The Caliph's House (21 page)

The animal kicked in spasm for a long while, its eyes rolled up, mouth groaning, tongue at the side. A vast torrent of blood had poured from the wound. The spasms continued long after death. Once the bull was dead, the foreman motioned me to take all the blood I needed. I bent down, poked a finger into the pool, and wiped a single drop above my nose. I felt disgusted.

At the house, I shut myself in the room where I had seen the pink slime. It was there that Hamza had said Qandisha resided. The slime may have been a sign of
baraka
, but the guardians still regarded the place with fear.

I took a chair in with me and sat there for much of the afternoon. The shutters were closed. The room smelled of damp. Outside, the rain was unrelenting. I didn't try to have a conversation with Qandisha. It seemed pointless to try speaking to something I didn't believe in. The blood above my nose had been smudged. I might have cared, but my thoughts were on the abattoir. Like so many in our society, I am a hypocrite. I love to eat meat but I revile the business that provides it.

I reflected on Hamza, Osman, and the Bear, and about our own lives at Dar Khalifa. I thought about Ariane and Timur, and about the childhood they would have, and were having. They spent their days in innocence, lost in a land that looked upon them as kings. I had no idea how long we would live at the Caliph's House, but at that moment I hoped it would be forever.

         

A FEW DAYS LATER,
word came that our furniture had arrived from India and was waiting at Casablanca's port. I had ordered it online months before. The Internet, a credit card, and a bottle of strong red wine make for a hazardous combination. One click of the mouse and you can find yourself financially destroyed. In a moment of heady enthusiasm, I had ordered six armchairs and five sofas, three king-size four-poster beds, a revolving bookcase and campaign desk, and a dining table long enough to seat a soccer team and their coach. As if this wasn't enough, I ordered an antique mahogany door from a palace in Rajasthan and a carved wooden swing taken from a harem in Mysore.

The next morning I received the firm's e-mail confirming my order and thanking me for submitting payment in advance. Payment in advance? My eyes jumped from my face. I fumbled with my wallet. My credit card wasn't there. It was on the coffee table beside the empty wine glass. I spent the morning dispatching frantic messages. But there was no hope. The furniture company in Mumbai refused to cancel the order. They advised me to take more care with my clicking finger next time.

         

WHEN I MET HAMZA
in the afternoon, he was laughing. He said the dream of the desert rider had been replaced with another, in which he had seen a snake slithering through long grass.

“Is that good?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Hamza jubilantly. “It means there is good fortune ahead.”

That afternoon when I went for lunch, I found the three guardians huddled together behind a hedge. They were talking fast in whispers. When they heard me approaching, they broke off and covered their mouths. Osman pointed at me.

“There he is,” he said.

The three men rushed over, followed by the gardener. Then the cook hurried out from the kitchen, and she called to the maid, who called to the nanny. After that, all the craftsmen from the house trouped out to see what was going on. They lined up respectfully as if they were in the presence of a saint.

“The Jinns listen to you,” said Hamza.

“You have
baraka,
” said Osman.

“You are blessed,” said the maid.

I shrugged them off at first, as I hadn't even asked the Jinns to help Hamza, because I didn't believe in them. But they declared there was no doubt. Then they thanked Allah for having blessed me. I tried to explain they were mistaken, but they would hear nothing of it. They took it in turns to laud me. They said my heart was chaste, that I was like a child who had not yet been tainted by the reality of the world. The praise felt good. It was a far cry from the low status they usually afforded me. I shouted at them. Quite the opposite was true, I said, my mind was regularly filled with the most repulsive thoughts imaginable.

“Only he who is blessed would pretend he is not,” said the Bear.

“He proves the
baraka
by denying it,” said the cook.

“He has power because he's descended from the Prophet,” said Hamza.

Osman was going to say something, but instead he hurried away into the bidonville. He returned five minutes later with his baby daughter. She was about three months old and had a high fever.

“Please touch her forehead with your hand,” said Osman. “Your
baraka
will make her well.”

When I was a child, my father warned me to take care not to mention our lineage when in the Arab world. I asked him why. He said that being descended from the Prophet's line was considered to be very important by very many, but it was something so gravely serious that mention of it ought never to be made.

Years later I read about the final hours of the Prophet Mohammed's life. It is said that, lying on his deathbed, he ordered his closest followers to gather around. He said he was to soon quit the mortal world but, before he departed, he was to leave them the two most precious things in his possession. The first was the Holy Qur'an, and the second was his family.

It may have seemed like a strange request, but it is a legacy that has preoccupied Muslims ever since. The immediate family of Mohammed, often known in the East as “The People of the Cloak,” are revered by all followers of Islam. No other family commands such respect, nor has any other had such a dynamic bearing on Islamic society. The Prophet's direct descendants have excelled as philosophers, poets, geographers, warriors, and kings.

I was touched that Osman would consider me a healer because of the blood in my veins. At the same time I was confused and a little appalled. I gave him a bottle of medicine to bring down his daughter's fever.

“This will work better than any healing I can do,” I said.

         

CASABLANCA
'
S PORT IS THE
biggest in Africa. It runs for miles along the coast, a city in itself. The perimeter is lined with razor wire, sentry posts, and armed police on patrol. There are dozens of quays crowded with hulking steel gantries, ready to unload cargo ships from every corner of the world. They come from Shanghai and São Paulo, from Helsinki, Hong Kong, Yokohama, and Vladivostok. It was impossible to say what filled the uniform steel containers. The only clue was when the inspectors from the
douane,
the customs, arrived, hacked off the lead seals, and emptied the contents onto the ground.

My fear of paying Moroccan import tax was very great indeed. The port was awash with horror stories. I heard of people whose goods were impounded for years, even generations. Kamal said his own father had once become so frustrated at the tax being charged, he set fire to a container full of machinery and walked away.

We spent three afternoons in a café outside the main gate. The coffee was thicker and darker there than anywhere else in Casablanca. Like everything within a mile of the docks, it smelled of rotting fish. The room was packed with rough types, all of them dressed in tattered jelabas and worn-out barboush. There wasn't a clean-shaved jaw in the place.

Some of them played checkers with bottle caps on homemade boards. Others clustered together, swapping tall tales of their travels and misdeeds.

“They're all liars,” said Kamal. “And they're thieves.”

“Then what are we doing here? Why don't we go straight to the customs office?”

“Research,” he said. “We're doing research.”

On the fourth day, we stood outside the café at a cart that sold boiled snails by the cup. Kamal made small talk with the one-eyed vendor, and I tried to pretend I was having a good time. Everyone could tell I didn't belong there. I didn't know the rules. I feigned delight in the taste of the mollusk meal. Kamal told me to keep quiet.

“People don't eat the snails 'cause they like them,” he said. “They eat them 'cause they're cheap.”

The one-eyed vendor blinked slowly and refilled my cup for free. He said I appreciated his wares, that I was a good advertisement. We stood slurping snails, watching the commotion of wheeled vehicles. There were wagons laden with whole trees from Brazil, stevedores pulling carts, forklift trucks, bicycles, scooters, and rolling stock.

On the fifth day, Kamal said it was time to go into the port itself. I showed enthusiasm at the idea.

“There's a problem,” he said. “We don't have passes, so we can't go in.”

“How are we going to get the container if we can't enter the port?”

Kamal peered over at the main gate. Three policemen were standing guard. Anyone without a pass was turned back. We saw a man trying to offer a bribe. He was arrested, handcuffed, and taken away. A moment later a waiter from the café was ushered inside. He was taking a silver pot of mint tea to the officials in the customs office.

I looked round, but Kamal had disappeared. When I turned again, he was being waved in through the main gate. He was sporting a maroon waistcoat and was balancing a tray on his hand, and a glass on the tray.

For three hours I waited with the snail seller. We exchanged pleasantries and talked about snails. I had never imagined there was so much to learn about the tiny shelled creatures. The salesman said his family had sold snails at the port for a hundred years. They had been there, he said, before the French occupation, a time when Casablanca was little more than a village.

Then he explained how his ancestors had once been doctors. They were Berbers from the mountains, where they used to cure the sick with secret remedies.

“Did you use plants for your medicines?” I asked.

The salesman twitched. “No,” he said, “we used snails. They're medicine that can heal, but there's more money in selling them as food.”

I had hoped we could move the conversation forward, but the one-eyed vendor had more information to impart:

“There are so many kinds of snail,” he said with relish, “and each one has a different use. You can cure typhoid with sea snails, and a cough can be relieved with tree snails, and if a woman wants to find a husband, she only has to eat boiled snails mixed with her menstrual blood.”

Thankfully, at that moment Kamal arrived.

“They're playing games with us,” he said.

“Can we get the furniture?”

Kamal looked me straight in the eye. “The customs want you to pay fifty thousand dollars,” he said.

         

THE NEXT DAY, PETE
called unexpectedly. I was sitting in a patch of sunshine on the lawn going through a book on Berber history. Hamza had carried my wicker chair into the sunlight, and insisted on moving it every few minutes as the sun arched overhead. I was grateful to him for attending me so well, but irritated, as it had begun to hamper my reading. The other two guardians lurked nearby. They, too, were keen to please me.

Pete's voice sounded faint, as if he was ill.

“Are you okay?”

“Alhamdulillah,”
he said, “thanks be to God.”

“But you sound weak.”

“I've had typhoid,” said Pete, his voice trembling.

“How's married life?”

Pete started to cough. “We're going to the U.S.,” he said.

“I thought you said you'd never go back there.”

“There's a reason,” he replied.

“Oh?”

“I'm going to set up an Islamic mission in Austin,” he said. “It's my calling. I'm going to spread the Word, gonna save Christian souls.”

I would have tried to stop him, but experience has shown me that nothing can counter the zeal of a convert. Any suggestion of toning down the message only fans the flames. I wished Pete luck and said I hoped our paths would cross again before long. He knew it was a lie. He could hear it in my voice.

         

ONE MORNING SOON AFTER,
a tall man with a trimmed black beard hurried up to me in the shantytown. He had been running and was out of breath. He handed me an envelope. I was used to being given notes as I walked through to the main road. People would often scribble down their requests and pass them to me. I helped when I could. But the man with the trimmed black beard obviously didn't live in the bidonville. He was wearing a very fine jelaba, with gold embroidery around the neck. The notes from the shantytown were usually written in pencil and were hard to decipher. They never came in an envelope, certainly not one made from imported paper.

The messenger hurried away before I could say a word. I took the letter back to the house and opened it expectantly. Inside was a single sheet of white ribbed paper, crossed with a few lines of navy blue ink. The hand that had written them was unmistakably French. No other race is capable of such refined Roman script.

Dear Monsieur Shah,
the letter began,
I should like to present myself. I am Countess Madeleine de Longvic, a longtime resident of Casablanca, and a former acquaintance of a gentleman whom I believe was your grandfather. I would be honored if you could come to my home on Saturday at four, for tea.

When I showed Rachana the letter, she held it to the light.

“Whoever she is,” she said, “the lady has style. The watermark is her own monogram, and the nib looks like vintage Mont Blanc.”

Rachana held the page to her nostrils and sniffed the faint hint of perfume.

“She likes beauty,” she said quietly. “When you go to see her, take flowers. But don't stint. Take her orchids.”

S
IXTEEN

He who foretells the future lies, even if he tells the truth.

HOWEVER HARD I TRIED, I WAS
unable to stop thinking about Pete. The rise of Al Qaeda and the bombings of 9/11 had made the American people reluctant admirers of fanatical Islam. I could imagine Pete and his Moroccan wife touching down at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport and being whisked away by police. The West's greatest fear is a convert with an Anglo-Saxon face prepared to strap explosives to his belt.

“The Feds aren't stupid,” said Kamal when I told him about Pete's quest to bring Islam to the American heartland. “They'll have that guy in Guantánamo before he can sneeze.” Kamal paused, took a long drag of his Marlboro, and said, “Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.”

We were in the Korean Jeep, driving south down the coast road looking for a source of cut-price marble. The windows were open and the buzz of the rubber on asphalt was loud. It was on such drives that Kamal lifted the veil on his past.

“I was in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001,” he said coldly. “I saw it all: the planes going into the Towers, the smoke, the dead lying around. It was fucking scary. Next thing I know, the Feds are checking on Arabs. They're looking them up and dusting them down.”

“Did they interview you?”

“Sure they did,” Kamal said, “they went the whole nine yards.”

“Were you expecting them?”

“It was a strange time,” he said, dodging my question. “The Arabs in the U.S. were as shocked as everyone else. We were against the bombings. Islam doesn't say to go fly passenger jets into skyscrapers. I suddenly found myself unable to trust any other Arab. I didn't know who was part of an Al Qaeda cell.

“Then one night I came home from work and my wife, Jen, was making dinner. I knew instantly that something was up.”

“Why?”

“Because she'd never cooked anything before,” he said, “not even an egg. She was terrible in the kitchen. I asked her if anyone had been to the house. She said no one had. But she didn't look me in the eye.”

Kamal wiped his face with his hand.

“You can tell,” he said, “you can tell when your partner's lying. It's the smell they give off.”

“So what happened?”

“Next morning there was a smack at the door,” he said. “I opened it and six Feds came charging in. It turned out they'd shut down the whole block. They had helicopter support, too. Jen had split. The FBI guys said they'd come the night before and told her not to let on. That was the worst humiliation. My own wife trusted them more than me.”

“Is that when they interviewed you?”

Kamal smiled. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “they got into every nook and cranny.”

“Of the apartment?”

“Of my mind.”

         

THE TADELAKT TEAM MADE
slow progress, but it was progress nonetheless. Mustapha the mime brought a special craftsman to score a horizontal pattern high on the walls; it mirrored the design running along the terracotta skirting. Work on the floors and walls may have been moving forward, but there were no general craftsmen. We urgently needed a painter, an electrician, a plumber, a mason, and a more reliable carpenter. The problem was that no one was hired unless they had a personal link with Kamal. It was the Moroccan system in its purest form—only a member of the tribe or of a known group could ever break in. Anyone without a direct connection was lampooned as being a con man, a delinquent, or both.

The only time I wore Kamal down was with Hamza's neighbor, who claimed to be a mason. I had ordered him to take the man on as a way of pleasing the guardians. There were problems from the moment the mason's sinister shadow crossed the threshold. He took a dislike to the job and even more of a dislike to Kamal. In the week he worked with us, he managed to smash everything he touched. It ended with him chasing Kamal through the shantytown with a clawhammer.

I grew up in England and so am familiar with the great British workman and his approach to the job. He arrives late and finishes early, but only after demanding a thousand mugs of milky tea. He fills your house with cigarette smoke, stubs the butts out on the floor, and turns the place upside down, moaning and groaning like a toddler with toothache. He disappears for weeks on end, before reappearing magically at Christmas, demanding a bonus for his men.

I thought I would never meet the English workman's match. But I did at the Caliph's House. Moroccan workers surpass almost any others in the depth of their skill. They are polite and never fail to offer prolonged greetings. When they are in your house, they work hard, and never dream of asking you to make them tea. If they want it, they brew it up themselves on the brazier they always keep with their tools. They are almost perfect in every other respect, but Moroccan workmen do have one major fault. They are virtually incapable of ever finishing a job.

As I toured the great buildings of Morocco, I found myself perplexed that they had ever been completed at all. Whenever I ran through the house ranting, the master craftsmen would grin broadly and exclaim that only Allah was complete.

Then one day during the first week of February, I met a well-known Moroccan architect. I asked him how the royal family managed to get anything finished. The informant stroked his silver beard with his hand.

“It's not about money,” he said pensively. “It's about domination.”

I asked him what he meant.

“The royal family have patronized traditional Moroccan crafts for centuries,” he said. “But don't think for a minute a craftsman will do his best work, even though it's for his king. Every man on the job has to be cajoled day and night into creating perfection.”

The architect said that when King Hassan II, the father of the present monarch, was building the Great Mosque of Casablanca, he would journey to the building site as often as he could. “He would inspect the tools himself,” said my informant, “and he'd choose a moualem and stand over him for hours at a time. If the work was off by the breadth of a hair, he would order the man to pack his tools and leave. He knew very well that word would spread, and that the master craftsman would never work again.”

         

IT WAS POURING
rain when Hamza took his old shovel and exhumed the ostrich egg. Osman stood over him, holding a torn umbrella and shielding him from the rain and the wind. I watched them from a distance, as ever wondering the meaning of it all.

When the egg had been retrieved, it was ushered to the stables, where the Bear rubbed it with grease. After more than a month in the ground, the once-pristine shell was a blotchy red-brown. It smelled sulfurous, like decomposing rats. The guardians were in high spirits. They wiped a chair clean and invited me to sit at their table, the spool from a giant roll of cable. I sat down and looked carefully at the egg.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“Eat it,” said the Bear. “We'll eat it.”

“Do you have to?”

Hamza took his masonry hammer and smashed in the top of the shell. The pungent odor increased.

“It's rotting,” I said.

“It will bring
baraka
to the house.”

A tablespoon was fished out from a box of tools. Osman passed it over.

“You can go first,” he said.

“I can wait,” I said.

“Please!” the guardians prompted. “It's your duty, your honor.”

I probed the spoon into the fermenting goo and pressed it to my lips.

“How does it taste?” said the Bear, grabbing the spoon.

“It tastes like rotten eggs,” I said.

         

ONE MORNING WHEN KAMAL
was in a good mood, I asked him more about the days following the 9/11 attack. He didn't like talking about it much, as if he had been betrayed.

“The Feds were bringing in Arabs from across the nation,” he said. “There were people I knew locked up without charge. The keys were chucked away. Some of them were sent down to Guantánamo. Go have a look, they're all still there.”

When I asked how his wife had reacted to 9/11, the blood seemed to drain from his face.

“Her husband was an Arab,” he said. “She was married to the enemy. She couldn't trust me. Trust is the basis of marriage. Without it there's nothing—just two people who used to like the same things.”

“What happened to her?”

“She enlisted,” he said.

“For the military?”

“Yup. She's serving at a base somewhere down in Georgia. Driving a tank or something.”

However crooked I found his schemes, I would never have considered Kamal terrorist material. He liked himself too much to get blown up for someone else's cause.

“When they couldn't link you with the bombers, did the Feds leave you alone?”

“Eventually, after all the polygraphs and interviews,” he said. “But the problem was that I'd met Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 strikes. We used to go to the same mosque.”

“You knew Atta?”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

“What was he like?”

Kamal blew his nose on his sleeve. “He was a stupid asshole,” he said.

         

SATURDAY AFTERNOON WAS A
long time in coming. I had my best suit dry-cleaned, my black shoes polished until they shone like lacquered wood, and I bought a spray of the finest orchids I could find. They were pink with a trace of lilac around the petals.

I took a taxi to the address printed on the letter paper and found myself standing outside a large double-fronted villa in the prosperous suburb of Anfa. The front door was dark brown, and varnished in such a way that it caught the afternoon light. Before I had even stepped onto the curb, it was opened by the tall man with the well-groomed beard. He welcomed me and said that Countess de Longvic was waiting in the salon.

I entered the house. The walls of the vestibule were covered with yellow silk, hung with etchings from imperial France. The floor was rosewood parquet recently waxed and scuffed at the edges. I followed the trimmed beard, clutching the orchids to my chest.

There was a curious light in the salon. It was unusually yellow, as if it had been tinted by the windowpanes. The room must have been forty feet long and almost as wide. It was dotted with European furniture: a carved sideboard and a rolltop desk, a nursing chair, low bookshelves, three or four sofas, and an Erard grand piano.

On one side of the room, below an oil portrait of Louis XIV, a lady was sitting. She was about eighty years old, her face wrinkled yet childlike. Her hair was gray, pinned to the back of her head tight in a bun. She was wearing a long lavender dress with frills on the sleeves and a lace collar. Her dark eyes followed me as I approached. I introduced myself, shook her hand, and presented the orchids.

“I am very pleased to have you here,” she said in a soft French voice. “I have waited a long time to meet you.” Countess de Longvic took a shallow breath and touched a finger to her chin. “You have no idea,” she said earnestly.

I smiled, muttered some apology, and asked how she came to know about me and where I was living.

“Casablanca's very small,” she said. “But its grapevine has deep roots. How do you like Dar Khalifa?”

“Very much, but how do you know the house?”

The countess waved at a chair. “Please do have a seat,” she said.

I sat down on a reclining oak chair and cast an eye around the room. There was none of the clutter that tends to accumulate in the homes of the elderly. Instead I noticed a refinement, a sense of precision.

“Your grandfather always sat in that chair,” she said, pointing at me. “He liked the sloping back and would comment on the grain of the wood. He said a well-made chair was as beautiful to his eye as a fine piece of sculpture.”

“How did you know him?” I asked.

Countess de Longvic stared into space. She picked a miniature brass bell from the table beside her and rang it twice. “We will have tea,” she said.

I waited for the answer to my question, sensing that the countess preferred to reveal what she knew on her terms, a little at a time. Tea was brought by a middle-aged maid, her hair covered by a plain pink shawl. She limped, which caused the objects on the tray to rattle as she crossed the room.

“I will tell you,” said the countess, pouring the tea. “I will tell you it all.”

Again, there was a long pause and I began to wonder if I would ever learn anything.

“Toward the end of his life,” the countess began, “your grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, came to live in Tangier, as you probably know. He took a villa on rue de la Plage. He wrote books there and continued to advise two or three heads of state. His years at Villa Andalus were a period of mourning. He never recovered from your grandmother's loss in . . .”