Apropos of the kitchen girls and the maid who did the rooms, Posy told me in a low tone one morning, when Ian had left the table, “It’s so awkward. I don’t quite know what to do. I’m pretty sure I had a hundred and forty euros in my suitcase—I don’t know how I happened to remember the amount. But now there’s only eighty. Robin says just forget it, but I tend to think someone should tell Ian that one of his people is—can’t entirely be trusted. But what if I’m mistaken? And it means so much less to me than to some poor person. I’m not sure what to do.”
Of course I sympathized, but it seemed hard to imagine that the silent maids in their nunlike white wimples, white pants, and tunics would risk their jobs for sixty euros. In the end, Posy decided just to watch for a while. “They must imagine we don’t notice, rolling in it as we are,” she said with an ironical laugh. From her tone, I guessed the Crumleys could be hard up—that must be the poet’s lot; people won’t pay much for poetry.
I was shocked that the maids would steal from Posy, as if she were made more vulnerable by her pregnant state, though I knew she wasn’t; I made a great mistake though, in thinking Posy had mentioned this to me as the de facto mistress of the place so I could deal with it. Dutifully, I asked to have a word with Miryam, who was in the kitchen. We stepped outside by the pool.
“Mrs. Crumley has lost some money,” I said. “Perhaps you could help, if you have any ideas…” As soon as I began, I knew this was sounding tactless, hopeless, accusatory. She looked at me with fathomless eyes and said, “No, mademoiselle, how could I?”
Not wishing to ruin Posy’s good rapport with the maids by suggesting she had complained of or accused them, I ended by practically begging Miryam to forget the whole thing. So much for my qualities as a law enforcer.
For my Taft reports, I spent a lot of time with the newspapers. I read two French-language ones, Libération and L’Opinion, carefully, all the way through, including all the ads, and still couldn’t really tell what their politics were. I took note of odd events in my reports. Looked at in a certain way—with paranoid vigilance—there was a surprising number of possibly interesting events: small fires, assaults, explosions, even car thefts that could indicate the presence of terrorist cells or training facilities. I began to think of this as the meth lab or firework factory effect, inadvertent explosions. You never knew but looked for patterns. For instance, apart from Ian’s explosion, there had now been two others—the first mentioned in news accounts of the fire in Ian’s building, the second a few days later in a small sewing factory where the employees escaped unharmed. Was this a lot of fires for a small desert city? The analysts would know that; I didn’t. I would also ask Colonel Barka.
Then there were a number of rather fascinating items too trivial to report, for instance that Marrakech was being visited by a party of Austrians fathered by Moroccans during the Second World War, now here trying to discover their roots. Also, in 1976—only thirty years ago!—in a small city near Meknes, a soldier noticed his mother “among the slaves of the mayor” and had to be restrained from trying to liberate her. He was sent to another city; the fate of the mother wasn’t reported. I had to read this several times, trying to understand if “esclave” meant what we mean by “slave.”
On the whole, with the library project and our social life, I was learning more about the dimensions of the international community than about the Moroccan. We belonged to the British part, but most of the foreigners in Morocco were French, Lebanese, or Egyptian, either businesspeople or the idle rich, and most of them had real lives in big cities somewhere else, usually Paris or Bordeaux, or London or Beirut, with Marrakech as their playground. There were a few Saudis, like the Al‐Sayads. The French and British didn’t seem to mingle much with each other, and there were very few Americans. Tom, Strand, and Habiba were about the only ones I knew.
I had several ideas about who among the people I had met could be involved in dark activities worth reporting. Khaled Al‐Sayad was an obvious choice, if only because I started out with a built-in reflexive dislike of a man who would make his wife wrap up like a funerary statue. He also had a bank account in Morocco, was connected in the business community there and in the U.S., and had the ostensible front of an expensive second home outside of Saudi Arabia. I asked Taft for information on him, but I didn’t yet know much about the nature of his business; his card said he was in the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, rather chilling, considering 9/11, but he didn’t seem to realize this. He talked of his indignation and of how, though the other bin Ladens were nice, no one in the family approved of bad seed Osama.
The other person I knew who most fulfilled the general conditions of having Western and Eastern contacts, Moroccan bank accounts, etc. was of course Ian. I couldn’t imagine either of them abetting suicide bombers, but one thing you are taught is not to trust what you can or can’t imagine; you learn that intuition has a role but does not replace facts and may mislead.
My intuition didn’t mislead me, I think, in showing me how stupid I’d just been with Ian, despite my resolutions. He was in my room; we’d made love after a party in the medina and had lapsed into a kind of dreamy, erotic conversation afterward; and I found myself telling him how much I’d fallen in love, how much I loved him—stuff that was in my heart just then, fervent and surprising even to me.
He was sweet, of course, and, without saying he returned these sentiments, was reassuring about how delightful it was of me to say them.
“It makes me so happy to have you here, Lu. I’m so hoping you’ll see the excitement and importance of this country. Our future—yours and mine—could be wonderful here. You’ll see how you’ll like it. I think you like it at moments already, right?” He smiled with this reference, I supposed, to our lovemaking.
But there had also been a moment of startled panic in his eyes—I don’t think I’d imagined it.
19
Take a little dainty, hot, full-breasted thing, and you get all kinds of good information from her. You know—a tiny, soft little mouse. You can stretch your arm a long distance, through a woman.
—Maxim Gorky, The Spy
When I telephoned Taft, it was usually from the Mamounia hotel, from the public pay phones in the corridor outside the ladies’ room, one-time events less traceable than cell phone records. I used a prepaid phone card and a different line each time, but we kept the conversations ambiguous in the assumption that all of them were tapped all the time. Posy and I had taken to going to the Mamounia for a drink at the end of the afternoon. Though I was always slightly bothered that Posy would drink alcohol in her condition, I was glad of a companion, and I somehow had the idea that if I was seen here on a regular basis, someone would eventually come up to me, or pass me a note, or I would see something revealing. I took to drinking tea instead of wine, for the sake of Posy’s baby.
The Mamounia hotel is a venerable old place and a haven for foreigners, an open city where ethnicity is put aside and people of all religions suspend their antagonisms and even their dress codes in return for an ambiance of Europeanized, tranquil self-indulgence. The clientele was agreeably cosmopolitan and also neutral sexually: Pairs of people of any sex, women alone, men alone, mixed groups—all were perfectly proper, even in categories that might be viewed askance outside these walls. The hotel lay within the walls of the medina, in its own gardens of palms, magnolia, and hibiscus bushes where one might walk along the paths or sit on benches. Musicians in tuxedos, with the slicked-down hair of the lounge lizards in thirties movies, played Western music on the patio, and alcoholic drinks were served. Beyond the perimeter of the grounds or at the edges, the real Moroccans in their drab native costumes might have been hired to provide regional color.
Occasionally, Ian would meet us there, or perhaps Strand or Tom would stop in, taking turns away from their own place, and perhaps bringing the poised, serious little Amelie for an ice cream or lemonade. I also invited people to meet me there to discuss library development matters. I h
ave mentioned that one day, from afar, Posy and I saw Gazi Al‐Sayad, not wearing a head scarf, and for once without the black covering she usually wore in public. She was leaving in a rush, so we didn’t call to her.
Gazi fascinated everyone—her beauty, her outbursts, the mystery of her willingness to wear the abaya, even of how she managed to keep the thing on, amazed me. Yet, over the weeks, I had grown used to seeing her in it, the way you get used to the green coat a friend always wears or a characteristic hat, and I stopped seeing it. She would come into a room and take it off, whereupon, instead of a symbol of female oppression, it became a limp square of black rayon, lying over the arm of a chair like a shawl, curiously inadequate to symbolize subjection or anything else.
Once she was unexpectedly sisterly and told Posy and me a little about her life. Posy had washed her hair—Posy has wonderful, long chestnut hair—and was drying it on the patio, and Gazi said, “Our mothers, or more our grandmothers—in their day the hair wasn’t washed, it was oiled. By some strange chemistry, their hair was long and lovely, and not oily.” I wondered if it was rude to ask whether her mother and grandmother had been plural wives. Probably they were. In the Louvre, I looked a lot at a painting by Ingres, of odalisques in their harem baths, with their jars of oils and myrrh. How sad to remember that the sultan was probably fat and ugly. I did think Khaled was better-looking than most Arab men, and better-looking in his tennis clothes than in his tablecloths. Probably that’s just cultural conditioning, but Ian is still my idea of a handsome man. I wondered if Muslim men worried about whether they were attractive or not. Attractive from our point of view, I mean, of course. Probably they don’t care, for their dominance is so total, they don’t need to care. Looking at television of sheiks arriving at conferences or what ever, you can see they don’t spend much time at the gym.
“It’s funny, but she’s actually a lot less conspicuous without her abaya,” Posy observed later. “Maybe she wears it to get attention. The first time I saw women from Yemen—they’re the ones that wear all black with the plastic mask like a beak; it was in Marks & Spencer—anyway, I screamed. They scared me.”
We talked about how the horrible imams who made these poor women dress in dismal black probably didn’t realize how menacing they look to us, programmed as we are by the iconography of witches and Dracula’s black cloak. Does Islam know that for us, wearing black is associated with crime and sluttiness? Might they really believe that wearing black is purer than pink or blue? I think you might arbitrarily adopt the custom of wearing black, but could you really believe it made you a better person? I see how you might believe that obedience makes you a better person, though. Nuns used to wear black in that spirit, I guess.
I have a belief problem of my own: I have trouble believing that people can really believe what they say they do—can they really believe, in their hearts of hearts, for example, that short sleeves showing a bit of elbow, or part of a lock of hair, can drive men mad and draw the wrath of God? In your heart of hearts would you feel purer wearing a head scarf? Eating fish on Fridays? What does “heart of hearts” even mean, except to acknowledge the secret reservations that lurk at one’s center, unexamined, often not even by oneself?
Maybe skepticism is just a matter of temperament and blind faith does exist in some people, but I don’t believe it, and I think if I could just believe one thing fervently, I would understand other people better, or at least I would know how it felt to believe in God, for example. But I never can seem to.
Poor Tom Drill, his was the lot of a wife. It took a lot of time, I could see, just organizing Amelie’s social and educational life. Tom and Strand had been in Marrakech for eight years, all of Amelie’s life. They had gotten her in Alabama as a newborn, from a private agency, and she was now eight.
“In those days, gay adoption? There was no way.”
“Especially gay interracial adoption,” Strand added.
“Nowadays it’s probably easier in the States, no one thinks anything of it now. Here, though, the other kids still say things, like ‘Regardez, Amelie et ses deux papas, hee hee hee.’ Amelie and her two dads. We make a point never to go to her school together.”
I wondered what Amelie herself thought. “She thinks it’s cool to have two dads,” Tom said.
Most days Posy came with me to the tea shop or the hotel. A little tea and the reassuringly European ambiance of these places seemed to relax her. Apart from concern about Posy’s reaction to the fumes of the fire—she was nauseated for several days afterward, whereas I felt fine—I had been worried about her general state of mind. At first I’d dismissed her as a regular, complacent English wife, but over the days, I’d gotten to know her better. I’d seen English wives, for instance at French ski resorts (for I’d had a season as a “chalet girl,” that is, a maid, in Courchevel). Plumpish, with their beautiful skin, eyes trolling for different husbands—this more or less described Posy, though she was too pregnant, and too amazed by her status, to flirt with anyone but her husband, whom she was valiantly trying to interest.
I might have thought, if I’d met Robin Crumley without Posy, that he was gay, but often these things aren’t quite one thing or the other. I had a feeling he was happy to have resolved his marital status and happy with impending fatherhood, but these states didn’t interest him really. Marriage was like having your wisdom teeth pulled, just one more grown-up thing out of the way. He did sort of flirt with me, in the fashion of husbands of pregnant wives, but it was more out of a gallant, guestly commitment to general festiveness than anything personal.
But I had come to see that Posy was unhappy, or was beginning to be. Not a year ago she had been a husband-hunting yuppie with a boring job in a lingerie boutique in London, slightly in love, I gathered, with her brother-in-law, and depressed. Now she finds herself an incipient mother, married to a major English poet, marooned in Islam, and depressed. A strange progression of events, and some might have thought an improvement—I would, I think. But I wasn’t sure she did, in her heart, though she said she did.
She didn’t complain—it was her quality of inner restlessness that belied the stolidity of her expanding body. From one day to the next, she seemed to change dimensions, and her ankles were now the circumference of Perrier bottles. She didn’t ever even look at the baby clothes in the souk and seemed to make no plans, didn’t have a list of names, didn’t know the baby’s gender. “Robin’s in charge of naming it,” she said, as if they’d never discussed it. “Being a poet, he’ll have some lovely ideas.”
She deferred to him, yet Robin didn’t seem overbearing. In public, he was solicitous and fluttered around her. He did seem more interested in Ian’s social set and its doings than in the coming baby, but I have heard men only have a limited ability to empathize with gestation issues. I often sat next to him at dinner, where he was always vivacious, and once he startled me with an ambiguous brush of his hand across my thigh, probably accidental. He flirted with everyone, even Ian, so I told myself it was no more than his social manner.
One morning he emerged from his workroom, blinking slightly, as if the light of the patio hurt his pale eyes, and, seeing me, came and sat next to me at the breakfast table. Posy was not there, so he could talk about her. “It’s nice of you, my dear, to spend so much time with Posy,” he began. It irritated me to hear his patronizing tone about her, so I responded somewhat brusquely: a plea sure, Posy is so nice, so intelligent, etc. “Yes, she is, isn’t she?” he said, in such an amazed way that I forgave him; he was just a somewhat obtuse man who was trying to do his best. “It’s nice of Posy to spend so much time with me,” I said.
I had considered whether it could be Robin Crumley who was some sort of spy or mole, whether for the British or an Islamic cause wasn’t clear. He had exactly the educational profile of Kim Philby, and I had imbibed the institutional bias of my employers, that Brits were apt to be spies; it was they, after all, who had invented the term “double-cross” and its practice. But apart from the
odd break during the day, he spent all his time in the workroom Ian had put at his disposal, writing poems, not out spying. In the few days that followed the fire, he was solicitous enough of Posy to satisfy even me. For, as I said, I had become fond of her, and protective.
Even though the shock and adjustment of marriage and motherhood, added to the culture shock of Morocco, had depressed her, even panicked her, at the Mamounia, diverted and away from the villa, she was calmer. We had long talks. She was interested in my affair with Ian—“He obviously is mad about you,” etc. I loved Posy, but sometimes I envied her outspoken candor and her literary education, and sometimes I pitied her insecurity and restlessness; some inner instinct in me predicted that things would get worse for her when she had a baby and Robin was off giving readings and being lionized, and she would have to stay behind because it had chicken pox or something.
She must have sensed this herself, because something was still bothering her about her own life, and this was the day she brought it out. She told me with heavy sighs the one thing that had her very frightened about approaching motherhood: the fear that her baby would not have blue eyes.
“Blue eyes are recessive, you know. Any baby of Robin’s and mine would have blue eyes. But…”
But she had had a little one-night stand just before meeting her husband, with a brown-eyed guy.
“It’s awful, when I look back on it. It was a frantic period in my life, I was just bloody out of control.”
I didn’t think she should worry. “What are the odds?” I said. “These things aren’t so cut-and-dried. A brown-eyed man could have had a blue-eyed parent.…” We contemplated the dismaying Mendelian absolutes.
“Sometimes I see it so clearly, I’ve ruined my life, and there’s no way out of it,” Posy cried.
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