Lulu in Marrakech (16 page)

27

Some believe that intelligence work will eventually become a science.

—Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

I
t actually proved more difficult to find Amid than Taft had predicted. With the cooperation of the Moroccan secret service, the DST, we had a record of hotel registrations, and Taft had a list of possible relatives and acquaintances, but this list was not as deep as we’d hoped. It was the DST that located him, after two days, staying in a mosque annex near Guéliz. Taft wanted to watch him as long as possible, to document his contacts and where he went. After his sudden appearance, he had not called the Cotters as he had promised to follow up on the whereabouts of his sister.

In the circumstances, I suggested to Taft that I accidentally encounter him and establish some sort of relationship, possibly by promising to help find Suma. Taft congratulated me on this plan. Accordingly, Tarik Dom waited outside the mosque (in our van) till Amid came out, and Dom telephoned me at the library. It was child’s play to walk toward him through the Jemaa el Fna and feign surprise.

“Oh, hello,
bonjour,
” I said. “We met the other night.”

“
Bonjour,
madame. I’m afraid I…” not connecting me to the Cotters.

“Did you manage to find your sister?”

“Ah, no, not yet.”

“Perhaps I can be of help. I’m sure she is homesick and wishes all were smooth again between you.”

“You know my sister.” It was a statement, not a question. I admitted to knowing her.

“Yes, of course, when she was at the Cotters’, I saw her often.”

“And you know where she is.” This seemed to be a statement too, so I said, “No, I have no idea.” Outright lies were coming more easily to me by now. I have heard there are some of us who become so comfortable lying, they easily pass the lie detector tests we have to submit to periodically. I’m not nearly that practiced a liar yet, but I’m making progress. I think Amid believed me. “But someone might, at our house. We are friendly with the Cotters, the children played together.”

“Do Madame and Monsieur Cotter know where she is? Why did she leave their house hold?”

“You must come to dinner one of these nights. To night, even, or tomorrow night.”

He looked quite surprised, and I saw the look of thoughtful calculation come over him. After a second, he accepted for the following night. I gave him directions, and of course he saw that Suma would not be at our house or I wouldn’t have invited him.

…

A
semipublic performance was formally expected from the artists at Ian’s artists’ haven, and the following night was also the night Robin Crumley was going to read to us from his new work, poems written since he’d been in Morocco. A few neighbors had been invited in, though not the Al‐Sayads. Mostly the guests were other Brits, but Madame Frank (and monsieur, a prosperous
pâtissier,
owner of a chain of fancy bakeries in France) had been invited to meet Moment, the painter, presumably so Pierre wouldn’t feel so much the lone Francophone.

Inevitably, sitting with drinks on Ian’s patio, before Amid got there, we discussed Amid and his sister, and those Muslim issues—suicide bombings, honor killings—which we are so unable to understand and find so crazy. “Which of us would die for Christianity?” asked Robin Crumley, and it was clear he meant this as a serious question. Of course, none of us would, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” notwithstanding.

“What about those monks in Algeria who were beheaded?” I said.

“That doesn’t count,” said Ian. “They didn’t mean to die, they were just foolhardy to stay. Suicidal.”

“A good Christian can’t commit suicide for Christianity,” Robin Crumley said. “Suicide being a sin.”

“Les martyrs,”
said Madame Frank.

“What would we die for?” Ian wondered. “Britannia, I suppose? If she were attacked, as she has been over and over. People died for her in the two wars.…”

“ ‘Died for king and country,’ ” Robin sang.

“Our children,” Posy said. “People defend their kids and homes. But not the monarch. I would think the queen should die for me, since I’m young and she’s old.”

“We’ve learned to mistrust abstractions, and they haven’t learned that,” Robin said. “Islam, I mean, hasn’t learned. A feature of civilization is to mistrust the abstract.”

“Mais non,”
protested Madame Frank, but, after all, the Franks were French, who love abstractions and are highly civilized, or like to think so.
“L’abstrait c’est l’idéal, la chose perfectionnée.”

The thing perfected. Keeping up a conversation was now a completely automatic, robotlike exercise for me, a disguise underneath which I could marshal the thoughts that kept pounding inside, about Taft, Amid, and Ian and Gazi. Now that I had thought about it more, it seemed unlikely that going to that distant lunch place to happen to see Gazi and Ian could have been coincidence. The colonel must have planned it, but what was the object? Was the intrusion of Suma’s brother at this point coincidence too, or was there a complex interconnection I would eventually understand?

Of course I had told the others Amid was coming. We were all a little apprehensive. Ian’s employees—Miryam, Rashid, the other maids— knew full well where Suma was. We had wondered whether he might try to bribe them or appeal to their Islamism. In the end, Posy, whose rapport with them was the best, reminded Miryam about the threat to Suma’s safety and left it to her to persuade the others to say nothing if he asked.

Amid came at eight, neat and sweet-smelling with some sort of cologne, jeans, clean shirt, very much in the uniform of a young Frenchman coming to dinner. He didn’t seem to know who, Posy or myself, was the official hostess, so he presented Ian with a gigantic sack of pistachios. In Paris, he was studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts. Very much the well‐ behaved young Frenchman, knowledgeable about the cinema and the coming French elections, willing to discuss the new Werner Herzog film and redevelopment efforts in North Africa. Educated and employed was not the profile of a smoldering fanatic.

“Is there much honor killing in France?” said the resolute Posy. “In Germany it’s a tremendous problem, among the newcomers, naturally.”

“I don’t know,” said Amid. “I have heard of it, but I don’t know if it is common.” He didn’t seem taken aback.

I remembered a conversation I had had with Rashid, about hypocrisy. “
Bien sûr,
we live in hypocrisy,” he had said. “What else can a poor Mussulman do? He cannot actually say ‘Yes, I accept to work in your country, but I cannot accept your absurd ideas that all religions should be respected’; also, how can I tell you all your women look like whores? No, I have to tell you I accept your right to your religion. Yes, the Prophet, peace be on him, said we are not to lie, but lying is a lesser evil, because I cannot tell you the truth, which is ‘I am waiting to kill all infidels.’ That is the mind of the Mussulman; I know many like this.”

We were having aperitifs—Amid accepted a
jus d’orange.
The discussion, mainly in French, generally concerned his attempts to find Suma and how he was passing the time. Given that he knew—that we or at least Ian and the Cotters knew—where she was, his manner was equable and light. He seemed to accept our peculiar role, knowing Suma’s whereabouts but not trusting him enough to tell him; he didn’t seem to blame or accuse, but appeared to understand that our position as protectors required us to conceal her.

He was not the picture of somebody in a murderous rage. But I remembered having read that the family of a dishonored girl just delegates someone else to do the job, and that person isn’t necessarily in a rage. Deputized killings in cold blood seemed to me even worse than rage, and I supposed they would seem worse to a court too. I remembered that if the intended murder is forestalled when authorities intervene, sometimes this delegated person promises the authorities not to hurt the victim, but then after she trusts him, he kills her anyway, obligations to the Prophet’s view of family honor taking precedence over mere criminal law or simple humanity.

We had learned various other things about Amid and Suma, from Suma. Their father had been a sergeant in the French army in the Second World War. Suma hadn’t told me much about that; I’d assumed they were poor immigrants, but they were a military family—like my own. There was another brother, older, a teacher of geography in a lycée, married, with children, living near métro Picpus. The other two sisters were not mentioned now by Amid, but it was the profile of a poor but assimilated, upwardly mobile first-generation family, hard to reconcile with the normal profile of simple and status-deprived people who are involved in honor killings.

The others knew, of course, of his threats to Suma, but only I knew of the threat to Amid from Taft and from me, that we planned to drag him off to be tortured in an Egyptian jail, for that was what I was pretty sure we were doing.

“I won’t deny that the issue of my sister’s honor is troubling to my parents. Any plans for her marriage… it could be settled, for instance if she would go to a doctor.”

We, Europeans, Americans, sat in an appalled silence for a moment before Ian defined what he meant.

“You mean get her virginity certified?” Ian asked, his tone ironical. “Yes, a doctor can tell,” Amid said. Again, no one thought of an immediate response. The gulf between our sensibilities and his yawned larger than we had imagined, probably impossible to cross. Finally, the always intemperate Posy leapt.

“It’s disgusting. That is disgusting!”

“That is the paradox,” Amid agreed. “Of course it’s disgusting for a modest girl, it renders her immodest almost by definition, yet I’m told that an experienced woman doctor can conduct the whole examination with exceptional tact.”

“This is the Stone Age!” cried Posy. Amid stared with a puzzled expression.

“Perhaps European girls have more to hide than modest Arab girls. But I assure you, Arab societies are not the only ones to value modesty. For instance, I happen to know that the American military demanded some such certification before a soldier could marry a French girl. This was during the Second World War.”

“That’s impossible,” we all objected.

“Modesty is a moral virtue, it is not a physical state,” said Robin Crumley. “A person can be modest and not a virgin; there is no contradiction. The same with honor.”

“Excuse me, I use those words euphemistically. Modesty, honor— we are talking about virginity,” Amid said.

“The Stone Age,” cried Posy.

Amid shrugged. “Things change very slowly. I think my sister should take our parents’ old-fashioned attitudes into account.” His face had darkened—we had seen this irascible side of him before, and Ian intervened smoothly by assuring him that Posy and I would tactfully raise the issue with Suma: Would she consent to a virginity test? But despite my promises, I was by no means sure I could collaborate with such barbarity. I was with Posy there.

“Remember Ophelia’s song,” said Robin. Where she says—‘Quoth she, before you tumbled me / you promised me to wed. / So would I a’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed.’ ”

“Shakespeare lived in the seventeenth century,” Posy said in an icy tone. “Do you know Shakespeare, Mr. Bourad?”

“Why did she leave Mr. and Mrs. Cotter?” Amid persisted. “Was it Monsieur Cotter?”

“She found something that suited her better. Something secretarial, but I have no idea where,” said Ian.

His expression was unreadable. I hoped mine was. Even in the midst of this confrontation with Amid, my thoughts would dart to Ian with Gazi, and the sight of him dissembling made me think of something that had happened twice: He and I were making love, and after my own plea sure, when it would normally be the gentlemanly Ian’s turn, he had sighed and withdrawn, saying once that he was too preoccupied, the second time too tired to go on. This abrupt, disappointing ending had shown me that men may dissemble the way women are said to, and now I saw it that he could no longer conceal his thoughts of Gazi and had lost his desire for me.

My attention was drawn back to Amid again when I realized he had begun to sound off about Jews: “Oh, well, the ‘chosen people’—we know who owns the banks and newspapers. And they make sure the educational system favors them, not the rest of us. It is this fact that makes us mistrustful of so-called democracy.” I was not quite sure I’d heard this right. He went on.

“The issues are not between Left and Right or Arab and Christian, though we are made to think so. Really it’s among various Israeli tribes, about ascendance. They decide among them what happens to the Palestinians.…”

“My dear fellow,” said Ian mildly, “Israel, Palestine—you must know that all this seems very unimportant to us. These people will have to settle it among themselves.” He was right not to try to argue, I thought. All at once, Amid seemed to realize where he was, or how intemperate he sounded, and fell silent. Robin Crumley had gotten to his feet and said he would be down in five minutes to begin his reading.