The Caliph's House (27 page)

I took out a hundred-dirham bill and rustled it in my hand like a dry leaf. He snatched the note and clapped his hands. The exorcists staggered to their feet. The pimp shouted some words in Arabic.

Then the exorcism began.

         

THE PIMP ADJUSTED HIS
gold lamé turban and ordered Hamza to open every door and window in the house as wide as he could. Hamza called Osman and told him to get on with it. Osman called the Bear and passed the command on. He ordered the gardener to do the job. As lowest in the pecking order, he had no choice. The gardener sauntered away while the guardians clustered around the exorcists.

“It's going to start,” said Osman very softly.

Before the exorcism could get under way, the Aissawa pulled on their white cotton jelabas and crept around the house. They spread out into groups of three or four, wandering through the rooms on tiptoes. They took a moment to stand in every corner, before moving on diagonally to the next.

“What are they doing?”

“They're searching for the heart of the house,” said Kamal.

“How do you know that?”

Kamal glanced away. “Everyone knows,” he said.

It took more than an hour to locate the heart of the Caliph's House. I would have thought it was in the garden courtyard, near the room the guardians had always kept locked. But I would have been wrong. The exorcists agreed unanimously that Dar Khalifa's heart was in the middle of another courtyard, the one outside the kitchen.

The pimp rummaged in his sack and fished out a handful of cheap tallow candles. He passed them to the oldest exorcist, a man who looked as if he was about to drop dead. He kissed them before handing them out to his brothers. The candles were lit and placed in the corners of the yard. Their long wicks flickered in the darkness. A rough square stone was carried in and positioned at the center of the courtyard beside a drain hole. The yard had become a temple, and the stone its altar.

One of the exorcists murmured something to the others. A few minutes passed, and I heard Ariane screaming hysterically on the lawn. I rushed out. Her fingers were knitted together around the neck of the goat. A pair of the Aissawa were trying to wrestle the animal away.

“You have to let them take it,” I said to her.

Ariane was in tears. “Where are they taking my goat?” she cried.

It was a difficult moment, one we never would have shared had we remained at the apartment in London. We were taking part in a ceremony, the kind that our ancient ancestors would have known well. But how could a small child understand it? How could any of us understand it? A perfectly healthy animal slaughtered to please an invisible force that probably didn't exist. I wanted to try to explain it all to Ariane. I wanted to tell her that the sacrifice said much about ourselves, and what we felt we must do to believe. But I could not explain.

“Where are they taking my goat?” she said again.

I wiped away her tears.

“To a better place,” I said.

         

IN THE COURTYARD A
cooking pot had been filled with milk. One of the Aissawa was stirring it. His eyes were closed, as if he was in a trance. He was moaning incantations. The reluctant goat was dragged into the house by the horns. It took three of the exorcists to get it to the makeshift altar. The creature bleated furiously at first, but then fear took over and it fell very silent. It seemed to know that something of great consequence was about to take place.

A spoon was dipped into the milk and held to my lips. I slurped it down. It tasted of stale tobacco. The same spoon was offered to everyone—to the two dozen Aissawa, to the guardians and the gardener, to the maid, the nanny, and the cook. Then came the turn of my wife and the children. Rachana refused to let Timur drink from the spoon.

“He's too young,” she said. “He could catch a disease.”

I opened his mouth and dripped a few drops of the white liquid into it.

“A ceremony's no time to think about cleanliness,” I said.

“You're beginning to believe in all this, aren't you?” Rachana said sullenly.

I was about to deny it. But something held me back. She was quite right. I was being drawn in. There was something powerful, something irresistible about it. Ceremonies appeal to our primitive mind. I didn't know why, but I couldn't help becoming involved. I found myself believing there was a real purpose to the ritual, that I was helping in some way.

When the milk had been consumed, a tambour was struck hard and slow, like a death knell. Its rhythm gave a framework to what was about to take place.
Boom, boom, boom.
The goat's legs were trussed up.
Boom, boom, boom.
The knives were taken out.
Boom, boom, boom
. They were scraped against each other.
Boom, boom, boom
. The chief exorcist stepped up to the altar.
Boom, boom, boom
. He rolled up his sleeves.

“Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim,”
he declared. “In the name of God, almighty, the merciful.”

Boom, boom, boom
. There was a glint of steel in the moonlight.
Boom, boom, boom
. Then silence. The animal kicked, and a pool of dark, oily blood seeped out over the terracotta tiles.
Boom, boom, boom,
went the tambour.

“Now it has begun,” said Kamal.

The shrill scream of a
nafir,
a seven-foot horn, rang through the house. The oldest exorcist hacked off the goat's head, bent down, and sucked the wound with his mouth. Then three others stepped forward, touched the fresh blood to their lips, savoring it, before hanging the carcass in the middle of the yard. Blood rained down, and was collected in a used paint can. The old exorcist took the long knives and skinned the animal.

He slashed the abdomen open first and inspected the entrails with his hands. They glistened like jewels in candlelight. It was an appalling yet very beautiful sight. Then the exorcist chopped out what looked like a kidney and swallowed it whole. After that, he excised a much smaller morsel and passed it to one of his fraternity, who nailed it up on the far wall of the yard.

“What's that?”

“The gallbladder,” said Kamal.

“Why?”

“It will protect the house.”

The trumpets resounded, echoing through the salons like harbingers of death. And the exorcists disappeared. I wondered if they had already finished their work. The pimp slunk over and slapped me on the back. I was going to ask if he was finished. But before I could, they reappeared, one at a time.

They were dressed in robes the color of wheat, over which they wore the traditional red cloaks of the Atlas, interwoven with zigzag lines. Their heads were crowned with gold and orange turbans, and their feet were bare. Each one carried an instrument—goatskin tambourines called
bendir,
clay drums known as
tbilat,
piercing woodwind pipes called
ghaytah,
and
garagab,
outsized iron castanets. They filed back into the courtyard, where they paid homage to the dismembered goat. It was impossible not to be affected by the noise. Just as sacrifice appeals to something primitive inside us all, so did the noise of their instruments. The music, if you could call it that, created a deafening wall of sound. Kamal, the guardians, and I watched as the Aissawa set fire to a bunch of poplar leaves, blew out the flames, and toured the house with the smoke.

In each room, they performed the same ritual, spraying the corners with milk, salt, and blood. They danced back and forth, rustling the bouquet of smoking leaves as they chanted a solemn mantra.

The pimp collapsed into a wicker chair on the verandah and rolled a hashish cigarette. I went up to ask him what it all meant. He waved me away.

“Sometimes it is better not to speak,” he said, taking a long, satisfying drag on the joint.

I went to check on Ariane. She had been distraught at being parted from her pet goat. In the bedroom, Timur was asleep in his cot, but there was no sign of Ariane. A wave of parental panic ripped through me. I ran out of the bedroom and down the long corridor.

Kamal was sitting with the guardians on the lawn.

“Have you seen Ariane?”

They shook their heads. I rushed up onto the verandah and into the main salon. She wasn't there. As I approached the courtyard where the goat was hanging, I could hear the echo of the exorcists in the distance. I glanced at the goat's carcass, still dripping with blood. The skin was lying on the ground below it, and beside that was the head. Next to the head was Ariane. She was crouching there in her pajamas.

“Baba,” she said gently, “what happened to my goat?”

This time it was my eyes that welled with tears. Hers were dry. She was not so sad as confused. An animal she had played with, and considered a pet, had been taken away by strange men, killed, skinned, and decapitated. It hadn't happened on television, or in a market, but in the middle of our home.

“Baba, why is my goat's head on the ground?” she said. “I don't understand.”

I picked her up and smoothed back her hair.

“I don't understand either,” I said.

         

ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT,
the exorcists roamed the Caliph's House. I cuddled up in bed, Ariane in my arms, the vibration of the drums trembling through our dreams. The guardians stayed awake all night. I found them at sunrise, sitting together on the stone steps that led up to the verandah.

“Is it over?”

Osman held up his hand. “Not yet.”

I walked through the salon, then the library, and the bedrooms upstairs, but the exorcists were not there. The house was very quiet, like the silence after an earthquake. There had been noise and terror, but now there was peace. All the rooms were splattered with blood and stank of smoke. They smelled as if something had happened, something grotesque. I couldn't pinpoint the change, but there had been change all the same.

I wandered into the garden courtyard. There, in the room at the far end, I found the exorcists. They were sitting on the floor in a circle, with candles all around. Some of them were chanting. I couldn't understand why I hadn't heard them outside. The air was pungent with waxy smoke and the same asphyxiating stench of burnt poplar leaves. Kamal was sitting against the back wall. He had dark circles around his eyes.

“Is it over?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are the Jinns gone?”

“Almost.”

The oldest exorcist rummaged in the sack, pulled out a cockerel, and stood to his feet. The bird flapped once, then again. A sharp twist of the fingers and its neck was snapped. More flapping, and the head was pulled clean off. The old Aissawa let the blood drip onto the floor as the chanting rose to a crescendo. The candles flickered, as if a breeze had swept through. The blood dripped, and the drumming began. It was cold, haunting, like the sound of a funeral march. But there was something compelling about it. It drew you in. You couldn't help yourself.

One of the younger men stood up and fell to the floor. His body was gyrating, shaking, his eyes rolled upward. The drumbeat grew stronger and faster like a whirlwind gathering speed. Another of the Aissawa got up and fell down, then a third. The drumbeat grew faster still, faster, and faster. I felt myself pulled in. All the air in the room seemed to be sucked away. The candles went out.

The female Aissawa stood up and began tearing at her hair. Her eyes were closed tight, her costume sprayed with wax and blood. The drums didn't cease for a moment. Their sound formed a backdrop, a stage, an ambience. The woman pushed up the loose sleeves of her jelaba. She sank her front teeth into her arm.

The drums continued.

They died away only when the sun had risen above the date palms at the end of the garden. The exorcists lay down in the salon and fell asleep again. They were exhausted. There was silence, a sense that a great upheaval had taken place but had now ended. It was like the last scene of a Hollywood movie, in which the stars hug each other, their faces blackened with dirt, their clothes shredded. But unlike the movie ending, there were no credits to roll.

The guardians strolled up and fell into line. They saluted, then held out their hands for me to shake.

“Qandisha has gone,” said Hamza.

“Gone far away,” Osman chipped in.

“Is Dar Khalifa our house?” I said.

“Yes,” said the Bear, very softly. “It now belongs to you.”

As dusk descended I thanked the pimp and his Aissawa exorcists. They piled onto the cement truck and drove slowly out through the shantytown, back to the hills. When they were gone, I closed the front door and breathed in deep. It was all over and, at the same time, it had just begun.

T
WENTY
-
ONE

Never give advice in a crowd.

COUNTESS DE LONGVIC TELEPHONED THE
next day. She had heard that the demons had been cast out from the Caliph's House, she said.

“Maybe they were never here at all,” I replied.

The countess emitted a shrill gasp. “Don't say that,” she warned, “or they'll be back in a flash.”

“Do you believe in the Jinns?”

“
Mais oui,
but of course,” she said.

I was thinking of how to reply. The countess cut in:

“Live here in Morocco long enough and they creep into your blood,” she said. “It may sound strange to your ears, but it's they who decide.”

“Decide what?”

“They decide whether to allow you to believe in them,” she said.

         

THE MONTH OF MAY
reintroduced the fierce heat that October had stolen from us. The days were long and scorching, filled with the sound of bees in the hibiscus flowers and of feral dogs fighting in the bidonville. Rachana and the children were happier than I could have dreamed. Unlike me, they seemed to have forgotten about the days of the exorcism. The guardians were content, too. They went about their duties of endless raking, patrolling, and skimming drowned butterflies from the pool. An entire month slipped by and I never heard a word about the Jinns.

The main work began to come to an end. The floors were complete, as was the tadelakt on the walls, and the magnificent mosaic fountain. The woodwork was stripped and painted, the glass in the windows replaced, and all the work that you never think of was done—the roofs were sealed and new hot water boilers installed, the plaster moldings touched up, wrought-iron railings fitted, and trellises laid. A team of twelve men hauled the great Indian doorway into place. Then the Rajasthani swing was suspended on the verandah before it, beneath a trellis crowned in passion vines.

At long last we could concentrate on the finishing details. There can be no country on Earth better suited to buying decorations than Morocco. Every corner of the kingdom has its own unique styles, each one perfected through centuries of craftsmanship. In the medina of Fès, we bought brass candlesticks, appliqué lamps, and miles of brightly colored sabra silk, woven from the fiber of the agaz cactus. In Essaouira, we found a coffee table veneered with the scented thuya wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. And from a merchant in the High Atlas Mountains, we bought a dozen Berber tribal rugs, fabulous concoctions of color and design.

But it was in Marrakech that we gave in to all temptation. The medina there is an emporium of art and craft like none other; the narrow streets are packed through the long dusty days with a frenzied tangle of life. There are donkey carts piled high with pots, armies of vendors laden with silver lamps, and an ocean of small boys touting rough wooden toys. There are blind men soliciting alms, sunburned tourists with cameras in hand, pickpockets and undercover cops, bicycles and scooters, fortune-tellers and snake charmers, madmen and hustlers. We pushed forward into the fray, wondering how we would ever escape.

Every inch of space was taken up with goods for sale—trays of fresh nougat glimmering in the afternoon light, heaps of pistachios and dried apricots, roasted almonds and shelled pecans. There was saffron, too, mountains of it, and pickled lemons, figs, and slabs of beef carved from the bone.

The moment before we were all sucked down and suffocated, a finger beckoned us into a shop. Inside, it was cool, calm, and filled with an alluring blend of wares. The owner slammed the door shut behind us, bolted it, and served mint tea.

“Welcome to my oasis,” he said.

Half joking, I asked if we were being kept prisoner. The shopkeeper, a skeleton of a man, passed me a glass of tea.

“I am not keeping you in,” he said, “I am keeping them out.”

We drank our tea and explored the treasures stacked on open shelves. There were terracotta pots adorned with zigzag motifs, camel headdresses from the Sahara, and mats made from the fibers of esperto grass. There were kelim rugs, too, woven in vibrant reds, yellows, and greens; silver brooches, calligraphic pendants, and ancient Berber marriage contracts inscribed on cylinders of wood. On the back wall was a bronze fountainhead in the form of a gazelle and, beside it, a clutch of brass divination bowls etched with cryptograms.

My eye was caught by a fabulous cedar door propped up in the window. It was adorned with the Star of David and with lines of Hebrew script. The shopkeeper noticed me inspecting it.

“You are surprised, are you not? Surprised at seeing a Jewish door.”

I said that I was. The merchant straightened his back.

“There may be tension between Arabs and Jews,” he said, “but without the Jews, Morocco would be a far poorer place.”

I said I had heard that the king retained more than one key Jewish adviser, and that I had read about the country's Jewish heritage.

“My ancestors were Jews,” the lean merchant said. “We came here from Andalucía seven centuries ago and we are proud of our traditions. For generations we practiced our Jewish faith and lived alongside the Muslim Arabs. But then, two hundred years ago, the Sultan of Morocco charged terrible taxes on Jewish families. There was no choice but to convert to Islam.”

Before leaving the sanctuary of the shop, we bought a divination bowl, a kelim, and a small silver box. The merchant eased the bolt back in the lock, wished us well, and slipped me his business card. I glanced at his name. It was Abdul-Rafiq Cohen.

         

BACK AT CASABLANCA, A
black-and-white postcard was waiting for me. The picture showed a group of camels and Saharan women huddled in a stark caravanserai. It was from Pamela, the well-read American woman who was living at my grandfather's villa on Tangier's rue de la Plage. She wrote:
I am traveling in the south of Morocco. The meals have been wonderful, all except for one, at Sidi Ifni. We were served a very suspect steak. God knows what kind of meat it was. It was inedible. It was even rejected by my traveling cat.

         

AT THE END OF
May, I flew to London for three days, for the launch of a film I had made. It was one of those dull trips filled with forced conversation and solitude. Every moment I was there, I missed the children, Rachana, and the Caliph's House. I met an old school pal who was still trapped in the cycle of zombie commuting and pseudo-friends. We laughed about English life, the terrible blight of flat-packed furniture and of information overload. He seemed impressed that I had moved to Casablanca. We had always conspired to break free together, but something had held him back. As I left I joked that he would put up with the chicken tikka sandwiches and the dreary weather until the end. His expression faltered.

“It's all I know,” he said.

An hour after I arrived back at Dar Khalifa, there was a knock at the door. I told Rachana it would no doubt be Hicham in search of some postage stamps. But it wasn't him. It was his wife. The whites of her eyes were the color of beets, as if she had been weeping. I asked her to come inside, but she said she could not stay.

“My husband died two days ago,” she said. “His heart stopped.”

I expressed my great sadness.

“He said if something happened, I should give you this.”

The stamp collector's wife, Khadija, held up a box. I took it into my study, switched on the desk lamp, and opened it. Inside was a stack of stamp albums. Hicham had taught me a great deal about Morocco, and about life. I sat down, depressed by the loss of a wise friend. At the same time, I was happy, happy that our paths had crossed at all, and that we had shared so many fine conversations, paid for in postage stamps.

         

THIRTY DAYS AFTER THE
exorcism, Osman said he had something to show me. He led me down to the stables, where he and the other guardians tended to lurk, drinking mint tea. I asked him what it was. He told me to wait and to follow him. There are four stables at Dar Khalifa, arranged in an L shape. One was the guardians' room; the others were full of old ladders and rope, gardening tools, barbed wire, and broken chairs.

Osman pushed the door of the stable on the left. There was so much clutter inside that it hardly opened at all. Again, Osman pushed.

“Can you see that?” he said.

“What?”

“The doorway? The old doorway,” he said.

I peered in. All I could see was a tangle of ladders and chairs, fence posts and pots. I couldn't see a doorway, I told him. The other guardians appeared, and after an hour of struggling, they managed to haul the doorway from the stable. They laid it out on the lawn.

It was crafted from cedar and was the shape of a keyhole, the front side painted with geometric designs.

“It's wonderful and so old,” I said. “Why didn't you tell me about it before?”

“We didn't know it was there,” said the Bear.

“Don't you know what's in the stables?”

“Of course,” Hamza exclaimed, “but it wasn't there before.”

“It was hidden,” said Osman, under his breath.

“Hidden by the Jinns,” said the Bear.

The doorway was restored by Rachid the bodyguard and was put as the entrance to our bedroom. I was thrilled. It was like getting something for nothing, like finding money on the street. Hamza took every opportunity to describe the advantage of living in a house newly recovered from the Jinns.

“Things become visible,” he said, “things that were hidden for years.”

“What sort of things?”

“Treasure,” he said. “All old houses like Dar Khalifa have treasure.”

I said I didn't believe him.

“The old door proves it,” he replied. “It was not there and then it was there.”

“Do you really think a treasure is going to materialize?”

“Of course it will,” Hamza explained. “You can sit back and wait.”

         

A FEW DAYS LATER,
I took a stroll down to the ocean before breakfast. It was a clear day. The beach was deserted, except for a man riding his Arab stallion through the waves as they broke on the shore. I took off my shoes and walked into the water, staring out at the horizon. I remember thinking it odd that my bare feet were on the same latitude as Atlanta.

On the way back, I walked very slowly through the bidonville, taking in the usual morning bustle. There was a man calling out for knives to sharpen, a vegetable seller arranging his wares, and a woman winnowing her family's grain. Children were hurrying to the school at the whitewashed mosque, where the stern mistress awaited them with her flexed orange hose. I was going to poke my head in the door and greet the teacher, when the imam came up. I expected him to ask for money.

“Thank you for your generous donations,” he said.

I didn't know what he meant. I had given nothing except for the school supplies.

“The things for the school?” I said.

“No, no,” the old imam replied, “thank you for all the money you have given.”

“Money?”

“Yes, Hamza has brought us the donations,” he said. “We have used it to repair the roof and to install electricity.”

I didn't know what to say. I hadn't given Hamza any money to give to the mosque.

“It wasn't from me,” I said awkwardly.

“You are as modest as Hamza said you are,” the imam mumbled. “He told me the money was from you, but that you would deny it if I ever mentioned it.”

The imam ducked his head and kissed my hand. I strode back into Dar Khalifa, washed over in shame. I later realized that every Friday after they had been paid, Hamza, Osman, and the Bear would visit the mosque and hand the imam a third of their wages in a donation on my behalf.

         

I WAS OVERCOME WITH
guilt at benefiting from the death of Hicham Harass. His widow was left with almost nothing, while I had inherited a lifetime of valuable stamp albums. She was too proud to take handouts, and whenever I called on her, she insisted that God was taking care of her. Each time I visited the shack behind the mosque, another precious possession was gone—the carriage clock, then the radio, after that the prized Qur'an. Rachana came up with the solution—to take the stamp albums to Europe and sell them to a collector there. I sent them with a friend who was going to London. He brokered a deal and wired back a considerable sum of money in return. As soon as it arrived, I hurried over to give it to Hicham's widow. I passed her the envelope of banknotes and explained that the albums were a kind of insurance policy, the kind that could be cashed in. She straightened her headscarf, wiped a tear from her eye, and said:

“Up in heaven there is an old man cursing you for what you have done. But down here on Earth there is an old woman who is very thankful.”