The Caliph's House (23 page)

I didn't understand what he was talking about. It was like a sketch from Monty Python.

“They're not going to take it!” I said.

My eyes scanned the inspection desk. There was a roll of packing tape, a couple of pens, and a modeling knife. Without a thought, I grabbed the knife, pushed out the blade, and excised the affected region. The clerk blinked, the map still grasped tight between his outstretched hands. I kissed the kingdom of Morocco and Western Sahara and handed them to the clerk.

“Do-it-yourself censorship,” I said.

         

AFTER WEEKS OF BEING
becalmed with no work done at all, the wind lifted and the workers returned. Mustapha the mime's tadelakt team found new energy and even learned to smile. They mixed up a new vat of plaster and thrust trowels of it at the walls, swishing it smooth. Before the tadelakt was dry, the second team would score a pattern into the plaster. Within days they had finished the dining room and the salons, the children's playroom, and the bedrooms above. The plumber turned up in overalls instead of the gray suit he usually preferred. He took out his biggest hammer and started smashing one of the floors. I would have questioned what he was doing, but I was so delighted that I ran up and shook him by the hand. A new mason started work, too. He finished off the staircase and fitted the balustrades. Then a sculptor arrived with a fountain I had ordered five months before. The house echoed with the sound of hammers, saws, and singing.

We even managed to get the tiles on the verandah clean. When I told Kamal I needed an army of people to scour them with acid, he sent five men to our house. They proved to be expert scrubbers, despite the fact that they refused to wear goggles and kept getting acid in their eyes. I asked Kamal how he had ever found a team of men so skilled in scrubbing.

“They better be good at it,” he said. “They work in our hammam as masseurs.”

I was so overcome that the work was on the move again that I asked the bejmat craftsman, Aziz, to build a mosaic fountain for the wall in the children's courtyard. Kamal would have vetoed the idea if he had got wind of it, so I waited until he was out of the house.

Moroccan mosaic work, known as zelij, is the pinnacle of the kingdom's traditional design. Unlike mosaics in the West, which tend to be square, zelij come in hundreds of shapes and colors. It takes years to learn to cut them, and as a result, the craft comes at a price.

I took Aziz aside. He spoke no French, and I no Arabic, and so I mimed the idea with my hands. I wanted a classical Moorish arch with a waterspout, sending water tumbling into a lower trough, which would, in turn, feed a large basin in the middle of the green tiled courtyard. The children could play in the water, I hoped, paddling in the long, hot summer afternoons.

Aziz said he could prepare the fountain,
Inshallah,
if God willed it, in a month. He scribbled a price on a scrap of paper—seven thousand dirhams, about seven hundred dollars. For once, it sounded reasonable, considering the fountain would feature five thousand mosaics, each one cut by hand.

A little later Kamal turned up. I didn't tell him about the fountain. He disapproved when I communicated directly with the craftsmen, as it endangered his own position. Instead, I asked why the workers were striving so feverishly to get all the work done. Kamal smiled wryly.

“I passed a rumor in the shantytown,” he said. “I whispered it to the vegetable seller. It looks as if word got around.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That the king's coming to visit you,” he said.

         

WE PLANNED TO TRAVEL
to Azrou in search of black-market wood. The town, south of Meknes, is set against a backdrop of cedar forest. Low-level contacts had hinted of a thriving black market. It was just a matter of finding it. Kamal liked nothing more than ferreting out the black market. He shunned established shops. Whenever I went toward one, he caught my collar and led me away. “You can't go in there,” he would say, “that's a rip-off joint.” I couldn't remember the last time I had bought anything from a shop. If we needed anything for the house, we would go to Derb Ghalef, the sprawling shantytown of stalls on the southwestern edge of Casablanca. It sold everything, from endangered reptiles in cages to antiquities from France, from red balls of Dutch edam to children's clothes, satellite receivers, and giant-screen TVs. Much of it was contraband, smuggled in from Spain or across the border from Algeria.

“Why don't the police raid the stalls?” I asked.

“Are you crazy?” Kamal replied. “They own most of them.”

The trip to buy a black-market cedar tree was put back because of problems with our Jeep. The engine had developed an alarming rattle. A mechanic was called. He looked under the hood and gasped.

“It's a very big engine,” he said.

I nudged Kamal. “Are you sure this guy's up to the job?”

“We can trust him,” he said. “He's the second cousin of my aunt's husband. He's practically family.”

While the Jeep was being fixed, I suggested we line up a new carpenter.

Kamal repeated his caution that Casablanca's carpenters were the last men on Earth you could trust.

“There must be one trustworthy carpenter in the city.”

Kamal looked at his watch. “There is one,” he said pensively. “He should be up and running by now.”

We took a small red taxi to the nearby suburb of Hay Hassani. The cab veered off the main street and trundled down a succession of smaller and smaller alleyways, until it reached a dead end. The lane was only a few inches wider than the car. We had to get out through the windows.

Kamal tapped on a rusting blue steel door. A bolt inside slid back and a frightening figure stepped out. He was about six foot five, as round as a barrel, and had no neck at all. He looked like Bluto from
Popeye.
I swallowed hard. The taxi driver gulped. Kamal strode up and kissed the man's cheeks. They hugged, then kissed cheeks again.

“This is Rachid,” he said. “He was my bodyguard in the old days when I used to get into fights.”

Rachid the bodyguard was the kind of man you wouldn't want to meet in an alleyway on a dark night. But, as I soon discovered, his looks were deceiving. He was gentle as a kitten. He said he had never liked fighting, that it was bad for his nerves. That's why he had taken up carpentry instead.

He led us into his workshop. There were two cumbersome cutting machines; both bore the word “Leipzig” in ivory-white lettering. They looked about a hundred years old. They were made back in the days when corners weren't cut and everything from toasters to teapots was made from cast iron.

On the workbench was an unfinished coffee table. Its edges had been expertly tooled, its uppermost surface detailed with a pattern of concentric octagons. The craftsmanship was very fine indeed.

Rachid tapped the dust off a half-finished chair and invited me to sit. Then he served us mint tea, and cracked his knuckles until Kamal told him to stop. In the silence that followed, I explained about the library. I said it was to fill a room eighty feet by seventeen, that it was to have shelves rising from the floor to the ceiling.

“I want cedar,” I said.

Rachid the bodyguard bit his upper lip anxiously. “That's expensive.”

“Black market,” I whispered, tapping my nose. “We're going to get it on the black market.”

“You will have to line the walls in cork,” he said, “otherwise moisture will come through and damage the books.”

I smiled at Rachid. He glanced at the floor meekly. I liked his attention to detail.

“You can have the job,” I said.

         

IN THE FOURTH WEEK
of February, Countess Madeleine de Longvic dropped in. Dar Khalifa wasn't ready for visitors, and I encouraged people ferociously to stay away. Most of them took my advice, warded off by the shantytown, the mud, and the sea of evil boys who threw stones at anyone they did not recognize. But the countess, who had no fear of the shacks, the dirt, or the boys, was lured by her curiosity of the past.

I was standing on the upper terrace when I heard the sound of a car approaching, splashing through the puddles. It was so rare for a vehicle to penetrate the bidonville that we always rushed to see who it was. The countess's royal blue Jaguar was purring down our lane. It came to a halt at the garden door. A liveried chauffeur stepped out and pulled the passenger door back with a gloved hand. From above, I saw the hat first. It was turtle-green velvet, as wide as the wheel of a men's racing bike, and crowned with a single ostrich feather.

The countess rang the bell. Hamza lunged for the door. A moment later I was in full apology mode. I apologized for the state of the house, for the noise and the cold. When Rachana had been introduced, I apologized for the way her hair was tied. Countess de Longvic stooped down and kissed Ariane on the cheek.

“You do not see the perfection around you,” she said.

It was a chill bright day. The garden was a thousand shades of green, cheered by the winter rain. We sat on the lawn and drank darjeeling tea. Ariane laid her dolls out on the grass and pulled off their heads.

“I remember the house as being darker inside,” the countess said at length. “I seem to recall several more walls.”

I explained about the army of hammer-wielding masons.

“They were very enthusiastic,” I said. “In fact, they were unstoppable.”

“It's much improved,” said the countess, “you can see all the way through to the garden. I think the masons did you a service.”

I steered the conversation to where our last one had closed—to Sergey, the Russian spy.

“Ah, yes,” she said in an unhurried tone, “I seem to recall he rented the house from a Frenchman. It flowed with Stolichnaya. All the rooms stank of it. Sergey had it shipped in every month, crates and crates, brought through the diplomatic pouch. There was caviar, too, and Russian pickles. That was all Sergey ever served—caviar and pickles, washed down with neat vodka.”

“What happened to him?”

“As the British say so diplomatically,” she said, “he was found to be engaged in activities incompatible with his status.”

“Spying?”

“Of course.”

We stopped talking, and watched Ariane struggle to do cartwheels on the grass. Hamza and the other guardians crouched nearby, watching us through a hedge.

“This is an oasis,” said the countess. “There's no other villa like it in Casablanca.”

“Someone told me it belonged to the Caliph of Casablanca,” I said. “But I can't find out anything about such a man.”

Countess de Longvic held out her glass as I poured more tea. She sat in silence, staring at the first spring flowers.

“The Caliph owned all the land around here a century ago,” she said, after a long while. “It was a sizeable estate. There were rolling fields all the way down to the sea and out toward Tamaris. His family lived on these lands for three hundred years. They were powerful, rich beyond imagination, and had great influence.”

“Who was the Caliph of Casablanca?”

“He was a member of your family,” said the countess airily. “He was a Sharif, one of the Prophet's descendants.”

“Why did he leave Dar Khalifa?”

“The Caliph died in the 1920s,” said the countess, “and the estate was inherited by his oldest son. He gambled the family fortune away and was left with nothing. I heard that he shot himself when his debtors took the house.”

“Do you think he killed himself here at Dar Khalifa?”

The countess sipped her tea.

“I suspect that he did,” she said.

         

THE NEXT NIGHT, THE
clatter of a machine woke me. I checked the clock. It was three forty-five. The engine's growl was deep and irregular, unlike a passenger car. I assumed it was the bulldozer returning to the shantytown. But the sound grumbled through the bidonville all the way up to the house.

I went down expecting trouble. Kamal was at the door.

“I've got the container,” he said.

In a way known only to himself, Kamal had managed to get the paperwork cleared and the Indian furniture released from the port. We had escaped without paying anything at all. The container was unloaded by a dozen burly men. They were nightclub bouncers whom Kamal had picked up en route. Their shift had just finished and they were willing to work for a tip.

The container doors were pulled back and the furniture was hauled into the salon. It was elaborately packed, each piece wrapped in twenty layers of cardboard, then packed into crates.

“Why do we have to unload it now, in the middle of the night?”

“Because you don't want people to see!” Kamal hissed.

He said he had learned the habit of secrecy from his father.

“But I've got no secrets.”

“Everyone has secrets,” he said.

E
IGHTEEN

Every beetle is a gazelle in the eye of its mother.

IN EARLY MARCH, SICKNESS
struck the Caliph's House. We all went down with it, the children first. Vomiting was followed by diarrhea so severe that there were moments I feared for our lives. Not since taking a shaman's brew of ayahuasca in the Upper Amazon had my digestive tract been thrown into such disarray. When the doctor arrived at Dar Khalifa, he found us crouching around toilet bowls.

“You have been poisoned,” he said darkly.

It was no great feat of detection.

“I've worked that out already,” I said.

Between the fierce waves of retching, we tried to understand what had poisoned us. We hadn't eaten in a restaurant for days, and our own kitchen was kept meticulously clean. The doctor inquired where our water came from.

“From the well,” I said. “We've had it cleaned. The water's pure.”

Hamza was called, and gave his own opinion, that the illness was caused by bad spirits, by the Jinns. I assured him that, as a medical man, the doctor didn't believe in Jinns.

“Of course I do,” the physician corrected sharply.

“There must be a scientific explanation,” I said.

“We will see,” he replied.

Hamza led him away to inspect the kitchen, leaving us huddled around the toilet bowls. I wondered how a doctor with a belief in the underworld could reach an accurate conclusion. A few minutes later, Hamza brought him back to the bathroom.

“The well is poisoned,” he said resolutely.

“But we had it cleaned by a professional,” I said.

“Someone has deliberately infected it,” the doctor said suspiciously.

“Who would have done such a thing?”

“Perhaps it was the shantytown's Godfather,” said Rachana.

I cross-questioned Hamza. “Has anyone put anything in the well?”

He looked at the ground. He didn't answer.

“Hamza!” I growled, giving in to a new wave of retching. “What's going on?”

The guardian washed his hands together nervously. I could tell he was holding something back.

“Tell me!” I shouted.

“The Jinns,” he said. “Qandisha.”

Had I the strength, I would have leapt up and throttled Hamza then and there. I was sick of the talk of Jinns. To hell with cultural sensitivity. We were all violently ill, and as usual, the Jinns were being blamed.

“Forget the bloody Jinns!” I shouted. “I never want you to speak of them again.”

The doctor asked Hamza something in Arabic. They chatted calmly for a moment or two.

“Now I understand,” said the doctor, breaking into a smile.

“What is there to understand?” I said. “Whenever something goes wrong, the guardians blame it on the damn Jinns.”

“Of course they do,” said the physician. “And the Jinns are to blame for the poison, indirectly.”

“What do you mean, indirectly?”

The doctor put away his stethoscope. “Hamza tells me that a female Jinn lives in your house.”

“Qandisha,” I said.

“Yes, that's her name, or what they call her. No one would dare use her real name. She doesn't want you to live here. She said she'll kill you all if you don't leave. The guardians are very frightened, so they are trying to keep this Qandisha happy. They don't want her to hurt you or the children. But they're very worried.”

“What about the poison?”

The doctor smiled again. “To keep Qandisha happy,” he said, “Hamza has been putting half a chicken into the well for her every night.”

“Damn it, Hamza!”

“He's just doing what he thought was right,” said the physician. “He wants to solve the problem, to get Qandisha out.”

I wished I were back in Britain, a land industrially cleansed of superstition.

“If we wanted to get Qandisha to leave and never come back,” I said, “how would we do it?”

“It's easy,” said the doctor. “You would hold an exorcism, of course.”

         

COUNTESS DE LONGVIC HAD
said that my grandfather would travel to Casablanca once a month to buy coffee from a shop near the Central Market. I checked his diaries, but there was no mention of the city. When I told the countess this, she laughed.

“Of course not,” she said. “He never called it Casablanca. He always referred to it as W.H., for ‘White House.' ”

My grandfather had been brought up in a time when confidentiality was king. Like Kamal's father, he was infatuated with secrecy. His diaries were full of anagrams, acronyms, and his own code words, often translations from Dari, the language of Afghanistan. I scanned the diaries again. The countess was right. There were regular monthly entries for W.H., the code for Casablanca. The note against it usually included the initials H.B. For example, he wrote “Checked on H.B.,” or “H.B. doing well,” or “Gave fifty dirhams to H.B.”

I telephoned the countess and asked if she knew about the mysterious initials.

“He used to say he came to Casa for the coffee beans,” she said. “That it reminded him of the coffee he had in Kabul.”

“But what about H.B.?”

“Is it a kind of coffee?” she asked.

“No, that wouldn't make sense,” I said. “He may have been eccentric, but an obsession with coffee beans doesn't sound right.”

I would have asked Kamal for his opinion, as he was good at crosswords. But he didn't turn up for an entire week. I called his long-suffering girlfriend and asked if she knew where he was.

“Probably run off with another girl,” she said. “I wish her luck.”

Rachana told me to check with the police. I didn't because Kamal himself had once warned me about contacting the police.

“Ask them for directions,” he had said, “and you'll find yourself behind bars.”

         

IF I NEEDED AN
exorcist in Britain, I wouldn't know whom to ask. The English yellow pages certainly don't have a listing, and if I stopped someone in the street and asked them, I'd probably be dragged away to an asylum. There were many things that were hard to find in Morocco, but an exorcist was not one of them. The guardians beamed with delight when I lined them up and asked for their advice on exorcists.

“In the mountains,” said the Bear.

“Yes, at the top of the mountains,” said Hamza.

“But how do I make contact with them?”

“Go and ask at Sidi Abdur Rahman,” Osman suggested.

Until then I had only heard gossip about the tomb of the saint Sidi Abdur Rahman. It lay on an outcrop of rocks two hundred yards into the Atlantic, a mile from the Caliph's House. I would often pass it and found my eyes drawn to the cluster of whitewashed buildings propped up on a plinth of jagged rocks. It looked like something out of a science fiction film. When the tide was in, it became an island, and when the tide was out, you could walk across to it if you dared.

Morocco has hundreds of such tombs. They are a focal point for anyone hoping to be healed or to attain
baraka
. Ordinary people flock to them in times of need. If their mother is sick, or they can't get pregnant or find a wife, they go to the tombs and pray, make a sacrifice, or beseech the resident sorceress to cast a spell. A wizened old woman in the bidonville once told me that the tomb of Sidi Abdur Rahman was the most blessed place in all Casablanca. She said that you could be touched by its power simply by looking at it.

In most Arab countries, people revere the tombs of the good, especially those of Sufi mystics. But I had not come across a Muslim country in which such strength was drawn from the burial grounds of saints. For me, the deep unwavering belief in them hinted of Morocco's pre-Islamic past.

Osman explained that I should go to the tomb before dawn on Friday. He said he would take me. Thankfully, the tide was out when we got there. The sky was lightless but not dark, the air very cold, a breeze sweeping in over the surf. The waves were far out, black crests breaking into white. It was hard to believe we were on the edge of a great city. The tomb itself had an outlandish presence. It seemed to glow. The only sounds were of the waves in the distance and the faint hum of a voice in prayer.

Osman led me over the jagged rocks, toward the island. It was comforting to have him there. I have never been unnerved in Morocco, but if there was a place to be afraid of, it was surely the tomb of Sidi Abdur Rahman. Where the rocks ended, a crude stairway began. We ascended it and found ourselves on the islet.

A group of four women were crouched on the path praying, faces veiled, bodies rocking gently back and forth. Beside them was a cluster of knapsacks.

“They have come from far away,” Osman said. “Their need must be very great.”

We walked up the path toward the tomb. Coarse one-room buildings lay on either side, the homes of pilgrims who had come and never left. Spend time in Morocco and you hear tales of people so fearful of Jinns that they move into a mosque or a shrine and refuse to go home. Kamal had told me that his own father was once so frightened of bad spirits that he slept in a mosque for an entire year.

To the left of the path was a patch of bare rock, a place of sacrifice. It was early but the specter of death had already visited. We stood there as dawn broke, the first rays of pallid pink light reflecting off the rock pools of fresh blood. Osman motioned to a door.

“That's where the sorceress lives,” he said.

“Shall we go there?”

“First we must buy some lead,” he said.

I didn't understand why the metal was needed. But I handed ten dirhams to a man with a pile of the silver strips. Osman strode up and tapped at the sorceress's door. A woman appeared. She was short and broad shouldered and had a cocked eye. Osman greeted her with respect, and I held up the lead foil. The woman fluttered a hand at the door in invitation. We slipped inside.

The room was extremely small, damp, and cold, its ceiling hung with bunches of dried leaves. There was a pile of white seashells heaped in one corner, and a Qur'an on a stand in the middle. We sat on our haunches.

“Tell her we need an exorcist,” I said.

Osman took a breath, smiled nervously, and explained. The sorceress frowned, sneezed, then talked about Jinns.

“What's she saying?”

“She says she can see it in your face,” he said.

“See what?”

“That there is a Jinn inside you.”

“It's not in me, it's in the house,” I whispered gruffly.

“It's the same thing. She says she has seen the Jinn.”

“What's he like?”

More chatter, then nodding.

“It's not a male Jinn. It's female,” he said. “She's strong, powerful, and very angry.”

“What about the exorcist?” I said.

Osman put the question to the sorceress. She took the lead and melted it in a saucepan over a gas burner. When it was liquid, she poured it into a steel bucket half filled with water. There was a crackle and a muffled fizz of something very hot becoming cold. The woman pushed up her sleeves, delved for the lead, and inspected what she found. She said something to Osman. His face paled with fear.

“The Jinn is
b'saf,
very great,” he said. “She wants to kill you. There's danger. One exorcist won't be enough. You will need twenty of them.”

“But where do we find so many exorcists?”

Osman translated the question. The sorceress inspected the silvery metal again.

“In Meknes,” she said.

         

ON THE SEVENTH NIGHT
after his disappearance, Kamal rang the bell. He was wearing a white blindfold and had been led to Dar Khalifa by a small boy. I welcomed him, but didn't comment on his apparent loss of sight. I knew an explanation would be forthcoming. We sat down and Rachana brought in a tray of coffee. Kamal fumbled for the cup. I remarked how nice the garden was looking.

“I can't see it,” he said.

“What happened this time?”

“Emergency laser eye surgery,” he said.

The thing about Kamal was that he told the truth as if it were a lie. I would always assume he was lying, only to find out later it had been the truth. He had taken time off only days before, claiming to have diabetes. I had telephoned the hospital. To my surprise, his explanation had borne out.

He fumbled for a crumpled scrap of paper in his pocket and held it in my direction. It was a prescription for glasses.

“There's no time for you to go blind,” I said frostily. “We've got to get twenty exorcists. We've got to go to Meknes.”

Kamal lifted the corner of his bandage and peeked over at me, blinking. “I know just who to ask,” he said.

         

WORK AT THE HOUSE
continued. On some days there were more than sixty craftsmen bustling away at the floors and walls, the masonry and woodwork. At least half of them had moved into the salon, where they slept in rows like conscripts heading off to war. By the middle of March the winter blues were behind us. We were on a fresh course, sailing toward stifling heat. The garden was alive with bees, tempted by the scent of honeysuckle, jasmine, and the fire red hibiscus flowers. And birds of every shape and size flapped around the trees—storks and woods pigeons, ibis and turtledoves.