Lulu in Marrakech

by Diane Johnson

  “Odd that such a one would attend such an event.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “I can’t help you here, I’m afraid, but I’ll inquire. I know someone who has contacts inside the sécurité. Dear me, you’re rather the kiss of death, aren’t you—in a manner of speaking, I hasten to say. I didn’t intend a tactless reference to the fate of the Parisian visitor.”

  This was chilling. “How did you hear about that?”

  “You know he was a—let us say, a valued person. Valued by la belle France.”

  Since I had heard that from Taft, I acted only a little surprised. Of course it had long occurred to me it could be the French the colonel worked for, but now I knew it must be so; otherwise, how did he know what they were thinking about Amid?

  “Suma’s brother, you knew we were interested in him. We talked about it.” Had we? Had I told him about Amid? I couldn’t thrash myself out of the tangled web in order to be sure. The colonel and I exchanged some recriminations like this, though he was growing more cheerful. Through his delicate allusions, I began to understand something else: Amid was not just a French citizen, he was a French agent.

  What did that mean for, or about, Suma?

  “Bourad’s real allegiances with the French sécurité were not known to the DST, alas for him. If so, they might have picked him up before you did, thus saving him from the bungling for which your agency is known. In any case, one of my employers—I trust your discretion, Lulu—is in a position to mitigate your legal problems. They are interested in Lord Drumm, who has many Middle Eastern connections. It would be of enormous value to know someone who knew him well.”

  “I’ve only met the man once, I don’t know him well,” I protested. “You have received a letter from him.”

  “No, of course not.”

  I saw he was surprised, betrayed by a tiny flicker of his eyelid. He knew I had told him a lie. Maybe he was surprised because I hadn’t lied to him before.

  “Perhaps you will,” he said. Little bits kept falling into place. “My employers.” Yes, the colonel worked for the French too. I was still trying to work out whether he was fishing or had actually opened my mail. He or someone could have opened my mail, and I’d never detected it. But only amateurs would be detected; we all knew how to do it properly.

  “Suppose I do?”

  “If you went to London, if you accepted his offer of… friendship, you could be sure that the French authorities would listen to suggestions that they not pursue the grave matter of the death of poor Bourad, illegally kidnapped on Moroccan soil.”

  “They’d want reports? Real intelligence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would my American colleagues know—could I tell them what I was doing?”

  “Of course, yes. They’d have to know—you’d have to get yourself reassigned there. I would leave to your discretion how to do it.” I thought of Taft’s mention of Notorious, with Ian as the longed-for Cary Grant and Lord Drumm playing the Claude Rains part. In a good cause. America! I had to face facts. Obviously, because of Ain Aouda, to avoid prosecution I couldn’t stay in Morocco, but I couldn’t go back to France or California either, and I had to be somewhere. So I had to behave and take orders, like Ingrid Bergman.

  It was through this frivolous film analogy that I could see the future, and what I saw was that I had plunged so deeply into the thicket, through the dark and tangled foliage, that I couldn’t avoid seeing out the other side: there was London—a little flat in Chelsea or Canary Wharf, tickets for Covent Garden and the Coliseum, and tawdry, racy little West End plays, and the Royal Shakespeare… oh yes, I’d spent some time in London, it was very agreeable.

  And, of course, I had signed on for this. Coming up, I could see, was the painful (for me) good-bye to Ian; in London, the pretty clothes and cultural events, and the weekly, or monthly, lunch with Taft, or the colonel, or some counterpart, and some time-consuming cover, crusading for female literacy. Beyond that, the view was obscured.

  45

  Then said I, Ah, Lord God! surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reacheth unto the soul.

  —Jeremiah 4:10

  As the days continued, I would catch myself indulging in a self-pitying reverie as a sort of female Saint Sebastian being shot with new arrows at each moment, my heart totally disordered by guilt and confusion. Then a more normal state of mind would reassert itself. I heard nothing more from Taft about my legal jeopardy, and received no intimate visit from Ian, though the surface of things was as it had been, except for Posy’s return home. To my relief, the happy excitement around this deferred serious talks with Ian. It was I who brought her home, in fact. One day on my visit, she was dressed and ready to come with us.

  Ian happened to be outside in his courtyard as Rashid drove us through the gate, and he strode across the driveway, all smiles, to hand Posy out of the car, clutching her bundle. Robin dashed down the stairs soon after, expostulating, “My dear! Is this wise? The doctor said… ,” and so on, a mood that carried us through dinner with a minimum of awkwardness and an air of general congratulation, maybe except for Robin, who peered impassively at the baby, his eyes betraying panic equal to Posy’s. I wondered if Marigold was still to be a great playwright after all or if he would decide on a different career for her.

  The week that followed showed Posy’s growing exhaustion. Things didn’t go well. She slept a lot, and the maids would walk in the garden carrying Marigold. I would hear the baby’s thin little cry. I wondered if I should tell Robin about postpartum depression. Perhaps they didn’t take it seriously in England. I talked about that with Marina Cotter, who had noticed Posy’s fatigue too but dismissed Posy’s gloom.

  “Motherhood is a shock, that’s all. It’s normal to be a little depressed, tired and so on. She’s better off than most women—all these people to help.”

  Since I wasn’t a mother, I wasn’t much of an authority, but I wished I could do something. “Couldn’t she take some antidepressants?”

  “Not when she’s nursing, I’m sure,” Marina said severely. “She has to think of her milk.” Poor Posy. It wasn’t my first glimpse into the way you burn your bridges when you become a mother.

  I was aware—couldn’t help but notice—that Gazi and Ian spoke most nights, maybe every night. Once he was with me in the dining room when his cell phone rang, and he answered, waved at me, and started to leave the room to talk privately. Then he realized he could hardly be wooing me and having surreptitious phone calls with her, so he took the call in front of me, in an affectionate but businesslike tone, no news of her children but no problems reported, some banking details.

  “She’s making some acquaintances in the building, it’s a good sign, though it’s probably the usual collection of American tax evaders and British retirees,” he said when they hung up.

  “I’ll ask Suma about the children again,” I said. “You should report.”

  Other nights, I would hear the low sound of Ian speaking in his room, late, after I was supposedly asleep. Once I tried to reveal that I knew this by asking how Gazi was doing.

  “Fine,” he said. “She’s a brave girl, she’ll get through it.”

  Another night, Ian came into my room after dinner, loosening his collar, the unconscious gesture I’d noticed before, one that always said to me that we would make love or that he wished to. I wanted to be in his arms, but I also thought it was a bad idea, prolonging something that needed to be over. Over, that is, if I was going to go to London as a London-based directrice of the Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative, the group for whom I was preparing the literacy report, or maybe the World Learning Project—which one had yet to be determined. Various thoughts descended on me simultaneously. Some were cynical thoughts; Ian/men just have to get it from someone, never mind that their beloved is off in Marbella. Desirous thoughts, since I was feeling quite hard up myself. Love for Ian, this powerful pull of his arms, self,
situation; professional, competent thoughts to do with the always foreseen term of my stay with Ian. It was always going to end if we didn’t prolong it, and now it was time to move on as my employers expected.

  I should note that I didn’t quite have the character to resist Ian this time, but at the climax, tears came, me knowing it was the last time. He, on the other hand, was passionate and relieved; we were back together, joined body and soul.

  “That’s better, Lu, now, right?”

  …

  “I know this is mad,” Posy said one morning at breakfast. Her pink and white skin was dry-looking, with dark shadows under her eyes, and she tore her toast with fidgety fingers, quite unlike her pregnant, stolid self. “I recognize that it’s bodily changes and all, but I can’t seem to shake the idea that Marigold isn’t safe here. Someone will kidnap her or drop her. I keep seeing it, a—well—a dark presence outside the window, all kinds of things like that that I know are mad.”

  “Oh, Posy,” I began.

  “I’m taking her to England; I will just feel better. Robin thinks I’m mad.”

  But I could understand, if you were in charge of someone so little, how the silence here, the creepy feeling the silent maids gave you… I could understand well enough. Even Ian could, though there was no danger, he said. “The Moroccans love children,” he said.

  “Let her try to find nannies in England,” said Marina Cotter, sourly.

  It was in the paper that the French had already asked for the extradition of a Walter Snyder in connection with the kidnapping of French citizen Amid Bourad. I knew I was procrastinating the real breaking off with Ian, the moving on, but now it had to be done. I had to let it be known I’d received a job offer in London, though its real nature was still being organized in Virginia. It would have to do with literacy.

  I’d thought a lot about literacy. “What good does reading do them?” Marina Cotter had asked that question. Maybe she was unable to imagine—though I was able to imagine it—a world in which you had no way of finding out anything, and if some man, or your mother, or the imam, told you you were a low creature and a man had a right to beat you, how would you find out that wasn’t true? You would be beaten because the Koran says that a man has the right, maybe the duty to beat you. If you couldn’t read anything else, how would you know any better? Suma could read and must know better, so did her heart burn with devotion or with rage? Was I ever to know?

  Of course I had to tell Ian I was leaving, but for a few days I procrastinated, maybe hoping for a miracle, something that would let me throw myself into his arms and say yes! our future! us! However qualified his hopes, I knew he meant them, the hope that he and I could rub along together and that I’d stay. The more fully furnished my imagination became with images of our future, of our happiness, our children even, the more miserable I became, until that very misery goaded me into making an end to it.

  “It looks like I’ll be going to London soon.” I said this at lunch, in front of the Crumleys and Pierre Moment—a coward’s way. They murmured, inquired; I explained about female literacy, the consortium of projects, the home base in London. Ian appeared startled, even dumbfounded. I knew it was cowardly of me to bring it up this way with others present.

  “I think it’s a great chance to operate on a more global scale—it’s a huge problem, after all.”

  “You’re doing so much here,” Ian objected.

  “I’m about finished with my report,” I said. We’ll talk about it, said Ian’s glance. But we didn’t. We avoided the subject pointedly the rest of the day. Then, at night, he came to my room, angry, as if his choler and disbelief had been growing all day and now must explode.

  “I can’t believe this, Lulu, how could you make a decision like that out of the blue?” And more in this vein. “We talked about this. We decided we could make it work.”

  “You told me what you hoped,” I said, very resolute, steeled against this, gratified too, I suppose, by his chagrin. “And I’ve been thinking about it—whether we could get on, Ian. I didn’t say I thought we could.”

  “But we do! Lulu, we have so much.…”

  Of course I couldn’t say those melodramatic things I wanted to say—“You love another, I am not your first love”—nobody has a right to say things like that. Life is full of compromises. I knew all that. I also knew I wouldn’t like a French (or Moroccan) jail. Life is full of compromises, and I was going to try to be professional and not bitter.

  He argued with me a little, then all at once, with a certain déjà vu expression, he said he understood and that he’d come visit me in London. I found this capitulation almost the most wounding thing of all.

  “My father’s company has a corporate flat—I’ll see if you can use it while you get settled,” he said.

  For the good of her health and morale both, I was making Posy take walks with me each day. We could walk together on the road—it did her good to get out of the compound and feel a little free. The maids were in love with Marigold anyway and hovered over her basket with rapt devotion, so there was no need to fear going for a little walk, though the English child-rearing manual someone had given Posy suggested you were a criminal if you left your baby for half an hour. I would have to undo her bookish tendency to look up every child-care question in this misguided tract. Was literacy a good thing?

  “Oh, you have so much experience, around babies your whole life,” said Posy sarcastically, knowing I knew nothing about them, though I did feel a swell of love for Marigold whenever I held the squirmy little bundle.

  One day we tried going out together in Gazi’s abayas, for she had left several behind, enormous squares of black rayon hung over the backs of a chair or on a peg in the hall. Sure enough, when men driving carts went by us on the road, they didn’t look at us. Once, a truck would have run us over if we hadn’t gotten out of the way; we were part of the landscape and had to throw ourselves into a ditch, invisible. It was up to women to get out of the way. “In some ways, I don’t mind invisibility. It makes you part of universal womanhood,” said Posy as we scrambled out again. “If it meant I could also tap into some realm of sisterhood and universality, I wouldn’t mind. It might be calming.” I wondered if she was being facetious or whether she had been co‐opted in some surprising way.

  “It would be a mistake,” I said, thinking of the old, old women walking by us, who would turn out to be forty-five, their teeth knocked out by their husbands. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “It’s just that I feel alienated from womankind. Why? Because I feel I was tricked. No one told me. They all pretended it was wonderful to have a baby and wear this lace nightie and smile. Other women should tell you the truth, how hard and scary it is and how you sign your life away.”

  “Well, I couldn’t because I didn’t know,” I said.

  “I’m so happy you’re coming to England,” Posy said. “At least we’ll be safe.”

  And indeed, on these walks along the dusty Palmeraie roads, I found I was growing more receptive to the allure of London, to the idea of getting away from the repellent, skinny palm trees struggling for water in the desiccated landscape (while the Europeans’ wells and swimming pools sopped all the water up) and the tumbling plastic bottles skittering across the desert, and even the poor, thin little girls whose only hope is in virginity—forget all this depressing disarray. Forget Ian. Brisk English problems appealed to me, never mind that English is no longer spoken on the buses up and down the Edgeware Road. Me, I’d be in Mayfair or Chelsea or Belgravia. But I wasn’t leaving those women to their fate. I would have my work.

  It remained in the next weeks to wrap up my Moroccan affairs and say good-bye to the people I’d become fond of here. Posy had left, Robin soon to follow. There were some drinks parties. The Cotters had a lunch, and Ian gave a grand dinner, for which Miryam oversaw a delicious pastilla of pigeon and raisin, and there were the drummers.

  “To ensure you will come back. You won’t get this in London,” Ian sai
d of the pastilla. “But I’ll be coming to London for shepherd’s pie.” This genial formality had marked his demeanor in the past days and made my heart ache.

  One friend I would miss was Colonel Barka. We had lunch at the Mamounia the day before I was to leave.

  “I have something for you,” said the colonel, pulling from a sort of man purse under the table a sheaf of papers. “These are copies of a notebook the Moroccans took from the luggage of the girl you are so interested in, Suma, Bourad’s sister, at the airport.”

  At the airport? This was chilling news. “Go on.”

  “She was leaving. She has left, in fact. She had a flight to Nice. Apparently she plans to study medicine there, or near there. I read the transcript of the interrogation. They were interested in her connection to the little girl arrested at the concert the other night. Anyway, they let her go, but they’ll be watching her. She apparently took this notebook, a list of donors to some cause, from the Al‐Sayad house hold. I’m amazed it was lying around.”

  “It was probably in the safe,” I said, seeing, of course, how she would get it, how she knew about the key, where it was, bath time. I was touched by her courage, but of course, Suma hadn’t done it for me, she was taking it back to France. What for? Had she thought to filch Gazi’s passport as well?

  “Lists of donations, donors, organizations. This notebook is going to make your friends very happy. They will think of you very kindly, Miss Sawyer.”

  “Yes, thank you, I see that they’ll be pleased,” I said.

  “A lesser man would exact a price for this from a beautiful woman” said the colonel, patting my hand. “But it is a token of my esteem for you and the hope we will always be friends.”