Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “But we must go see!” I said. “Don’t you love a fire? Isn’t there someone who could take us?” I had to see it, for to me it almost seemed owing to my presence that an alarming event should unfold as soon as I got here, and it gave me a pleasant sense of being in the thick of things already.

  “I don’t see how,” Posy said, “but we can ask Rashid.” She went off to find him; she had rapport with him after all this time.

  “He says no, Ian said we were not to come to the fire. Anyway, Ian and Robin took the car, but he is to take us to the souk in a taxi; he can guide us around if you want. Let’s do. I’ve gone to the souk a lot, but I still don’t know my way around it without him.” She was just bored, I supposed.

  Presently, Rashid took us the few miles into the center of the city in a taxi. Rashid was a man in his forties, maybe no older than Ian, but already worn-looking, and he had a slight harelip. It was no more than a scar and the slightly flattened aspect of a repaired upper lip, but it caused a little lisp. He wore the tunic and the white skullcap most of the men seemed to wear, and performed the office of a tour guide, pointing out to us the houses of Yves Saint Laurent and some symphony conductor from London, and some shantytown villages whose corrugated metal roofs glittered in the sunlight.

  “Moroccans,” he said. “These villages spring up from nowhere like maggots from a rotting melon.”

  The taxi driver appeared to be his brother, at least so Rashid called him: “Turn here, my brother,” etc. I thought they looked alike. The driver wore a dusty suit and a sort of military cap, and tutoyer‐ed Rashid. It was odd that they spoke French instead of Arabic, perhaps to reassure Posy and me they had no secrets from us. I could see there was no use opposing Rashid and Posy, so I tried to submit to this expedition with some good grace at least.

  As we drove, I became more aware of where we actually were when we were at Ian’s—some miles out of Marrakech in an area made up of large walled properties, mostly owned by Europeans, according to Rashid. Fanciful names in French and English decorated the portals, of the “Sans Souci” variety, but some were in Arabic, which Rashid translated; things like “Perfumed Rest” or “The Pearl of Solitude.” Luxurious vines bloomed on every wall, and all the walls were the same curious ocher pink, crafted from local clay; all the vines were intense fuchsias and oranges, ablaze in the dry landscape. I could see that our location so far out of town was not propitious for information gathering. The medina, the central walled part of Marrakech, was beyond walking distance, and a woman alone along the highway would rivet attention—every movement would be visible for miles.

  We parked in a parking garage, a prosaic, rather jarring modern touch at the edge of the ancient enclosure of the medina. Posy and I followed Rashid, apprehensions coming back, into a dank alley lit by electric bulbs hanging from wires, though it was bright sun outside.

  Orange halves and peels washed in a trickle of water down the center of the way, watched by a skinny cat, happy in her element of darkness, and two children splashed their feet in the water. From here we emerged into the great square I had seen the day before, and once again into a twisty maze of boutiques and hawkers. Fairy-tale carts were piled high with oranges and dates perfuming the air, wafts of incense and the smell of animals stung our nostrils, and the music of drums underlay the bustle with an exciting throb.

  The narrow lanes of the souk were crowded with shoppers, mostly stout young women in long pastel robes and head scarves, carry ing baskets and parcels, but also men, families, little kids skipping along, and many, many tourists, so we were by no means conspicuous. Occasionally a woman stood out because her face was entirely veiled with a black handkerchief; these seemed like veils of shame, some sort of stigma, or symbol of contagion, but Rashid said they signified extra piety. We saw one group of women draped all in black, and these had the air of being tourists like us, turning confusedly at the intersections of the alleys or peering where the doors of a mosque stood open.

  At stalls suggested by Rashid, Posy bought a caftan, the ideal maternity garment, and I bought some slippers, more or less for verisimilitude, women shopping. Of course I hated to bargain, but Posy had already gotten rather good at it. Why do we hate to bargain? Westerners, I mean. I suppose because it implies that a falsehood is the basis of the transaction—the first asking price is a lie. Whereas we value candor and relying on each other’s word, which would mean you state the true price right away. And there is an unpleasant metaphor of victory and defeat embedded in the bargain—you finally defeat your adversary, yet you really know you are defeated, because he is getting the price he secretly meant to get all along.

  As we wandered the alleys of the souk, closely followed by Rashid, I began to understand even more about the limitations of my situation, a woman alone: first would be the simple difficulty of walking around unnoticed. I thought again of a discussion with Taft on the general principles of recruiting and getting to know the locals. What a poor choice he had made in me, an agent limited by social conventions. He couldn’t ever have been faced with those particular disqualifications: Without Rashid I would be, geo graphically, lost in seconds in the winding labyrinth, and the idea of establishing any sort of rapport with any of the indistinguishable men and boys crowding the indistinguishable stalls of polyester fabrics and cheap underwear was beyond imagining, let alone thinking of prying into their ancient networks and bankless financial repositories, resources existing since the beginning of time and entirely male. What had Taft and I been thinking for me to have come here?

  But of course it was not expected I would get to read the native secrets of the souk—it was the European community that was, for the moment, of interest. “Someone with Western connections is cooperating with or running the Islamists,” Taft had said. “Nobody knows to what end, but there is chatter. Something may happen.” Was it Ian’s fire, was it happening even now?

  10

  Is it ye who grow / The tree which feeds /

  The fire, or do We / Grow it?

  —Koran 56:72

  We stopped for a cup of tea in a little tearoom overlooking the edge of the square Jemaa el Fna and gazed down at the spectacle, storytellers and snake charmers, and native people coming and going on the errands of their daily lives. When we had drunk our tea, Rashid, who had briefly disappeared, led us down to wander in the thronged square. We stopped on the fringes of a crowd around a man telling a story, with a little drum he used to emphasize the thrilling parts—of course, we couldn’t understand it, but Rashid whispered a translation.

  “It is a poor widow, she is defenseless, her children are starving, but she has found a ring, left by a stranger to whom she offered the last drops of her poor soup. It is a jewel of indescribable value, and she will sell it. It means her children will eat.

  “But soldiers have come and accused her of theft. She is dragged off to prison, and the children are left to starve. But now the story is over. People have to pay him more money. But they are walking away. Perhaps they have heard this story.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Posy bitterly. “How could they just leave it hanging?”

  “Instead I will take you to the best saffron,” Rashid said. Hoping to get to the fire, I would have said no, or “later,” but Posy fell into smiles. He had told her that most saffron is false, people are fooled and disappointed, there is a trick to telling true from false saffron, and she felt she now had the confidence to buy. Saffron was the thing everybody back in England wanted her to send them. He led us into alleys we’d just been in, to a little stall we probably had passed without noticing, lined with apothecary jars and hanging bunches of herbs and peppers. It exuded the fragrance of lavender or thyme, and, if I was right—for I am only beginning to take an interest in culinary things—some sort of anise concoction resembling the odor of pastis, a nasty French drink I’d never liked. Bottles of rose water and fleur d’oranger lined the shelves, and little fragrant mountains of powdered cumin and turmeric were composed on a plank in front
. Burlap sacks of pods and dried leaves were artfully opened to add to the richness of the array. A wind would have wafted the whole of his treasure into the air, but there was no wind.

  Rashid saluted the owner, a fat, slow old man in a wrinkled polyester robe, and went to crouch against the wall opposite, watching us. In a droning voice, the old man began an almost mechanical spiel about unguents and remedies, especially directed at Posy, for an easy childbirth, for a beautiful child. Posy brought him back to saffron. I suppose my mind wandered, for suddenly Posy was counting out dir‐hams and he was pressing waxy balls of something wrapped in paper into our hands. After his effusive good-byes and bows, we stepped back into the lane and looked for Rashid, who was now talking in a group of men. He left them and came over to us, and nodded at the paper-wrapped balls we carried.

  “You must eat them,” he said. “To acknowledge your trust in his products. They are sweets, with your fortune inside.”

  “ ‘Your thoughts are perfumed with the words of the Prophet,’ ” Posy said, reading the writing on the inside of the wrapper.

  So I opened mine, and it said, “The Bearer Angel may safely communicate with Aladdin the Eagle through the trusted dealer in spices,” and it contained some other words that must be mentioned in any communication of this sort, known only to my colleagues and me. Aladdin the Eagle, that is, some agent of that designation, was getting in touch with me, therefore knew that I am me, and that I’m the Bearer Angel.

  Taft had told me that someone would be in touch with me, but I hadn’t expected it so soon. He had said people undercover might go years without much or any contact; we were taught that our problem would be to keep up a sense of purpose and reality, except in the form of a generalized indignation fueled from reading in the papers about people dying at the hands of suicide bombers, car bombers, roadside bombers in Israel, in Cairo, in Rome, on sunny Pacific islands, with an increasing sense of disgust at fanaticism of any kind.

  Of course I couldn’t let her read my message, so I made something up—very ill-judged, exactly wrong, suggested, I suppose, by Posy’s pregnant form. “This one says, ‘The happiness of motherhood awaits you,’ ” I said, the first thing that came to my head, realizing only too late that she would think such a message was meant for her, that our fortunes had been strangely swapped, and that she would want to save such a propitious message. I stuffed it in my pocket, mind speeding up with the possibilities of who had sent it. Was it the old man himself or someone known to him? What was Rashid’s role?

  “Here, let me keep it,” she said.

  “I was kidding. Mine is too horrible, I just made it up. I’d rather think my thoughts are perfumed with the words of the Prophet,” I said, and I hastily dropped it onto the filthy cobbles, where she wouldn’t pick it up. “How stupid of me. Never mind.” And I drew her along.

  We walked on, and when Posy stopped to look at some brass trays in one of the stalls, I started back to retrieve the paper. But Rashid was already bending to pick it up.

  11

  During a journey, Mohammed found a man who started a fire and had endangered some ants. Mohammed was very disturbed to see this. “Who made this fire?” He asked. “I made the fire, O Messenger of Allah!” came a reply. “Put out the fire! Put out the fire!” was Mohammed’s teaching.

  —The Hadith

  “You’re right, I think we should see the fire. I love a fire, don’t you? We should take them some food,” Posy said, looking at the dates and mandarins. “Please take us to the fire,” she suddenly said to Rashid, who as usual hovered near. He shook his head.

  “It is dangerous,” he said. “It is far. Monsieur does not wish it.” Ian had said we were not to come, etc. Of course I was distracted by questions about Rashid—how had he known to take me to the saffron man, was he trusted by Ian, what did Ian know, and so on, an infinitude of questions raised by what had just happened. But Posy had taken up the cause.

  “We wish it. We insist. Your brother can drive us.” We were a tiresome chorus, and he had to agree, but from his surly expression, I understood that by defying Ian’s instructions, we were making an enemy, or at least not making a friend. The problem was, I would come to understand, that women do not have wishes and the power to insist, at least in public. Yet we had power over him too, Western and spoiled members of his master’s harem.

  “Very well,” he said at last. “We will take the truck from home.” Another taxi took us back to Ian’s; Rashid produced a small pickup truck from the garages at the back of the house, and we set out.

  It took us about forty-five minutes to reach the foothills of the mountains, but we imagined we could see a plume of smoke high in the sky almost as soon as we left Marrakech. To a Californian the foothills of the Atlas range felt like a natural landscape; the rising ground, ravines, and scrub undergrowth looked like it does around Santa Barbara, still arid but at least not flat, and at the lower levels, there were gardens and vineyards, terraced and reassuring, with flocks grazing and all the lovely details of agriculture and husbandry one might also see in Italy or Spain.

  The route was complicated and I could see why Rashid hadn’t wanted to take a taxi, for he seemed to know the way perfectly. It was steep. In three quarters of an hour we’d climbed a thousand feet, passing occasional trucks and carts coming down, and the smoke and fumes had increased before at last we pulled off the road into a dirt track on the right and then across an expanse of hard ground for perhaps a half a mile. “God in hell,” Posy complained of the bumpy, hard ride, “I’m sure to miscarry.”

  You would have to know where you were going to find the place at all. Up ahead a small group of men and a couple of vehicles were clustered some distance from the still-blazing building. A few other men, in work clothes or uniforms of the gendarmerie, had assembled at the edge of the road, gazing in the twilight at the spectacle. I had noticed in the square in Marrakech that people gathered together were noisy, but here they stood in silence.

  As for the building, a huge, rectangular, cement-block industrial structure, there wasn’t much doubt it was beyond reclaim. From the fingers of flames still shooting from every window, I could imagine the inferno earlier, and the metal roof began to buckle as we watched. The heat was too strong to allow us very near. A smell, very strong now, was getting worse. A white fire wagon was parked near us, with its hose coiled on the ground like a lethargic serpent; no one was trying to use it. There was no hydrant, there was really no way to stop a fire, and I was surprised that that there were so many people—I imagined the onlookers were workers in the factory. Another small, helpless-looking fire truck trailing a water tank arrived; two men unwound its hose and aimed a thin stream of water at one of the flanks of the building, but it was only a gesture.

  Ian and Robin Crumley were standing by the side of the road, Ian with an expression of preoccupation, and both men smelled of fire and chemicals. They were amid a knot of men, perhaps seven or eight, all gazing with the eagerness that people always feel to see something burning. The men moved away from Posy and me. Ian and Robin greeted us perfunctorily, and if they were irritated that we’d defied Ian’s injunction, they didn’t say so. Ian said several times, as he stared, “Luckily there was no one inside.”

  It seemed odd that they were not worried about the fire spreading, but Ian explained that the dirt road, which led to distant buildings, created a natural firebreak. In the dry brush, there was nothing else to burn except the brush itself. Ian said again that there was no one inside—the explosion had come at a moment of a prayer interval and tea break, when people had gone outside. The main question was, how had it started? Ian’s manner now was concerned but not surprised, was almost resigned, as if explosion and loss were overdue.

  Later he explained that his factory was a building that, though he owned it, was leased to a manufacturer of fertilizer, a product by its nature explosive, and such an accident was always to be feared and provided against. I knew that Ian had a number of such projects; in Kos
ovo, he had talked about his four compact but efficient industrial buildings, built on tracts in the Atlas foothills with his own private funds and a development loan from the World Bank. These buildings were leased to Moroccan entrepreneurs for developing light manufactures of various kinds. In another place, he had built a coeducational school for young children of farmers, in practice attended by only a few of the more forward-looking locals in the area. He supervised and managed these properties—I don’t know who had managed them while he was in Bosnia; it was strange that he’d go off and leave them.

  “What exactly were they making?” Posy asked.

  “Well, in effect, explosives. That is, fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, a perfectly stable compound unless it’s set off. As it can be—one reason it’s manufactured up here. There’s a lot of security. Ammonium nitrate plants have been detonated a few times—in Toulouse in 2001, another once in Texas, with hundreds of deaths.”

  “I thought Toulouse was an accident.” I probably shouldn’t have known that.

  “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” Ian said. “The French authorities. They didn’t want to give anyone credit, or cause panic either, so soon after 9/11. But it takes a trigger—a rocket or torch. They don’t see evidence of anything like that here, but they haven’t ruled it out. We won’t know for days, till it cools down.”

  It seemed inappropriate to think of love in a violent situation like this, but my heart stirred with love to see Ian that day. Whereas in Kosovo he had been an attractive compatriot and confidant, in Morocco, in his own grand house, and even at the ruins of his factory, he was the personification of lordly colonial master, someone before whom a man asleep on a mat on the floor would leap up and bow, as I had seen with my own eyes. No different from other women, I liked this powerful, preoccupied Ian even better and, after the transports of last night, was prepared to be more deeply committed to him than ever.