Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

Posy laughed. “I’ve tried to explain our general indifference to virginity, but they don’t believe me. How could we be indifferent to losing our sole possession, the entire determinate of our value? Not its moral symbolism, either, they mean the actual membrane.”

  True, of course. Western young women had never been taught to think of the hymen at all. It had been explained to us in gym class that with Tampax and horse back riding, we probably didn’t have one. What ever we had experienced of unconscious denigration, to a person of my age no one had ever been so derisive, so condescending to women, as to imply that our value lay solely in our virginity.

  “Let alone expect us to bleed like a sow,” Posy said. “It’s the most offensive thing in all Islam.” That was saying a lot in Posy’s book, since for her it was a religion full of offensive ideas. I was still trying to focus on its beauty and antiquity.

  Posy said, “It’s not such a big deal after all, to have a man poke you in that particular way. Enjoyable of course, but I mean, it doesn’t change your essence, it doesn’t change you.”

  I agreed. I tried to remember being a virgin and I couldn’t. That is, there was no difference in me either way; it was exactly the same, and it was terrible to think there were whole continents of poor girls for whom that inconsequential poke might mean life or death.

  After this conversation, it came to me that if I were married to Ian, all would be well. In the ritual duties of wifehood, in the possession of silver and china, I would be redeemed and safe. I wish I hadn’t had that thought, for it stayed with me; what a reasonable thing it would be to marry Ian.

  17

  … The central riddle of the mysterious North African civilization: the perpetual flux and the immovable stability, the barbarous customs and the sensuous refinements, the absence of artistic originality and the gift for regrouping borrowed motives, the patient and exquisite workmanship and the immediate neglect and degradation of the thing once made.

  —Edith Wharton, In Morocco

  After my rendezvous with Colonel Barka, I had lunch with him from time to time, usually along with Posy, in the guise of being shown some tourist attraction, to establish the normalness of our relationship. It was known that the sociable and urbane little man often showed European friends through palaces and restored riads in the medina, or drove them to charming oases or even to Fez or Essaouira. I knew now that this was part of his mission, but he had a streak of the natural tour guide and a real relish for the details of Moroccan history and architecture, and it allowed us to meet more or less freely.

  “What have you brought me?” he would ask while Posy went to the ladies’ room—oftener and oftener as her pregnancy advanced. He would gaze into his tea as if to read the leaves and I would whisper some tidbits, never anything much, for I didn’t know anything much. I could tell him how the fire investigation was going or some details of Ian’s business plans. I saw no harm in this, because Ian was plainly not involved in anything, or so I came down on the side of thinking. Colonel Barka in turn would give me some Moroccan names, people who went to Casablanca or supported certain charities, for me to pass along to Taft. It was enough for me that he had come recommended by those above me, trusted if not altogether ours; I was allowed to trust him, and I did.

  With Posy present, the colonel would discourse on world events. “There is a systemic American blindness—your intelligence services failed to notice the Berlin wall was coming down, that Russia would implode, that your enemies in Islam were at your door. You believe the myth that you are the most fortunate country—I don’t say the best; Americans are too modest to say that. But fortunate, that is, with the happiest way of life—this is a serious error, for it prevents you from achieving a more cheerful and pleasant society, like some others.”

  Since I’ve lived abroad since my twenties, I had sort of forgotten that myth, that we had the best way of life; I liked where I grew up, Santa Barbara, though I remembered some bad things about it. “You shouldn’t say ‘you,’ ” I protested, “as if you mean me. All Americans are not alike.” For I knew, now, that ours was not the best way of life, that there were many countries with higher standards of living—though there were also many worse.

  Talking of Islamic radicals, “I am no ideologue,” said the colonel. “I do not pretend to understand our passionate young men. But I half admire them for their puerile focus, their energy.”

  “If women led more normal lives, the men would be less angry,” I said.

  “You see—you have an American view of what is normal.” He smiled. “To us it is normal for women to be busy perfuming themselves in the hammam and waiting for the caresses of their husbands.” Posy and I laughed.

  These lunches were fun because Colonel Barka, without ever mentioning our mutual profession, was a fount of lore about the history of espionage, especially as it related to Morocco, in the days during World War II when spies congregated in Casablanca. He could quote long sequences from the film of that name and had memorized the works of John Buchan and the more recent Ian Fleming and John le Carré. Often he said, apropos of almost anything, “ ‘I am shocked, shocked.’ ”

  I was able to firm up my recruitment of Habiba. What ever her attitude to America had been during the sixties, now it was friendly, even nostalgic, and so I hinted to her that I knew people who would appreciate insights about the Islamic world and would make donations to her literacy program. Whether the payments I made ever got to her programs I never knew, but she would give me little lists of donors and officers in other charities and of any Europeans she was aware of who made donations. I passed these along to Taft, but her usefulness to me was often just as an interpreter of events. She hadn’t lost her ability to respond like an American, but she understood the Moroccan perspective too.

  “They are obsessed with the safety of their king,” she said. “He is universally loved. As loved as his father was hated. I remember the days of his father.”

  “What was that like?”

  “The people suffered. Everyone knew he was CIA. My husband’s brother was in prison for nineteen years, just for being against him. No trial, just a sort of cursory process. But the present king is loved.”

  Tom and Strand were my other “pickets.” Sometimes I gave Posy the slip, figuratively speaking—she would nap or be reading, and I would ask Rashid to drive me to Tom Drill’s tea shop. There I had discovered, over the weeks, that Strand smoked a lot of dope; maybe someone not Californian wouldn’t notice the unmistakable, rather delicious smell, the bright eyes, the mellow welcome. I was actually thrilled to find something vaguely criminal going on, for if he would tell me about his dealers, I would finally have a sense of the intrigues and betrayals that I was supposedly looking into. Another consequence of my supposedly privileged and isolated situation was being remote from the fast, racy, drug-sniffing, opium-smoking world of the prominent French fashion and English film people. This world was said to exist, but I never saw it. Ours was the staid world of whiskey and soda, business, and diplomacy—the very world we believed was implicated in money laundering and support—but any depravity was invisible. The sole outward sign of the secret life of Marrakech was the flock of little boys at every corner, alert to guide the traveler to some den or other. But never me.

  Tom was no help; deploring Strand’s life in drugs, he refused to know about his sources. “It’s just easier for some people in this house hold to get stoned than deal with things,” he said snappishly when I mentioned, in a nonjudgmental way, that smelling marijuana made me nostalgic for California. I figured Strand needed to be stoned to get up at four every morning to do the baking, as he did, which Tom had rather unfairly forgotten.

  “Morocco is all about drugs,” he said. “Why do you think people come here? All those English directors, all those French dress designers, it all goes up in smoke.” It was clear that he was worried about Strand’s habit, if only because it meant that with Strand so laid back, he, Tom, did most of the work around the house and the tearo
om, and most of the parenting. Tom didn’t smoke, or only rarely, but this was my introduction to the subject of drugs in Morocco, not at all the focus of my presence there, but of interest, linked as they often are to politics, as a source of money to support political, i.e., terrorist activities, and as an expression of general defiance and disillusion—philosophically linked.

  Tom and Strand thought I was just trying to put together my sense of where I was, and they liked to be of help with information and analysis of their tearoom clients, who came in with whom. Strand told me about his buying expeditions, how you shouldn’t buy hashish from the little boys who proffered it by the side of the mountain roads and were in league with the police, who’d arrest you soon after.

  “You have to get it in the restaurants,” he said.

  “What an experienced drug dealer you are,” I said.

  “Well, don’t laugh, I was the drug dealer when I was at Berkeley High, but now I just buy a little for my own consumption.”

  18

  For the prohibited month / And so for all things prohibited / There is the law of equality. If then anyone transgresses the prohibition against you / Transgress ye likewise / Against him.

  —Koran 2:194

  Sometimes, fed up with company, I’d go to my room after dinner, leaving Ian to his guests. I would write my e‐mails to “Sheila,” and I’d read. To tell the truth, I’d never been much of a reader. One reason I never liked to read is that I early discovered that in stories, the female character you were supposed to love and admire was expected to make choices of the heart instead of rational choices. She was supposed to be buffeted by her emotions, and that was what made her lovable and womanly. True, in Little Women you liked Jo, the most intelligent one, though my secret was that I didn’t like the little women at all; Jo was only the best among them, but even she, swayed by her emotions, sold out for the ugly, bearded, older professor, a repellent choice for lots of reasons.

  I had really taken up reading when I went to work in Pristina, where, unlike here, there was nothing to do in the evenings; so before I met Ian, I’d begun to form the habit of going to bed early with a book. In Marrakech, first I read the supply of miscellaneous paperbacks and old Tauchnitz editions to be found on the bookshelf in my room—one volume only of the Forsyte Saga (Indian Summer of a Forsyte); Mr. Midshipman Easy, which was a sea story; The Man in Lower Ten; the collected writings of Max Weber (English translation). Then I began to bring home books from the informal lending shelf at Tom and Strand’s tea shop, the Tea Cosy, old paperbacks people would leave for each other. It would be this that led to a useful development, the library project.

  I was reading Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, in which the traveling Persian bemoans the vengeful behavior of the vindictive women in his seraglio back home. I couldn’t help but think that my situation, at the moment, was not so different from theirs. Well, it was totally different, of course, for I could always leave. Instead, with the perfectly truthful excuse of feeling guilty at having so much free time, apart from my modest expeditions on behalf of female literacy, I had suggested to Ian that I needed to find something else useful to do, and he had suggested volunteer activities for both Posy and me, an idea we had had ourselves, of course, but, given our unfamiliarity with the way things ran there, needed his help to set up.

  On the nights I went up early, Ian often didn’t come in at all, as if to punish me for my lack of sociability. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it was punishment, so I pretended not to notice and didn’t complain—though it was punishment. I feel positive about sex and have since I began it, and it was certainly part of what I’d come to

  Morocco for. It was after those nights of no love, in the morning, that we nodded a little guiltily and avoided each other’s eyes.

  Posy shared my restlessness, and I felt much sorrier for her than for myself. I had my secret job and my overt one, while she was stuck there with no useful occupation, newly married to a vague, fluttery, older husband, not really ready for motherhood, and perhaps (my secret vanity) less endowed than I with inner resources. When I suggested she throw herself into the world of poetry, she indignantly pointed out she had a good degree at Oxford in English poetry and the like, and must already know much more about poetry than I, which wouldn’t have been hard.

  “I meant the politics of poetry,” I said. “The critics, the patrons, the competition—helping Robin with his career.”

  “Oh, Robin is deeply attuned to that,” she said.

  “I’d like to read Robin’s poems, if you have a book of his,” I suggested. To my discomfiture, several copies of slim volumes by Robin Crumley were sitting reproachfully next to my breakfast plate the next day. However, I liked them, short witty lyrics and soulful evocations of green English scenes, and even the tongue-in-cheek parody of older English subjects, on the line of “Where is the ploughman / poor bastard / who used to slog along this lane?”

  We had begun our researches for a useful project. As I had been briefed before coming here, Marrakech was crawling with NGOs devoted to all kinds of worthy things—literacy especially, but also there were other aspects of the advancement of women, public health issues, historic renovation and beautification projects. Some of the expatriate women were involved in such causes, but most groups were nonetheless run by Moroccans, or by people from other parts of the Muslim world, who with their colonial memories were not really receptive to Christian Anglophones.

  At first I volunteered to teach women how to read, along with evaluating the various programs. Besides her donkey rescue, Marina Cotter was involved in a teaching program, but she and her friends were teaching English to only a handful of Protestant Christian children, for the simple reason that most children’s families had no use for English . However, it became apparent to me that teaching reading in any language demanded patience and special techniques I didn’t know.

  Once we started seriously looking, Posy and I easily found something more suited to our skills to throw ourselves into: There was one glaring lack in the Christian/English community that struck us as a way of doing a real ser vice, and coincidentally might give me an entrée to a variety of new places; apart from the single shelf at the Tea Cosy, there was no lending library, either British or American, for books in English . The idea of founding one hit me with a rush of excitement, for it would give me the perfect reason to go around talking to people, Moroccans as well as foreigners, snooping into things, soliciting funds, and getting to know the power structure, at least in the expatriate community. And Moroccans would use it too, and be exposed to the benefits of the best of Western literature (fatuous assumption). It seemed strange, even slightly shocking, given that Europeans had been here for centuries, that no one had thought of a library before—or maybe they had.

  The location for this library was easily found, in a dusty two-room storefront annex adjoining Tom and Strand’s Tea Cosy in Guéliz, a modern section of the city where a lot of foreigners live. Tom was delighted and supportive, for what could be more compatible than books and tea shops, and he had already operated as librarian, by default, of the informal library shelf of paperbacks his patrons traded and helped themselves from.

  Acquisitions would begin with a book donation drive, which I began to talk up in the course of the active nightly social life around Ian, and everyone volunteered to donate books. I also began to search the Web for lists of books basic to any library—reference works and classics to start. We ordered things from Amazon to be sent to Ian’s address in London, for it proved complicated to import books directly to Morocco. Morocco put maddening obstacles in the way; every book ordered from abroad had to have a certificate of importation and get past a censor. Each book had to be cleared of being offensive—no Salman Rushdie, not even any Zadie Smith, as the censor was unable to feel sure about the tone of her presentation of Muslim characters. The library project thus tallied nicely with my clandestine interests, since it turned out that a lot of intrigue was requ
ired—asking people who were going to Paris or London to smuggle books back, for instance.

  All this library activity gave me the feeling I was doing something useful, even though I made little headway on my covert mission, and only slow progress on the lumbering report I was drafting on the literacy programs, though I’d become passionately committed to them at the sight of little girls laughing at stories they were reading, about bunnies and such. The river of money flowing through Morocco to the benevolent imams of the suicide bombers, the opium producers of Afghanistan, or the arms dealers of Bulgaria did not abate, but it was an underground river. Patience, said Taft/Sheila. Sometimes you wait for years.

  Nor was I proving to be a good judge of the Morocco I was seeing. In a village: Were these people the desperately poor or were they the relatively well-off? Was there worse, in Tangiers, in Casablanca? Was the water clean? I didn’t know and couldn’t find out. The girls who came in to wash the dishes in Ian’s kitchen came from such villages—what did they say when they went home? Did the lavish hot water amaze them? I didn’t know and couldn’t find that out either. It was as if the Europeans and the Moroccans were each afflicted with an eye disease that prevented them from seeing each other—it was the perennial eye infection of colonialism. The girls in the kitchen played the wailing music of popular songs. Tuneless and anguished, it drifted through the gardens, its passionate rhythms suggesting that frenzy lurked beneath the placid surface of comfortable daily piety.

  “In Ramadan, they don’t eat all day. They’re preparing our food but they can’t eat it themselves,” Posy said. “I’d poison us if I were them.”

  I had noticed too that they cooked for us without complaint pork roasts and wild boar, forbidden in Islam.