Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “Our presidents are uniformly fine fellows,” I said. He probably didn’t understand my tone any more than I his, for he dropped the subject of American presidents and went on, “Met Ian in Kosovo, he said.”

  “Yes, in Pristina, when he was working with Oxfam.”

  “Social worker you are, I guess.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I just wanted to do something to…” Absolute silence, a remark to Marina on his other side, then back to me:

  “Do you plan to go on in that line? Have you moved here permanently? Lots to be done here, I’m told.” I told him about female literacy and the library, which obviously bored him utterly, but careful to preserve his reputation for great charm, he managed to make me feel it was fascinating—quite a reverse of the usual dinner table pattern in which the young woman would be fascinated with the important older man. He was apparently beyond susceptibility to the flattery of young women, his mind in some realm of megaplayers and world profit. So far was he above this present scene that his squat and bulky little presence seemed incorporeal, his merely material paternal incarnation, with his real self off in some archetypal boardroom. I could see why Ian was daunted by this frightening parent.

  When he gave me his actual attention, I sensed it was because he was wondering about my relationship to Ian. Was I just a hot number? A serious candidate for Ian’s wife? A good future mother of his grandchildren? I felt the intensity of his unacknowledged scrutiny; so unlike that by a potential mother-in-law, it seemed to include a fertility assessment, an I.Q. test, and, possibly, a sort of sexual scoring system, checking out the bosom, thighs, etc.—all this without there being anything rude in it. At the same time he was taciturn and lordly. Over dessert, he said, “Do you like Morocco, Miss Sawyer? Could you envision living in London eventually?

  “I nourish the hope that Ian will come back to England someday,” he added.

  I thought about this a lot, later. It could have been a question that took for granted my involvement with Ian in the future and implied that he imagined my feelings for England would have some weight or importance. It made me almost sure, but not quite, that I was being looked over as a wife.

  What would it be like to live with Ian in England, not a country I know much about except as a tourist? Would he be different? People often seem different when you meet them in a new place. They seem different in the night too. Ian, in his villa, distracted with projects and the duties of a host, and, this week anyhow, a son, was different from the more physical and more carefree Bosnian aid worker.

  I would always look forward to the moment at night when Ian came into my room, so that the twenty-two hours of the day and night seemed to hang on two, a sequence that seemed badly askew; and yet I accepted this rhythm. We didn’t always make love; often we just gossiped about the others and talked over the news of the day, almost as we used to do. After we had made love in Pristina, we had often talked into the wee hours, gossiping about colleagues, with recipes to remedy the world. Now he tended to go to his own room, mentioning things he had to do in the morning or the narrowness of the bed. His ardor was there but confined to our lovemaking itself.

  I’m not among those women who regret that men don’t share their feelings—I appreciate it, mainly (declarations of love excepted). I prefer third topics when they’re interesting, on the subject of art or Moroccan development. But now I did wish he weren’t so reserved. He wasn’t reserved in bed, of course, but full of affection that seemed not to influence his conduct at other times or soften his demeanor of stiff‐ish charm to one and all.

  Sometimes, awakened by the first calls to prayer at about four, lying uneasily awake, I could hear that he was up too, but he never came in at that time.

  But in truth, I found myself wishing we were back in Pristina, where we were both hardworking volunteers and we conducted our trysts in one or another of our uncomfortable quarters and ate the bad food at the one restaurant we could stand, snatching at moments of plea sure with a sense of gratitude. Here, all was plea sure, or at least leisure, almost cloying in its abundance.

  Of course it was often on my mind how Ian himself was well-placed to be the conduit or recipient of knowledge, or of money to launder. Who better? He knew everyone, had a big safe in his office, and came and went mysteriously. But it was inconceivable that he could be connected to a terrorist network or an ideology of any kind, and withstood my disloyal scrutiny perfectly.

  On the nights I went up early, skipping the long after-dinners, I had also read The Perfumed Garden, which was among the books on the shelves of the main living room downstairs. I was familiar with this work, because in Kosovo I had read Ian’s complete series of Anthony Powell’s novels A Dance to the Music of Time, wherein Jenkins, the hero, reads it under its subtitle: The Arab Art of Love. It made me laugh to think that Ian had acquired the original work itself, and of course I was interested to see what it said. It says such things as, “Thus it will be well to play with her before you introduce your verge. You will excite her by kissing her cheeks, sucking her lips and nibbling at her breasts. You will lavish kisses on her navel and thighs, and titil‐late the lower parts. Bite at her arms, and neglect no part of her body; cling close to her bosom and show her your love and submission.” Of course I did wonder if all this was happening in all the nuptial chambers of Marrakech. Do the tired-looking donkey drivers remember all these steps? Do they apply to English men? It did seem that, while perfectly done, Ian’s version was quite a lot plainer.

  22

  Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, resisting the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.

  —E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

  I had been in Marrakech three months, though it seemed in some ways longer. Because of the utter strangeness of the culture, I still had so much to learn—to bargain, for instance. I still felt impatience and resentment, but at least now I had learned to do it, the head shaking, the little movement as if to walk away, the proffering of a ridiculous price. At Ian’s villa, we continued the routine of days occupied in visits, banal conversations, tracking the little vendettas (as between Posy and Marina) that seem to animate any small community. It did seem that the Europeans there lived in a parallel universe, served by under-beings in caftans who consented to cross over into ours, as in the time of the raj, or maybe it was like a film, with costumed extras bringing tea and speaking among themselves in a secret dialect.

  In my role of tourist, I photographed groups of people at the Mamounia and people sitting alone or walking in the gardens. No one seems to mind you pointing your little camera at them, and if they did, or ducked their heads, I made extra sure to get them. These photos I sent to Taft/Sheila. I also photographed extensively in the souk, especially groups of men if they were young. Some of these photos I sent home to my real family too, who enthused about the exotic sights I was seeing, could imagine camels and sand.

  I had had tea at the Mamounia regularly with Cousin Alice/ Habiba, to hear about Moroccan literacy and suspicious donations, and on these occasions she had talked very willingly about how she had run away to Mecca, now thirty-five years ago. She was a Sufi, and when she explained Sufism to me, I understood it; it was all the things people believed in at the time of my birth—hippies, and people going to India to find enlightenment, LSD and such—people you still saw in Santa Barbara bookshops, wearing love beads and mandala pendants, and now white beards. My stepmother, according to her, had been a hippie. How odd to think that she and my father, who’d been in the ROTC and then the air force, were now a harmonious couple with congruent worldviews.

  “Islam is the most beautiful of all the major religions,” she said. “Sufi prayers are incomparable.” She scorned my questions about dervishes but offered one standard explanation of the basic beliefs of this sect, about a flame. You can be told about the flame, or you can see it, or you can touch it and be burned. “The Sufis seek t
o be burned, to have direct experience. I’m afraid I’m not as involved as I once was, but we do pray. Real life impedes mysticism. My husband is more pious than I.” In fact, she seemed the soul of piety, with the fussiness of the convert, making sure that the sandwich was halal—from an herbivore slaughtered in just such a way, a way you didn’t like to think of, actually, like kosher—and never having a drop of alcohol.

  I asked about her husband—he worked as a biologist for the Moroccan government.

  “We were impressed with the accuracy of the Koranic cosmology,” Habiba said. “As early as the seventh century, there was an accurate description of the origin of things. The sky: ‘We built it with might and we cause the expansion of it.’ All the Koranic ideas are more or less confirmed by modern physics. Unlike those of the Bible. Since we were both scientists, that was important to us.” I wasn’t informed enough to conduct much more of a discussion about this.

  “The Koran has a more intelligent idea of God,” she said. “ ‘He begets not, nor is he begotten.’ No nonsense about ‘only begotten son’ or the Trinity. God is a first principle, not a person.”

  “What about Allah? They imagine him smiting and so on. ‘Inshallah.’ He has views.”

  “Unfortunately it’s a human tendency to reduce things to a level we can understand. I’ve never liked it,” she said dismissively.

  Habiba ran a large literacy program to teach adult women to read. I got the impression that non-Moroccans, especially the French, ran a lot of things in Morocco. It was hard to imagine back to the days when the opposite was true, when it was Islam in power and resplendent Moroccan pashas were waited on by European slaves snatched by North African pirates from the decks of English ships or even from the streets of European cities.

  The second time we visited her program, a woman from the Moroccan government came with us. We drove about forty-five minutes to a village, watched some stout, beaming women pore over their books, smiling with vast friendliness and passing over their notebooks for us to see. When we left, the government woman said, “I will tell you my point of view, and you can report it. I see no reason at all to teach these women of forty or more to learn to read. It’s a waste of resources—of money and teachers. What are they going to read? How will it change their lives? Don’t tell me it will help them know their rights. We have the Moudawana theater for that, and most of them aren’t interested anyway. They’ve raised their children, their daughters are long since married. Teach the grandchildren, start there.”

  I couldn’t see any arguments on Habiba’s side, except the vague philosophical one to do with the richness of life experience, and felt the harshness of the government lady’s judgment that an older woman couldn’t be made happier by knowing things, by finding new things to know, even practical things—remedies and crafts. In Santa Barbara, my stepmother and her friends are forever enrolling in new classes and they get very excited. But I know it isn’t the same here. Half the men here can’t read either. Why shouldn’t everybody learn?

  Suma Bourad, at the Al‐Sayads’, moved back and forth uneasily between the European and the Moroccan worlds. She found she was too French for some things, and she stopped making an effort to make Moroccan friends among most of the girls who came to help in the kitchens or with the gardening. For one thing, they were too ignorant and lazy, as far as she could see, and they described outrages, such as sisters or mothers kept in purdah, that were worse than anything in France. On the other hand, our world was strange because it wasn’t French, and above all it was adult. We were not her nationality or religion or age group. She did have one sort of sidekick, a Moroccan girl of about twelve or thirteen, in school clothes—long socks and pleated skirt, and a navy scarf on her hair. It was her job to run after the children for Suma and the nanny. She was called Desi—I never heard another name.

  Since Suma had been with the Al‐Sayads, I’d noticed a change in her clothes. Where before she had worn a simply tied scarf over her head, this headscarf was now black, with a blue one worn underneath, tucked up under her chin, though she didn’t wear an abaya as the Saudi women did. No doubt the scarf was in deference to the Saudi customs in the new house hold, but it made her seem to be sliding toward Saudi fundamentalism, though I had never detected any religiosity in the Al‐Sayads. (The nanny wore a full Islamic costume of black.)

  Suma’s manner, however, was normal. We’d discuss things—whether it was hard to be a Muslim in France (sort of, or no, if you didn’t make waves), or her plans to go to medical school in Montpellier in the autumn next year. She worried about this. She would ordinarily have been in a preparatory class for the entrance exams. The odds against succeeding were huge. A thousand people would start in the freshman class, but only two hundred would finish, and she would have to work at some part-time job to pay her room and board. “My parents will help if they can,” she said, “but they aren’t really in favor of women’s education, or only up to a point, and being a doctor, horrors, what intimate, nasty things will be required of me?” I planned to speak to Ian about us possibly subsidizing Suma a little bit.

  Conscious of educational hardships, Suma interested herself in Desi’s schooling. “She can read,” she told me. “She’s been to school, and I hope she can go back. She’s from a village where she was the only girl in the school, and the reason in her case is that someday she’ll have to take care of her mother, who has some kind of wasting disease, and no one will marry her, given the handicap of her mother.

  “The Al‐Sayads don’t pay the help when they’re away in Saudi Arabia, and the Moroccans think that’s normal,” she added. I could imagine how shocking that was to someone raised in France.

  “What about you? What about your brother? Won’t you be in danger if you go back to France? What’s to stop him from going to Montpellier and tracking you down?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve written them the truth. I think they will hear it.” I wasn’t sure; we all know that abused women often give the abuser the benefit of the doubt, frequently to their cost. It made one think about the head scarf issue too; odd that it has to bear such a lot of symbolic freight, for Suma perhaps symbolizing piety, for Posy (and me) female submission. Suma said, “I’d never be submissive to a man, never! It is a sign for God.” With nuns, no one thought about the veil, and now it was a principal article in dealing with vast political questions, such as Turkey joining the European Union.

  “I think getting out of Paris is the most important thing,” she added. “Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe I will find someone to marry on my own, and it will be a marriage of love.”

  Apropos of intimate nastiness, I suffered the eavesdropper’s fate for the first and less important of the two occasions that were to shock me. One day, coming down from my room, I paused in the open arch of the stairwell to gaze over the gardens, and voices drifted up from the patio, Posy and Marina Cotter talking, not about me but about Nancy Rutgers. But the implications were for me.

  “It can’t have been easy for Nancy—the arrival of Lulu,” said Marina. “She couldn’t wait to get out of here.”

  “I think Lulu is the better suited to Ian, don’t you?” said Posy. That, at least, was a response friendly to me.

  “No, I don’t think mixed relationships work out in the long run. Nancy is Ian’s nationality, religion, and, frankly, milieu. And I don’t see Lulu as a wife and mother. And, after all, she’s American. I think that was his father’s view too.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Not in so many words. I could see he didn’t quite approve. He seemed quite affected by the situation.”

  “Luckily, what ever his father ordains, Ian will be sure to do the opposite,” said Posy, as if she’d known him a long time. They both laughed. Mentally thanking Posy for her loyalty in not endorsing Marina’s views, I waited a moment or two on the stair so that I couldn’t be thought to have heard them.

  Actually, I was startled. Nancy Rutgers a former girlfriend or pretender to a place of so
me kind in Ian’s life? I had seen nothing of this, obvious though it now seemed. There had been absolutely no detectable behavior, of Ian toward Nancy or vice versa, that could have hinted at anything between them. No glances, not even any particular familiarity—that I’d noticed. What shocked me was my own failure to pick up anything. They had never even seemed to speak, and Nancy was always dashing around with David. Yet again, I was stupefied by my own deficient powers of observation, or the power of my hopes to drown out common sense. But this was a mild shock compared to what was to come.

  23

  Suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language.

  —Eric Ambler on spies

  One day soon after this, I was to meet Colonel Barka at the Sidi‐Ali Restaurant, which was far out of town but had, he said, a special almond soup, luz shorba, and was in an eighteenth‐century palace well worth seeing. The Crumleys were not coming, and they needed Rashid to take them to some social engagement, so I went by taxi, deeply preoccupied by the literacy situation, barely noticing the route, into an area of increasingly squalid houses—more washing hung outside, more animals in the street, the air of real life far from the detached remoteness of the Palmeraie.

  “You get out here, mademoiselle,” said the taxi man, pulling into an alley piled with cardboard boxes and cartons. “The boy will conduct you.” This disconcerted me, but it was true that someone from the restaurant, carrying a staff like a tour leader and wearing a tall fez, was waiting in the rubble of a vacant lot, with two other Western-looking tourists, who smiled at me, plainly relieved that other Europeans had made their way to this forlorn spot. We waited in silent collegiality until three more plump, pink Europeans were delivered by taxi, then we all followed the fez into the warren of tiny streets too narrow for cars, exchanging pleasantries.