do without me?” he moaned. “They will starve.”

“I'm sure you are not going to die,” I said. “It's only a dream, and most dreams don't come true.”

The guardian swept back his hair with his hand. “I have had the same dream for seven nights,” he replied. “There is no question about it. I will die very soon. Only Allah knows the hour.”

Dar Khalifa was bathed in an air of imagined grief. It seemed ridiculous, but whenever I questioned it, the guardians waved their hands high in the air and exclaimed the dream to be an unmistakable sign. They went around the house, their heads hung low, pained expressions stretched across their faces. I asked the Bear if there was anything I could do.

“You can ask Qandisha to protect Hamza,” he said.

I didn't understand. Qandisha supposedly hated me for living in her house.

“You can ask her,” the Bear insisted. “She may listen to you.”

I found the situation absurd, especially as it was me who didn't believe in Jinns. But how could I ask something I couldn't see to save Hamza's life?

“It's simple,” said the Bear when he had heard my question. “You go to a place where bulls are being slaughtered, and you dip your finger in warm blood. Touch it to your face, just above the nose, and Jinns will become visible,” he said.

Kamal agreed that the easiest way to see Jinns was to do as the Bear had described. He didn't regard it as odd at all, and drove me to an abattoir on the eastern edge of Casablanca. As anyone who knows me well can vouch, I am squeamish around the dead. It was raining hard when we arrived at the slaughterhouse. The sky was so dark with storm clouds that it seemed more like night than day. We ran from the Jeep to the main entrance of the abattoir and were drenched within a second.

Inside, Kamal explained to a foreman why we had come. I found myself wondering how a British slaughterman would react if told we needed fresh blood to materialize what amounted to a ghost. The Moroccan foreman readily agreed, as if he had encountered the request often before. He led the way through the abattoir, to where the bulls were being killed.

The place stank of death and was drenched in blood. The last cries of condemned animals were drowned out by the whir of a circular blade, spinning fast, hacking through bone. In line with Islamic tradition and the belief in halal killing, the animals were bled to death. They were brought from a holding pen one at a time. Two men stepped forward and bound the creature's legs together. It took a few seconds. They held the neck rigid as the bull wrestled to get loose. A short knife slashed the jugular, and the process of dying commenced.

I tried to leave, but Kamal told me to stay. He said death was part of life, and it was good to witness where one ended and the other began.