In Arabian Nights (5 page)

Zohra said the dream had a meaning, that her friend Sukayna
could interpret it for me. She lived behind a bakery in the nearby suburb
of Hay Hassani, and had a skill, a knack of peering into the dark reaches
of a troubled mind. After a week of insomnia I should have gone for a reading,
but all I could think of was Dr Mehdi's comment, that Berbers search for the
story in their heart.

On the Friday morning, I came down to find the guardians
scurrying about near the front door. A new crop of chalk
symbols and numbers had appeared in the night. There were
more than the first time. All of it was in white, except for a single
word in pink chalk. It was Arabic, and read:
Mut
, 'Death'.

Osman, Hamza and the Bear fell into line. They ordered me
to buy more honey at once.

'That will not be happening,' I said.

'But the jinns have returned,' Hamza insisted. 'Do nothing
about it, and there will be problems.'

Zohra muscled in and echoed Hamza's words.

'He is right,' she said sternly. 'Believe me. I speak the truth.'

Dr Mehdi had the habit of rationing his conversation. He knew
I would turn up the next Friday if he had left me with sufficient
bait the week before. For seven days and nights I found myself
thinking about his remark. There was something poetical about
it, something irresistible. That afternoon I hurried through the
shantytown and made my way to Café Mabrook. I nodded a
greeting to the other regulars, took my usual place and waited
for a thumbless hand to slap down an ashtray and a glass of
café
noir
.

After about an hour the surgeon entered. He was very calm,
almost calculating.

'You have been thinking about what I said, haven't you?'

'I can't help it,' I said. 'It's eating away at my mind.'

A lengthy pause followed. Then the retired surgeon said:
'The Berbers believe that when people are born, they are born
with a story inside them, locked in their heart. It looks after
them, protects them.' Dr Mehdi flicked the hood of his
jelaba
down on to his neck and sipped his coffee. 'Their task is to search
for their story,' he said, 'to look for it in everything they do.'

'But how do they know it's there?'

The doctor smiled.

'You have never seen your lungs,' he said placing a hand on
his chest, 'but I am sure you will agree that they are in there.'

The doctor broke off to greet his friend Hakim. As they
exchanged salutations, I wondered what he was talking about. It
sounded a little mad, but the more I thought of it, the more the
idea grew on me. At the same time, it seemed like unbelievable
luck – luck at ever hearing of such a secret Berber belief. It was
as if I was being handed the idea on a plate, just like that, without
having to dig away to find it.

'Some people find their story right away,' Dr Mehdi said, once
Hakim had sat down. 'Others search their entire lives and never
find it.'

'But how do you know when you have found it – your story,
I mean?'

'It's a question of perception.'

At that moment another regular of Friday afternoons came
in, greeted us and took his seat. Hafad was an excitable giant
with a passion for clocks. We all enjoyed his company. The only
problem was that Hafad had often made clear his low opinion of
anything Berber. No one dared mention the word in his presence.
Eventually when he left, I coaxed the surgeon to continue.

'I've told you,' he said, 'you have to search and when you find
the story it's as if your mind lights up. You know instantly when
it's the right one. After that your whole life will be one of
fulfilment.'

'But there are so many stories in the world, what's the chance
of finding the one connected to you?'

'That's the remarkable thing,' said the surgeon. 'If you search
for it, the story will find you . . . by a kind of intuition.'

'Have you found your story?' I asked.

The doctor glanced at the table. He seemed to blush.

'Yes, when I was about ten years old,' he said in little more
than a whisper.

'Will you tell it to me?'

Dr Mehdi scratched a fingernail to his ear.

'There was once a group of three dervishes who decided to
have a picnic,' he said gently. 'The weather was fine and so they chose a
place in the shade near the bank of a stream. As they laid out a tablecloth,
with stones on the corners to keep it down should a breeze start up, a stray
dog appeared. The animal sniffed around at the cloth. One of the dervishes
said to the others, "Should we tell it there is no food to spare?" "No," another
said, "because action is more powerful than words." So they continued to weigh
down the corners of the cloth. The dog suddenly ran off, yelping. The third
dervish, who had learned the language of animals, interpreted the cries. "He
is saying, 'If these humans have only stones for lunch, what hope is there
of tasting real food?'

Not long after hearing Dr Mehdi's story, I visited Marrakech
once again. The heat was unbearable. There were almost no
tourists and the shopkeepers in the medina would flare into a
rage at the slightest provocation. The combination of hot air and
the dearth of visitors was too much for them. I took advantage of
their hard luck and bought a large framed mirror with silver
octagons etched round the edge. Then, carrying the purchase on
my head as a kind of sunshade, I wandered out to look for the
storytellers.

Jemaa el Fna was all but deserted. The
gnaoua
musicians were
sprawled in the shade, too hot to sing, their indigo robes
drenched black with sweat. The travelling dentists had disappeared
with their tins of second-hand teeth, as had the medicine
men with their chameleons and their mice. Even the watersellers
in their wide-brimmed hats were too hot to work. I
trudged into the middle of the square, the brown-paper package
on my head.

There wasn't a storyteller in sight.

As I made my way back towards the medina in search of
refreshment, I noticed a tired old donkey standing outside a
fundouk
,
a traditional caravanserai, the kind once used by travelling
merchants. The donkey caught my eye because of the white
blotch on its rump. It looked like the one the storyteller had
lifted on to his shoulders to draw a crowd. I went into the
fundouk
and asked who owned the animal. Someone pointed to
a ladder. 'Up there,' he said. I put down the mirror and climbed
the rungs until I was on the upper level, on a balcony overflowing
with rotting bread and junk.

Again I asked about the donkey.

'It's mine,' said a man wearing a cotton
jelaba
and a homemade
turban. It was the storyteller. I introduced myself.

'And I am Khalil,' he said, 'the son of Khalilullah.'

'May I sit for a moment?'

'
Marhaba
, welcome,' he replied.

The storyteller's young son was sent scurrying down the
ladder to buy a sprig of mint for tea. As I sat down on a cushion,
I made out the sound of a hand rinsing a teapot behind and
caught the aroma of charcoal being fanned into life.

I told the master that I had heard one of his tales on my
previous visit to Marrakech.

'My family have told stories here for nine generations, right
on the same spot in Jemaa el Fna,' he said. 'Father, son, father,
son. I continue the tradition because it is that – tradition. I
promised my father that I would not let the tradition die. But
I don't make enough money to live. So I teach history in a school
each morning and tell stories in the afternoons.'

'What about the tourists? Don't they pay you?'

'No, no,' said Khalil. 'My tales are in Arabic and they don't
understand. Anyway, tourists don't have time to listen. They just
want to take photographs.'

'Where are you from?'

'From the Atlas Mountains.'

'Are you Berber?'

Khalil the storyteller untied his turban and rewound it tighter
round his head.

'Yes, we are Berber,' he said.

I told him what Dr Mehdi had said, that all of us are born
with a story inside us, that it's our duty to discover what that
story might be.

'That's the tradition,' he replied. 'But these days people are
forgetting the traditions.'

'I want to find my story,' I said.

Khalil looked at me, his eyes mapping my face. He pursed his
lips a fraction, revealing a row of sharp, square teeth.

'You must take care,' he said.

'Why?'

'Finding your story is harder than it sounds. It can be
dangerous.'

'Really?'

'Of course. To find your story you must trust. Trust the wrong
person and the consequences could be bad.'

I asked if he could tell me the tale that lived inside me. It would
save me a lot of time and trouble, and he was a storyteller after all.

Khalil the son of Khalilullah smiled very softly.

'I cannot do that,' he said.

'Why not?'

'Because the search for your story will change you.'

Zohra urged me night and day to have my dream interpreted by
her friend Sukayna who lived beyond the shantytown. She said
there was probably poison inside me, a poison somehow
connected to the chalk symbols on the door.

'How would I have been poisoned?'

'The Changed Ones.'

'Jinns?'

'Tsk! Don't ever say that word!'

'It's a lot of old rubbish,' I said.

The maid placed her right hand over her heart and spat out
her favourite catchphrase: 'Believe me, I speak the truth.' Then,
hoisting Timur on to her back, she climbed the stairs and was
gone.

The mother to six daughters, Zohra longed for a son. She
wouldn't admit to it, but I used to get the feeling she felt the lack
of male offspring to be a divine punishment. As soon as she
arrived at the house each morning, she would scoop Timur up
and feed him a packet of banana-flavoured chewing gum. All
day long she would carry him around, whispering stories into his
ear, feeding him titbits and boosting his ego with an endless
stream of praise.

Zohra spent so much time doting on Timur that we were
forced to hire a second maid to do the work she had been hired
to do. Rachana and I were still far too fearful to fire her and
began to regard her wages as a kind of tax.

The new maid, Fatima, who came recommended by
Ariane's schoolteacher, was young and innocent. She smiled all
the time and was a whirlwind of activity. Unlike Zohra, who
lived in the shantytown, Fatima moved in to Dar Khalifa. She
rose before dawn and started with the windows, cleaning them
until they shone like cut gems. After that, she would scrub the
floors on her hands and knees and then mop the ceilings and
the doors.

From the first moment Fatima arrived, Zohra stalked her
through the house, gripped with psychotic rage. She took to
hiding behind the curtains and jumping out, and would sprinkle
dirt from the garden on the sitting-room floor, so that Fatima
would have to start the mopping again.

The situation was not satisfactory, but it became far worse one
morning in mid-September. Fatima spent a few dirhams on buying
Ariane and Timur candyfloss. They were both lapping
greedily at the spun sugar, when Zohra burst in. She looked at
my son perched on Fatima's knee, scowled and stormed out.
Twenty minutes later she returned holding a huge bag of sweets.
She presented it to Timur and kissed him on the cheek.

The next day I found Timur playing with a miniature tinplate
car. He said Fatima had given it to him. By lunchtime he had
abandoned the car for a much larger die-cast vehicle from
Zohra. By the afternoon he had discarded that, too, and was preoccupied
with an expensive-looking spaceship with red and
white stripes. When I approached him, he gloated and lisped
Fatima's name.

The next day, Timur was riding a brand-new tricycle through
the house. On his arm was a silver-coloured wristwatch and over his shoulders
there was a leather jacket with his name embroidered across the back. I was
going to stop the reckless overspending, but Rachana stopped me. She said
that with time the pressure of economy would prevail.

After meeting Khalil the storyteller, and talking it over with Dr Mehdi, I
decided to search for the story inside me. Both men assured me it was somewhere
in there, deep in my heart, waiting to be heard. When I asked my Moroccan
friends about searching for the tale inside, they all said it sounded crazy,
that they had not heard of the tradition, that I was succumbing to the psychosis
known to touch foreigners who live in Morocco too long.

The next Friday afternoon, I asked Dr Mehdi if he had any
tips.

'You want a short cut, don't you?'

I nodded eagerly.

'Well, I will give you one. Although you are in Morocco,' he
said, 'remember that you are in the East. That may be the Atlantic Ocean out
there, but culturally it may as well be the South China Sea.'

The battle between Fatima and Zohra continued to rage. By the
next week, Timur was drowning in gifts. Both the maids had
blown their monthly salaries. As a way of protecting them, I
forbade either of them from going near the little boy and took
him out for a haircut.

In Morocco, henpecked husbands spend much of their time
hiding from their wives in men-only cafés. The other place they
go to escape are barber's shops. In the West, if you turned up at
a barber's and found the place full of unshaven men, it would
probably mean you had a lengthy wait ahead. But in Morocco, a
crowded barber's merely means its owner has a lot of friends.
They come in and lounge about, watch TV, drink tea and
smoke, flick through the grubby magazines, and, occasionally,
they get their hair cut.

When I first moved to Casablanca, I began to frequent a small
barbershop up the hill from the shantytown. I like to keep my
hair very short and nothing gives me more pleasure than getting
it trimmed with an electric razor. The barber was a quiet man
with pebble-grey eyes, strong hands and an obsession with
soccer. As he moved the scissors through a client's hair, or the
cut-throat razor over a man's cheeks, he would be watching
the game on TV from the corner of his eye.