The Caliph's House (3 page)

“Absolutely not!”

“But you can prick your finger,” the Bear said. “It wouldn't hurt. You could let the blood drip into the toilet. It would make the Jinns very pleased.”

“Oh yes,” Hamza echoed, “it would make them very pleased.”

The Bear held up a pin. He just happened to be carrying it.

I wasn't about to start feeding my blood to imaginary forces of the underworld.

“Can't one of you give them your blood?”

“No, no, no,” the Bear riposted. “You are the new master of the house and so only your blood will do.”

We filed up to the toilet again and stared into the bowl. The thought that only my blood would suffice made me feel somehow important, indispensable—as if I was in charge. The Bear handed me the pin. I pricked my forefinger and let a large, single droplet of crimson blood splatter into the water. The guardians smiled broadly like Cheshire cats and took it in turns to shake my hand.

From then on, they seemed to regard me with a little more respect. Osman brought a pot of chicken soup for us the next night. He said his wife had made it from a recipe that had been in her family for six hundred years. One mouthful and, he claimed, we would dance like angels inside. I was touched by the thoughtfulness and rather liked the idea of dancing like an angel. The soup was flavored with fresh coriander and saffron and a hint of ginger. It was quite delicious and made a change from our stark diet of bread and triangles of processed cheese. The morning after that, Hamza crept into the bedroom and sprinkled us with pink rose petals while we slept. And, so as not to be outdone, the Bear presented us with talismans fashioned from black calfskin. There was one each, of differing sizes—ranging from large to very small. We tied them around our necks dutifully and praised their craftsmanship.

         

THE FIRST DAYS SLIPPED BY
. Talk of Jinns died down, but I knew the subject was still very much on the agenda. Hamza would roam around the house reciting verses from the Qur'an or sketching magic squares on the whitewashed walls. He said the squares were amulets. They were formed of nine smaller squares, each with a number written inside. Add up the three numbers of any line, and you got the number fifteen. When I asked what they were for, Hamza said they would help bring
baraka,
divine blessing, back to the Caliph's House.

The focus of his prayers was the largest courtyard, in which there lay a wonderful secret garden. It looked like the oldest part of the house. At each end there stood a long salon with a colonnaded verandah. The room at the east end had fabulous cedar doors twenty feet high and a pair of giant matching windows carved with geometric designs. I planned to turn it into a library lined with bookshelves from the floor up to the ceiling.

After a week at the house, I realized that I still hadn't seen inside the room at the western end of the courtyard. I tried the handle but it was firmly locked. Hamza was crouching behind a squat palm tree, going over a magic square with a nugget of coal. I asked him to open the door. He saluted, then pretended not to understand. When I repeated the request, he seemed displeased, but ambled off to fetch the key.

As the chief guardian, nothing was more important to him than maintaining control. He controlled Osman and the Bear, anyone who came to the house, and, through skillful corralling, he managed to control us, too. The most effective method of staying in control was to lock all the doors at all times, unless one of us was in the room. Even then he quite frequently locked us inside. He kept all the keys in an old shoebox. There were hundreds of them. I would leave the kitchen for a few seconds to take a plate of food to Ariane, and when I came back, the room would be locked. The same with the bathroom—leave it for a moment and you couldn't get back in. Sometimes you would hear Hamza's worn leather-soled slippers shuffling away and the box of keys jangling.

I waited twenty-five minutes at the locked courtyard door for Hamza to return. He may have been hoping I had lost interest and had gone on to do something else. When he did finally turn up, the shoebox under one arm, his head was stooped low. He rummaged in the box for a moment and winced in declaration: “The key isn't here.”

“You haven't looked very hard. Let me have a look.”

The guardian covered the mouth of the box with his hands. “I'll look, I'll look!” he said, delving a second time.

Ten minutes later he was still rummaging.

“It's not here,” he said with certainty.

“Doesn't anyone ever go in there?”

“No, they don't,” Hamza said. “No one's been in there for years.”

The secrecy made the locked room all the more intriguing. I began to speculate on what lay behind the door.

“There are other, more interesting rooms,” said the guardian. “Don't bother with this one.”

“Have you ever been in there?”

The guardian swished the air with his hand. “Oh yes,” he said. “It's very boring.”

“When did you go inside?”

Hamza thought for a moment. “Many years ago,” he said.

“But it's an important part of the house,” I said assertively. “Let's open it up.”

I suggested we get a hammer and break the lock. At that moment, the muezzin rang out across the shantytown and Hamza hurried away with his shoebox of keys.

“I must go and pray,” he said, calling back.

The question of the locked room continued to grate on my mind. When I asked Osman about it, he said Hamza was the only person who had ever been inside.

“He always goes there at night,” he said.

“You mean he goes in now?”

“Of course,” said Osman. “He goes in there every day.”

“What's inside?” I asked.

Osman grimaced, slapped his hands to his cheeks in horror, and sank his teeth into his upper lip. He was wheezing.

“What's inside the locked room?” I repeated.

“I don't know,” he said. “Really, believe me, I don't know.”

         

DESPITE THE MATTER OF
the mysterious locked door, relations with the guardians continued to improve. Then, one morning as I was going into the courtyard, I spied Hamza leaving the room. The moment he saw me making a beeline for him, he slammed the door shut. I tried the handle. It was locked fast.

“Can you please open this door, right now.”

The guardian glanced away. His brow was running with sweat. “It is locked,” he replied.

“I know that, but you just came out. You have the key.”

“I don't,” he said. “I swear to Allah that I do not have the key.”

I was about to search Hamza, but something stopped me. For some reason, I felt it better to leave him alone. I'm not sure why. It was very strange. I should have pressed him to hand over the key then and there, but I didn't, almost as if something was affecting my decision.

         

ALTHOUGH WE HAD NOT
started renovating the house, we did buy a few things to make life more comfortable—crockery, lamps, extra mattresses, and more garden furniture. But we soon found that no taxi driver was keen to venture into the shantytown. They said its jagged track was far too rough on their precious vehicles. So I decided to rent a car.

Osman was the first to catch wind of my plan. He said it was a fine idea, that he and the other guardians would assist me, as I was new to the Moroccan car rental scene. I thought this meant they would point me in the direction of a large, well-respected rental firm. But it did not. It meant something quite different. Hamza came to our bedroom that evening and said that he and the others had arranged everything.

“What do you mean by ‘everything'?”

“No problem, Monsieur Tahir. We have found a nice car. It's very very nice.”

He then explained that the butcher never drove his car because of his bad back, so it made perfect sense for me to take it on. What made less sense was the fact that the vehicle had been used for twenty years to ferry sheep carcasses from the slaughterhouse to the fly-smothered butcher's stall.

Sitting in it was like being strapped into a curious scientific experiment in which the passengers were the guinea pigs. The seats were encrusted with dead maggots, and the air around them alive with flies. No matter how many you killed, there were always more.

After taking one look at the vehicle, I thanked the guardians, praised the butcher's generosity, and politely refused the arrangement.

“It doesn't have enough space,” I said.

“What do you mean?” said the butcher. “You can fit ten dead sheep in there.” He thumbed to the rear seat. “There's plenty of room for your entire family.”

“I was hoping for a four-by-four.”

“This is far stronger than any four-by-four!” snarled the butcher.

“It has
baraka
,” said Osman. “It will bring you good luck.”

I looked at the sordid heap of blood-splattered metal, with its cracked windscreen, smashed lights, and maggot-ridden seats.

“Go on,” Osman whispered, “try it. For a few days only.”

“All right,” I said gruffly, “for a few days.”

Only later did I begin to understand the game. It was a game I didn't know I was playing, a game that everyone in Morocco—not only foreigners—is forced into by their family and friends. Moroccans see it as their duty to help those they are close to. Not being of assistance at all times can bring dishonor and disgrace on the family. This wonderful tradition has evolved into a state in which everyone tries desperately to get you to do what they think is best for you. I knew the system well from years spent in Asia. Had I rented a car from Avis, Budget, or Hertz, the guardians and their families would never have been able to live down the shame—the shame of not getting involved.

         

LIKE ALMOST EVERY OTHER
vehicle in Casablanca, the butcher's wretched Toyota was dented on every side and was falling to bits. I hated it, but at the same time, I valued it for the veil of authentic camouflage it provided. When out driving, no one would take me for a foreigner, or so I thought.

The moment I crept timidly into the ferocious stream of traffic, retching from the stench of rotting blood, I stood out like a pacifist on a battlefield. Moroccan traffic isn't like normal traffic. It's armed combat, a war of wills, in which only the very bravest have a chance to survive. Every driver, except for me, was an expert in swerving. You could veer sharply to the left or right without any warning and be quite certain that all the other cars would swerve out of the way.

On the first day on the road, I realized that I had to find someone who could help get things done and act as a bridge between us and everyone else. The constant swerving was fraying my nerves. I called François and asked him for advice on how best to choose an assistant.

“You have to show your teeth,” he said. “It's dog-eat-dog out there. A man with no teeth is swallowed in one gulp.”

“I'll be hard,” I said weakly. “I'll ask tough questions. I'll bare my teeth.”

“That's not enough,” the Frenchman said frostily.

“What else can I do?”

“Tell each applicant to bring their family tree to the interview.”

“What good will that do?”

François clicked his tongue at my ignorance. “Hire the person with the longest family tree,” he said. “They'll have contacts. They'll be survivors.”

I thanked François, but he wasn't listening.

“Tell me,” he said, “did you fire the first ten people who walked into your office?”

“No, not exactly, François. You see, I don't have an office, and the only people I have working for me were inherited. I can't fire them. It would be unkind.”

There was silence.

“Hello. Are you there?” I stammered.

“You're going to be eaten alive,” said François.

T
HREE

An old cat will not learn how to dance.

A SMALL ADVERTISEMENT PLACED IN A
local newspaper attracted a good crop of applicants. I went through the résumés with care, whittling them down to just two. Giving directions to the Caliph's House was so extremely difficult that I decided to hold the interviews at the nearby Café Corniche. I had begun to frequent the establishment, attracted by espresso so strong that it coursed through the intestines like crude oil surging up from the wellhead. Nothing gave me more joy than sitting at a shaded outdoor table, watching the world rage by. In Britain I used to feel at fault for whiling away more than a couple of minutes in a café. You felt you needed an excuse to be there at all. But in the Arab world, there is no pursuit more honorable for a man than sitting, hour after hour, staring out at the street, sucking down tarlike café noir.

The first candidate for the position of assistant was a prim, well-spoken girl of about nineteen. She was called Mouna. Her hair was covered neatly by the
hejab
scarf she wore, and her dress had full-length sleeves, tight at the wrist, and a hem so long that it dragged along the floor behind her. As soon as I set eyes on Mouna, I knew that someone was trying to protect her from the kind of staring men who patronized the Café Corniche.

When I asked if she had brought her genealogy, Mouna handed me a roll of thick paper. I unfurled it and glanced at the many lines of Arabic names.

“Very impressive,” I said.

“My family are proud of their heritage,” she replied.

I asked what jobs she had had before.

“My father doesn't like me working,” she said softly. “He would kill me if he knew I was even here.”

“I'm sure he wouldn't go that far,” I said, laughing.

Mouna's russet eyes looked into mine very hard. She was silent for a moment.

“Oh no, you are wrong,” she said solemnly. “He would.”

There was an uneasy silence. Mouna sipped her orange juice.

“Sometimes my father becomes very enraged,” she said. “If he found me here now, he wouldn't just kill me, he would kill you as well. You see, it's a matter of my family's honor.”

I handed Mouna back her family tree and came out with a list of clumsy excuses. I imagined her father stalking me through the streets of Casablanca. For all I knew, he was already on his way.

“I'm sure you would make an excellent assistant,” I said, “but I have given the job to someone else.”

Mouna was disheartened for a moment. “It's always the same,” she said mournfully as she left. “No one will employ me when they hear about my father.”

The second applicant was a man named Adil. His résumé informed me he had lived in New Orleans for five years, where he had managed a cemetery. Despite the oppressive heat, he was wearing a thick leather jacket lined with sheepskin, with a bloodstain on the collar. He was close shaven and had a mop of greased black hair, a broken nose, and small darting eyes. During the twenty minutes we sat together, he knocked back three double espressos and smoked five cigarettes. He shook like a crack addict going cold turkey.

I asked him first how he had liked the U.S. It's a good solid question, one that tends to loosen people up.

“Lots of bitches,” he said.

“You liked the girls?”

“No, the hookers.”

He ran his hand up his nose, sniffing it. “I can smell 'em now,” he said.

“What about work at the cemetery?”

“What about it?”

“Well, wasn't it gruesome?”

Adil pulled the bloodstained collar of his jacket tight to his neck. “The bitches loved it,” he said.

I didn't know what he meant, but decided to move swiftly on. I asked for his family tree.

“That's bullshit.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it isn't the future . . . it's the past.”

After twenty minutes Adil got to his feet, lit a sixth cigarette, and said, “I'm out of here.”

“Don't you want the job?”

“No way, man,” he mumbled, shaking. “Got no time for jobs.”

I walked back to the house, pondering why a guy would turn up for a job interview if he had no time to work, or why a girl would want to be my assistant if she knew her father would hunt us down and kill us both.

As I reached the shantytown the imam approached me. I had seen him from a distance, loitering in front of the whitewashed mosque. He was short and bearded with a severely wrinkled face, a small mouth, and a gray turban wound tight around the top of his head. He shook my hand, then rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

“F'lous,”
he said, grinning, “
argent,
money.”

I smiled a great deal, pretended not to understand, and hurried away down the lane. The garden door opened before I knocked. I crossed the threshold through the coolness of Hamza's shadow. The guardian had been waiting for me. He saluted and said there was a problem, something that couldn't be put off for a moment. I asked for a minute to wash my face.

“It can't wait.”

“Not even for a minute?”

The guardian frowned. “No, not for a second!” he said forcefully.

Hamza proceeded to lead me down the garden path. At the end stood a tall wrought-iron gate. It must have been exceptionally beautiful once, long ago, before the rust set to work crumbling the curlicues. Behind the gate was a patch of good land, about the size of a tennis court. Hamza opened the gate.

“Who owns that land back there?” I asked.

“You do, Monsieur Tahir,” he replied.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

The land was encircled by a wall, the edges planted with trees. There was an assortment of palms, eucalyptus, juniper, and fig, and a burgeoning asparagus plant.

“Are you sure I own it?”

Hamza nodded. He led me through a haphazard crop of sunflowers, giant golden heads following the sun. At the far end of the wall, beyond an expansive slab of concrete, was another doorway. I followed the guardian through it to find a small, dilapidated outbuilding with its own walled garden.

“Who owns this?”

“You do, monsieur,” said Hamza.

I could not understand why no one had told me before of the building and its secret garden. The sense of getting something entirely for free filled me with pleasure. But my joy was quickly erased when I saw what Hamza was pointing to. At his feet was another dead cat. It looked as if it had been gutted. The animal was covered in flies.

“Who did this?”

Hamza rubbed his nose. “It is a problem,” he said.

“I know, but who did it?”

“Qandisha,” said Hamza. “Qandisha did it.”

“Who's he?”

The guardian filled his lungs full of air and sighed very deeply. Then he went back to sit in his old wicker chair in the stables. Getting answers out of him and the others was not easy. There were only three of them, but they had established their own close fraternity, bound by a code of strict silence.

Over the next few days, I asked Hamza, Osman, and the Bear again and again about Qandisha. Where did he live? What did he have to do with the house? Whenever the name was spoken, the guardians would become tense. They said they couldn't tell me, that there was nothing to tell. I begged. I pleaded. Still silence.

         

A WEEK PASSED. RACHANA
ordered me to stop trying to find out about Qandisha and start finding an assistant again, one who could hire a nanny. I interviewed seven more people. None of them were suitable for one reason or another. Then, out of the blue, a young woman arrived at the Caliph's House. She spoke good English, and smiled a lot, as if someone had told her to do so. Her hair was long, very dark, and shiny, like newly roasted coffee beans. She announced that her name was Zohra and handed me a family tree. It stretched back seventeen generations.

“When can you start?”

She looked at her watch. “At once,” she said.

“You are hired.”

We made a list of things to do—find a nanny, and a maid who could double as a cook, find an architect, and a school for Ariane, buy all manner of odds and ends, explore Casablanca, and look into the paperwork of Dar Khalifa.

Zohra took precise notes whenever I spoke. It hinted at a professional training.

“I used to work in the film business,” she said in a calm voice. “Hollywood shoots all its desert adventures down at Ouarzazate. I worked on
Gladiator, Troy,
and
Black Hawk Down
.”

“Did you meet any stars?”

Zohra blushed. “I fell in love with Brad Pitt,” she said.

         

RACHANA BEGGED ZOHRA TO
search for a maid and a trustworthy nanny for Ariane. We had only been in Morocco four weeks, but everyone we met lectured us on whom to choose. Some said only girls from the mountains could be trusted, others that only a desert woman would do, or one from Fès, Meknes, or Marrakech. Moroccan society is founded on a system of helpfulness. But people are so obliging that you can almost find yourself being suffocated by their kindness. Before we knew it, women—young, old, and extremely ancient—were arriving at the door. As word spread, they came from farther and farther afield, claiming to have been sent by friends of friends of friends.

One morning four women arrived from the mountains. Each one had a similar rugged, wind-chapped face with a tattooed chin and a floral scarf tied over her hair. Their hands were rough, like the hull of a ship that has been at sea for many months, and their nails were broken through honest work. I asked how they had come to hear of the vacancy.

“In Morocco,” said Osman, “word spreads like a fire tearing through the depths of Hell.”

The women spoke a Berber dialect, the original language of northwestern Africa. None of them knew more than a few words of Arabic, and they understood no French at all. The Bear, who was from the mountains himself, talked to them in Berber.

“They tell me they have been traveling for days,” he said. “They came from a village in the High Atlas, near the Gorge of Ziz. It's taken them five days to get here.”

The Berber women explained through the Bear that they were all widows and were in desperate need of work. There was no money in their village, they said, and life was very hard. They confirmed that they could cook, clean, do the laundry, and look after the children. Better still, they would work for a fraction of the going rate. All four of them would sleep in one room, and would charge the same as a single maid from Casablanca. Each one had brought a bedroll and a knapsack. They looked at me eagerly, their lined faces awaiting the instruction to begin. I asked Zohra what she thought.

“Let's give them a week,” she said.

Hamza led the women to one of the empty rooms on the ground floor. They unfurled their bedrolls, lay down, and fell fast asleep.

         

TRAIPSE THROUGH AN ENGLISH
supermarket and take a look at the fruit. It sits there staring up at you primly. It's perfect, not a blemish on any of it. Every apple, every pear, orange, and plum, is identical to the next in color, weight, and size. Each one is shrink-wrapped with two or three others, labeled with a nation's name. The melons are from Barbados, the pineapples from Tanzania, the kiwis from Thailand, and the strawberries have been flown in from the southeast of Brazil. There's virtually nothing grown in Britain, and certainly nothing local.

The first time I went shopping for fruit and veg with Zohra, it was to a vast open market, popular for the freshness of the stock. Wherever I looked, there were great mounds of produce, with no cellophane or bar codes in sight—mountains of scarlet tomatoes, oceans of lemons and green beans, cartloads of pumpkins, strawberries, and succulent figs. At first I found myself cursing the irregularity and the imperfection. The crops were abundant, but they were different shapes and had the odd speck of brown. But I remembered my grandmother's caution that taste is more than skin-deep.

The economy of English life had trained me to buy only what I knew we would use, and not an ounce more. In Morocco we could ease into comfortable excess. On my first shopping expedition, I bought forty pounds of giant tomatoes, twenty pounds of red peppers, half a dozen cauliflowers, seven lettuces, a sack of onions, another of apples, and three hundred oranges for making juice. The huge sack of oranges cost what I would have paid for only a dozen in London.

         

OVER THE FOLLOWING WEEK
I explored Casablanca, taking in the many quarters that made up the whole. Although she was from Rabat, Morocco's capital, Zohra was a knowledgeable guide. She took me to the port—the largest in Africa—where I hoped our furniture would soon be arriving by cargo ship, and she showed me the old medina, and the sprawling new conurbation of Maarif, where fashionable stores and restaurants teemed with the nouveau riche. By far the most interesting area was Old Casablanca.