by Tahir Shah
“They are for sale,” the secretary said, handing me a catalogue.
After ten minutes of waiting, a broad-shouldered man with slick black hair and manicured nails swept through the glass doors. He was clothed in a handmade gabardine suit with monogrammed buttons. On his feet were snakeskin shoes, and around his waist was a slim sharkskin belt. A stream of cigar smoke swirled behind him like a vapor trail. Apologizing profusely for being late, he cursed the Prime Minister for keeping him waiting so long.
I told him about the Caliph’s House, and said once, and then again, that my budget for renovation was small. The architect, Mohammed, laughed, lit a fresh Cuban cigar, and inhaled.
“What is money?” he said grandly in a high voice before leaning back in his chair. “It’s just expensive paper.”
I repeated for a third time that my budget was limited, and explained I was an impoverished writer waiting for a big break. The architect was about to say something, but his cellular phone began to ring. Excusing himself, he answered it and spoke fast in French to an infuriated woman at the other end. The lady was beside herself with anger. When he hung up, the architect blushed.
“Women are very special,” he said uneasily, “n’est-ce pas?”
We arranged for him to visit Dar Khalifa the next afternoon and left the gallery office. On the way home I asked Zohra how she had come to meet Mohammed the architect.
“Through the dental community,” she said.
NEXT MORNING I SENT Zohra to the Land Registry to look through the archives for Dar Khalifa’s file. I wanted to get an idea of the building’s history and to find out who had lived there before us. During our first weeks in Casablanca, I asked dozens of people about the Caliph’s House. Most of them had something to tell. Some said it was formerly the summer residence of the Caliph of Casablanca, whoever he had been; others that it was once owned by an important magistrate, a confidant of the king. One old man, who was selling used copies of French magazines on the street, declared the house had been a high-class brothel back in the fifties. He squinted with delight at the memory.
“The girls who worked there were angels,” he said, pressing the fingertips of his right hand to his lips in a kiss. “But, alas, they were reserved for French officers.”
Someone else told me the building was used by high-level American diplomats during the Anfa Summit back in January 1943. I had read that President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill chose Casablanca to discuss wartime strategy and had planned their attack on Japan at the summit. Their talks were held nearby in the district of Anfa, making it plausible that their staff had made use of the Caliph’s House.
At the Land Registry, Zohra hadn’t found any mention of the Anfa Summit or any clues whether the house had been a brothel. She couldn’t even say when exactly the house was built.
“What was in the file, then?”
Zohra looked down at the ground, unsure of how to break bad news.
“There isn’t a file for Dar Khalifa,” she said.
Every large building in Casablanca had a file bound in red cloth lodged at the Land Registry. But there was a gap of exactly four inches on the shelf where our dossier was supposed to be. The clerk had told Zohra that someone had taken it and not put it back.
“I begged him for more information,” she said, “and it was then he told me something very bad.”
“What?”
“That someone paid a bribe of twenty thousand dollars to lose the papers.”
“Who would have done such a thing?”
“Your neighbor,” she said.
I didn’t understand. Our neighbors were a respectable family from Fès. They came from one of the old clans. Their ancestors had built themselves the famous Palais Jamai, now run as a magnificent hotel. We had only met a few times, but they had lavished us with welcoming gifts, and had always been ready to explain the intricacies of Moroccan life. We valued them as real friends.
Zohra read my mind. “Not the Jamais,” she said softly, “they are good people.”
“Then who?”
“Your other neighbors. Come with me. I’ll show you.”
Zohra led me up the guardians’ homemade ladder onto the roof. Shading my eyes in the dazzling afternoon light, I gazed out at the warren of cinder-block homes and the gilded waves of the Atlantic in the distance.
“These are all your neighbors,” said Zohra.
“I’m sure none of them have twenty thousand dollars to spare as a bribe.”
Zohra wiped the moisture from her chin.
“That one does,” she said, motioning over the jumbled shanties.
She was pointing to a large whitewashed home with oversized windows and a green tiled roof. It stood at the far end of the shantytown, and was encircled by date palms and a wall topped with razor wire. The house was so far from our own that I hardly regarded its occupants as neighbors at all.
“They’re miles away,” I said. Until that moment, I had had nothing to do with them. One thing was certain—they were despised by the residents of the shantytown. This was evident because each morning, as the husband drove his Mercedes four-by-four at high speed down the slum’s track, a gang of boys would line up and hurl stones at it. I knew, too, that his wife was in her late thirties, that she dyed her hair plum purple, wore a great deal of gold, and dressed like a Russian nightclub singer.
“Should I go and confront him?” I whispered feebly.
Zohra’s face froze in a mask of fear. “Absolutely not!” she snapped. “Do you have any idea who he is?”
I shook my head.
“He’s Casablanca’s Godfather,” she said. “Challenge him and he could snatch the children. Before you know it you’ll be getting fingers through the mail.”
NEXT AFTERNOON, MOHAMMED THE architect arrived in a very fine black Range Rover. His initials were painted on all four doors, and there was an open box of Montecristo No. 5s on the leather upholstered dashboard.
For once, my mind wasn’t on renovation. I was preoccupied with the rich neighbor, and confused. Zohra had tried to put my mind at rest, explaining that although the man was a gangster and a local Godfather, he wasn’t involved in drug-dealing and gun-running. Moroccan gangsters, she insisted, were the kings of contraband, running empires built on illegal cigarettes, pirated movies, and stolen cars from Spain.
The Range Rover’s monogrammed door swung open, and the architect’s handmade shoe touched the ground. I welcomed him and showed him around.
“We’ll take down some walls,” he said casually, sucking at one of the cigars. “This one, that one, and that one over there. It’ll be much better opened up. And over here, we’ll cut arches so you’ll be able to see right through the house. We’ll rip out this old staircase and build a new one, gently curved. Then we’ll extend the bedrooms upstairs and slot a huge roof terrace on the top. You’ll get a fabulous view of the ocean from up there.”
Despite my worries of how we would pay for all the work, I was impressed by his vision.
“My budget’s very small,” I mumbled yet again.
The architect swished my doubts away along with his smoke.
“Money,” he said caustically. “It’s just money.”
FOUR
Every food has its flavor.
A MAJOR DILEMMA FACED US WITH the sewers. The fragile clay waste pipe laid to the Caliph’s House had been designed to service a single lavatory. Over the years, as the house grew in size and the popularity of flush toilets spread, more and more of them were added. By the time we arrived at Dar Khalifa, there were a total of thirteen lavatories. The narrow clay sewage pipe running through the shantytown to the house was frequently shattered, as residents there attempted unsuccessfully to link their homemade sewers to our own. The problem was made all the worse by another modern innovation—toilet paper.
Add to the equation the stifling heat and drought of mid-August, and we were hit by an overwhelming wall of stench whenever we went outside. The matter was made all the mor
e unbearable by the plague of biting flies that savaged us both night and day. Zohra said it was quite common for the primitive drains beneath Casablanca’s shantytowns to explode in the night. Like many local people I met, she was something of an expert on sewers, but her casual interest didn’t even come close to Hamza’s preoccupation with the subject. His interest in sewers was equaled only by his obsession with the Jinns. Whenever I was doing my business, he would pound on the bathroom door.
“Not more than ten centimeters!” he would yell. “I beg you! Do not use any more paper than that!”
I assured him repeatedly through the keyhole that I was rationing the paper as best I could. I had never been so frugal. But still Hamza felt it necessary to patrol and to shout warnings of impending disaster through the door. We became so used to his intrusions that after a few weeks we grew concerned when they did not come.
ONE NIGHT AS WE were about to clamber into bed, the postman arrived. Ecstatic at finding the house at last, he thrust a clutch of letters into my hands and stood by the door meekly, inspecting his fingernails. I tipped him well and told him to remember me. He promised to do so and ran off into the night.
The next day, when I had opened the mail—most of it bills from England—I remembered my own promise, to Hicham the stamp collector. The guardians said he lived in the shantytown in a shed behind the mosque. They said I would know it because a dog with three legs would be sleeping outside. I strolled down the main track, slipped behind the mosque, and searched for a dog with three legs. In my hand was an envelope containing five postage stamps, all bearing Queen Elizabeth’s head.
A large brindle dog was lying on its back in the dust. I counted its legs. There was one missing. I stepped over it and knocked at the tin door. Hicham the stamp collector appeared, called out greetings, and invited me to come inside. The one-room shack had a neatness about it, the kind that only a stamp collector knows. Dustcovers had been laid meticulously over the prized artifacts—a carriage clock, a tea set with matching plates, a portable television wired up to a car battery. A faded photograph of King Hassan II loomed down from the far wall, and an impressively large copy of the Qur’an stood on a carved wooden stand near the door.
I presented the postage stamps to Hicham, who hissed to his wife for tea. He thanked me once, and then again, before pulling out a wallet.
“I will pay you,” he said, taking out a note.
I refused the money. He insisted. I raised my voice and refused a second time. Hicham Harass’s pride was dented. His face fell.
“Then I cannot take them,” he said.
We sat in silence, crippled by good manners. Tea was brought. It was hot, sweet, and served in miniature glasses with a gold pattern on the rim. I wondered how we might save the situation. Then the perfect solution struck me. Hicham wanted postage stamps for his collection, and I wanted to learn about Morocco from someone who knew it. I suggested we make a trade. Each week we could meet. I would part with my postage stamps and Hicham would pay me, not in money, but in conversation.
BEFORE MOVING TO MOROCCO, the fantasy of having a large retinue of staff to attend to my every whim was very pleasing indeed. I used to find myself daydreaming. I would have people waiting on me hand and foot, I thought, and would never have to lift a finger again. The reality was very different.
By the middle of summer, Zohra had found us a maid, a full-time cook, and a nanny with jade green eyes. Morocco has severe unemployment and as a result everyone does their best to get on someone else’s payroll. There is no shortage of applicants for any job. Before we knew it, we had three inherited guardians, the maid, the cook, the nanny, the gardener, as well as Zohra to pay.
Individually, no one was given very much. The rate per hour was low. But together, their salaries were substantial—money that had to be earned by me, then handed out each Friday lunchtime in small-denomination bills. The second problem was that once someone was on the payroll, it was almost impossible ever to remove them. Their jobs were secure for life—a point that each of them was very well aware of. But the worst aspect of all was that the house was suddenly filled with people who were trying to control us.
At the top of the rigid pecking order was Zohra. She was sweetness personified to me, but everyone else was terrified of her. Below Zohra were Hamza, Osman, and the Bear. They had been at Dar Khalifa so long that they had earned the right to boss the other staff about. Below them was the maid, then the cook, and after her, the nanny. At the very bottom of the hierarchy was the gardener. I discovered later why he was regarded as such an object of ridicule. It was because his wife had run away with another man.
Everyone had their own way of achieving power. The most effective method was to do the opposite of what they were requested to do. If I asked the cook to prepare a certain dish, she would sweep me out of the kitchen with her broom and make something quite different. When I asked the maid to make my bed, she cleaned the windows, and when I asked the gardener to cut the lawn, he pruned the hedges instead. The guardians were no better. Their longtime service had made them expert at evading orders. They could tell when I wanted something done—they could hear it in the way I walked—and they would vanish into the stables and bolt the door behind them.
Nothing gave the workforce more pleasure than taking up my time with their own requests. These usually included a petition to hire their brother or cousin, or to bestow charity on a long-lost uncle or aunt. At first I would um and er, blush, and mumble hollow promises. Then one morning I thought of the answer. It was simple. I would agree enthusiastically to hiring the person in question, so long as he or she was taken on as a replacement to the person making the request. It worked like a dream.
Even more irritating was the constant bickering and petty squabbles between the guardians and the other workers. I would sit down to write, and within minutes, the maid would come to say that Hamza had taken her brush, or that Osman was pouring her bleach into the drains. The gardener would complain about the nanny, because she let Ariane throw snails into the swimming pool, and the cook would rant on about the Bear for glancing at her in a lustful way.
IN THE LAST WEEK of August, the crag-faced imam from the mosque ambled over to the house and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together again. He needed cash, he said, because the mosque was very poor. As the owner of the largest house in the shantytown, it was my responsibility, he informed me, to pay for its upkeep. I asked Zohra what to do.
“The worst thing is to give money,” she said. “If you hand cash to the imam today, tomorrow you’ll have a line of people three miles long.”
“Then what do I do?”
“You can support the shantytown’s school.”
A small windowless classroom was attached to the mosque. Inside, there were a few battered chairs, homemade desks, a handful of copies of the Qur’an, and an elderly schoolmistress armed with an orange rubber hose. There were no blackboards or pictures, and no electric light. From eight-thirty in the morning until three each afternoon, the dark classroom was filled with forty children. Twice a day, when I strolled by, I would hear the whoosh of the rubber hose, followed by the shrill sound of a small child weeping.
Zohra said corporal punishment made children strong, but that they only understood the good it did them in later life. She told me her brothers had been beaten senseless at school, and it had made them saints in adulthood. They still had the scars, she said, as we went downtown in search of school supplies.
“You mean they’re mentally scarred?” I asked.
“No, no,” said Zohra, “I’m talking about their backs.”
IN THE OLD ART Deco quarter stood the colossal Bessonneau Apartment Building, with HOTEL LINCOLN bolted onto the side. A forlorn reminder of the French era, it spanned an entire block of Boulevard Mohammed V, and was constructed in the very grandest Franco-Moorish style. Every technique of the day had been employed—arabesque arches and filigree ironwork, subtle cornicing, and miles of exquisite fretwork adorning the faça
de. But the golden age of Casablanca was a faded memory, and the Bessonneau building was a fragment left behind. It was derelict, unloved, and awaiting demolition. Behind it stood the great Derb Omar Bazaar.
The shops there were packed with cheap cardboard boxes piled up to the rafters. The boxes were filled with Chinese vases and gunpowder tea, with ornamental figurines, chrome chandeliers, pink plastic dolls, and school supplies. I spent an entire afternoon buying colored pencils and chalks, felt-tips, paints, exercise books, notebooks, and pens. I purchased forty sturdy schoolbags, too, and posters and maps for the classroom walls, and a blackboard for the teacher with the orange hose.
The next morning we delivered the boxes to the class, to the delight of the children and to the fury of the imam. He poked a wrinkled finger at me and rubbed it to his thumb. As Zohra and I dragged the blackboard into the class, the architect’s Range Rover came purring down the trail through the shantytown. It was followed by a shabby Japanese truck with balding tires and a windshield cloaked in a spider’s web of cracks. In the back were perched a dozen of the wildest men I had ever seen. They were scarred from head to toe, had unnaturally developed shoulder muscles and a brutal, sadistic look in their eyes. They resembled convicts sentenced to hard labor, and were armed with hammers—not the petite kind we use to do jobs around the home, but industrial sledgehammers.
Mohammed the architect extended his velvety hand for me to shake. It was soft and warm like a new chamois. As he marched in the door, he slipped me the details of his bank in Paris and asked me to deposit a very large sum of money into his account. Make the transaction, he said, and all my problems would be over.
Rachana and I watched as he glided through the house, with the rowdy hammer-wielding demolition crew heavy in his footsteps. In his right hand was a red china marker, and in his left, a cellular phone. He paused before each wall, inspecting it for a moment before either scratching an X with the pencil or walking on to the next wall. While he walked, he talked, or rather listened, to an angry voice at the other end of the telephone.
