MASH Goes to Morocco

by Richard Hooker

  “That was a hiccup,” Dr. McIntyre said, “not a burp—a regrettable side effect of this otherwise marvelous medication.”

  “May I have the envelope, please?” the baby doctor from Bangor said. A representative of House, Water and Grumbacher, Certified Public Accountants, hired to remove any suggestion at all of hanky-panky in prize-awarding, came from the wings, wearing a top hat, white tie, tails and high, black mesh stockings. (It was, of course, a female representative of House, Water and Grumbacher.)

  The baby doctor from Bangor tore open the envelope.

  “Oh, this is wonderful,” he said, coyly. “I can think of no one who would more enjoy fifteen glorious never-to-be-forgotten days in Merry Morocco with his wife than the winner!”

  “He’s talking about you, Trapper,” Hawkeye said. “You’re always complaining out loud about being as thirsty as a camel.”

  “The winner,” the baby doctor said, “is that distinguished surgeon, the co-proprietor of the Finest Kind Fish Market and Medical Clinic … whose card says he was unable to be with us because he mistakenly sutured his fingers together … Dr. Benjamin Franklin Pierce.”

  A loud groan came from deep within Dr. Pierce’s chest.

  “Is there anyone here who would be willing to claim Dr. Pierce’s prize for him?” the baby doctor asked, waving the airplane tickets over his head.

  Mary Pierce rushed down the aisle, pausing only long enough to inform the Oldest Physician Present that she would be willing to take his luggage off his hands, and up onto the stage.

  Dr. John Francis Xavier McIntyre rose to his feet and began to sing “The Sheikh of Araby.” Dr. Pierce snatched what looked like a six-ounce medicine bottle from Dr. McIntyre’s hand, tilted it to his mouth and drained it.

  Mary Pierce, now on the stage, grabbed the microphone from the baby doctor from Bangor: “I would like to thank all those who made this possible,” she began.

  Drs. McIntyre and Pierce collapsed in their seats, one apparently suddenly struck hysterical, and the other apparently in agony.

  Chapter Two

  When His Royal Highness Prince Hassan ad Kayam, heir-apparent to the Sheikhdom of Hussid and chairman of the Council of Ministers of Petroleum of the Pan-Arabic Oil Consortium, saw the internationally famous opera singer, Maestro Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, across the polished marble floor of Paris’s Hotel George V, his heart fell and his gastric juices started to boil. He reached inside his gold embroidered robes for his roll of Tums for the Tummy.

  It wasn’t that His Royal Highness didn’t like the singer. Quite the contrary. Hassan and Boris were the best of friends, and had shared many jolly escapades together. These usually involved long-legged, well-bosomed blonde females, in which His Highness had long had an interest, but with whom, pre-Boris, he had had little success, despite an income estimated by Fortune Magazine at $30,000 (pre-devaluation) weekly.

  Long-legged, well-bosomed blonde females (as well as short-legged, flat-bosomed brunettes; amply bosomed, short-legged, red-haired females; et cetera, et cetera) gathered around Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov like moths around a candle flame. Boris’s rejects provided his pal with more feminine companionship than, pre-Boris, he would have dreamed possible, and he had had a rather active imagination.

  Normally, His Royal Highness would have been delighted at the sight of his friend whom, until this moment, he had believed to be in New York City singing the title role in Otello at the Metropolitan Opera. Especially since Boris was in the company of two blondes, a redhead and a brunette.

  But these were not ordinary circumstances. His Royal Highness was in the company of Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug, absolute ruler of the Abzug tribe and the 15,000 square miles of granite mountains, desert and subterranean oil deposits of the Abzugian Sheikhdom.

  Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug was a sheikh of the old school. When he had boarded His Royal Highness’s helicopter for the flight to Marrakech where His Royal Highness’s Douglas 707 was waiting to fly them to Paris, it had been not only Sheikh Abzug’s first helicopter flight as well as his first airplane flight, but the first time in his sixty-eight years (or sixty-nine, there being no accurate registry of births—or for that matter of anything else—in the Sheikhdom) that he had stepped foot on anything—land, carpet, Rolls-Royce, whatever —that he did not own.

  Originally a nomadic tribe, the Abzugians had moved across the great desert after the Great War of 1802 to their present homeland. You will recall that Sheikh Mohammed the Merciful (1770-1806) had methodically slaughtered all adult males (fourteen and older) of those tribes which had surrendered to him after the Battle of Ungawallah, on June 11, 1802, and then had marched after the fleeing Abzugians with the same purpose in mind.

  By the time the Camel Corps of Mohammed the Merciful caught up with the Abzugians in December of that year, they had reached the ridge of mountains separating the Sahara Desert from what is now Morocco and had established what proved to be impenetrable defenses. The Siege of the Mountains (1802—1806), which terminated only upon the death of Mohammed the Merciful, is the longest sustained military operation in Arabian military history, although not, of course, the only spectacularly unsuccessful one.

  During the Siege of the Mountains, Sheikh Ahmed the Wise (sometimes known as Ahmed the Suspicious), who had not been willing to surrender to Mohammed the Merciful and who had led the trek across the desert to the mountains, died and was succeeded by his son, Abdu ben Ahmed, who was later to be known as Ahmed the Shepherd. The appellation had a double meaning. It made reference to both his devoted sheepherding of the Abzugians and to the means by which he established the Abzugian economic base. Recognizing that sheep and goats were essential to the survival of his people and that he had none to speak of, Ahmed the Shepherd, even before the death of his father, proceeded to rectify the situation.

  In a series of daring raids, the Abzugian Camel Corps swept out of the mountains into what is now Morocco and returned with large flocks of sheep and goats taken at sword point from the Moroccan tribes. In obedience to the exhortation in the Koran to “go forth and multiply,” they also brought back with them whatever women they happened to encounter. Each male Abzugian was allotted three females.

  This naturally angered the tribes in Morocco, and a series of attacks was launched against the mountain redoubt; but these (which lasted until about 1840) met with no more success than had the attacks on Mohammed the Merciful.

  Gradually, a détente with their Moroccan neighbors evolved, much of it based on the role of the female vis-à-vis the Moroccan and Abzugian cultures. The Abzugians, whose 3-to-l ratio had produced a viable socioeconomic life-style, were perfectly willing to take excess females from the Moroccans, whose 1-on-l ratio (monogamy) had produced a far less efficient (and apparently less satisfying) social structure. The Abzugians sometimes went so far as to take excess Moroccan females in lieu of sheep or goats but, normally, the Abzugians demanded at least 50 percent of their annual tribute in livestock.

  During the French Occupation of Morocco, the détente between the Moroccans and the Abzugians was greatly strengthened. Sheikh Beni ben Mohammed (grandfather of the present Sheikh) permitted Moroccans fleeing before the French Foreign Legion to find refuge in his mountain redoubt. After several valiant, but quite futile, attempts to crush the Abzugian Redoubt by the French Foreign Legion (the last on May 19, 1909), it was decided to pacify the Abzugians only after the rest of Morocco had finally been brought peacefully and for all time under the French Tricolor. They were classified a “backward tribe” by the French and, for this reason, the precise boundaries of the Sheikhdom have never appeared on maps.

  (François-Marie Alexander Hautetblance, then a distinguished French lieutenant general, told the story of his own service as a young officer in the region. He asked his captain where he could expect to find the Sheikhdom of Abzug. “Ride out toward the mountains,” his superior told him. “When one of those barbarians shoots you between the eyes with one of our rifles,
you know you’re at the border.”)

  One of those to whom the Sheikh of Abzug gave refuge was His Royal Highness Ali ben Hassan of Hussid who, while serving as an officer in the British Army, was being pursued by the Turks during World War I.

  As soon as he was able to return to his own side, he sent to the Sheikh a solid-gold wristwatch, self-winding, from Switzerland. The Sheikh had seen watches before, of course, interesting little devices that went tick-tock, tick-tock, which he had taken from the French, but never before had he seen one that would continue to do this day after day, week after week. All the others had stopped going tick-tock, tick-tock after the sun had come up twice.

  As a token of his appreciation for the tick-tock, the Sheikh sent His Royal Highness some things he considered of value: two camels, four goats, one well breasted Berber guaranteed to be a virgin, plus a hand-woven prayer rug.

  Thus began the relationship between the Sheikhdom of Hussid and the Sheikhdom of Abzug. Aside from friendship, however, it had been a sort of economic one-way street. The Hussid Sheikhdom had sent teachers and doctors to Abzug, and the Abzugians had sent the Hussids more sheep, goats and prayer rugs, the word having passed as tactfully as possible that there was already a surfeit of virgins in Hussid. And then, after oil had been discovered under Hussid’s shifting sands, just before World War II, the word was passed that there was a sufficiency of goats and sheep, too.

  The time had now come, as the Sheikh of Hussid rather bluntly told his son and heir, His Royal Highness Prince Hassan ad Kayam, to drag the Abzugians into the twentieth century. The Wise Men had spoken, the Sheikh said. All seismological data gathered to date had been run through the computer and there seemed to be little question that a hundred feet or so below Abzug’s soil were large pools of oil and large deposits of natural gas.

  It wasn’t that His Hussidic Majesty objected to paying for the entire national Abzugian budget (Rolls-Royces and all, it was in the Hussidic budget under “petty cash”), but rather an honest belief on his part that the Abzugians would be much better off if they were paying their own way.

  He instructed his son to first get Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug’s permission to drill for oil; then to arrange for the drilling, supervising it himself; then to arrange for the sale of the oil; and then for the other necessities, pipelines, refineries, and so on.

  When His Royal Highness Prince Hassan ad Kayam spotted Maestro Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov across the polished marble floor of the George V, His Highness was on Step One of the plan to bring the Sheikhdom of Abzug into the Twentieth Century, and he wasn’t doing very well.

  The Sheikh had passed the helicopter flight from his capital to Marrakech in prayer. With his head bent to the prayer rug, he had not, of course, been able to see out of the helicopter. He had spent the first thirty minutes of the Marrakech-Paris flight in prayer, until he developed a crick in the neck and got to his feet. The Sheikh had, at first, been fascinated with his new surroundings, although he had some difficulty in understanding why it was absolutely impossible for him to ride the rest of the way walking on the wing.

  But then he happened to glance downward from 30,000 feet and seen the cloud cover, like so much cotton batting, between him and the earth. He had said nothing at the time, but had obviously been lost in his own thoughts for the rest of the flight.

  In Prince Hassan’s Cadillac limousine, en route from Orly Field to the George V Hotel, he finally spoke, to announce that, having considered all things, when the time came for him to leave this place, he would do so on ground transportation. If Allah had intended man to fly like the birds, he would obviously have given him wings. He, Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug, would return to his Sheikhdom as God intended; that is, by Rolls-Royce.

  Neither, he announced, after being shown the fifth-floor Royal Suite of the George V, did he think that such surroundings would do. He was reluctant to give his reasons at first, saying that he would, for the time being, be perfectly content to sit here in the lobby of the hotel watching all the strange people. Finally, however, just before Hassan spotted Boris and Boris spotted Hassan, he gave his reasons.

  For all of his life, but especially in the last twenty years, he had had the habit of rising in the middle of the night to void his bladder. A man doing that in the middle of the night, five floors up, was running a risk a wise man would not take.

  The Sheikh was sure that his friend Prince Hassan would be able to make other arrangements for him.

  The Sheikh had brought with him, as in the Arab custom, his personal bodyguard. As the Sheikh had sipped his tea and confessed his concern about his nocturnal necessities, the bodyguard, a 250-pound, six-foot-two-inch Son of the Desert had suspiciously eyed the patrons in the hotel lobby with a frown of disapproval that would have done credit to the U.S. Secret Service. When he saw Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, he had a triple reaction. The first was the admiration of one large man for another. Boris was three inches taller and forty pounds heavier than the bodyguard. Furthermore, he had a magnificent beard: black, thick, curly, shining, the sort of beard every Arab wishes he could have. The first two reactions, therefore, were pleasurable. The third was quite the reverse. This huge man was approaching Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug and Prince Hassan with a broad smile on his face. Protocol required that Sheikh Abdullah be approached, especially by infidels, by crawling on the stomach.

  The bodyguard pulled his knife from his waistband.

  “Hassan, you old camel thief,” Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov cried loudly, “am I glad to see you!”

  “Excellency,” Prince Hassan said quickly, in Arabic, “the man who approaches us means no harm. He is well-known to me.”

  “Infidel, isn’t he?” the Sheikh said. “But look at the size of him! There’s Arab blood in him for sure.”

  “Hello, Maestro,” Prince Hassan said.

  “Put the knife away,” Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug said. “This infidel bastard is a friend of Prince Hassan’s.”

  “Now see here, hooknose,” Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov said, in fluent Arabic, “any pal of my pal Hassan is a friend of mine, but knock off that infidel-bastard business, O.K.?”

  “You are an Arab,” Sheikh Abdullah said. “You speak Arabic. You must be an Arab.”

  “What I am,” Boris said in Arabic, “is a genius— musically and intellectually. I speak … let’s see … eleven languages.” He sat down in one of the armchairs. It creaked ominously under the load. He snapped his fingers to attract the attention of the waiter. The sound rang like a rifle shot in the large room, causing a waiter bearing a silver tea service on a tray to stiffen and jerk, spilling the whole thing on the floor.

  “I admire your women,” Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug said to Boris, nodding his head toward the Baroness d’Iberville and Esmerelda Hoffenburg, the ballerina, who were smiling in his direction, waiting where Boris had left them near the reception desk. “Are they for sale?”

  “I think you could probably work something out with the Baroness,” Boris said, “but Esmerelda has a boy friend just as rich as Hassan.”

  “Your Excellency,” Hassan said, “among the other strange customs of the infidels is a prohibition against selling females.”

  “How strange,” Sheikh Abdullah said.

  “Some of them,” Boris said, “actually believe in equality of the sexes.”

  “Astonishing!” Sheikh Abdullah said. “And how do you cope with this?”

  “I just laugh at them,” Boris said.

  The waiter appeared.

  “I thought you were home with your father,” Boris said to Hassan.

  “And I thought you were in New York singing Otello.”

  “You speak of the opera by Giuseppe Verdi?” Sheikh Abdullah asked.

  Hassan looked at him in surprise, even shock. The last thing he expected Sheikh Abdullah to be familiar with was Italian opera.

  “Why, yes, Your Excellency,” he said, “we do. Are you familiar with Otello?’’


  “My grandson,” the Sheikh said, and his eyes lit at the very thought of the boy. “Omar ben Ahmed, has developed a taste for Western music. Most of it, of course, pains the ears. But he has a phonograph recording of that opera which I have come to admire. There is one singer, a man whose very voice tells you that hundreds of healthy children have sprung from his loins, whose Allah-given tones make up for all the female caterwauling one must also hear.”

  “I see,” Hassan said.

  “You say you sing in this opera,” the Sheikh said to Boris. “Has it been your very good fortune to have heard the golden-toned lion of which I speak, a man by the name of Korsky-Rimsakov, sing?”

  Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov got to his feet. The bodyguard, mistaking his intention, unsheathed his knife again. Boris put his right hand on his chest, inhaled and opened his mouth. The final lines from scene 4, act 4, “Cold, now, yea, even as cold as thy chastity, most fit for heaven. Desdemona! Desdemona! Ah, Dead! Dead! Dead!” came out of his throat.

  The chandelier over the main staircase trembled. The plate-glass mirror behind the assistant manager’s counter cracked and then crashed in a thousand shards to the marble floor. The Baroness d’Iberville slumped to the ground in a swoon.

  “Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov at your service,” he said. He bowed slightly from the waist toward Sheikh Abdullah and then sat down.

  The Sheikh stared at him in disbelief for a moment, tears running down his cheeks. Then he slipped a nineteen-carat cut emerald, mounted in platinum and surrounded with a dozen small (nothing larger than a half carat) diamonds, from his index finger and gently pressed it into Boris’s hand.

  “I don’t want your ring,” Boris, startled, said, in English. “It’d make me look like a fairy film producer.”

  “Take it,” Hassan hissed, in English. “Say thank you and take it. I’ll explain later.”

  “The ring does not please you, oh golden-voiced one?” Sheikh Abdullah asked, a look of concern (and perhaps of about-to-be-injured pride) on his face.