The Caliph's House (4 page)

Built by the French after they annexed Morocco in the first decade of the last century, the buildings had the sweeping lines of classic Art Deco and Art Nouveau. I spent hours strolling there, staring up, picking out the details—the floral façades and gilded domes, the orderly wrought-iron balconies, the mullion windows and stone balustrades, and the sleek, rounded walls of a robust age. Casablanca was the first city in the world to be planned from the air. Looking at it, one thing was astonishingly clear—that the French regarded it as a jewel in their imperial crown. The buildings lining Avenue Mohammed V, the main thoroughfare, were a statement of domination, an exclamation of French colonial might.

We wandered through colonnades where a chic clientele once snapped up the latest styles of the thirties and forties. Seventy years later and downtown Casablanca was a byword for danger and dereliction. The grandeur was still there, but it was hiding—under a blanket of verdigris and grime. People hurried through fast. No one bothered to look into the shop windows anymore. Most of them were boarded up anyway. Doorways were homes to the homeless, and the backstreets were running with feral dogs and oversized rats.

I asked Zohra why the old quarter had been deserted, why people had felt it necessary to build the stylish new district of Maarif when they already had one of the most beautiful city centers in the world. She thought for a long time as we walked.

“People don't realize what they have until they have lost it,” she said.

         

ONE MORNING, OSMAN FOUND
me sitting under a banana tree in the courtyard garden. He approached cautiously, as if he wanted something. I smiled. He shuffled forward, dipping his head, his hands clasped over his heart. When he got to me, he saluted.

“Monsieur Tahir,” he said.

“Yes, what is it, Osman?”

“Qandisha is still not happy.”

That name again. I frowned. The guardian wiped his face with his hands.

“Tell me, Osman, who exactly is Qandisha?”

He didn't reply.

“Did he used to work here?” I prompted. “Is he an angry ex-employee or something like that?”

“No, no, not like that,” said Osman.

“Well, is he from the shantytown?”

“No, he is not from the shantytown,” said Osman.

“Then where does he live?”

The guardian licked his lips anxiously. “In the house,” he said. “Qandisha lives in Dar Khalifa.”

“But I haven't seen him here. Surely I would have noticed if a man called Qandisha was living in the house.”

There was a long pause. Osman rubbed his eyes.

“But he's not a man,” he said.

“Oh, Qandisha's a woman?”

“No, not a woman either.”

Again, Osman paused.

“Qandisha's a Jinn,” he said.

         

THE WOMEN FROM THE
mountains cleaned the house from top to bottom, and each afternoon they cooked a plate of couscous wide enough to feed a family of twenty-five. When they were not cooking or cleaning, they could be found sitting on the kitchen floor, gossiping in their Berber tongue. They tended to keep to themselves and didn't fraternize much with the guardians.

After learning the name of the resident Jinn, I brought the subject up with Zohra. She took it very seriously.

“You will have to do an exorcism,” she said.

“You don't believe in it, too, do you?” I laughed.

Zohra didn't say anything at first. Then she said:

“This is Morocco, and in Morocco everyone believes in Jinns. They are written in the Qur'an.”

She went down to the stables and talked to the guardians for a long time. At the end of the discussion, she came to explain.

“Each night you must put out a large plate of food for Qandisha,” she said. “There should be couscous and meat, the best food, not scraps, and you must lay it out yourself.”

I could hardly believe that such a levelheaded woman would believe in such superstition but, with Osman's help, I asked the maids to prepare a special dish and leave it for me at dusk. I didn't say why I needed it. I felt stupid, that I was giving in, but thought it was worth trying once.

That night, the Berber women did as I had asked. They made a fabulous plate of couscous with pumpkin, carrots, and a tender chunk of lamb buried in the middle. It smelled delicious. I carried it out into the garden. Hamza showed me exactly where to place it—behind a low hedge. He shook my hand, bowed, then shooed me away.

Next morning I hurried down to the garden, ran across the lawn, and found the platter. It had been picked clean. There was nothing left, not a single grain of couscous. The Bear was raking the grass nearby.

“Qandisha was hungry,” he said.

         

FOR THREE NIGHTS THE
women from the Gorge of Ziz prepared ever more lavish feasts, and for three nights the platters were devoured. It was obvious the guardians were the only beneficiaries of the banquets. They were in high spirits. I wondered how long to allow their ruse to continue. Zohra said a natural break would occur, and it did.

On the morning of the fourth day, one of the maids was picking sprigs of rosemary, which grew wild in the garden. She was singing to herself. The sun was not yet high. Its syrupy yellow light streamed through the lower branches of the trees, warming the air. I was on the upper terrace reading a book of Moroccan proverbs. The tranquillity was suddenly shattered by a high-pitched shriek. I peered down over the garden and saw the mountain woman waving her hands turbulently above her head. She had dropped the rosemary. It lay at her feet, along with a dead black cat.

Fifteen minutes later, Hamza called me to come downstairs. The Berber women had tied up their bedrolls, packed their knapsacks, and were waiting to be paid.

“Where are they going?”

“Back to the mountains,” said Osman.

“Is the dead cat scaring them away?”

“Not the cat,” said Hamza, “but the Jinns.”

         

WE HAD NOT BEEN
living at Dar Khalifa very long when a stout elderly man in tweed tapped on the door. His face was craggy and coffee brown like a bar of nut chocolate. On his head was a frayed cloth cap, and on his chin a swirl of white hair. He looked at the ground when I greeted him, and asked in good French if I had any postage stamps to spare.

“I will pay you,” he said, “a few dirhams for each.”

Until then the postman had brought nothing in the way of mail. I suspected he was having trouble finding the house. I apologized.

“Can you come back next week?”

The man blinked twice. “Will you forget?” he said.

I promised not to and, with that, my friendship with Hicham Harass began.

         

ZOHRA PROVED HERSELF TO
be efficient and kind. She put up with the glaring gaps in my knowledge of Moroccan culture and helped to fill them in. The formality of the first days eased away, and we found ourselves chatting about our lives and our dreams. One afternoon, as we swerved through the traffic in the butcher's car, Zohra confessed her secret. There was something she had to tell me, she exclaimed, something that I had to know about her if we were to be friends.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You will think badly of me,” she said.

“Tell me, tell me what it is.”

“I am engaged to be married,” she said without looking at me.

“Oh, who's the lucky man?”

“His name is Yusuf. He's an Arab. He lives in New Jersey. We met on the Internet.”

“That's great news. When is the wedding?”

Zohra dabbed the tip of a finger to her eye. “There's no date yet,” she said.

“The distance must be very difficult—with you here and him over there in the U.S.”

“Oh yes, yes, it is,” said Zohra earnestly. “It's a terrible strain. But we communicate every day. We are deeply in love, and when you are in love,” she went on, her voice rising in tempo, “when you are in love, distance doesn't matter.”

I changed the subject and asked Zohra if she had found an architect. I was eager to start work on renovating the house, and we needed someone who could plan the building work. We were still living in one room, while the rest of the house lay empty. Zohra dabbed her eyes again and said she had indeed made contact with an architect. He was young, dynamic, had studied in France, and had won praise for his innovative designs. She had set up a rendezvous for the following afternoon.

         

NEXT DAY AT FOUR P
.
M
. we rumbled up to the architect's office, located on a swish side street in Maarif. At first I thought we ought to have taken a taxi, but the blood-soaked butcher's car suggested a lack of excess funds. The architect's office had tall glass doors open to the street, an array of potted palms, and elevator music piped in from miniature speakers hidden in the ceiling. There weren't the clouds of cigarette smoke or the mass of papers and blueprints more usually found in architectural offices. Instead, the walls were hung with oil paintings of traditional Moroccan scenes—a tribal wedding, a shepherd carrying a wounded sheep, a landscape of Marrakech with the snow-capped mountains rising up behind.

A secretary ushered Zohra and me to soft imported chairs at one end of a walnut-veneered desk. She served espresso with a twist of lemon, and squares of dark Swiss chocolate. I praised the paintings.

“They are for sale,” the secretary said, handing me a catalogue.

After ten minutes of waiting, a broad-shouldered man with slick black hair and manicured nails swept through the glass doors. He was clothed in a handmade gabardine suit with monogrammed buttons. On his feet were snakeskin shoes, and around his waist was a slim sharkskin belt. A stream of cigar smoke swirled behind him like a vapor trail. Apologizing profusely for being late, he cursed the Prime Minister for keeping him waiting so long.

I told him about the Caliph's House, and said once, and then again, that my budget for renovation was small. The architect, Mohammed, laughed, lit a fresh Cuban cigar, and inhaled.

“What is money?” he said grandly in a high voice before leaning back in his chair. “It's just expensive paper.”

I repeated for a third time that my budget was limited, and explained I was an impoverished writer waiting for a big break. The architect was about to say something, but his cellular phone began to ring. Excusing himself, he answered it and spoke fast in French to an infuriated woman at the other end. The lady was beside herself with anger. When he hung up, the architect blushed.

“Women are very special,” he said uneasily, “
n'est-ce pas?
”

We arranged for him to visit Dar Khalifa the next afternoon and left the gallery office. On the way home I asked Zohra how she had come to meet Mohammed the architect.

“Through the dental community,” she said.

         

NEXT MORNING I SENT
Zohra to the Land Registry to look through the archives for Dar Khalifa's file. I wanted to get an idea of the building's history and to find out who had lived there before us. During our first weeks in Casablanca, I asked dozens of people about the Caliph's House. Most of them had something to tell. Some said it was formerly the summer residence of the Caliph of Casablanca, whoever he had been; others that it was once owned by an important magistrate, a confidant of the king. One old man, who was selling used copies of French magazines on the street, declared the house had been a high-class brothel back in the fifties. He squinted with delight at the memory.

“The girls who worked there were angels,” he said, pressing the fingertips of his right hand to his lips in a kiss. “But, alas, they were reserved for French officers.”

Someone else told me the building was used by high-level American diplomats during the Anfa Summit back in January 1943. I had read that President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill chose Casablanca to discuss wartime strategy and had planned their attack on Japan at the summit. Their talks were held nearby in the district of Anfa, making it plausible that their staff had made use of the Caliph's House.

At the Land Registry, Zohra hadn't found any mention of the Anfa Summit or any clues whether the house had been a brothel. She couldn't even say when exactly the house was built.

“What was in the file, then?”

Zohra looked down at the ground, unsure of how to break bad news.

“There isn't a file for Dar Khalifa,” she said.

Every large building in Casablanca had a file bound in red cloth lodged at the Land Registry. But there was a gap of exactly four inches on the shelf where our dossier was supposed to be. The clerk had told Zohra that someone had taken it and not put it back.

“I begged him for more information,” she said, “and it was then he told me something very bad.”