Getting to Grey Owl

by Kurt Caswell

  I imagined Bob and I had an unspoken pact. We would choose nothing and very soon walk out to meet Ahmad in the reception area.

  “I like that one,” Bob said. “Yes, and those two there.”

  “Very good, sir,” Fahd said. “But these are not rugs. These are blankets.”

  “I like them,” Bob said.

  “All right. Any others?”

  “Yes,” Bob said. “Those small ones there.”

  “Those are not rugs, but samples only, please,” Fahd said. “You must choose a rug.”

  “All right,” Bob said. “But I like those best.”

  Fahd nodded to his man, who put the samples aside with Bob’s blankets. “Now you, sir,” he said, looking at me. “Please make your selection.”

  I did not want to make a selection, as I was certain I didn’t have enough money for a rug. And I didn’t know how I would I carry it anyway.

  “Please,” Fahd said. “The time is growing late. Your guide will be here soon.”

  “All right,” I said. “How about those three there.” I chose three nearly identical rugs that Fahd had indicated were wool and silk, very colorful. They differed from each other, as far as I could see, only in color, and slightly in pattern. I did like them, these rugs, and I began to imagine having one as a remembrance of my journey.

  “Very well,” Fahd said. “Now please sir, you come with me.”

  Fahd led me back down the stairs into a room adjacent to the reception, while his man gathered up the rugs. Bob was left behind with the other two men, who stood at the door.

  “Where is my friend?” I asked.

  “Do not worry. He is very fine. Now, please, you have chosen these three rugs, very nice each of them. Please choose the one you enjoy the most. Meanwhile, perhaps you would like more tea.”

  “Yes, all right,” I said. “I mean, no tea. But, this one? How much?”

  “This one, yes. This rug is $850.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “These rugs are much too expensive for me. I really don’t have enough money.” I stood up to leave.

  “No, no, no. Please give a moment, sir. These other two are much cheaper. Which one do you want to know about?”

  His man pulled the first rug away and presented the remaining two.

  “I don’t think they are any different,” I said.

  “This does not matter,” Fahd said. “They are much less money. And very affordable for you.”

  “All right. That one.”

  “This one,” Fahd said. “This rug is $395.”

  “No,” I said. “Much too expensive. I can spend about $50. No more.”

  I am not, nor have ever been, nor will ever likely be, very good at this sort of thing. I was not trying to get a better deal; I really didn’t have the money. If I had had more money, I probably would have spent it, but not because I am reckless (in fact I am frugal). It’s just that I have a hard time facing down authority like this, especially spontaneously. Often, in countries where such negotiations are common, I avoid shopping altogether.

  “Well, we are in luck,” he said. “You cannot pay this price, but the next rug is even cheaper. Our most value.”

  “How much?”

  “This rug is $295,” Fahd said. “That is the best price for you.”

  In those days, airline tickets and money were still mostly paper, so I carried all the money I had for the next few months of traveling in a pouch around my neck beneath my clothes: about $2,000 in travelers’ checks, and my flight ticket back home. I inventoried my remaining resources in my mind. No, I couldn’t do it. I’d rather go to this museum and that museum and eat. “No. Sorry,” I said. “I just don’t have enough money. And it is time for me to go.”

  “No,” Fahd said. “Just a moment more. Now. Here is a small paper.” He produced a scrap of paper from his pocket. “On this paper, you will write your price.” He handed me the paper and a little pencil.

  I wrote, “$50,” and handed it to him.

  He sighed heavily when he saw the sum. “Look what you buy,” Fahd said. “Look what you buy. That is much too little. Now, you write here, not $50, not $295, but between. You write your best price. Please.”

  Again I wrote, “$50.”

  Fahd stood up, angry this time. “Look. Look,” he shouted. “You must not be so unkind. Look what you buy. Excellent quality. Made by the mountain peoples. Wonderful for your home in America. You are very rich, and I am very poor. My country is a poor country. Please,” he said, waving his hands in the air, and then returning to his seat. “Please,” he said. “Please write your price.”

  This time I wrote, “$100.”

  “Now, this is better,” Fahd said. “But it is not enough. Once more, please,” he said. “Please try one more time. Try your best. We are very close now.”

  Again I wrote, “$100.”

  Fahd looked at the paper, and a long sigh came from his weary face. “All right, sir,” he said. “I understand. You are a good boy. You can pay $100. Yes, I will accept your offer.” He motioned to his man, who rolled up the carpet. “Now, we take traveler’s checks, and cash, of course. We can take US dollars or Moroccan currency. And we can ship the rug for you to America. Thank you very much for your business, sir. Perhaps more tea? No? All right, sir. Please come, this way,” and he led me back to the reception.

  The rug I had purchased, I would later learn, is a kilim, a flat weave suitable as a wall hanging or perhaps a furniture or bed covering. In traditional cultures of the region, and farther north and east, such rugs are essential to everyday life. They serve as a shelter from wind and windborne sand, as a table or a bed laid out on the ground, as a social space for discussion, as a cradle for babies, as a funeral pall, and as a space for prayer. While selling rugs in Morocco is men’s business, their creation is rooted in the female world. In his wonderful book Kilim: History and Symbols, Dario Valcarenghi describes the weaving of kilims as a nine-thousand-year-old tradition that has been passed down from mother to daughter. It is the women who make life, so it is the women who weave rugs. Weaving is a reenactment of the process of birth, which “comes out of the union of two opposites”: on the loom, the warp and weft; in the womb, the sperm and egg. When the weaver finishes her work, she “cuts the threads that link it to the loom, and while doing this, pronounces a formula of blessings that is the same as the one used by the midwife when she severs the umbilical cord of a newborn child.”

  This meeting of opposites is rooted in the great archetypes Jung finds bubbling up from the collective unconscious: night and day, death and birth, masculine and feminine. “If the meeting of opposites does not take place,” Valcarenghi explains, “nothing is created, for each element is defined by its opposite and takes its meaning from it.” On the loom then are two threads: the warp, which runs vertically and is stretched taut; and the weft, which undulates horizontally and is intertwined with the warp. “To produce the textile,” writes Valcarenghi, “it is necessary for these two threads to be bound, otherwise each will remain a fragile and fluttering potentiality.” Here in North Africa, Valcarenghi asserts, the warp is associated with the sky, and the weft with the earth. As in mythologies all over the world, the sky, and thus the rigid, taut warp, is male (the sky father), while the earth, in all its undulations, is female (the earth mother). To weave is to unite the male and female into a human community and to unite the sky and earth into a world in which we might live.

  Valcarenghi makes a distinction between the female world of the kilim and knotted rugs, like the wall-to-wall carpet in many American homes, which he considers male. While the kilim requires the meeting of opposites, warp and weft, a knotted rug is made by tying threads to the woven warp and weft, thereby creating a third opposite. “The knotting,” writes Valcarenghi, “introduces a third element into the original duality of the two directions of the kilim. . . . Two is a feminine receptive number and three is a masculine penetrative number, since the former embraces a totality and the latter prepares
a new opposition.” He goes on to assert that knotted rugs are made from a fixed pattern and therefore can be copied, but the pattern changes to accommodate changes in culture and society. The kilim “was transmitted orally from mother to daughter,” so both the art of weaving and the pattern woven into a kilim are symbolic and unconscious. Valcarenghi regards these patterns as a symbolic language, a language “evocative of ideas, convictions and states of mind that were deeply rooted in the collective unconscious of the women who wove them.” While knotted rugs are a sign of the times, the kilim is ancient and universal. As kilims were used and wore out, the patterns were transmitted from mother to daughter and from rug to rug, like DNA. If the pattern in a kilim is indeed a symbolic language, then the weaver is engaged in an “unconscious inner dialogue” with her foremothers “stretching back nine thousand years.”

  Color was important too in the kilim, especially red, as the first uses of color by paleo peoples was red ochre, which was associated with a belief in the afterlife. Mircea Eliade writes that in the Paleolithic period “there is evidence for the use more or less everywhere of red ochre, a ritual substitute for blood, symbols of life, as a testimony to the belief in an existence after death.”

  What did the patterns on my rug mean? Valcarenghi cites a fourteenth-century Middle Eastern expression: “Everyone can pull his own kilim out of the water.” In other words, everyone can recover their own lost identity or everyone can dig out their own truth from the unconscious. So if Valcarenghi is right, and Jung and Eliade are right, perhaps whatever attracted me to my rug is rooted deep inside me, and if I could understand the language of the rug, I might come to know myself a little better. Or perhaps, like a horoscope, the patterns in a kilim are general and universal, so each one can apply to most anyone at all.

  My rug is made up of a series of long bands of pattern drawn across the width. Among them is a long wavy black band, repeated thirteen times, possibly the symbol for running water. Running water is the symbol for life, say the scholars. Pretty general. Moving on, Valcarenghi writes about the “the body of the goddess,” a symbol of a female figure with legs and arms spread, often stylized to look more like a geometric shape. The goddess, or mother goddess, is a hermaphrodite, as she possesses the power to create both male and female. She also possesses the power to take life, hence her association with the forces of nature beyond human control: vultures, lions, wolves, bulls. According to Valcarenghi, in the pattern of the kilim, the image of the bull is often posited inside the image of the mother goddess. The bull possesses a “deep ambivalence.” It is “male for its sexual vigor, the abundance of its semen, and the strength of its body,” and it is “female for its roundish curves, its color of the earth and its horns,” which link it to the moon, the night, and nature’s fecundity. The essence of the bull is this dualism, asserts Valcarenghi, so in the ancient world, the “religions of the great mother were founded on the cult of the bull.” In an early ritual, initiates stood in a grated pit while a bull was sacrificed above them. The warm blood that rained down over them was “a symbol of energy and life,” writes Valcarenghi, “a dual symbol: male as the origin of physical strength and vitality, female as the cyclic flow linked with birth.”

  Looking at my rug, it is easy to associate two slightly different bands with the great mother and the bull, but then also I see here the wolf’s mouth, or what is sometimes known as the wolf’s track. This symbol, in all its variety, is common among nomadic tribes who regard the wolf as both a spiritual force and an enemy to their sheep, goat, and cattle herds. To weave the wolf’s mouth into a rug is to help ward off wolf attack. And I could recognize the bird symbol, too, and find in the scholars’ interpretations such various and general meanings as to be nearly meaningless: bad luck and good luck; happiness, joy, and love; power and strength; impending news; and the soul of the dead. Emre, who was a shepherd as well as a Sufi, writes of death, “The bird of life has flown off,” and “We took off, became birds, and flew, Thank God!”

  When I arrived at the reception desk, Bob was there with Ahmad, and Fahd’s men now stood on either side of the front entrance. Bob held nothing in his hands. Fahd glanced at him with disgust but then turned to me with great enthusiasm.

  “Here our friend has purchased a very fine rug for a very fine price,” Fahd said. “He has done well. Please, sir, write your entry into my ledger. I will wrap your fine rug in brown paper. Now, of course, we will ship to any place in the world. If you leave your rug with us, for you, we will ship it to America. What would you like to do?”

  “I’ll take it with me,” I said, opening the ledger. Inside I wrote: John Smith, $100.

  “Ahh,” Fahd said, winking at me. “You will carry your rug with you. A very wise boy. It has been a pleasure,” he said. “I have enjoyed your company and patronage. Please, Ahmad, take care of this fine boy. He has done very well.”

  One of the men opened the door and showed us our way into the street.

  “What did you pay?” Ahmad asked.

  “One hundred dollars.”

  “Yes, very good! You have done well. Very good. As Fahd said. It is a good price.”

  The kilim, because of its tight weave, requires more work than a knotted rug, so it is more expensive, perhaps somewhere in the range of three dollars per square foot in Morocco. The rug I bought was no more than twenty square feet, so a fair price, at the upper end, was about sixty dollars. The same rug in the United States would indeed go for the kinds of prices Fahd had recorded in his ledger.

  “Well,” Ahmad said. “Now I will take you to your hotel. When the time is near, I will return and we will go to a very nice restaurant. You will hear me knock at the door. All right? Come this way, my friends.”

  Later we heard a knock at the door.

  “Friends,” Ahmad said. “I will take you to a very nice restaurant. Come with me.”

  Ron had come around after his nap and was dressed, washed, ready to go. We followed Ahmad through town like puppies. He led us on dark streets and across narrow alleyways. Where we were, I did not know. I tried to keep track, marking buildings and other odd-looking structures in my mind, trying to see the streets as if from above, on a map. But a few minutes into this maze, I was lost. Bob was lost too, and Ron was without a response. We were completely in the hands of Ahmad.

  “Just this way, my friends. Just here.”

  We stopped in front of a little restaurant and went inside. The interior was dark and cluttered with bric-a-brac, but it looked clean and well cared for. It was full of people, too, all men, and every head turned when we walked in.

  “These are my friends,” Ahmad announced. “They need a nice table and some good food. Please, this way,” he said. “Please sit here and I will have the chef bring you his best. OK? Do not worry. I have arranged it for you.”

  The meal unfolded as a series of courses, beginning with a lentil-based soup, probably harira, with flatbread and a sad-looking salad, which Ahmad warned us against eating. “No,” he said. “You will become ill. Please do not take this dish.” Then on to a lovely fish, which Ahmad assured us came from the sea that morning. And then a sample, which Ahmad insisted on. “Yes, you will like to have the story of eating the bastaila. Please try this small bite. No cost. It is a specialty here, but mostly you find it more south.” Bastaila, I would later discover, is a rich pigeon pie. And then a pastry for dessert, which reminded me of the Spanish churro. No one else was eating, just me, Bob, and Ron.

  “Come, gentlemen,” Ahmad said. “We must go now, as the Ramadan is about to be broken for these gentlemen here. The restaurant is for them now and not for you. Please come with me.”

  We went out into the Moroccan night, following Ahmad through the streets. I recognized this and that, and then realized we were just a few streets down from the hotel.

  “Now,” Ahmad said, “you will like to try the local smoke. It is very nice after a good meal. I know a place where you may buy the best kif in town. We will sample several kin
ds, everything you want, and then you may buy what you like to carry. This way.”

  I stood there on the street corner as Ahmad led Bob and Ron away.

  “Come, my friend,” Ahmad called to me. “This way. It is the best thing for you.”

  “I’m going back to the hotel.”

  “Come, my friend,” Ahmad said, and hurried back to where I waited under the dim streetlight. “Will you not come?”

  “No,” I said. “I am not a smoker. I’ll just go back to the hotel.”

  “OK, my friend. OK. I understand you now. Please go back to the hotel. It isn’t far. Do you know the way? It is just there and there, and then to your left side. You will find it very easily.”

  “I know the way.”

  Deep into the night Bob and Ron returned to the room. I had locked the door, so they awakened me with their knocking.

  “My god, Ron,” Bob exclaimed, as they burst in. “I didn’t think we would get out of there.” Then to me, “You wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  But I did believe it. What happened at the border, what happened in the rug shop, and what had been happening all day with Ahmad also happened in the kif dealer’s home.

  “We kept telling them, no, we didn’t want to buy that much,” Bob said. “No. No. But each time they would not listen, and they would not let us out the door. And we had smoked a lot, so we felt obligated, but we didn’t want that much. And that fellow at the door would not let us out.”

  “And Ahmad?” I asked.

  “He had gone to help his grandmother,” Ron said.

  “Yes,” Bob said. “It took hours. First we were smoking happily with these guys, and then they wanted us to buy, god knows how much that was, but they wanted about $1,000. Finally we consented to buy $100. But we had to buy to get out, so once we did, they opened the door for us. That’s when Ahmad appeared again.”

  “What a coincidence,” I said. “Where is he now?”

  “No telling,” Bob said. “He left us at the door downstairs.”