Lulu in Marrakech
Page 15
“I need to know,” I told Taft.
“When you find out, tell me. You’d better go home, Lulu. Presumably, he won’t cool his heels, he’ll be trying to see the Cotters, we’ll get on his tail over there.”
“But he’s already seen them!” I said, “His sister’s not at the Cotters. They didn’t tell him where she is.” I explained about Suma’s change of jobs. Taft looked skeptical, shrugged.
“You have my cell. Someone will be waiting here at all times if you have anything for us,” Taft said, preoccupied. “Car keys?”
“Beige Renault panel, license 40719-40, keys with the hotel valet.” I told them good-bye and left.
To tell the truth I wasn’t amazed right then—I was in a state of excitement about everything, and especially at the idea that our “subject” was Suma’s brother. Then, to add to a day crowded with events, leaving the room, I was amazed to see Gazi at the end of the hall, for the second time like this at the hotel, without Khaled in sight. She didn’t see me but was getting in the elevator. This time she was veiled, but by now I could recognize her, the way, I suppose, Saudi children learn to recognize their mothers out of a group of veiled women, something about the shape, the height, the carriage, her way of holding the cloth around herself. Dark suspicions rushed in on me, that Ian was in one of the rooms and that they’d just been together.
On the stair, I called Rashid on his cell to see if he was anywhere nearby and could come get me. He said he could pick me up in a half hour. I walked quickly to the Mamounia and ordered a glass of white wine in the bar to drink outside on their terrace, insisting on the semblance of normality, mind racing about Gazi, what she could be doing alone on the upper floor of a hotel, though I could think of possible explanations, visiting a friend the most likely. I couldn’t connect her to Amid, Suma’s brother, unless Suma herself had told her about Amid, and anyway, who knew where Amid was? He could be here at the Sheraton.
Perhaps Taft knew, or soon would. I felt a certain institutional pride in our expertise, our functioning network, our virtual ears, to have spotted, surveilled, uncovered, exposed, tracked this dangerous person even into the heart of the English expatriate community of Marrakech, Morocco, even his connection to a modest French school‐girl. So far was he from them, and yet they (we) found him.
I did feel some compunctions about what was likely to happen to him in some Egyptian or Romanian jail; I didn’t like to think of myself as instrumental in getting him hurt, but I saw this wasn’t an appropriate scruple. You have to be willing to be a person who changes things, even if you risk changing them for the worse. It seemed hard, though, to imagine consigning to torture someone whose sister you knew. I recognized this was a very Californian qualm, to hope that the evil you do won’t count, like a video game.
When we got back to Ian’s, he was just getting home himself, driving his jeep, so I knew he wouldn’t have been wondering where I’d been all day, and Posy thought I’d been at the library. There would be no problem, no suspicions, no explanations—except mine about him.
It was rather late, almost seven. Colonel Barka had come for drinks and was sitting on the patio with the Crumleys and the new French painter, Pierre Andre Moment, whose name I had actually heard, maybe read of, in some art review, as a leading neo‐Expressionist, an affiliation I was hoping he would define. Ian went up to change, but I sat down with the others. Colonel Barka’s manner as usual gave no indication we had ever met. The day was still sunny and cool, and the shadows of the palms were long and dark against the glowing tiles of the walls, each with its tortuous ornament of tendrils entwined.
We had heard nothing more from Amid, but it was possible he had contacted the Cotters to say where he was. I had spoken with Suma that morning, and she had seemed strangely tranquil about her brother being in town, feeling herself safe behind the Al‐Sayads’ impregnable, anonymous walls and little knowing that we were going to round him up.
27
Some believe that intelligence work will eventually become a science.
—Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”
It actually proved more difficult to find Amid than Taft had predicted. With the cooperation of the Moroccan secret service, the DST, we had a record of hotel registrations, and Taft had a list of possible relatives and acquaintances, but this list was not as deep as we’d hoped. It was the DST that located him, after two days, staying in a mosque annex near Guéliz. Taft wanted to watch him as long as possible, to document his contacts and where he went. After his sudden appearance, he had not called the Cotters as he had promised to follow up on the whereabouts of his sister.
In the circumstances, I suggested to Taft that I accidentally encounter him and establish some sort of relationship, possibly by promising to help find Suma. Taft congratulated me on this plan. Accordingly, Tarik Dom waited outside the mosque (in our van) till Amid came out, and Dom telephoned me at the library. It was child’s play to walk toward him through the Jemaa el Fna and feign surprise.
“Oh, hello, bonjour,” I said. “We met the other night.”
“Bonjour, madame. I’m afraid I…” not connecting me to the Cotters.
“Did you manage to find your sister?”
“Ah, no, not yet.”
“Perhaps I can be of help. I’m sure she is homesick and wishes all were smooth again between you.”
“You know my sister.” It was a statement, not a question. I admitted to knowing her.
“Yes, of course, when she was at the Cotters’, I saw her often.”
“And you know where she is.” This seemed to be a statement too, so I said, “No, I have no idea.” Outright lies were coming more easily to me by now. I have heard there are some of us who become so comfortable lying, they easily pass the lie detector tests we have to submit to periodically. I’m not nearly that practiced a liar yet, but I’m making progress. I think Amid believed me. “But someone might, at our house. We are friendly with the Cotters, the children played together.”
“Do Madame and Monsieur Cotter know where she is? Why did she leave their house hold?”
“You must come to dinner one of these nights. To night, even, or tomorrow night.”
He looked quite surprised, and I saw the look of thoughtful calculation come over him. After a second, he accepted for the following night. I gave him directions, and of course he saw that Suma would not be at our house or I wouldn’t have invited him.
…
A semipublic performance was formally expected from the artists at Ian’s artists’ haven, and the following night was also the night Robin Crumley was going to read to us from his new work, poems written since he’d been in Morocco. A few neighbors had been invited in, though not the Al‐Sayads. Mostly the guests were other Brits, but Madame Frank (and monsieur, a prosperous pâtissier, owner of a chain of fancy bakeries in France) had been invited to meet Moment, the painter, presumably so Pierre wouldn’t feel so much the lone Francophone.
Inevitably, sitting with drinks on Ian’s patio, before Amid got there, we discussed Amid and his sister, and those Muslim issues—suicide bombings, honor killings—which we are so unable to understand and find so crazy. “Which of us would die for Christianity?” asked Robin Crumley, and it was clear he meant this as a serious question. Of course, none of us would, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” notwithstanding.
“What about those monks in Algeria who were beheaded?” I said.
“That doesn’t count,” said Ian. “They didn’t mean to die, they were just foolhardy to stay. Suicidal.”
“A good Christian can’t commit suicide for Christianity,” Robin Crumley said. “Suicide being a sin.”
“Les martyrs,” said Madame Frank.
“What would we die for?” Ian wondered. “Britannia, I suppose? If she were attacked, as she has been over and over. People died for her in the two wars.…”
“ ‘Died for king and country,’ ” Robin sang.
“Our children,” Posy said.
“People defend their kids and homes. But not the monarch. I would think the queen should die for me, since I’m young and she’s old.”
“We’ve learned to mistrust abstractions, and they haven’t learned that,” Robin said. “Islam, I mean, hasn’t learned. A feature of civilization is to mistrust the abstract.”
“Mais non,” protested Madame Frank, but, after all, the Franks were French, who love abstractions and are highly civilized, or like to think so. “L’abstrait c’est l’idéal, la chose perfectionnée.”
The thing perfected. Keeping up a conversation was now a completely automatic, robotlike exercise for me, a disguise underneath which I could marshal the thoughts that kept pounding inside, about Taft, Amid, and Ian and Gazi. Now that I had thought about it more, it seemed unlikely that going to that distant lunch place to happen to see Gazi and Ian could have been coincidence. The colonel must have planned it, but what was the object? Was the intrusion of Suma’s brother at this point coincidence too, or was there a complex interconnection I would eventually understand?
Of course I had told the others Amid was coming. We were all a little apprehensive. Ian’s employees—Miryam, Rashid, the other maids— knew full well where Suma was. We had wondered whether he might try to bribe them or appeal to their Islamism. In the end, Posy, whose rapport with them was the best, reminded Miryam about the threat to Suma’s safety and left it to her to persuade the others to say nothing if he asked.
Amid came at eight, neat and sweet-smelling with some sort of cologne, jeans, clean shirt, very much in the uniform of a young Frenchman coming to dinner. He didn’t seem to know who, Posy or myself, was the official hostess, so he presented Ian with a gigantic sack of pistachios. In Paris, he was studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts. Very much the well‐ behaved young Frenchman, knowledgeable about the cinema and the coming French elections, willing to discuss the new Werner Herzog film and redevelopment efforts in North Africa. Educated and employed was not the profile of a smoldering fanatic.
“Is there much honor killing in France?” said the resolute Posy. “In Germany it’s a tremendous problem, among the newcomers, naturally.”
“I don’t know,” said Amid. “I have heard of it, but I don’t know if it is common.” He didn’t seem taken aback.
I remembered a conversation I had had with Rashid, about hypocrisy. “Bien sûr, we live in hypocrisy,” he had said. “What else can a poor Mussulman do? He cannot actually say ‘Yes, I accept to work in your country, but I cannot accept your absurd ideas that all religions should be respected’; also, how can I tell you all your women look like whores? No, I have to tell you I accept your right to your religion. Yes, the Prophet, peace be on him, said we are not to lie, but lying is a lesser evil, because I cannot tell you the truth, which is ‘I am waiting to kill all infidels.’ That is the mind of the Mussulman; I know many like this.”
We were having aperitifs—Amid accepted a jus d’orange. The discussion, mainly in French, generally concerned his attempts to find Suma and how he was passing the time. Given that he knew—that we or at least Ian and the Cotters knew—where she was, his manner was equable and light. He seemed to accept our peculiar role, knowing Suma’s whereabouts but not trusting him enough to tell him; he didn’t seem to blame or accuse, but appeared to understand that our position as protectors required us to conceal her.
He was not the picture of somebody in a murderous rage. But I remembered having read that the family of a dishonored girl just delegates someone else to do the job, and that person isn’t necessarily in a rage. Deputized killings in cold blood seemed to me even worse than rage, and I supposed they would seem worse to a court too. I remembered that if the intended murder is forestalled when authorities intervene, sometimes this delegated person promises the authorities not to hurt the victim, but then after she trusts him, he kills her anyway, obligations to the Prophet’s view of family honor taking precedence over mere criminal law or simple humanity.
We had learned various other things about Amid and Suma, from Suma. Their father had been a sergeant in the French army in the Second World War. Suma hadn’t told me much about that; I’d assumed they were poor immigrants, but they were a military family—like my own. There was another brother, older, a teacher of geography in a lycée, married, with children, living near métro Picpus. The other two sisters were not mentioned now by Amid, but it was the profile of a poor but assimilated, upwardly mobile first-generation family, hard to reconcile with the normal profile of simple and status-deprived people who are involved in honor killings.
The others knew, of course, of his threats to Suma, but only I knew of the threat to Amid from Taft and from me, that we planned to drag him off to be tortured in an Egyptian jail, for that was what I was pretty sure we were doing.
“I won’t deny that the issue of my sister’s honor is troubling to my parents. Any plans for her marriage… it could be settled, for instance if she would go to a doctor.”
We, Europeans, Americans, sat in an appalled silence for a moment before Ian defined what he meant.
“You mean get her virginity certified?” Ian asked, his tone ironical. “Yes, a doctor can tell,” Amid said. Again, no one thought of an immediate response. The gulf between our sensibilities and his yawned larger than we had imagined, probably impossible to cross. Finally, the always intemperate Posy leapt.
“It’s disgusting. That is disgusting!”
“That is the paradox,” Amid agreed. “Of course it’s disgusting for a modest girl, it renders her immodest almost by definition, yet I’m told that an experienced woman doctor can conduct the whole examination with exceptional tact.”
“This is the Stone Age!” cried Posy. Amid stared with a puzzled expression.
“Perhaps European girls have more to hide than modest Arab girls. But I assure you, Arab societies are not the only ones to value modesty. For instance, I happen to know that the American military demanded some such certification before a soldier could marry a French girl. This was during the Second World War.”
“That’s impossible,” we all objected.
“Modesty is a moral virtue, it is not a physical state,” said Robin Crumley. “A person can be modest and not a virgin; there is no contradiction. The same with honor.”
“Excuse me, I use those words euphemistically. Modesty, honor— we are talking about virginity,” Amid said.
“The Stone Age,” cried Posy.
Amid shrugged. “Things change very slowly. I think my sister should take our parents’ old-fashioned attitudes into account.” His face had darkened—we had seen this irascible side of him before, and Ian intervened smoothly by assuring him that Posy and I would tactfully raise the issue with Suma: Would she consent to a virginity test? But despite my promises, I was by no means sure I could collaborate with such barbarity. I was with Posy there.
“Remember Ophelia’s song,” said Robin. Where she says—‘Quoth she, before you tumbled me / you promised me to wed. / So would I a’ done, by yonder sun, / An thou hadst not come to my bed.’ ”
“Shakespeare lived in the seventeenth century,” Posy said in an icy tone. “Do you know Shakespeare, Mr. Bourad?”
“Why did she leave Mr. and Mrs. Cotter?” Amid persisted. “Was it Monsieur Cotter?”
“She found something that suited her better. Something secretarial, but I have no idea where,” said Ian.
His expression was unreadable. I hoped mine was. Even in the midst of this confrontation with Amid, my thoughts would dart to Ian with Gazi, and the sight of him dissembling made me think of something that had happened twice: He and I were making love, and after my own plea sure, when it would normally be the gentlemanly Ian’s turn, he had sighed and withdrawn, saying once that he was too preoccupied, the second time too tired to go on. This abrupt, disappointing ending had shown me that men may dissemble the way women are said to, and now I saw it that he could no longer conceal his thoughts of Gazi and had lost his desire for me.
“The issues are not between Left and Right or Arab and Christian, though we are made to think so. Really it’s among various Israeli tribes, about ascendance. They decide among them what happens to the Palestinians.…”
“My dear fellow,” said Ian mildly, “Israel, Palestine—you must know that all this seems very unimportant to us. These people will have to settle it among themselves.” He was right not to try to argue, I thought. All at once, Amid seemed to realize where he was, or how intemperate he sounded, and fell silent. Robin Crumley had gotten to his feet and said he would be down in five minutes to begin his reading.
“Frankly, I wrote the Palestinians off after they killed the Israeli athletes.” Posy can never resist that sort of remark, I assumed meant to irritate, but it suddenly seemed true. I had too—not the little children or poor beaten-down women, of course, but the men; what a bunch of defectives. It’s hard to care about people who run around shooting each other. Posy and I had talked about this. “How are we supposed to think of them as men?” she had said. “All they do is throw bombs and run around screaming, and wave their bums in the air in prayer.”
“Some cultures are just defective,” she said now, as if intuiting my very word, and looking around to see who was going to make the politically correct objections to it.