Lulu in Marrakech (21 page)

34

One paradox of intelligence… is a further inherent problem in intelligence calculations. Certain military operations seem too risky to be taken seriously; yet precisely because of the tendency to discount extraordinarily high-risk operations as impossible, the risk involved is actually minimal.

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

O
n Monday afternoon, Posy and I walked over to the Al‐Sayad compound to tell Suma about our success in organizing the virginity test. Ian’s maid Miryam, who was in Posy’s confidence, had found a special doctor. “Miryam says, ‘Guaranteed results,’ ” Posy said. “Meaning, presumably, he finds what you hope he’ll find.” We wondered if it would be expensive and whether we should offer to pay.

“The brother should pay if it’s so important to him,” Posy said, “but of course we’ll pay. I wonder if she is a virgin?”

“Growing up in France? I can’t guess. Amid obviously thinks not.”

We had discussed virginity tests with Gazi. “Girls are mortally afraid of them. They faint and scream with pain,” she said.

“Why pain?” Posy had asked. “Are Muslim girls anatomically different from us?” Gazi had peered at her, as if unsure whether she was being made fun of.

“Not at all,” she said.

“Way more hung up about it,” I said.

Gazi said, “I’m not sure I understand that expression.”

“It’s so disgusting,” said Posy again now as she lumbered along. “I just couldn’t wait to not be a virgin, just to put it behind me, could you?” Not really. It had never been a focus of my thoughts, and not being one had not changed the essential me. But for girls like Suma, their lives were shadowed before and after the big event by the irrevocable, desperate step they were taking, and God knew what psychological damage was foisted on them by all these layers of rather dirty beliefs, shared by their mothers, brothers, fathers, friends. How could they ever shake this dirtiness off? All the smug disciples of cheerful, positive sexuality smirked with us from our corner, from D. H. Lawrence to the manuals we were given in seventh grade sex‐ education class, preaching its beauty and naturalness, while scraggly imams thundered at the poor Muslim girls about its forbidden nature and their mothers examined their underwear.

“Have you ever noticed, in the Koran, if you substitute the word ‘cow’ for the word ‘woman,’ it still makes perfect sense? ‘Beat them, and then if they mind you, leave them alone,’ things like that,” Posy said.

I was having trouble walking as slowly as Posy these days. My steps would run ahead; I would have to slow and wait for her. She was aware of this and cannot have been unaware of herself as an example of the pitfalls of nonvirginity. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just as big as a cow. I can hardly put on my shoes.”

When we drew nigh the Al‐Sayads’, their gatekeeper, seeing us, vanished inside, then came back out and opened the driveway gate, although we were on foot and could have gone through the door at the side. We had come at Khaled’s bath time, but I wasn’t committed in my heart to trying to get the key; I just planned to see how it went.

Suma was waiting in the hall; perhaps she had risen to the post of official hostess in Gazi’s absence. She asked us in, not into the living room, or wherever the center of the house hold was, but into a room off the hall we had seen before. I tried to review the floor plan Gazi had drawn me, but it was turned around, and I had to re orient it in my mind. Either Gazi had drawn it wrong on purpose or had misremembered; it was just backward. If we’d come in the main entrance, then the kitchens were off to the left of this office, not the right, the bedrooms behind the court to the right, not the left, and so on. I didn’t think Gazi would mislead me, it was too important to her, but it was hard to reverse the plan in my mind.

Posy began telling Suma about Miryam’s efforts and the doctor and so on. “You don’t seem thrilled,” she said, her French less fluent than mine but not bad. “Thrilled…”

“Bouleversée,”
Suma said. “
Non. Oui,
I’m insulted my family would think I’m so dumb that I would have a romance and throw away everything. I would not. I have my plans. But I do think it’s unfair that Muslim girls are held to standards other girls aren’t.
Mais c’est comme ça
. We are the winners too, to have our ideals and our faith.” She went on in this vein, the great unfairness of it, but it was clear that Suma thought there was something to virginity all the same, some idea of its sanctity that to us was just an excuse to put conditions on womens’ lives and control them.

“Men are privileged in all religions and women inferior, it is the same in all,” Suma said. “They have twisted the Koran to mean things it doesn’t really say.”

“One thing,” said Posy. “Supposing—even allowing that you aren’t worried about what the doctor will say…” I could see she was searching for a tactful way of saying this. “How do you know that you have a, well, an intact membrane? Anything can pop it, horse back riding, bikes, Tampax. Some people don’t have them in the first place?”

“ ‘Sumaya, don’t lose your
trésor,
’ ” Suma said in her mother’s voice.

“It’s nothing to regret. There’s a first time for every single thing in life,” I said, “and usually each new thing improves you.” I was thinking of the first time I drove a car or shot a gun.

“My first brain surgery,” said Posy. “My first case of botulism.”

“But you know what I mean.”

“Well, when do I do it?” Suma asked. “I’m perfectly aware of what’s involved, it’s only a matter of a piece of paper acceptable to my parents, if that’s what it will take. Before, I said no, but…”

“I don’t think you should do it,” said Posy suddenly. “Sod them, it’s so demeaning.”

“May I use the
toilette
?” I asked, jumping up. She would probably send me to the powder room along the hall to the left. That would be near the living room, and it would be necessary to go out into the courtyard and across it to the first set of French doors, which we could actually see from the room where we were sitting, but Suma not from where she sat with her back to it. She rose and led me to the door.

“The second door right there.”

This caper seemed immensely foolhardy and risky, though nothing was really at stake, nothing fatal anyway. I was wearing a dark dress and in my bag had a black headscarf, in case anyone glancing out saw me. I put it on in the bathroom and tucked in my bright hair. I have the theory that women are somewhat invisible, especially in a house hold where there are lots of maids and visitors.

Also in my bag was a pat of dental wax, melted down from the wax pencils in my kit of stuff. On the dresser would be a bunch of keys; Allah was going to help me know which one was the key to the safe, I was going to take an impression of it, and it would only take a few seconds. Posy met my eyes, so I knew she would keep talking, discussing Suma’s fate with her and organizing how we’d have to send a car from our house so no one at the Al‐Sayads’ would know where she was going.

I scuttled across the courtyard, a distance of maybe forty feet, and opened the French door I thought would lead to Khaled’s room and did lead into a small foyer with an easy chair and magazines, like a shrink’s waiting room, with a door at either end. If the floor plan was truly reversed, the left-hand one would be the bedroom. I hesitated before opening that door, listening, and heard nothing. I prayed the door wouldn’t squeak. If someone was inside I’d say “sorry” boldly and walk away.

No one was inside. It was dim, dark, the shutters closed, in the desert way I can’t get used to. The bed, grandiose headboard, neatly made with a leopard‐printed velvet spread; two doors, behind one of which, presumably, was Khaled in his bath. I thought I dimly heard splashing. The dresser sat between the two doors, so that I’d have to steal across the room and not rattle the keys, if they were there.

I was afraid, though I saw that my physical manifestations of fear—pounding heart and damp hands—were out of proportion to the actual danger. Khaled was not a killer, presumably, and I had plausible explanations at the ready. It was more that I saw that I wasn’t going to be good at this kind of illegal, risky activity in my chosen profession. It was too late for me, I lacked the anarchic core, some fuck-it mentality that Taft had; I was too goody-two-shoes. But maybe you improved, got used to crime the way I’d gotten used to being Lulu Sawyer.

The keys lay with coins and a watch on the dresser. I got out my patty of wax and studied the keys without touching them, trying to decide which one went with the safe. There was one obvious choice, thin and oddly shaped, among normal-looking car and house key shapes. Next, how to pick up this bunch of keys without jingling them? The stillness was suffocating, and now there wasn’t even splashing from the bathroom, though at one moment someone might have hummed. In the manner of playing pickup sticks I moved the keys one by one around their ring to isolate the right one, then immobilized the others with one hand and lifted the bunch. It was necessary to take the target key off the ring; it couldn’t lie flat enough on the mold because of the ring itself.

I had to decide whether it would be better to risk the noise or to take the whole bunch outside. I risked the noise, because I couldn’t have stood to come back in. It was the wrong choice, as it turned out, but in the event, I could almost silently fiddle the key ring open. Then it was only the work of a few seconds to get a pretty good impression—as nearly as I could tell in the dim light—put the key back, and get out of there, not breathing for so long I thought I might pass out. Just as my fingers were releasing the keys, there was a noise, and Khaled was standing before me, towelless, naked as the moon.

We both screamed in unison; I remember only his look of horror.

I’m sure mine was the same. I fled out the door and across the courtyard; the image of his pale body in the dark room was etched on my retina. He would have to put his clothes on to pursue me, which gave me time to rejoin Posy and Suma, saying, “Oh my God, I went in the wrong room.” Maybe that’s what he thought too. Maybe he didn’t recognize me in the black scarf. Why would he imagine it was me? We could hear him bellowing something in the courtyard.

Posy was already standing, ready to leave. I wondered how long I’d been gone; it had been like being underwater, seemingly forever, but was perhaps only a couple of minutes. My chest hurt now. “Let’s go,” she said.

“Tomorrow we’ll come for you in the car at ten,” I said to Suma, tense, waiting for Khaled to burst in wearing some provisional clothes, damp and furious.

“It’s against my principles,” Suma grumbled, “but I can’t stay in Morocco,
c’est certain,
so, what ever it takes.” Her sigh expressed the fatigue perhaps felt by all people torn between two cultures; for her, it was exhausting and bewildering to be Muslim and French—I would have thought to be anything and French—having to uphold some standard of civilization all the time.

Khaled didn’t come out of his room.

I
didn’t think I could ask Taft to help with making the key; I couldn’t see where he would get it done quickly. I knew of no company resources in town, so he would have to drive it to Rabat, and it would probably be me appointed to do the drive. Anyway I thought I could trust the colonel, who most obligingly took the envelope containing the mold, no questions asked except one, which I was prepared for.

So when the colonel said, “I hear you have some visiting relatives,”

I didn’t panic. Since Taft had left such decisions to me, and I thought it highly likely the colonel knew Taft was in town anyway, I decided I could tell him, both to prove my good faith and to answer the question in my own mind about what game the colonel was playing. I thought we were unlikely to lose Amid now, as Taft and the others had him in constant view and the pickup—extraction, rendition, whatever we were calling it—was so soon. I couldn’t help but think about Amid, being delivered by us into a limbo of torture and confinement. But now was no time for compunctions, and I didn’t have any really—I believe in what we’re doing and that people shouldn’t blow each other up or murder their sisters. I pitied him all the same; a thin person, with dark eyes I could imagine staring hollowly from a cell, his ribs sticking out, like a starvation victim in a Goya.

“Or so I’m told,” the colonel said cheerfully. “What will they be doing during their visit?”

I decided to be truthful. “It has to do with Suma Bourad’s brother. I was hoping you could tell me why he’s of interest.”

“
Moi,
no, I was hoping you’d have some idea.” He shrugged. “All we can say is that there appears to be no connection to the Casablanca bombings. That’s what would interest us. He has a French passport, he’s here as an ordinary French tourist. We welcome French tourists here.”

That’s as much as I learned: Amid had no connection to the bombings in Casablanca. Still, it was revealing that, of all arriving French tourists, Colonel Barka knew about Suma’s brother, which meant either that he was visible in some connection other than his connection to Suma or that the colonel was aware of all French tourists, which seemed less likely. I was glad I’d been candid with him, augmenting my credentials as an ally and friend.