Lulu in Marrakech (2 page)

2

Analysis may be the most important and is surely one of the most vulnerable components of the intelligence process. Analysts are required to answer difficult questions on the basis of usually limited data. Thus they are frequently tempted to accept data more or less at face value.

—Roy Godson, ed.,
Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s

T
hough I don’t usually talk to people on planes, I had fallen into conversation with the woman in the seat next to me, a slender, tan, and well-dressed Frenchwoman in her forties. I’d stopped in Paris for a visit between posts and was flying out of Charles de Gaulle on Royal Air Maroc. The plane was crowded with merry Parisians making for their weekend places—their riads and condos in the warm, exotic desert.

“There’s no problem in Morocco,” she said. “It’s the last place where Europe and Islam still get along.”

“No one shot there, as in Egypt, or bombed, or kidnapped like in Afghanistan. Not yet,” I said, for I had boned up on all this.

“Luckily, such things are impossible in Morocco. They are culturally very French,” she said, apparently remembering nothing about Algeria and the French experience there.

We were flying high enough that the whole contour of the northern coast of Africa was visible, a whole new continent, the dark continent, as it used to be called, though it lay beneath us as green and cheerful as one could wish—the strip along the coast at least—so lovely that I hadn’t been able to keep myself from calling her attention to it.

This led to our introducing ourselves. She was Yvette Frank, and she dealt in real estate in Marrakech, but more interesting than that to me, she told me she worked as a
bénévole,
a volunteer, with a group in Paris that helped young Muslim French girls escape from the murderous intentions of their fathers and brothers: On the plane with us was a girl, Suma Bourad, whose father and brother had planned to slit her throat in one of the honor killings you read about, and which actually happen.

“We help these girls menaced by their families. Some of the
histoires
are quite harrowing,” Madame Frank had said, and told me what she knew of Suma’s story, in a low voice so Suma couldn’t hear. The girl was sitting two rows behind us in the first row of coach. They hadn’t been able to get seats together, and I sensed that this was something of a relief to Madame Frank, who, well-meaning as she was, probably didn’t have a lot in common with a teenage Muslim victim. Or maybe the French charity wouldn’t spring for a business-class seat. Anyway, luckily for the girl, she had eluded her family; at least, no mark was visible under the sedate fastening of her foulard, though one wondered what kind of mark it must have left on her soul.

Suma was a student, eighteen or nineteen, very pretty, with almond skin and large dark eyes shadowed by a sort of plum bloom around them, not quite bruised-seeming, but you looked twice to see what it was; it brought to mind the reason for her fleeing. Madame Frank didn’t know if this was the first time she had been on a plane. She was born in France to Algerian parents, perhaps had never seen North Africa. Su‐maya Bourad, Suma. She appeared such a model of Islamic decorum, I had to remind myself that what ever her religion, she was also a French girl, educated in dialectics and Descartes, hoping to be a doctor.

“It’s not so common among Algerians, honor killing,” said Madame Frank. “It’s usually the Turks.”

Suma’s story, Madame Frank said, is not unusual among the daughters of immigrant families in Europe, when the old ways cherished by the parents conflict with what Parisian girls come to feel for themselves. For every one who accedes to the wishes of her parents concerning marriage or education, another rebels or—I don’t really know the proportion of the rebels to the dutiful— but Suma was the former. She had embarrassed her family in some way, had believed her brother was going to kill her, and had gone to the shelter.

Apart from chatting with Madame Frank, I read and looked out of the window, but I was conscious of the young woman, who didn’t seem to be doing anything. I would have expected a vibrant, rebellious girl, but she sat quietly the whole way, not reading, her hair covered in a dark blue scarf, eyes lowered, gazing at the seat in front of her. Several times I walked back through the coach section toward the toilets, which took me by her seat. She didn’t give any sign of desperation, though I supposed she must be desperate.

I was glad she had the gumption to escape. The metaphor of flying contains the idea of flight from something, from danger or constraint, and it contains the idea of freedom. I supposed these were the things this trip meant to Suma, the opposite of what it meant to me.

“The brother is a fanatic, he’s watched, the police have had him down for some time,” said Madame Frank.

“It is almost too late to buy in Marrakech now,” she went on, reverting to her favorite subject. “The beautiful old riads are mostly gone, though some remain, for a price. Currently I have a line on an especially good one, in a good location, completely
à rénover, naturellement
… if that should interest you.”

“What will she do in Marrakech? Suma.”

“She will work as an au pair for a very nice English family. They’ll be meeting us, of course. I will present you. The Cotters. ‘Sir and lady’!” She smiled the patronizing smile the French adopt when dealing with English titles and other vestiges of what they consider a backward political system they themselves had had the wisdom to ditch. “Maybe you know them?”

The French also always assume that all Anglo-Saxons know each other. “No,” I said, “I don’t know anyone in Marrakech except my host, Ian Drumm.”

“But I know
him
!” she cried. “He is very known in the community. You must surely come to us during your visit.”

I thanked her. I could see that Madame Frank, in Moroccan real estate, and Suma, positioned in a nice English family, could become useful sources for me; I hoped Suma and I would eventually become friends, and it seemed that Madame Frank and I were friends already.

3

Who stays at home during that month / Should spend it in fasting; But if anyone is ill, / or on a journey, the prescribed period should be made up by days later… and you may be grateful.

—Koran 2:185

“W
hat may I serve you, Miss… Sawyer?” said the flight attendant, glancing at her manifest. But when I asked for a glass of wine, she said they couldn’t serve alcohol during Ramadan. “It is our sacred period, the Muslim month of fasting,” she continued, though I knew what Ramadan was, of course. We were now at the end of September, and Ramadan had just begun. No food or alcohol all day. Could they drink water? I suddenly wasn’t sure, and this made me doubt my general preparation, though I had read works of sociology, slogged through the Koran, and learned the rudiments of the beautiful script.

The flight attendant was serving water, tea, and coffee, what ever the rule. Though most of the people on the plane were Western, drinking coffee and eating pretzels, some were sitting abstemiously. One or two hungry-looking people were standing in line before me waiting for the toilets in business class. Next before me was a beautiful, dark Middle Eastern–looking woman, her huge eyes kohl-lined, her clothes Armani. She took an inordinate amount of time in the
cabine,
and when she came out she was wrapped in a black chador, or abaya, as these garments are called in Morocco, an Islamic shawl over her hair, her body, the lower part of her face. I had heard that the abaya was not worn much in Marrakech, and in fact she was the only woman on the plane dressed in such a way, her black costume contrasting with the pastels and beiges of the Europeans and returning Moroccans, so that she stood out like the wicked godmother at the christening and was a powerful reminder of the strange fate of women in the place I was going.

We were flying a bit lower, so that now the cities of the northern coast were visible on the edge of the sea, arcs of settlement like white rickrack against the turquoise Mediterranean. Then we turned inland, south, toward the desert. We were too high to make out figures, but tiny towers rose here and there out of the chalky landscape. As we came down, the buildings resolved into apricot and beige, more nearly the colors of earth. Now from the sky, you were conscious of more desert lying to the south, the Sahara, a wasteland of hot sand and death, encroaching relentlessly on these human habitations and their precarious water supply.

When we landed, Madame Frank stood up to reach her carry-on, trapping me in my seat, but I could watch Suma follow the other passengers up the aisle. She carried a nice leather purse and one of those Chinese red-and-white‐striped plasticized paper carrier bags. I noted these things, but mostly now that we were here, I had fallen to thinking of Ian and about whether a month or two with him would be wonderful or unwise. Thinking of sleeping with him caused an agreeable stir, but I reminded myself that months of sunshine and what ever you ate or couldn’t drink in Morocco could also become as monotonous as the the limitless Sahara. If things didn’t work out with Ian, my orders were to attach myself to an institution that I would eventually stay on to teach in or run.

There was nothing exotic about the brisk, modern airport except the costumes of the cleaners in their washed-out cotton smocks and backless slippers, in contrast to the smart European clothing of the arriving visitors and the people waiting for them. Otherwise all was potted palms and marble terrazzo, like airports anywhere. I looked beyond the passport line and was surprised that Ian wasn’t among the group of excited locals waving to their families or Europeans waving at their guests. Instead, a man I didn’t recognize, with a pudgy, cheerful face and a day’s beard, wearing khakis and loafers, was holding up a sign that read MISS L. SAWYER. He saw my reaction, concluded I was me, waved from behind the barrier, and tapped his own chest to show he was meant for me.

I looked around for Ian again and couldn’t see him. Though my tendency is to imagine that everything is okay, my training, and perhaps a trace of the slight paranoia that renders you suitable (as ascertained by batteries of standardized tests) for this line of work, spun scary explanations through my mind: Maybe this was Ian’s driver, but he could be a kidnapper, an agent, the bearer of bad news. What should I say to him? How to get his credentials? Asking for a note from Ian was too dramatic, would suggest I had some reason to be fearful. Yet to go with some stranger would be an elementary mistake. I could refuse to go with him, I could say I preferred a taxi.

And, after all, how could Ian fail to come for me? What did this foretell? Indifference? Regret, perhaps? Yet probably neither—for him, Morocco was a normal place, with functioning taxis, well within the capabilities of a grown woman to negotiate; he would not think of kidnapping or robbery or indifference. This flood of thoughts occurred more or less simultaneously; meantime I smiled to acknowledge that I was L. Sawyer.

I found a cart and went to pick up my bags. The girl Suma had crowded close to the luggage carousel too. I held her eye for a brief instant and we exchanged the impersonal smiles of people who catch each other looking. Was there something uncertain and imploring about her glance? No lurking male relatives menaced her.

Madame Frank and Suma piled a suitcase and a box on a cart and began to push it toward the exits, it seemed without talking much to each other, but smiling, like two people of goodwill who didn’t speak a common language. Madame Frank pushed the cart, and Suma walked behind her. I assumed I was seeing her off safely into her new life. My bags were the last, as usual, or so it always seems to me, and then I went past the barrier to where the stranger waited.

“Miss Sawyer? I thought it was you. Tom Drill. I’m supposed to take you to Ian’s. He had to wait for his tree man,” he said. “I said as I was coming to the airport anyhow… are these your bags?”

Obviously they were. I still hadn’t decided whether to act on my mistrustful apprehensiveness. He seemed all right, American, familiar, but I couldn’t judge the local context, the significance of his unshaven beard and rumpled khakis. And all the tales of kidnapped agents or businessmen began like this, at the airport, with an unfamiliar emissary saying someone had sent them. He’s just near here, he wants me to bring you to him, he’s waiting, was delayed.

So far, there hadn’t been kidnappings in Morocco. But there hadn’t been any in Beirut, in Peshawar, Cairo, or Athens, until the first one. Terry Anderson. Daniel Pearl. Thus did my inner discussion go. But if you make a fuss, express hesitation, they will see you have reasons, reasons an uncomplicated girlfriend ought not to have.

It weighed with me that this guy was American, but I dawdled, hoping Ian would appear, hoping Madame Frank would present me to Suma. They were standing in the lobby, maybe waiting for their own driver. As I watched, a tall woman wearing a yellow blouse walked up to Suma, smiling, welcoming, and they shook hands. A large, handsome woman around sixty, rather glamorous in the style of Mrs. Thatcher, with wavy whitish-blonde hair and a Thatcherian purse. Before I could catch Madame Frank’s attention, Tom Drill greeted the woman in the yellow blouse, “
Ciao,
Marina.” This was sort of a relief, that he was known to people.

Marina’s English ness was evident from her size and clothes, and no mistaking the plummy upper-class tones. While they chatted, I smiled again at Suma and said
bonjour
. “
Bonjour,
madame,” she said. Yes, it was her first time in Morocco; yes, she was happy to be here. She would be studying and working.

“Suma will be staying with us,” said Marina, or “Lady Cotter,” in the terms of Tom’s introduction. It was clear she and Madame Frank hadn’t met before, but now they acknowledged each other enthusiastically, and Marina Cotter thanked her for the help of her group.

As we parted, Madame Frank asked me again what my last name was. “Sawyer,” I said. “I’ll be staying at Ian Drumm’s.”

“Yes, Lulu’s here to visit Ian Drumm,” Tom told Marina. Oh, how nice. Did their eyebrows raise slightly, did little smiles play across their lips?

“Yes, a charming man!” said Madame Frank. “I will invite you. I am always trying to get him to sell me his big Palmeraie tract. Maybe you will intercede for me.
Au revoir! À bientôt! À bientôt!
”

B
y now, it was starting to feel to me slightly too propitious that I should so neatly be furnished with all this local information; my arrival was sort of front-loaded with background facts, like the beginning of a play, and Tom Drill later gave me even more—that Sir Neil and Lady Cotter had a showplace riad, that there were a ton of Brits in Marrakech, that Marina Cotter was his own best pal, that she had recently been struck with tragedy: She had been saddled with her grandchildren after a daughter-in-law had died in Nepal. Their son, the father of the children, was in the military somewhere in Africa and couldn’t take care of them. The little granddaughter played with Tom’s daughter, Amelie, sometimes. Suma would be helping Lady Cotter. The Cotters thus had the satisfaction of rescuing a girl and getting a babysitter into the bargain.

Lady Cotter had given Madame Frank and me a knowing, complicit smile; we were all good people cooperating to help a girl threatened by violence. “And we’ll be seeing a lot of you—we adore Ian, he is one of Neil’s oldest friends, well, since he was a boy, Ian, I mean. Neil and Ian’s father were friends in the Second War.…” She talked on.

Ian. In general I’m not attracted to Englishmen—too pale and pink, usually, and they smoke and drink too much. Ian didn’t have these faults, but now, not coming to the airport was a fault.