Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “Two princesses of the royal family have electrocuted themselves. People make jokes about their amazing obtuseness around electricity.” She laughed.

  Whether she was or wasn’t an adulteress—how odd and stern that old-fashioned word sounded, so seldom used nowadays—was never discussed. Without ever alluding to a lover, or to a grand passion, the convention adopted in our talks about Gazi’s plight was that Khaled was under the delusion that she was unfaithful but this wasn’t the case. When she was present, this morphed into an analysis of Saudi attitudes and realities instead of seeming to allude to her particular case.

  “It’s a question of his honor. It doesn’t matter what really happens. Women who are raped are accused of adultery,” Gazi herself said. Sometimes, though, she was more positive about Saudis. “No one is really executed for unfaithfulness in Saudi Arabia. Well, not for a long time. They are in Iran, though.” She spoke with an odd mixture of defensiveness and pride when her religion or her country, or Khaled, came up. “Mostly they disappear, they aren’t put on trial or executed. They used to be, though. Families deal with their own questions of honor.”

  “Someone should talk to your husband.” It was Robin Crumley who believed this most firmly and offered to do it. Her plight seemed to have stirred his poet’s soul, and it was an unusual departure from his normal detachment.

  “No, no,” Gazi would say. “I cannot go back. He will never believe the truth.” None of us felt able to demand the truth, though, and she never explained.

  If Ian crept into her room at night, I had no way of knowing it. He would come in to say good night to me, much as usual, but never stayed. His light good‐night kiss was brotherly, or maybe merely businesslike. My whole body yearned for him. Sometimes I lay awake listening, trying to hear someone stealing down the hall or his door closing. I never heard him, but the little cat we had adopted, Stuart, had taken to coming into my room to sleep on my bed, whereas he usually slept with Ian.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what Ian’s plan was vis‐à-vis Gazi’s future. Maybe he was just chivalrously rescuing her, with no commitment beyond that. Or did they have dreamy plans to go live in a cottage in Surrey together, or do African social work? Can you have love without a plan for it? I had unconsciously planned to spend my life with Ian, and now I saw that was not going to happen.

  30

  Perhaps the greatest impetus for the establishment of a peacetime U.S. intelligence service was the argument that enough information had been available to predict the attack on Pearl Harbor—if all of it had been laid on a single desk.

  —Angelo Codevilla, “Comparative Doctrine and organization”

  What Taft and the two others were doing for these several days wasn’t clear. I knew they were still keeping Amid Bourad under surveillance. Presumably, he’d lead them to his contacts, people he was in touch with; evidence or money might change hands. It was apparently Taft’s belief that I should be ignorant as far as possible. I no longer chafed at being in the dark; I agreed that innocence is a good defensive position. As he said, an agent needs to know some things, but real ignorance makes you less vulnerable in case of interrogation: It was enough that I knew that we wanted Amid, and I knew the general activities that got you wanted and watched.

  But it isn’t surprising that I felt closer to Colonel Barka than to Taft, if only because the colonel’s refusal to share certain information was expected from a DST (I assumed) agent, while Taft’s mystifications I found insulting and uncollegial. Was I not a foreign intelligence case officer? To him I was a beginner and a girl.

  The colonel was my tutor in many things, though it didn’t always help me understand Morocco. Once Posy said in front of him, “It doesn’t appear to me that honesty is particularly admired here.” The other English people present (the Cotters and a couple named Wyatt) gasped their dismay at this rude political incorrectness, which pleased her of course. She defended her position by mentioning bargaining, and also the Moroccan tendency to tell you what you want to hear, and I had to agree that these practices were founded on untruth, but the colonel pointed out that she didn’t understand the underlying assumptions, things the locals understood perfectly going in, and I could see that he was talking to me.

  “They might be telling you, for instance, in saying ‘It’s over there,’ and pointing in the wrong direction, that it isn’t done for women to go there, and a Moroccan would understand that message,” he said. Posy sniffed resentfully, but I took it to heart.

  I knew I ought to be more open than I am to Islam, like Madame Frank, like all those who rejoice in the color, music, revelry, and charm of its souks and squares, with the snake charmers, and photo-op camels, and rugs spread out, the donkeys and horses, the poor goats. Why could I only think of the cruelties that people poor as this inflict on each other and on animals, and not of, say, the kindness of Moroccans to their children and the systems of trust among the old men in the medina that enable their businesses to work. Instead, I always think of Mohammed Atta and wonder if he had told the others they were going to die or whether he had told them something else, some lie about going to Cuba.

  Since I had rented the rooms for Taft and his party at the Sheraton, and he was publicly a guest there, he and I met more or less openly there—Taft might be my cousin, my brother-in-law—the DST probably knew who he was anyway, and via the colonel, it certainly knew about me. The other two agents, Dom and Snyder, were never to be seen. Taft and I would have a drink, and he’d ask questions.

  “How’re you doing, Lulu? It’s not hardship duty here, I trust?”

  “In what way?”

  “I always think of Ingrid Bergman in that Hitchcock film, where she was married to Claude Raines so she could spy on him but she’d rather be sleeping with Cary Grant.”

  “No, it’s not a hardship. I don’t feel that useful, though.” I wasn’t going to discuss my feelings for Ian.

  “You’ll be useful soon. The Thursday after Christmas, no symbolism intended. That’s when we’ll pick up the kid. I’d as soon wind this up. We’ve got a lot of information already, and I’m starting to feel nervous about something going wrong.”

  “What’ll I be doing?”

  “Driving. I brought you something.” He put a plastic sack on the table, and from the clunk it made, heavy and metallic, I could tell it was a gun.

  “You should have this,” he said. “Do you have a safe place to hide it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d just like to know why we’re picking him up.”

  “Believe me, Lulu, I’d tell you, but every bit of info you carry around is eventually going to show. It shows in the eyes, it shows in the set of the shoulders.” This is what Taft always said. Once, I had asked him directly what our interest in Ian was and what we were going to do with Amid Bourad, and he had shaken his head. Evidently I was supposed to admire his opaque eyes and the resolute set of his shoulders against the weight of hidden knowledge. A man just past his prime (and in my view a man’s prime comes a little later than some believe); a trifle overweight and a smoker. To give him credit, he had mastered every detail of the literacy program reports I’d been filing for months, and every name involved, and was familiar with all the locations in my photographs. But now he gave me the feeling my immediate utility was over, except for one last service, coming on Thursday.

  Taft was interested in Gazi’s story as he would be in a soap opera, and of course he already knew from me that his quarry had actually dined with us in connection with Suma. “How strange to find yourself in this embattled bastion of beleaguered Muslim females,” Taft said. “ ‘Embattled bastion of beleaguereds,’ haha.”

  I saw what he meant about knowledge affecting your posture. I had so much guilty knowledge by this time—Suma’s whereabouts, Gazi’s whereabouts—I was almost afraid to speak out loud to anyone about anything. Were the situations of Gazi and Suma similar? I couldn’t tell. Both were in fear of their lives, but to be fair, it was hard to remember that when,
if you talked to them, both preserved natural, even contented facades. This suggested that being in fear of your life was not so different from other constraints they had internalized since infancy and hence didn’t react violently to. It was only a little bit worse, so where I would have been in a hysterical panic, each seemed serene in her way.

  Maybe that’s what’s meant by lives of quiet desperation, or else neither one believed that the retributions decreed by the Koran or by their respective societies would really be exacted. And, again to be fair, as they made sure to tell me, the Koran didn’t dictate death for adultery or premarital sex. In Suma’s case, she had an inner sense of innocence anyhow. I didn’t believe in Gazi’s innocence, but she did stonewall and never admitted that our general discussions about the conservative precepts of Islam had any relevance to her particular case.

  “It’s all a ghastly mistake” was her frequent remark.

  Gazi was nice to everyone, but especially to me. I figured this meant either that like everyone else, she knew about Ian’s relationship with me but accepted it to keep me in place as a cover, hence needed to reassure and deceive me, or she didn’t know, just liked me or just liked Americans, thinking fondly of her college days. Or she wanted to make use of me: “Darling Lulu, if you went over to my house to see Suma, you could check whether my children are all right.” Of course I understood how hard it must be not to see her children, but in just a corner of my hard, hard heart I heard generations of WASPy ancestors saying, “Well, you should have thought of that.”

  Nor could I seem to talk about Gazi with Ian. I didn’t know the source of my compunctions about confronting him with what I knew or thought I knew. Was it that since I myself was living a lie, in the phrase, I had no right to call someone else’s lies to account? More likely I just really didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear him say, that he loved Gazi.

  Posy and I both looked at Gazi with interest from the point of view of her habits, attitudes, life rhythm. We felt its difference from our Western ways, as different as our red, razor-bumped skin from her satin, depilated chamois-colored skin. Her long black hair was braided in the morning by one of the maids, who did it cheerfully as they sat in the patio. The black lines of kohl around her eyes went on in the evening, but even without it, her eyes were huge, and Posy and I despised our pallid blue ones, squinting ineffectually against the Maghrebian sun or hidden behind our shades. I didn’t let myself dwell on the scene that always came to my mind, Gazi’s body, hairless as a statue, pressed against Ian’s muscled torso, enjoying his cock.

  Every day, she seemed more and more at ease, friendly and admiring of all house hold details—Miryam’s cooking, the menus, the candlelit evenings, the chats at breakfast before we moved into our respective days. When I commented to Posy on how happy she seemed, Posy said, “She was probably raised in a harem. She was brought up within a female group. Group life probably feels normal to her.” We eventually asked if her father had more than one wife, and she said, “Yes, two. I am the daughter of the younger.”

  Of course we were fascinated. Her mother had been married at fifteen and was still only forty‐nine years old!

  “She is beautiful. I have a picture of her but, very stupidly, left it at home. I mean, with Khaled, for now I have no home.” Of course we burned to know if Khaled had more than one wife, but assumed not, for where were they?

  “Oh, well, most English men have more than one wife, eventually,” said Posy. “How long have you been married?”

  “Fifteen years. I was married when I was seventeen. My mother thought I was an old maid.”

  “I thought you went to university in America.”

  “Yes, but I was already married. Khaled and I went together. How else do you think I could be permitted? Saudi women—in those days even more than today—we couldn’t study abroad unmarried. Oh, the princesses do.”

  “Do they ever marry Americans?” I wondered. “Or English men?”

  “No. The government needs to give permission to marry foreigners. Saudi men can, though, they can marry English women, even Christians.”

  “Do they?”

  “The occasional blonde airline stewardess. Rarely college girls.”

  One morning, at the library, Posy said, “You seem so good-natured about the Gazi situation.” I was a little shocked, because though everyone knew me to be Ian’s mistress, no one had acknowledged any special connection between Ian and Gazi. Or, for that matter, between Ian and me; a sort of tactful discretion hung over everybody’s treatment of everybody, and I had never asserted any rights as mistress in titulo—didn’t step into the role of hostess, for example, even though, having heard Posy’s conversation with Marina about Nancy Rutgers, I knew people understood my relation to Ian; it was no mystery. Still, in the general atmosphere of British good manners, it was easy for everyone to pretend my connection to Ian was simply as house guest. Now Posy was saying I ought to defend my rights.

  Of course I wanted to ask—to confront—Ian and get an explanation of his ties to Gazi, but a new straw had floated by for me to clutch at: the idea that Ian and Gazi, at the Sidi‐Ali Restaurant, had been plotting her escape from Khaled and Saudi Arabia. They were friends and neighbors—to whom else could she turn? As Suma had turned to the shelter in Paris, so the desperate young Saudi woman had turned to the solvent and managerial Ian—what could be more natural? That they were only plotting her escape would explain the absence of any simmering looks and tiptoeing in the hallways now that she was here.

  And it would mean that the colonel hadn’t betrayed them, important for my own view of his trustworthiness.

  These thoughts, along with an inner reluctance to know more, silenced me. I also felt that this personal problem was a sort of an imposition on Company time; I shouldn’t be thinking about it so much.

  Now, I must have looked rueful, and Posy plunged on: “You haven’t said anything to him, have you? I know you haven’t, you’re so reserved. Maybe ‘inhibited’ is a better word. Americans are supposed to be so voluble, but you’re a sphinx. How do you expect him to know how you feel?”

  “He hasn’t said anything to me about her,” I said. “She’s just there. I see, I can see…” And at this I was taken by surprise with a sudden big sob and tears that flooded in, though I wiped them away. Posy gave me a hug—I could feel the baby in her distended, slightly churning belly as it pressed against me. But our embrace, and my tears, lasted only a second. Posy seemed pleased at the accuracy of her perceptions, and I must say, I envied the faculty of accurate thinking, wished mine were accurate.

  “I thought I was imagining it,” I said. “He’s in love with her.” The truth is, I hadn’t imagined I could talk to Posy about intimate things, because it would seem like gloating. She seemed slightly disappointed in her own erotic life, as if what had been revealed to her was no big deal after all. It was a turned-off quality I’d seen before in married women.

  “Oh, yes, it’s very plain. He’s infatuated,” Posy said.

  “I am going to bring it up and say something,” I said, and it was a firm resolution, but what would I say? I had weighed bugging Gazi’s room, which I could have done easily, but resisted this frivolous and self-indulgent course, partly because it seemed to lower my profession to the sleazy level of divorce detectives, partly because I was afraid of what I’d find out.

  To my shame, one night soon after this, the anguish cost me an entire nuit blanche, shedding tears of chagrin to be so sleepless, chagrined to be so obsessed and wracked with jealous egotism. We had all come up to our rooms at midnight—we’d been to the house of a former American ambassador to Tunisia, at a riad in the medina near the Cotters. I’d been uneasy the whole evening. We didn’t see that many Americans, and I found it slightly disconcerting to meet this one, as if, in the spirit of “It takes one to know one,” the ambassador would spot me as a spy and poseuse.

  Back home, in my bedroom, I was still keyed up and found myself sitting at my desk fooling aroun
d with my computer, listening out for any noise or tiptoeing from Ian’s room, even from time to time going into the bathroom to be closer to Ian’s door. Then, at two, faced with going to bed or owning up to myself what I was doing—staying up to spy—I couldn’t avoid understanding that I was in the grip of personal misery I couldn’t really master. I sat at my desk for endless moments more, then lay down on my bed, sleeplessly, ears straining and hearing nothing but night noises and, at four thirty, in the silent desert, from afar somewhere, the call to prayer. Then, despite my intention to sit listening the whole night through, I must have dropped off, because it was seven thirty, and I did hear footsteps in the hall, but it would be maids or Ian getting up.

  Then I knew Posy was right that I should confront Ian and ask for an explanation of what was going on. Can you be sleeping with someone in the happiest way—happy at least till recently—and not sense insincerity or reservation? Apparently, yes. The history of spy literature, for one thing, is full of Mata Haris and Christine Keelers and their abashed victims—seduced, susceptible males who didn’t notice even a hint of treachery. Can it work the other way? Of course—there’s the whole history of prince consorts and gigolos. But there I was, clinging to the idea of the beauty and sincerity of the sexual act and thinking I couldn’t be mistaken that Ian loved me. I longed to confront him, yet I was afraid of what he might say.