The Caliph's House (13 page)

“Has there been another accident?”

“No, no, not an accident.”

“Thank God for that. Then what is it?”

“Follow me.”

We walked across the terrace and into the courtyard garden. Hamza extended an arm, jabbed his index finger to the top of the great palm tree.

“See,” he said.

I didn't see anything abnormal. “It looks fine to me.”

Hamza and Osman clapped their hands to their faces. “What do you mean?” they said at once.

“Well, I can't see anything strange.”

Osman prodded a finger at the tree. “Up there!” he said.

I looked up, peering into the afternoon light. I squinted, tilted my head. Squinted again. Then, gradually, I saw what they were pointing to. Hanging on a string by the cluster of dates was a small, lifeless, ratlike creature.

“It's a hedgehog,” said Osman.

“What's it doing up there?”

Hamza ushered me from the courtyard, across the verandah, and out of the house. He led me through the shantytown, where the fanatics' trailer was still parked, and down the hill toward the ocean. I asked again and again where he was taking me. He didn't reply, except to say that we needed a safe place to talk.

“Isn't the house safe?” I asked.

An expression of absolute fear swept across Hamza's face. His tanned complexion seemed to turn ivory with fright. “No,” he said once, and then again. “No, Monsieur Tahir, it is not safe.”

At the end of the main road, Hamza crossed the Corniche and led the way down over the fence to the beach. Bitter winter waves were breaking on the sand. The guardian stopped and stared me in the eye.

“There is bad news,” he said.

“Is it with the workmen? That they left?”

Hamza frowned. “No, no, not with the workers,” he said. “Something far more grave. Someone is trying to hurt you.”

“Qandisha and the Jinns?”

The guardian glanced down at his feet. “I will tell you,” he said quietly.

We sat down on the sand and Hamza stared out at the waves.

“Once there was a man who fell in love with the wife of another man,” he said without looking at me. “He would meet her secretly under a palm tree on the first night of each month. He would give her little gifts—a rose, a pastry, something like that. The woman fell in love with the man and they ran away together. The husband of the woman swore that he would kill them both. His family had been dishonored. He hunted them for weeks, then months, and years.”

Hamza drew a square in the sand with his finger.

“When he eventually found them,” he said, “they were living in a house near the ocean. They had a child, and were happy. The woman's husband broke down the door. He was about to kill the couple when something stopped him. He turned around, went back to his own house, and killed himself.”

I wondered what the story had to do with the dead hedgehog.

“There was something that neither man knew about the woman,” Hamza said.

“What?”

“That she was a Jinn, and her name was Qandisha.”

“Qandisha's a female Jinn?”

“Yes.”

I asked where the hedgehog fitted in.

“It's a sign,” he said. “A sign that Qandisha doesn't like people living in her house.”

“Well, what should I do?”

Hamza stared out at the water. He opened his mouth but no words came out. I repeated my question.

“Tell me, what should I do?”

“You should take your family, leave Dar Khalifa, and never come back.”

         

I FOUND MYSELF TRAPPED
in an awkward position. On my assistant's orders I had fired my workforce, and lost a fortune in the process, with little hope of recovering any of the money. I had a gangster for a neighbor, a house marooned in a shantytown with no title deeds, and the weather was getting bad. And I was now being told that I should abandon the house because an invisible spirit was angry at us living there.

The next day, I asked Kamal for his opinion. He was quite certain the dead hedgehog and tales of Qandisha were part of an elaborate ruse to scare us away.

“Do you think the guardians were trying to take the house?” I asked.

Kamal pondered the question for a while.

“It's not the guardians,” he said at length. “Someone else wants the house, not them.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Again Kamal felt silent.

“Because,” he said at last, “Dar Khalifa means too much to them.”

         

IN THE SHANTYTOWN, THE
imam was looking worried. As I walked past the mosque he smiled fretfully, but for once, he didn't ask me for money. It was then I realized something was very wrong. There was a tension in the alleyways and in the small shops that faced out onto the main track. I could feel it. Everyone could.

At dusk on the second day after its arrival, the windows of the white trailer flapped down. The two bearded men were sitting primly in the window on stools. They had donned white crocheted skullcaps and were wearing matching blue sweaters over their robes. Anyone who walked past the trailer seemed to do so at speed, as if the bearded men were waiting to reach out, grab them, and slit their throats.

“The bombers were men like that,” Osman whispered to me that night. “Having them here doesn't do us any good. If the government sees them, they'll tear down our houses. They'll say that we support the radicals.”

“Why don't you all chase them away? This is your bidonville, not theirs.”

Osman's ready smile froze, then became a scowl. “If we throw them out,” he said, “they'll burn our houses down.”

         

RAMADAN CONTINUED. AS IT
did so, the façade—that everyone was enjoying the strict routine of fasting—wore thinner and thinner still. Each day, Kamal would meet me at the house later than the day before, until one day he didn't turn up at all. I was worried. I thought he might have been killed on his morning adrenaline run or knocked down by a nicotine-starved driver running amok.

By late afternoon the streets of Casablanca were a terrifying place. Cars swerved about even more randomly than normal, veering from one lane to the next, as if the drivers didn't care whether they collided or not. Everyone had their windows open. Not for air, but so that they could yell abuse at anyone they passed. By five o'clock, Boulevard d'Anfa, a main thoroughfare, was a carnage of crashes, scrapes, and feuding motorists.

Another day slipped by, and still no sign of Kamal. I called his cell phone, but it was switched off. So I griped to Rachana, then ranted with anger, asking how anyone could be so irresponsible. Two more days passed, and with each, my fury mounted even more.

By the fourth day I had decided to fire Kamal, if I ever saw him again. There was no question about it. I lined up the guardians and told them of my decision. They were delighted. Hamza said Kamal was nothing but trouble, that he was trying to get his hands on my money. The Bear broke with formality and slapped me on the back. Cackling to himself, he made for the stables to celebrate with the others.

At seven that evening, I received a text message on my cell phone. It read: “Come to big police station on Zerktouni Blvd. Now.” I ran through the shantytown, my heart pumping, and took a taxi into the center of town. A policeman shooed me away from the gates of the precinct. He told me to wait at the corner.

I waited and waited. Then, at nine-fifteen, Kamal appeared. He was dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing five days before. His head was low, his confidence broken.

“Where have you been?”

“In jail,” he said.

N
INE

A one-eyed man is king in the land of the blind.

THE WORST THING ABOUT RAMADAN WERE
the thieves. They were everywhere. You couldn't leave anything unattended for a minute without having it stolen. Thieves preyed on honest folk, whose hunger made them easy targets. Morocco is usually a safe country with very little crime. But as soon as the holy month arrived, everyone we met cautioned us to lock up or tie down anything we owned. We scoffed at their warnings. By the second week of Ramadan, my wallet was gone; so was Rachana's, as well as Ariane's schoolbag, my new camera, and even our groceries. The local newspapers were packed with tales of daring theft—of cars and donkeys; briefcases filled with cash; jewelry, furniture, and even household pets.

The holy month was supposed to be a time of pious reflection. But, like Christmas in the West, it was tinged by commercialization. Every evening families spent fortunes on providing delicacies for
iftour,
the breaking of the fast. There were trays of macaroons and a hundred varieties of biscuit, pastries, and sweetmeats, and dates from oases in the south, juicy figs from the mountains, honeydew melons, fresh yogurt, and plums.

Each evening as the day's fast was broken by the muezzin, the guardians would nibble a handful of dates, sip a little milk, and rush out on patrol. For them, it wasn't a time for gorging oneself on food; rather, it was the time to go hunting—for thieves.

“They come while people are eating iftour,” said the Bear.

“Yes, and they creep about like foxes,” Osman said.

“Like young, cunning foxes,” Hamza added.

“What would you do if you caught one?”

The three guardians looked at each other furtively, then at me. Then they guffawed.

“We would trap him in a corner and throw stones at him,” said Hamza. “Then we would beat him with long sticks, until he cried out like a woman.”

“Would you give him to the police?”

The guardians scoffed at the suggestion.

“That would be no fun,” said the Bear, grinning.

         

KAMAL DIDN
'
T SAY A
word until after he had eaten his way through an entire dish of couscous piled high with pumpkin, potatoes, and succulent lamb. He wasn't his usual self. For the first time, he was meek.

“What happened?”

“It was bad,” he said, picking at the lamb's shoulder bone. “Very bad.”

“Did you steal something?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

He leaned back and lit a cigarette. “I was at a government office checking some papers,” he said, “and the clerk insulted me. It's Ramadan and his temper cracked. He called me the son of a noseless whore!”

Kamal paused to exhale.

“No one calls my mother a noseless whore,” he said.

“What did you do?”

“I saw a big metal vase on a shelf. I picked it up and hit him with it in the face.”

         

IT WAS TWO DAYS
before Kamal was back to normal, although there was no such thing as normal in Ramadan. His eyes were circled by black rings, his complexion pasty and white. He said the clerk had dropped charges against him. They had come to an understanding of some kind. It was good news. But there was better news to follow. The vulture had located an engine. Kamal claimed it was pristine as the day it was built and had been ripped out from a freshly injured Korean-made Jeep.

“What luck that an identical car to yours crashed just when we needed it to.”

It sounded too good to be true.

“Are you sure the car wasn't hunted down on my behalf?”

Kamal looked at the floor timidly. “Don't ask me that question,” he said. “You know it's Ramadan and I cannot tell a lie.”

         

I HAD BEEN SO
ready to fire Kamal, but having him back meant we could start solving problems once again. I scribbled down a new list of things to do. The first was to find a net to cover the swimming pool. A few weeks before, Zohra had managed to get a quote from the leading pool company in Casablanca. Their price was close to three thousand dollars. Kamal said he could get a net made for almost nothing. He asked for the second problem.

“The staircase is a death trap,” I said. “It's got no banisters. We need a mason to build some, and a carpenter, too.”

Next morning, Kamal arrived at Dar Khalifa with two plump men carrying two plump sacks. They looked like brothers and were wearing thick rubber aprons and gumboots, the kind worn by fishermen. Kamal led them to the swimming pool and motioned to it. He took time to explain something carefully in Arabic. The men nodded, opened their sacks, and dumped out two heaps of brown nylon cord as thick as a child's finger. They folded the sacks and sat on them, took a handful of cord, and started to knit.

A few minutes later, there was a scratch at the front door. Hamza hurried over. In the frame was standing a tall, thickset man with rounded shoulders and a wild growth of beard. He looked like a hit man. I assumed he was in the employ of the shantytown's gangster.

“I think he's got the wrong house,” I said.

“No, no,” Kamal said, greeting the man, “he's the mason.”

“What about a carpenter? We need one to make doors and windows for our bedroom.”

The winter rains had transformed the windowless hulk of a room into a lake complete with a family of ducks.

“In Morocco, carpenters are all drug addicts,” said Kamal.

“That's a sweeping generalization.”

“It's not. They are bad men—all of them.”

“There must be one honest carpenter. I'm sure we can find him if we look very hard.”

Kamal suddenly tapped a finger to his temple. “Of course,” he said. “There is one.”

         

THE FISHERMEN KNITTED AND
knitted, and as they did so, a great brown blanket of net billowed out over the garden. They claimed there was no finer net in all Casablanca, that it was strong enough to catch a whale.

“I don't want it to catch a whale,” I said.

The plump fishermen seemed displeased for a moment. They glanced at each other, and one of them said, “This net has
baraka.
It can protect life as well as taking it.”

By the afternoon of the next day, they had knitted a net thirty feet long. They were halfway done, their nimble fingers knotting the nylon cord at an astonishing speed. I was admiring their work when Kamal rolled up in my Jeep. The vulture's engine had been fitted.

Wasting no time, we trundled through the shantytown and out to the open road, in search of the clean-living carpenter. Kamal recounted his exploits in America as we drove. Nothing gave him more pleasure than talking of the times he had spent in the bosom of Southern hospitality. He said that when he first got to Atlanta, he went to a supermarket and fell backward at seeing such packed shelves.

“It was like a dream. There was such wealth. Such glamour.”

“Glamour? In a supermarket?”

“Yes!” said Kamal in an excited tone. “I met my first American love right then, right on that first day.”

“Where?”

“In Safeway, at the frozen peas.”

The Jeep rattled southward out of Casablanca toward Marrakech. The villas were replaced by shantytowns, and then by open fields. Farmers were tending their crops of onions, melons, and maize. I asked Kamal about the girl.

“She was beautiful,” he said, a hint of lost passion in his voice. “Her skin was the color of walnuts, her eyes green, like apples hanging in an orchard's shade. We stood there, staring at each other at the refrigerator filled with frozen peas. It was love.”

I burst out laughing.

“You don't believe me,” Kamal said desolately. “But it's true. We had so much in common. She gave me her picture. I pressed it to my heart. By the time I left Safeway, we were engaged.”

“That's crazy!”

“What's crazy about it? It was love.”

“Did you marry her?”

Kamal glowered at the road. “Allah did not want it,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I left her phone number in my jeans when I went to the laundrette. It was washed clean away.”

Kamal eased the car into fourth gear.

“There was only one thing to do,” he said.

“What was that?”

“I went back to Safeway and waited. I waited and waited, but she never came back.”

“How long did you wait?”

“For a week.”

“You wasted a week waiting for a girl you'd met for a few minutes at the frozen peas?”

Kamal sniffed, as if he felt genuine pain at the loss. “You don't understand,” he said. “We were engaged.”

         

THE CARPENTER
'
S WORKSHOP WAS
set off the road, opposite Casablanca's main garbage dump. Refuse trucks from across the city would end up there day and night. A pack of scrawny dogs were picking their way through the trash.

The workshop was a one-room shed with a wooden roof. There was nothing remarkable about it. A man inside had heard the car approaching. He was aged and crooked, like a warped old post of pine. His head was completely bald, his eyes small, as if they had been shrunk in some way by time. As we neared him, he squinted at us through a large magnifying lens held in his left hand.

When he saw Kamal, the crooked man almost jumped for joy. He let the lens fall on its cord around his neck, and he staggered forward to press his old lips to Kamal's cheeks.

An hour of inquiries slipped by. The carpenter asked after each member of Kamal's family. He knew them all—brothers, cousins and aunts, nephews, nieces, uncles, and grandparents. The name of each one was spoken, praised, and blessed. He begged our forgiveness.

Were it not Ramadan, he said, he would have served us a banquet. Next time, there would be a couscous cooked with raisins and tender meat, trays of pastries flavored with orange blossom, and gallons of sweet mint tea.

“Next time,
inshallah,
if God wills it,” I said.

After two hours, we still hadn't brought up the subject of work. I nudged Kamal.

“The old generation can't be hurried,” he whispered.

Another half hour elapsed. I couldn't stand waiting any longer, especially because the wind had changed and we were all choking on the air gusting off the garbage mountain. At last, when every relative living and dead had been praised once and praised again, the old carpenter fell silent. He prayed for a few moments, his hands cupped on his lap.

Kamal explained that we had a favor to ask him. We needed a set of windows and a door to be made. The carpenter leapt to his feet. Pulling the magnifying glass up to his eye, he moved in close to me, the lens a window between us.

“I will do the finest work that has ever been made!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “The wood will be fragrant and strong. I will sculpt it, lovingly, caressing it with my fingers.”

“That sounds very good,” I said. “Just what we need.”

The dimensions were scratched down on a splinter of pine. And, after more prolonged formalities, we made our escape. On the way back, I asked Kamal how he had come to know the carpenter. He said he would show me. We drove back past the open fields and the shantytowns, past the villas and the office blocks, into the center of Casablanca.

Kamal stopped the car outside an apartment building. On the ground floor was a
hammam,
a Turkish-style steam bath, with an entrance for men and another for women.

“I live in this building,” he said, “and my family own the hammam.”

He opened a steel door on the street level and led the way into a dark basement. When my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, I made out someone crouching against one wall, near a boiler. He was completely bald and had no eyebrows. Kamal called out. The figure opened a hatch on the side of the boiler and tossed a handful of something into the inferno.