The Caliph's House (7 page)

“When are you going to learn to hunt game?” he asked me on my tenth birthday.

“But we don't have any wild animals at school, Baba,” I replied limply.

My father glanced down at me, his long forehead a web of frowns. “Don't you?” he said distantly.

Morocco was the balance that compensated for his shame. His children might have been learning useless skills at school, but he hoped that our journeys to the mountain kingdom would reveal to us the order of the real world. Nothing was so important to my father as mountain life. We would rove through Morocco's fertile valleys searching for “Fantasia,” displays of tribal bravado—a dozen charging horsemen, firing their ancient weapons and whooping into the air.

Whenever the family Ford Cortina reached a mountain village, my father would wave his arms and order the gardener to apply the brakes. He would open the doors and, like the Pied Piper, would lead my sisters and me into the nearest teahouse. His feet may have been in the Atlas Mountains, but his mind was back in the Hindu Kush. To him, the teahouse was an Afghan caravanserai, the mint tea was
chai sabs,
green tea, and the Berbers were shepherds from his beloved Nuristan.

“This is the heart of Morocco!” he would exclaim. “Forget all that rubbish they teach you at school. This is the place to learn.”

“But what can we learn here, Baba?”

My father would pause, knock back his tea, and slam the empty glass down on the table.

“My children,” he would say. “It is here that you can learn why the heart beats as it does.”

         

ONE AFTERNOON IN EARLY
September, I sent Zohra to the Land Registry to search for the missing file, and I went downtown to poke about behind Hotel Lincoln. The area felt to me like the nucleus of the city—the spot where the seed of Casablanca had fallen long ago. People there were different. The shopkeepers didn't really care if you bought anything at all. They were in no rush for customers to leave, and liked it best if you stayed and chatted. Conversation of the old days passed the afternoons.

I perched on a black-vinyl-covered stool in a grocer's shop, swishing at the flies with my hand, listening to a tale of life after the war. Ottoman, the grocer, was round, white-haired, and bespectacled, with an affliction of furry brown moles all over his face. He was talking about the days when Casablanca was famous throughout the world, its name synonymous with all that was modern and exotic.

“The shops were filled with expensive goods from Paris, from London and Rome,” he said, running his hand over the sleek tabby cat curled up on his lap. “The men wore hats then, and the women walked tall in high-heeled shoes. They smelled of perfume.” He paused to draw a breath for effect. “The streets were clean and bright, and everyone was confident. Casablanca was paradise.”

“Why did the center of town move to Maarif?” I asked.

The grocer scratched a thumbnail down his nose. “Other Moroccans cherish what is old,” he said, “they understand that old is good. But people in Casablanca are childlike. They are fickle. They only appreciate the shiny, the new. Down here it used to gleam like a diamond, but when the luster was lost, they hurried away, to Maarif.”

“I heard Casablanca's restaurants were once the finest in the world,” I said.

The grocer's face froze, his old eyes misting over. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Yes, it's true! There was one just over there . . .” He paused mid-sentence to point out the window. “It was called Au Petit Poucet. What a place! What an ambience! I took my wife there when we were first married. She wore a black dress, and I, my wedding suit. I had saved up my money and we dined like kings. I can see it clearly now.” Ottoman stopped again and stared into the pool of fly-infested sunlight at the back of his shop. “There was the scent of lilies and the soothing sound of a harp,” he said. “The waiter wore the whitest apron I have ever seen. His cheeks were so clean, they were pink.”

“How was the food?”

“Oh, the food, the food!” he said wistfully. “I can taste it now! My wife had the duck. It was served with petit pois, and asparagus that melted in her mouth.” Again, the grocer paused as he peered to see the detail of his memories. “I ate a steak,” he said gently. “It was rare in the middle with dauphin potatoes at the side.”

F
IVE

Tomorrow there will be apricots.

AUTUMN APPROACHED. THE CRUEL
summer heat softened, and the garden erupted into a blaze of color—red hibiscus and subtle pink mimosas, yellow jasmine, and delicate passion flowers, all set against a backdrop of blinding crimson bougainvillea. Dar Khalifa was an oasis, a sanctuary encircled by reality. Ariane would prod her tortoise across the lawn after school, little Timur would slurp his milk in the shade, and I would sit there, watching them both, thankful. We may have been beset with local difficulties, but we were blissfully separated from our previous lives.

When the telephone rang, it would be our relatives or friends, rather than some annoying voice trying to sell a holiday or a pension. There were no computerized switchboards to deal with or parking meters, no gridlock traffic or triangular sandwiches with upmarket names. Certainly, there was a language barrier, and a cultural one, but I found myself happier than I had been in years.

Late one night a close friend called to say that his Californian home had burned to the ground. There was nothing left. A lifetime of papers and possessions were gone. Next morning, I asked Zohra to upgrade our fire insurance. The policy she found was astonishingly expensive, but, I reasoned, it was money well spent. When Osman heard how much the insurance cost, he howled with laughter.

“Everyone knows that fire insurance doesn't work,” he said.

“What do you mean, it doesn't work?”

“The only way to keep the fire away,” Osman maintained, “is with a frog.”

I raised an eyebrow. “A frog?”

“
Oui,
Monsieur Tahir.”

“Can you explain?”

Osman acted out the method with his hands. “First you catch a frog, then you kill it, dry it out, rub it in salt, and hang it outside the front door.”

“But what good is that if the house catches fire?”

Osman seemed surprised at my question. “If the house starts to burn,” he said matter-of-factly, “you pull down the frog and put it in your pocket.”

“And?”

“And when you go into the building, the flames will not harm you.”

         

A MAN WITH A
donkey cart took to selling cactus fruit outside the house. You knew he was there when you heard his cricketlike cry. There was something comforting about it. We would take it in turns to mimic him as we sat out on the verandah, wondering if the architect's building team would ever arrive. Overhead, flocks of white ibis could be seen as the afternoons eased into dusk. They were flying out to sea, toward the setting sun, their wings tinged with gold. I have never seen anything quite so beautiful.

One autumn morning a thick salty mist blew in from the Atlantic like dragon's breath. It consumed the Caliph's House and the garden and muffled the commotion of the shantytown. Hamza wasted no time in running round opening all the doors and windows as wide as he could. The vapor seeped silently into the main body of the house. I was in the shower when he rushed in and thrust the window open.

“The fog will bring
baraka
,” he said as he ran toward the next room. “It will purify the house! We are blessed!”

By midafternoon the mist was gone, scotched by the sun's warmth. It was as if a spell had been broken and reality returned. To me, the place seemed unchanged, but Hamza was certain a divine transformation had occurred.

“It smells different,” he said. “I have worked here a long time and I can smell it.”

I told him I didn't agree. I said the mist was just water vapor and it had nothing to do with purification,
baraka
, or Jinns.

The guardian was usually willing to argue his case. But on this occasion he slid his hands into his pockets, took a shallow breath, and said: “Of course, Monsieur Tahir. You are quite right.”

         

ONE MORNING ZOHRA ARRIVED
at Dar Khalifa in tears. Her eyes were bloodshot. I asked her what was the matter. She brushed me away.

“It's fine,” she said, sniffing into a handkerchief. “There's nothing to worry about.”

When I asked again, her grief overflowed.

“He left me,” she said, weeping on my shoulder. “Yusuf has broken up with me. He's ended the engagement and gone off with another girl.”

I mumbled sympathies. Zohra mopped her face with her scarf.

“I shouldn't have trusted him,” she said. “Amina warned me.”

“Who's Amina?”

Zohra looked up at me and froze, as if she had let something slip out by mistake. “Oh, um, er,” she said, flustered. “She's a friend, a very good friend.”

I asked if she was from Casablanca. Again, Zohra appeared uncharacteristically knocked off guard.

“She's not a normal friend,” she said.

“Not normal in what way?”

Zohra stopped crying. She held her breath for a moment. “She's not a normal friend,” she repeated, “because she is a Jinn.”

         

HICHAM HARASS HAD MOVED
to Casablanca twenty years before, when his three children were grown up and his career as a postal clerk had come to an end. Over the years, he had developed an affection for the city, but like almost everyone else, he was embarrassed by it.

“It's a French creation,” he told me in one of our first conversations. “Everything about it's French, from the bath taps to the long boulevards. It's amusing,” he said, “but it's not really Morocco.”

I asked him where to find real Morocco. Hicham's eyes lit up.

“Real Morocco,” he said, moistening his lips with his tongue, “it's in the south, far down south, where I was born.”

“Where was that?”

“Three days' walk from Agadir.”

“Why did you leave?”

The stamp collector rubbed his swollen hands together. “Because of a witch,” he said, breaking into a smile.

As a small child, Hicham Harass tended his family's sheep on a rough patch of dust encircled by cactus plants. He lived with his parents, five brothers, a sister, and three dogs in a house made from flotsam scavenged from the Atlantic shore. Their life was simple and uneventful. Then one day a
sehura,
a sorceress, arrived.

“She said I would die within the next cycle of the moon,” Hicham explained, blinking, “unless my parents gave me away to the first stranger they met. They were very sad, of course, because I was only seven years old. But they believed the woman.”

Hicham stopped talking and watched his three-legged dog amble in and collapse by his feet.

“So they gave me away,” he said.

“Who to?”

“To a man called Ayman. He was passing our village, selling scrap metal from a cart. He needed someone to help him, so I went along.”

Again, the stamp collector paused. He looked at me hard, as if he were about to say something important.

“The day I left my village on the back of the scrap metal cart was,” he said, “the first day of my life.”

         

LATE ONE SEPTEMBER MORNING
I was staring out through the giant carved cedar doors from what was to be my library. The view of the courtyard garden could hold my attention for hours on end. I would watch how the light broke through the layers of palm fronds, how the vines had triumphed over every obstacle in their path. At the center of the garden stood a fine date palm. It towered up eighty foot or more, its great spray of fronds throwing zigzagged shade across the whitewashed walls.

The gardener was standing at the base of the palm tree waving an axe. He was shouting at the tree in Arabic.

“Don't you dare cut down that palm!” I yelled.

The gardener, who was the only person on the payroll with genuine fear of me, dropped the axe and waved both hands in front of his chest. “Monsieur Tahir,” he whispered fretfully, “I am not going to cut the tree down—I am just threatening it.”

“Whatever for?”

“I'm doing it for you,” he said.

I didn't understand. “How will I benefit?”

“Because if the tree thinks it is to be chopped down,” the gardener said cunningly, “to save itself it will grow the finest dates you have ever tasted.”

Just then Hamza came running into the courtyard, hands cupped over his head.

“It's begun! It's begun!” he shouted.

“What has?”

“They have started to break down the shantytown!”

I climbed up onto the roof and surveyed the scene. A pair of dilapidated bulldozers were wheezing down the bidonville's central track. An official was following in a small white car with Arabic lettering on the doors. The usually peaceful residents of the slum had erupted into a frenzy of activity. Women were pulling down their washing at high speed, the vegetable sellers were packing up their stock, and all the schoolchildren were tearing through the narrow alleys, sounding the alert.

The wizened imam stood outside the mosque. His hands were raised in the air, as if someone was pointing a revolver at his chest. A few feet away, the bulldozers were poised to attack the first row of homes. The families who lived in them didn't know whether to run out with their belongings, or to stay inside, hoping it would lead to an act of clemency. The white car shuddered to a stop at the first shack; the official clambered out, a clipboard under his arm. A group of fifty or so men appeared from the alleyways and waved their fists at him. He held the clipboard in the air so that its papers rustled in the light breeze. Then he pointed to the bulldozers. The vehicles revved their engines as if cued to do so.

Somewhere in the fray were Hamza, Osman, and the Bear. I wasn't quite sure where they lived, but I knew very well the shantytown was their home. If the tin-roofed shacks were leveled, they and their families would be homeless. As their employer, it would then fall to me to find them all new places to live.

The standoff continued for an hour or more. The official's clipboard waving on one side, fists on the other, and the bulldozers revving between them. Luck was on the side of the posse. Somehow they managed to cajole the official into ordering the vehicles to retreat. Life in the bidonville instantly resumed its normal routine—women hanging out the clothes, old men crouching in the dust talking of the old days, dogs gnawing at the garbage, and small boys jabbing donkeys with sharpened sticks.

That night I met Hamza as he prowled through the garden with his homemade sword.

“They have given us a week to move away,” he said stoically. “After that they are going to smash down our homes.”

“Where will all the people go?” I asked.

Hamza cleared his throat. “They have offered us apartments on the outskirts of Casablanca,” he said. “But no one has the deposit.”

“How much is it?”

“Forty thousand dirhams.”

“That's four thousand dollars,” I said.

“We can't pay it,” he repeated. “No one can. So we will refuse to move.”

Owning the Caliph's House was a blessing, but at the same time it was a curse. We had dozens of rooms at our disposal, vast kitchens, many bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, piping-hot water and electricity, endless gardens, stables, a tennis court, and an impressively large swimming pool. I cringed with guilt that we owned so much. A stone's throw away, Hamza, Osman, the Bear, and hundreds of others lived in lean-tos lit by candles. They had no refrigerators or cooking stoves, no running water, proper toilets, or privacy. What little they did have was now under threat.

Before he melted away into the dark, moonless night, I went up to Hamza and asked him about the future.

“What will you all do?”

He clicked his tongue. “We are in God's hands,” he said.

         

A FEW DAYS LATER
I bought a dark green Korean-made Jeep. Upgrading from the butcher's car was indescribably pleasing. There was no longer the stink of rotting blood or the scourge of flies. I found that when we drove through the shantytown, people would stop what they were doing and stare. Zohra said the Jeep had
baraka
because it was green, the color of Islam. She said that was why people were looking at it. It was, she whispered, the wisest purchase of my life.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked doubtfully.

“Because Amina says so.”

It was a good moment to find out more about the Jinns.

“Tell me, Zohra, where is Amina?” I asked.

“She lives on my left shoulder,” she said.

“Can you see her?”

“Oh yes, of course I can.”

“What does she look like?”

Zohra thought for a moment. “She's got a beautiful face,” she said. “She looks like an angel, and . . .”

“And what?”

“And she's a hundred feet tall.”

         

IN THE THIRD WEEK
of September, I was sitting at a café on the Corniche waiting for Zohra when a spindly, earnest-looking foreigner sat down at the table next to mine. He had a slight hunch, and stooped his head as he walked, as if he was used to people being unkind to him. He ordered a cappuccino in dreadful French and pulled out a crumpled copy of the
Herald Tribune.
It was so unusual to meet an English-speaking foreigner that I felt drawn to speak to him. I leaned over and broke the ice.