The Caliph's House (9 page)

We had just finished eating lunch on the terrace when we heard the sound of a fist pounding at the garden door. It was followed by loud cries in Arabic, what sounded like threats. Hamza and Osman appeared from nowhere. They jumped at the door, held it shut, and sent the Bear to rally the workmen. A minute later there were twenty men on our side holding the door shut.

I went over and asked Hamza who was trying to break down the door from the other side.

“It's the police,” he said.

“Shouldn't we let them in?” I said.

“Monsieur Tahir,
s'il vous plaît!
” he retorted. “Of course we should not let them in.”

As we stood there blocking the path of the authorities, I realized I still had much to learn about Morocco and the way things were done. In England we are raised to have a certain respect for the police. We may not like them, but we feel bound to do as they ask, whether we like it or not. If a squad of English bobbies tried to knock down your door, most people would consider themselves obliged to open it and inquire why they had come.

“Hamza,” I said, “why are the police trying to break down the door?”

The guardian looked askance. “You don't have permission to do building work,” he said.

“Don't I?”

“No, of course you don't. No one ever does.”

“Then is this normal, then, the police hammering at the door?”

Hamza's spirits rose. “Oh yes, Monsieur Tahir,” he said, “it happens all the time.”

S
IX

A lame crab walks straight.

MISFORTUNE CONTINUED TO
hound us. Household accidents decreased, but other forms of ill fortune arrived. First came the locusts. Their camouflage made them hard to see. But when my eyes had adjusted to picking out their segmented forms, I saw them all over the garden. They covered the hedges and the shrubs, the vines and the low boughs of the trees, and they consumed whatever they could get into their miniature mouths. Their territory spread from the end of the garden to the top of the house. Before we knew it, they were in the storeroom and in the cupboards and in our beds, in the laundry and even in the food.

The balance of nature prevailed, and the plague of locusts was slaughtered by the rise of the rats. At the end of the second week of October, the savage, thickset rodents were almost everywhere the locusts had been. An easy supply of locust meat had made them strong and brave. They caused extensive damage. My files and all my books were chewed to pieces, as were Ariane's toys and Timur's quilt, and almost all the food in the larder was destroyed. They gnawed holes in sacks of cement as well, and shredded our duvet to make a nest. Ariane's soft leather shoes were eaten in the night. All that was left were the buckles.

I told Hamza to go and buy ten tubes of the rat-catching glue. He shook his head and said the only way to dispose of a plague of rats was to get a fierce dog. The bigger the dog, he said, the better.

“Why do you think the bidonville has so many dogs?” he intoned.

“For the rats?” I guessed.

“Precisely.”

“Can't we just get a cat?” I said. “Rats are scared of cats.”

Hamza burst out laughing. “In Morocco,” he said boastfully, “rats eat the cats for breakfast.”

Again, I instructed him to put out more cardboard strips laden with glue. The method had already proved its effectiveness.

“I told you,” he said. “It's too late for glue. We need to spray the garden in poison!” he exclaimed. “Every blade of grass must be covered, and every centimeter of the house!”

Mindful of the children's safety, I told him not to use poison. Instead, I promised to find the most ferocious dog money could buy.

         

THE SUBJECT OF CHILD
safety reemerged the next day. Ariane was found under the kitchen table by the cook, vomiting uncontrollably. Her face was scarlet, her breathing strained. Beside her was an open tub of oily white cream. It had a pungent smell, like drain cleaner. The label's script was Arabic; it bore the image of a grinning, fair-faced woman in Moroccan dress. We set to work trying to get Ariane to throw up more while waiting for the pediatrician to arrive. The cook, who had bulbous eyes and a swarthy complexion, was pacing up and down on edge. I asked her what the cream was for.

“I want to be fair like you and Madame,” she said.

I repeated my question: “Fatima, what's the cream for?”

“It's for bleaching my face,” she said.

         

ALL THAT WEEK I
searched for a dog. The pet stores offered prim little Pekinese, bichons frises, and jittery poodles with silk bows tied all over them.

“These won't do,” I explained to the sales staff. “I'm not looking for a lapdog. I want a blood-crazed demon dog, wild enough to devour a plague of rats!”

After much searching, I was given the number of a man who was rumored to own a German shepherd. He lived in an apartment and felt bad keeping his animal cooped up all day. The dog was seven months old. I asked if it was ferocious. The owner's voice trembled on the telephone.

“Of course not, monsieur,” he said reassuringly. “She has a lovely character.”

“What a shame,” I said. “You see, I want a vicious dog. The wilder, the better.”

The man thought for a moment. “Well,” he said acidly, “I suppose if you want her to be aggressive, you could treat her very badly.”

In the afternoon, I tracked down the man's apartment in fashionable Maarif. The German shepherd was brought out. As soon as she saw me, she gave me her paw and licked my face. Then she rolled on her back and whimpered.

“I'm desperate,” I said. “I'll take her.”

         

BACK AT THE HOUSE,
I let the new rat-killing hound into the garden. But the rats were already dead or dying—cut down in their prime by a mysterious affliction. The carnage made for a terrible sight. There were dying rats everywhere. You couldn't walk two yards without stepping on one. Ariane was bawling her eyes out. She had grown to like them.

I took Hamza aside and quizzed him.

“I sprinkled a few pellets of poison,” he said.

“A few pellets could not have caused death on such a scale,” I replied. “How much poison did you use?”

The guardian rubbed his eyes. “Five bags,” he said.

At that moment, the German shepherd began chewing at something on the lawn. It was a dead rat. I lunged for her mouth and prised the jaws apart. Thankfully, her teeth hadn't reached the rodent's stomach. I ordered Hamza to pick out every pellet of poison and to burn the dead rats. He would rather have tossed them over the wall into the bidonville, as he did with the trash. Do that, and we would have killed all the dogs in the shantytown.

Hamza was about to ask me something when he slapped a hand to the back of his neck.

“It's a bee,” he said. “It just stung me.”

A moment later, the colonnaded corridor was filled with bees. They were swarming. I couldn't believe it. First locusts, then rats, and now bees—all in the same week.

“What's going on?” I said. “I've never known anything like this.”

But Hamza wasn't listening. He was dancing.

“Have you been stung again?”

“No, Monsieur Tahir,” he said, “I am happy. Bees are a blessing sent by Allah!”

         

A FEW DAYS LATER
, peace began to return to Dar Khalifa. Gone were the locusts, the rats, and the bees. The only scourge left were the oversized mosquitoes. They infested the house, where they tormented Ariane the most. She had an allergy to them. Her eyes swelled up like tennis balls when she was bitten. The pediatrician suggested getting the garden sprayed with insecticide.

When we moved to Morocco, I was not overly superstitious, but as time went on, I found myself wondering if someone had put some kind of curse on us. It was the easiest way of explaining the run of bad luck. You can't live in North Africa without being affected by the ingrained belief in superstition. It's everywhere. The more you think about it, the more it seeps into your bones. I was used to hard luck, but there was usually a gap between the waves of misfortune. In Casablanca, bad luck came in three dimensions.

One evening I was pondering the subject when Osman approached my desk gingerly. We were all invited to his home the next day, he said. I thanked him.

“What is the occasion?”

The guardian ducked his head. “It's my son's circumcision.”

         

THAT NIGHT I COULDN
'
T
sleep. Perhaps it was a mixture of accident and pestilence, or the greater worry that someone was trying to frighten us away. My mind was entertained by images of pools of warm blood, dead rodents, and the gangster's wife. I sat up in bed. Ariane and Timur were sound asleep, but Rachana wasn't there. She wasn't in the bathroom either, so I crept through the house to the kitchen. It was empty.

The guardians took it in turns to patrol at night, armed with Hamza's homemade sword. But they, too, seemed to have vanished. The moon was nearing fullness, and the warm night air was alive with bats and with nocturnal sounds from the shantytown—the savage dogs fighting, setting off the donkeys and the hobbled mules. I walked all around the house, calling Rachana's name. To my alarm, she didn't reply. I climbed the makeshift ladder and searched the upper floor and the terrace. After that I looked in the outbuildings and in the garden. I suddenly realized I had forgotten to look in the courtyard garden. I rushed over, my bare feet tramping through the dirt.

“Rach! Rach!” I called. “Are you there?”

On the verandah beside the locked door, a figure was standing very still in a flowing white robe. It was Rachana.

“I have to go in there,” she said very softly.

“What are you doing here? Come back to bed.”

She resisted my arm.

“No, you don't understand. I have to go in there.”

“Why?”

“I don't know.”

“The key's lost,” I said.

“Then break open the door. Do it now.”

I called out for the guardians. No one came at first. Then, after a few minutes I could hear the Bear's heavy step moving across the terrace outside.

“
Oui, monsieur,
” he said balefully. “What is it?”

“We have to go into this room right now,” I said. “Get me the crowbar.”

The Bear spat out excuses. “There is no key,” he said. “Only Hamza can go in there.”

“I don't care. I own this house and I am going in there, do you understand?”

The Bear swallowed hard. He disappeared, returning a minute later with a jimmy. In the beam of his flashlight, I wedged the end of the steel bar into the crack and levered as hard as I could. The lock snapped. I pushed the door inward. The lights weren't working. We crept inside and I shone the beam over the walls. They were discolored with algae. The room was freezing. It smelled of death.

“Can you smell that?” Rachana said.

I grunted. “Let's go,” I said.

“No, not yet.”

Rachana walked into the anteroom, to the left of the door. She took the light and shone it upward. The ceiling was high, at least twenty-five feet. Then she moved the beam down to the floor. I edged closer to get a better view.

“Do you see that?” she said.

“My God, there are steps going down.”

         

THE CIRCUMCISION ATTRACTED ALL
the main players from the shantytown to Osman's modest home. Hamza, the Bear, and the gardener were there, too, as were their wives. Osman's own wife was flustering about making sure that everyone had a glass of sweet mint tea. She had a checkered scarf tied over her head and was wearing her best jelaba. It was violet and had a trace of pink embroidery around the neck.

In the middle of the small room was Ahmed. Having recently reached the grand age of five, the boy was about to pass through Islamic ritual to manhood. He was dressed in a sky blue three-piece suit with matching bow tie and a pleated dress shirt. On his head was perched a green tarboosh, and on his feet were shiny black shoes.

Ahmed showed off a new bicycle his father had bought for him, before being prodded outside into the dusty street. In front of the tin-roofed shack, a man was holding the reins of a slender gray horse. I wondered where such a magnificent animal had come from. Osman lifted the boy up, and the horse was paraded about through the heaps of rotting garbage. Unsure of what to do, Rachana and I clapped.

“This will be the happiest day of his life,” said Osman, the smile even broader than normal beneath his handlebar mustache.

Under the circumstances, I might have disagreed. A few seconds later, little Ahmed was wrenched from the horse's back and dragged into the house, where his miniature suit trousers were whipped down. An unshaven hulk of a man loomed over the child, who was now pinned out on a low table. I recognized him as the street-stall barber from the shantytown. Osman ordered his son to be brave. I gulped. Rachana gulped, and Ariane burst into tears as the infant's penis was remodeled by the barber's scissors.

The crowd of family and guests pressed in close to gain a good view as little Ahmed's lungs swelled with air. There was no sound at first. Then the screaming began. It went on and on, rising sharply in volume, as the boy understood the scope of the operation.

“Ah,” Osman exclaimed as his son writhed in agony before him, “this surely is the finest day of his life.”

         

AT FIRST, I COULD
not bring myself to ask Rachana why she had wanted to go into the locked room. I feared what she would say. We didn't talk about it the next morning. When I saw Hamza raking leaves in the garden, he didn't mention it either. I went up to him and asked where the stairs led.

“You should not have gone in there,” he replied.

“Why?”

The guardian didn't say. He looked down at the leaves and continued with his raking. Leaving him to it, I went back to the locked door. To my surprise, the lock had been replaced.

Rachana could tell I was thinking about what had happened the previous night. She wouldn't look me in the eye all day. At last, in the evening, when the children were asleep in bed, she turned to me.

“I had to go in there,” she said in a trembling voice. “I don't know why, or what it was about. But something happened in there. Didn't you feel it?”