Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “ ’E probably went to the gents’,” said Robin in a strange, faux-cockney accent. But when we had stood there another ten minutes, Ian hadn’t appeared.

  “I think I’m not perfect,” Posy was saying.

  “My dear, to what do we owe this disarming admission?” said Robin.

  “I mean, it might have to do with the baby. Or I’m just hungry. My stomach could be upset.”

  “Good God,” said Robin.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” Posy said. “There for a minute…”

  I wasn’t paying that much attention to Posy—she’d been saying things like this for a few days. I was thinking about Ian: Maybe he he’d gone to the men’s room; but other possibilities flooded across my mind, suggested by Taft’s presence and by the vague questions that surrounded Ian, even if I didn’t articulate them. “We’re going to roll up these people,” Taft had said.

  Peggy Whitworth in her brilliant yellow cocktail jacket came up to us, radiant, and said, “We get so little music in Rabat.” Now I didn’t see Taft, either. Maybe I was just having an attack of paranoia. Strand was next to me. “Do you know Strand Carter? This is Mrs. Whit‐worth,” I introduced them automatically, and it seemed to me they exchanged a look, the tiniest glint, that said they did know each other. Was I imagining this? “Have you seen Ian?” I began to say to each person I knew, keeping Robin in sight. I went outside, where people smoked. Rashid, waiting with other drivers at the curb, had no notion where Ian was, had not seen him, or so he said. I went back inside.

  Now there was Taft again, grim, and he said in a low voice, “Shit, Lulu, something’s off here.” It seemed to me then that everyone else was in on some plan, and knew what was happening, and were conspiring together to keep something from me. My head swam. Like a bride waiting at the altar, I insisted on standing in that lobby until everyone got impatient and made me come back to sit down.

  I went back in. The second half of the program was about to begin, and it was about seven thirty. Afterward, the Moroccans would be going to restaurants to have their dinner, and we were expected at Madame Frank’s. It struck me that maybe Ian would turn up there.

  As I sat down, I was occupying myself with these observations, trying to train myself to notice, notice, when, in a way I’ve gone over and over trying to account for, in my peripheral vision, something jarred. It was a small note of discord in an otherwise calm atmosphere, in which I was apparently the only distraught person; I assumed my agitation at not finding Ian was peculiar to me.

  I had been thinking of explanations of why Ian wasn’t there, and about Posy’s intermittent labor pains, and about how I was failing her by my insufficient interest in the drama of birth. I’m interested in it, of course, but just then almost everything else was more absorbing: my Amid journey; Ian’s whereabouts; Gazi; when I should go back to Khaled’s with the key, which the colonel was to slip to me to night but hadn’t, to get her passport. Who was Peggy Whitworth? Still, I did feel for Posy and resolved to be more of a sister or mom to her at her hour of need.

  Nor can I account for my own actions next—they seemed automatic, and in retrospect I can see that if I’d thought through what to do, I’d have hesitated or fled. This wasn’t something I’d been trained for, wasn’t the automatic action of a well-trained person, and was not anything I’d ever faced; it was an impulse. But it was that I saw Desi, little Desi the certified virgin, kitchen maid at the Al‐Sayads’, sitting at the end of the row ahead, where no one had been sitting before.

  Her clothes startled me. They seemed wrong. She wore a bulky, padded coat in an Indian print, but in retrospect, it wasn’t even that so much, it was the fact that she was there at all, this child, a maid at the rich Saudi house—what on earth was she doing here? She was sitting in front of me and a little to the side. Without thinking, I moved over a couple of chairs to be directly behind her and leaned forward to make sure it was she. Strange: When I moved places, I took my purse with me. From behind her, I could inspect even more closely; the bulky, long garment she wore was not a garment she would wear, and the curve of her thin little shoulders and—for I leaned around to see her profile—her look of glazed despair, tears dried on her cheek, told me I was right to be scared.

  The person whose chair I’d taken appeared and was tapping me on the shoulder. “Madame, je pense que vous avez pris ma place…”

  “Oh, désolée,” I said without looking, intent on what I was going to do—speak to her calmly, and at the same time trap her arms without letting her hands or arms touch her sides.

  “Bonjour, Desi,” I said in a low voice, smiling. “T’aimes la musique? Tiens… sortons.” I imprisoned her arms and hands with all my force and hissed at her to be quiet. She jerked, gasped, froze.

  This is not what I should have done. In such situations, the rule, or police policy, may actually be to shoot someone who appears to be loaded with explosive, before the suicide bomber can detonate his load; but I was not police, and she was just a small girl. Also, I might not have been right. She might have been a music lover, guest of her oud teacher, anything. I only thought later of good musical reasons she might have been there.

  The danger was of setting her off in any struggle, blowing her and all of us up. I also should have shouted for people to move back, but my throat was sealed up; I had barely been able to whisper to her to stand up and walk outside with me. “Please move away,” I said to the couple who were trying to reclaim their seats, but they were backing away anyway, mystified and alarmed.

  Desi didn’t cry out, she had frozen between my hands, but she stood at my direction and let me frog-march her to the foyer, where the waiters were clearing up the drinks. To the eyes of spectators, she might have been taken ill, was being helped outside by a friendly female companion. Perhaps all this took a minute, not more.

  Taft, to my relief—I would be impressed with this later when I thought about it—was at my side, wherever he’d been, and said to Desi, “Slip off the coat,” in a hoarse, scared voice, in English . Now Desi had begun to cry and protest in Arabic. Once the coat was off—it was guiltily heavy—Taft took it out of the building. The DST men moved toward Taft, waving their arms.

  “Doucement, doucement,” I said to Desi. She recovered her French. “Oh, madame, madame!” she wailed.

  “Who brought you here, Desi? Are they here?” I feel I would have found out, but the DST converged, guns pointed at her, and took her away almost instantly, trembling and sobbing, under the eyes of astonished ushers and whoever happened to have been standing in the lobby. Did she know she had escaped death? From inside, music rose, choral voices, singing from a Haydn oratorio (I had read in the program) the words: “The great work is achieved.” I couldn’t tell if she knew what had been averted, or even if anything had, for I hadn’t really seen inside the coat. Was she crying because she had welcomed death or feared it? Because I had scared her? Did she even know what might have happened?

  This had all taken place in perhaps another minute, without causing any alarm among the audience within, much in the way someone fainting or having a coughing fit is dealt with at the other side of a concert hall without disrupting too much your enjoyment of the music. The music continued, discordant, atonal, played on strange instruments, and flowed out into the foyer like a soundtrack to our actions.

  “Close one, maybe,” Taft said. “How did you spot that?” I was shivering by now and could only shrug.

  Even among professionals like Taft, there’s an impulse to indulge the wish to hash things over, a sort of debriefing. “Let’s have a drink,” he said. “We can come back before it’s over. Tell me what you know.”

  We sat in the café across the street, where we could see people when they began to come out. Mostly I was exhilarated. My heart still raced. I heard myself talking too loudly. I was expecting his praises. But then he said, “She wasn’t going to detonate herself. I don’t think so. No. She probably didn’t know what she was wearing. Someone else was going to deto
nate her, or it was set to go off; I’d bet on that. Anyway, you saved her ass, Lulu. They might have shot her. Or I would have. You can’t take chances like that, don’t ever do it. Just get out of the way.”

  It was only then I realized, like a cold stab at my heart, that Taft and the others had seen Desi too, maybe all along, and might have shot her, but I had got in the way. And it was only then that I began to feel sick, really woozy, nauseated, though I knew it was just a reaction. The thing averted is worse afterward than during it.

  We spoke of the horror of people who would send a young teenager to blow herself up. Taft’s ire was also directed at the DST, at the promptness with which they had whisked Desi away, out of our clutches and those of her handlers.

  Suma? Lots of things pointed to Suma, especially her influence over Desi, but didn’t clarify her role. Maybe her whole presence in Morocco had been orchestrated, which, as I was telling Taft about Desi, came to seem especially likely, especially her move to the Al‐Sayads’ from the Cotters. Orchestrated by whom? Maybe Suma herself, maybe Amid, maybe others. It was hard to grapple with all the possibilities and the complete absence of any explanations. Say there was a bomb—to what end plant a bomb in the French Cultural Center? Obviously, to attack Western interests in Morocco, for that seemed to explain this venue, this night, and implied a master plan by any of the many possible evil forces—Al-Qaida; the North African subgroup, Al-Qaida of the Maghreb; other North African organizations; plots out of Pakistan; maybe the Al‐Sayads themselves. Everybody wanted to get rid of Europeans and Americans, frighten them off.

  So was Suma a dupe or a willing participant? And could Gazi be a plant, sent to spy on us? What was the role of Amid? God only knew; but I liked the idea that it wasn’t love but policy that brought Gazi into our midst, that she was some sort of spy. I would have liked to talk to Colonel Barka about these things but he was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared, like Ian, after the entr’acte. Had they expected an explosion?

  I told Taft how I had recognized Desi and that I didn’t think she was a fanatic, just a clueless thirteen-year-old.

  “Ah, what swine,” Taft said over and over, “that little young girl! These people are unutterable.” It was the first emotion I’d seen in him.

  “What will the Moroccans do to her?”

  Taft shrugged. The waiter brought us a demi‐pitcher of rouge and said, “Bomb, did you hear? They got the Avis agency.” He had no details. It almost didn’t register with me.

  After twenty minutes, the first people began to come out of the Cultural Center. I saw Ian’s car start up, with Rashid at the wheel, and get in line among the other cars, come to take the Crumleys and me to the Franks’. Ian wasn’t in it. Taft and I got up and crossed to mingle in the foyer as if we’d been there all along.

  “Dom or Snyder will leave the van outside your place, outside the gate, along the road, keys under the front right tire. See you tomorrow,” Taft said as we parted. It was so casual, we might have been arranging to have coffee, and no more was said about averted bombings; but his relief was as obvious as mine, a kind of palpable joy, even glee, that made us soar. Taft put his hand to his ear, his hearing-aid ear, and made an astonished grimace.

  “They blew up Avis, some library, and an English tearoom to night, must have all happened at the same time,” he said.

  37

  If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts.

  —Francis Bacon

  In the car, I explained to Posy and Robin my missing the last part of the concert by saying I had been hunting for Ian. Everybody pitched in to devise explanations as to where he’d gone. Taken ill, kidnapped by terrorists, received a telephone call, and Posy’s contribution and half my secret fear: eloped with Gazi. The other half of my secret fear was that it had something to do with Taft being at the concert; Ian was incriminated in something, and he’d taken fright.

  “I’m sure he’ll turn up at the Franks’,” Robin said. “He knows where we’ll be.” Then, to Rashid, he said, “I think Posy’s time may have come.” I remember this odd locution, not immediately comprehensible; it was a second or two before I saw it was the biblical expression meaning Posy’s labor pains were increasing. Meantime, Rashid slowed the car at the Franks’ gate. “If you could stay outside,” Robin said to Rashid. To Posy he said, “Are you sure?”

  I got the sense that Robin wanted me, or some other female, to interrogate her about the details of what she was feeling. Of course I had no idea beyond what anyone knows from a lifetime of moviegoing, that you have to time the contractions, and something about deep breathing. Posy had been such an unreconstructed pregnant person, however, so resolute about not talking or thinking about it, that I had no idea what she knew.

  “I’m not sure… perhaps… false alarm… you hear… ,” she said, relaxing with a reassured smile. “That’s better. I think it’s a false alarm. Just some twinges during the Haydn, and just then another.”

  “Shall we go home? Shall we go to the hospital?” Robin asked, with a tiny note of impatience, as if Posy was always doing this, intruding her personal condition on happy social occasions.

  “I don’t think so,” said Posy. “I’d rather be at a party. I’m better now.

  “Oh, no, it’s not really anything,” Posy said presently, in a piteous voice, as another spasm hit her. And so it went the rest of the evening. Every half hour or so, she would suddenly stop talking, with a look of concentration and concern, then smile and shrug as the twinge passed.

  The Frank riad was in the medina, like the Cotters’, and was superior to it, I could see, now that I had learned the criteria: size, antiquity, the care and taste of the restoration, and, to a certain extent, the panache of the decor. I suppose Madame Frank, with her real estate connections, had had an inside line on this superb example, which, as she explained, they had done up from a complete ruin, with passionate attention to authenticity, using craftsmen now irreplaceable to do the mosaics; and even the shutters were carved à l’ancienne with wooden tendrils and hand-hewn slats.

  Madame Frank was alerted in confidence that we might have to leave her dinner party abruptly, and she reacted with bright understanding. “Ooh la la. How splendid. N’attendez pas trop longtemps!”

  “No, I think I’ll know,” Posy said. “I don’t think this is really it.”

  “Where is Ian?” Madame Frank asked. “We have certain things to discuss, you know—not that we would have a business conversation to night, no, no, but I wanted to set up a real business appointment, to discuss the matter he mentioned.”

  I didn’t even have to guess. He was selling her his developable tract of land in the Palmeraie.

  “I’m so happy about this, the area is too lovely for his factories, that’s the problem for him. Luckily for me, he could not get the planning permission for an ugly factory. I’ll build something beautiful, and of course he’ll be able to buy in at cost if he would like one of the units for himself. I hope you encourage that.” She smiled trustfully at me.

  “I don’t know where he is,” I said. “He had to leave the concert. I expect he’ll be along.”

  Dinner was served rather promptly, with no aperitifs beforehand, maybe out of concern for Posy, maybe because it was latish, now after ten. There were puff pastries stuffed with sesame and chickpea, there was a delicate cucumber soup, a tagine of lamb. I watched Posy. Her face was slightly puffy, making her eyes smaller. She was still pretty, but I wondered what she looked like not pregnant.

  As expected, the talk concerned the bombings. Madame Frank had been watching television and had more information than we. There had been bombs at the library and the Avis agency. A Moroccan employee of Avis had been killed, and at the library, an English woman, the volunteer on duty, had been killed—an Elsie Pring. We expressed our shock and dismay, truly felt. Miss Pring was Ian’s secretary. Our library, a few books, the life of a mild English spinster. It seemed so pointless.

  “It’s beginning, it
was bound to,” said Posy.

  “Oh, they will control these people,” said Madame Frank. “It was to be expected, there is so much unrest elsewhere. But the Moroccans know it is in their economic interest to have peaceful development and European investment. They’ll round up the fanatics soon enough.”

  “The Algerians probably thought that too,” Robin said. “And look at Lebanon.”

  “Yes, but here the natives are culturally very French,” Madame Frank repeated—her favorite delusion. Then she brought the talk back to center on the property market in Marrakech, and the errors to be found in this or that restoration, and the criminal tendencies of Moroccan contractors, who had to be watched like eggs boiling. There was a slight tension over Posy’s condition, and conversation would slow if she made the slightest stir. She skipped the cucumber soup, I saw, a first for Posy, who has the appetite of a drover. I could only keep thinking of little Desi, now in the clutches of the DST, and wondered what had really happened and whether Suma was connected to it. And of course, of Ian.

  “I’ve noticed that here, Yvette, and at other French occasions, the food is better than at Ian’s, where the cook is plain Moroccan. Do you French ladies teach your cooks a thing or two?” remarked Robin gallantly.

  “Bien sûr,” said Madame Frank, showing all her dimples. “The village cooks only know a few dishes—tagine, couscous—and tend to overcook those. I fancy I’ve made some impression on them.”

  We left before midnight. Posy’s pains were still intermittent, or even seemed to have vanished—she couldn’t say precisely—and they had not really impeded her enjoyment of the evening. “It’s more of a backache,” she said. I supposed they would worsen in the night, and that’s what happened.