Shadows of Marrakech

by Tim Kindberg

  He stood, gave himself another scratch. “Why, they are an absence, they are shadows.” Akimbe looked back at the carpet. “Do you think they are down there? It’s an interesting question. But there are other ways of becoming a shadow up here in old Marrakech and onwards in Europe, I can assure you.”

  “You mean slavery. Trafficking.” That word Chemchi had used. Was it the same thing as slavery? Akimbe wanted to hit him; to beat his face to a bloody pulp. He started to walk around the carpet then stopped. “I’m not here to be taught a lesson about shadows by you. You’re full of lies.”

  “Or are they simply dead, in unmarked graves? Now, you asked why you should believe me —“

  “Save your stinking breath. I’m not interested.”

  “Oh, I see, I need to give you some hope, don’t I — no one can live without hope, can they? You’ve lost your only friend,” he pointed with a flourish towards Chemchi’s shadow. “And now I’m telling you your parents have passed away. And your sister too I suppose. Too much bleakness to shovel at you, little one?”

  Akimbe couldn’t stand it any longer. Tears started to pump.

  “Here,” said Camel-breath. “Another place to look. In case I’m wrong, that is.” He held out a piece of paper.

  Akimbe walked around to take the note, at arms length and ready to make a dash. But Camel-breath just stood there and regarded him, with a cold look on his face. Taking a last look at Chemchi’s shadow, Akimbe turned back into the darkness the way he had come.

  PART TWO

  A Bug in Reality

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IT WAS BEFORE the dawn, and above the rooftops of Marrakech lay a spill of glinting stars. Inside the souks, the call to morning prayers was over and stillness hung before commerce began.

  But at the fringe of the souks, as close as it could physically fit before all the passageways became too narrow for it, a large van, almost a lorry, reversed up to a gateway. Its four indicators flashed amber together. A shrill beeping warned those behind to stay clear.

  Someone banged on the side when the van had reversed as far as it could. The engine died, leaving the stillness to fill the void, but only briefly. Soon there was a clattering as two men who had been waiting threw down their glowing cigarettes and raised the roller door at the back.

  A light came on to reveal animal carcasses hung inside. More men appeared. They wrapped their arms around the carcasses in pairs, swung them down from the van to further arms, which placed them on carts to be carried over to Morchid’s stores.

  Once they had emptied the stinking, blood-spattered interior, one man cleared the hanging meat hooks to the side and then placed a few boxes around the floor. A group of the men went back into an unseen part of the souks. The driver lit another cigarette and dragged on it, his eyes expressionless as he listened to a tale from one of the men who leaned into his cab.

  After a while the group came back with new cargo for the van: a string of about twenty people with their hands on their heads, a consignment to somewhere north of Marrakech, possibly even Europe. A few men, mostly women and children. The gang now carried guns and torches. The slaves-to-be looked nervously to right and left as they were marched along. The children tried not to cry in case they came to the men’s attention.

  One by one they were poked and pushed into the van. There were only a few boxes. Two of the male slaves dragged the boxes to the side and bade the children and some of the women to sit on them. The remainder found a place as best they could to stand or squat, so that they could place at least an outstretched hand on the van’s side. As the van filled, this became impossible so they placed a hand on the shoulder of someone nearby and hoped that they would be able to stay upright when the van drove off. They had no idea where they were destined for.

  None of the men spoke to the captives. And the captives silently obeyed their gestured commands. Eventually, when the last had climbed in, pulled up by his fellows to occupy the remaining bit of cramped space, the men brought down the roller door, banged on the side, and watched the van start and slowly drive away through the narrow passage.

  Chemchi watched this scene from the second-storey room where she was held prisoner. The sight of these people herded like animals, their fates unknown but certainly bleak, caused her to forget, temporarily, the throbbing pain in her head from the blow that had knocked her unconscious, and to forget, too, the smell of something decomposing that filled her cell.

  She had seen only flashes of this silent brutality in the electric lights. But it was clear what was going on, as clear as the stalls now crystallising in the light of the coming morning. And Morchid, the man by whose might she was now locked up, was behind it.

  Akimbe would be worried that she hadn’t returned, and know that Morchid was the cause. But what could he do against Morchid and his gang of enslavers? She cursed herself for thinking that a confrontation with Morchid could have led her anywhere but where she now found herself. She hoped Akimbe would not try to save her because he was certain to end up trapped – or enslaved – like her. But equally she knew that he would try. Well, she couldn’t do anything about that. Her job was to escape. And then to do something about Morchid.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MORCHID ATE LIKE a great bear, dipping his paws in a plateful of stew from the terrines. Meat eating meat, Chemchi thought. She looked at her plate, decided she would rather die of hunger than dine alongside this man, then thought better of it: there was no point in allowing herself to feel weak. It was the second night since the morning of her capture, and she had had no food. In the traditional Moroccan style, she ate without knife, fork or spoon, but with fingers and chunks of bread.

  They ate in silence except for Morchid’s chomping. The man standing ready to serve them was a slave. She knew this from the cast of his eyes. On the other hand, the two men who took her from her cell belonged to Morchid’s gang. They brought her here through the tangle of the souks, to a corner that even she did not know, via a metal workshop empty of the artisans who wrought intricate lamps by day, and then through alleyways behind, all in the close evening heat. They had their liberty. They walked and talked like men whose lives belonged to them, although she wondered to what extent that could really be said of anyone who worked for Morchid. They were not to be messed with. They did not shackle her in any way, but walked her like two uncles, through the ambling tourists and past the local men squatting on stools. The thought of fleeing terrified her. And screaming would have done no good: people would know Morchid’s business when they saw it, and remain uninvolved.

  And so she sat, Morchid’s business, across a table filled with terrines, bread, fruit and a large pot of mint tea.

  She wanted to ask him about the torch. He was the only person who might be able to explain why a torch in her hands became an instrument for seeing things that others could not see — not an X-ray but — what? It seemed from what he had said that he knew what she could do, although he hadn’t encountered her before the matter of Ibtissam. What else did he know about her? She thought of her mother’s last phone call, of all the mystery surrounding Ali’s wrenching of her from her mountain home, from everything she had known. Akimbe said she had a talent, a talent for seeing. I see, she thought, but I don’t know. I don’t know what I need most of all to know. I can’t see inside Ali’s mind.

  Was Morchid like her: could he also see what others couldn’t see?

  He put aside his plate and went over to the shelves, took one of many black boxes inlaid with mother of pearl, and handed it to Chemchi.

  “Open it.” She wiped her hands and took it from him. It was shut fast, and she could see no latch. In fact there seemed to be no lid at all.

  “But there’s no way to—“

  “Very well. Tell me what is inside, anyway.”

  She shook it gently. Something rattled inside. But a sound continued after she stopped: a patter of hard feet tapping on the wooden shell. But it couldn’t be. She move it again, more
gently. The feet scampered. It seemed to her that they walked to wherever her hand gripped the box, that whatever was inside was interested in her fingers.

  “It’s a crab, or an insect.”

  “Inside a sealed box without water or food?”

  Now aware that this small house was inhabited, she carefully raised it and looked underneath. But that too was a solid face of lacquer without joins.

  “Here.” He gave her a torch: a thin, pencil-like torch. She shone it over the glossy surface.

  A human head gazed back at her, but on the body of a scorpion. It was a girl with long hair, about ten centimetres from head to tip of curved sting. She was hard-faced, and appeared to be chewing gum. Her face was splotchy, as though she had been crying but she was daring you to say so. She’d sting you if you so much as suggested it.

  And the walls of the box were now glass. Swirling around within those walls were the blotches of light she recognised from when she had left the chamber with Akimbe: the slow swirling like you see behind closed eyelids, which had floated behind the velvet drape.

  Chemchi played the beam on and off the box, and the girl-scorpion appeared and disappeared with it. She had begun to try to say something to Chemchi. Her face was screwed up and she looked as though she was screaming abuse but Chemchi could not hear her. Now the girl was crying. Her scorpion legs were rattling against the glass. Chemchi switched off the torch.

  “Tell me what you saw.” For a moment she had forgotten he existed, so strange was the vision. Morchid was either testing her or didn’t know. She stared back at him, the tall girl at the brute across the table, the butcher and enslaver and … maybe even worse, if such were possible. But every time she looked at him she felt there might have been something more, perhaps something even noble, even sensitive beneath that exterior. His mouth, now slightly greasy from the meal, seemed to struggle to play the part asked of it.

  “I looked as you wanted me to but I couldn’t see anything. If you think there’s something in there, perhaps it didn’t want to be found. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for, anyway, so how could I find it?”

  Morchid wasn’t looking at her. Was he even listening? Couldn’t he be tricked, like the men in the films she watched so often were? But he wasn’t a man. Was he? Two servants crept in to clear the table but he waved them away as though he had eyes in the back of his head.

  “Now look at the box again, without the torch this time.” Chemchi picked it up, acutely aware of the girl-scorpion inside. She didn’t want to hurt her so she handled it gingerly.

  “Turn it upside down.”

  “No, I won’t. What is this game you’re playing?”

  He looked at his great calloused hand. “So you saw something in there – or someone. Now look, I mean really look.”

  She lowered the box back to the table and stared at it. It was easier than looking at him and gave her time to think.

  “It’s just a black box,” he said, “but now there is something in there that wants to be found. Think about the torch beam. Imagine shining it.”

  And as she did so, the girl-scorpion re-appeared, but only in her imagination, clattering on the box’s glass walls while the eyelid lights swirled around her. Except that she was different. She looked calm and collected, almost like a different person. She gave Chemchi a sniggering look and then disappeared into the swirl.

  Chemchi put the box down. What was it like to go mad? Wasn’t this the kind of vision a crazy person would see? Had he put something in her food? They had eaten from different terrines, she now realised. She didn’t feel crazy but she put her hands together, just to see what that was like, whether the sensation of one hand on the other felt normal, like the two hands of a person who was not dreaming, or drugged, or crazy; who was in the world as she had known it before she lost her cat in the souks, the world of Ali’s riad, of mopping the floors, of making tea for him.

  “You saw how long I tried, but it’s just a black box.”

  “Give me the box,” Morchid said, rising to replace it on the shelves, which Chemchi now realised were full of black boxes just like it. Was there someone inside each of them?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MORCHID TOOK CHEMCHI back to the place where the captives were processed.

  The citizens of Marrakech saw the trafficking vehicles moving around night after night, some of them windowless, some carrying captives openly, their gaunt faces visible. Escape was impossible because of the padlocks and chains on the doors — always supposing that the threat of extreme violence didn’t dissuade them from the attempt. They were destined for households as domestic servants, for farms or building sites where they would labour, sweatshops where they would toil, or, in the case of most women and even children, brothels. Marrakech didn’t see them unloaded and processed. Marrakech knew masters and mistresses and saw people slaving for them, but didn’t ask any awkward questions.

  The captives were quickly sent on to where they would slave. It wouldn’t do to keep too many in one place: profits would be lost, and someone stupid enough to risk their life might finally ask an awkward question. Some were sent out in small vans in and around Marrakech, but larger groups were collected and dispatched to farther places in bigger vehicles like the one Chemchi had seen.

  Chemchi watched a group of arrivals bundled into a chamber not unlike the one with the shadow carpet, and not far away from it in the souks. She stood with Morchid as the gang asked curt questions to find out what language the slaves could speak, and whether they had any skills. They sorted them by physical type: the strong, the attractive, the rest. Their teeth were examined. The men ordered them to jump as high as they could. Some clients were there to hand-pick and haggle.

  Chemchi felt sick. She struggled to breathe the cooling night air. Another van was backing up and men were readying to unlock the back doors.

  “It is human nature,” said Morchid, “to slave or be enslaved. We even do it to ourselves. Life itself is slavery.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Are you saying this cruelty is traditional, so we have to keep it going?”

  “It’s essential, deep in your history, yes.”

  “‘Your history’. Are you saying you don’t share one with the rest of us? That you’re not human?”

  “I am the butcher. In the stall in the souks. The rest you needn’t know.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “If I were born fated to be a slave I would accept my destiny. We are but a succession of waves breaking on a shore. None of us matters. What persists is the sea. The depths.”

  “Spare me your philosophy. Do I look stupid, Morchid? All this trafficking must be making lots of money. Who benefits, then?”

  “This,” he swept a hand across the scene, his men handling captives like cattle, “this is really not the point. You will help me. You made a deal with me.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then it’s a box for you.”

  She had felt as though she had nothing to lose. Now she was reduced to silence.

  “Do you know what you know?” he said.

  “Of course I do. Look, I don’t have any time for this. Get to your point.”

  “And know what you don’t know? Are there things that you know but don’t know that you know them? And matters of which you don’t know that you don’t know?”

  “You’re trying to trick me. You’re confusing knowledge and awareness, anyway. I won’t be part of this game.”

  “Seeing is like knowing, in a way. If someone doesn’t see something, then there are no means or force or ability that will necessarily enable them to see it. It’s in front of their eyes but it might as well be invisible. But you are different. You can see what’s in front of your eyes. At least, when you use a torch, a torch that shines with your consciousness.”

  He paused. Chemchi didn’t know what he meant. Or perhaps she did. Conscious light. When she shone a torch, she did focus — she was co
nscious — in a way that didn’t feel like any other way of concentrating.

  “You will find my son.”

  “You?! A son?! The poor creature. Find him yourself. Or get one of your lackeys to do it.”

  “He went through the carpet.”

  “So look for him there.”

  “He has been looked for there.”

  “But not by you?”

  “He is in front of their eyes.”

  “So, you send people there. But you can’t go yourself for some reason, because you would if you could. But they don’t find him. And they come back — at least, some of them do — or you wouldn’t know that. Interesting. What exactly have you told them to look for? ”

  “He is a baby.”

  “How exactly is that supposed to help?”

  “There are no babies there.”

  “So you’re asking me to find what doesn’t exist.” She shook her head. “If I hadn’t seen an invisible carpet lately I would think you were a crackpot. So, this baby, he went there — was put there — recently.”

  “No.”

  “What? Now I really don’t understand.”

  “Whoever goes there, stays as they are. But forgets.”

  “Where is my mother?” She tried to catch him off guard.

  “She is not relevant.”

  “I’ll help you on two conditions: that you release them. All of them.” She nodded towards the captives. “And you tell me where my mother is.”

  “You’re not in any position to dictate to me. You found your cat because of me. That was the deal. Your mother is your problem. Use your torch.”

  “I wish I knew how. And that applies to your son, too.” And yet she had found Ibtissam, on an initial direction from Morchid. Was that really more than chance?

  “You said the slavery is not the point. So when you have what you want, if I find your son, let them go.”

  One of his men was waiting to speak to Morchid, who bid him approach with a slight movement of his eye. The man whispered something in his ear.