Shadows of Marrakech

by Tim Kindberg

  “Why have you stopped?” the mother was frantic. “We have to go. There is no time. They’ll catch us.” She was the only one to pause with Chemchi: the others continued on across the square in the brilliant sunshine, towards the dunes, their small shadows gliding with them from the high sun. No one came to whisper in their ear and turn them back.

  Chemchi shook her head again. “It’s just sand out there, and other bits of places like this. There are no mountains. Where do you think you are going?”

  “Come with us.” The mother shook her head as though Chemchi were simple, took Chemchi’s hand in both of hers and looked deep into her eyes, her cat’s eyes. But Chemchi froze. She didn’t know what to say. “Very well,” the woman said. “My children, I must go with them. Thank you. And goodbye.” She turned and ran to catch up with the others, who were paused on the blurry, faintly zig-zagging edge where the desert began. They were looking back for the woman, but not for Chemchi.

  And six people walked over the edge as though it did not exist; with mothers’ arms around their children, they stepped beyond and walked in a valley between dunes, disappearing from view as Chemchi watched them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHEMCHI HAD NEVER felt so alone; even her loneliness when she cleaned the riad while Ali and the guests were all out was nothing like this. She wished Akimbe were with her. But most of all, she wished she could go to her mother.

  A fly buzzed at her face and she swatted it away. Stop, she told herself, stop thinking of what makes you weak. Of what takes your power away. Morchid’s baby son: she must find him and find her way back, before she began to forget like Akimbe. There was no one to fetch her back. “Return from this place.” That must mean the chamber. The chamber, or rather its counterpart, here in the fragment, in cracked Marrakech.

  The old woman along the wall had not moved. She was dressed in black and whatever shadow she made under this high sun was indistinguishable from the folds of her dress.

  Chemchi stopped a few paces away and asked, “Where is the butcher?” The woman barely lifted her severely drooping head to answer:

  “You can’t ask me that.”

  “But I just did. What about a baby? Have you seen one?” She felt no qualms by now, about asking these abrupt questions.

  “Nor that. It’s my heart, my weak, weak heart; you’re making it flutter; you’ll break an old woman in two.”

  “It’s a simple enough question, my dear. Look,” Chemchi put on a mollifying voice and crouched beside her. “Look, I’m only asking. If you’ve heard of a butcher, or a baby, his son, just tell me what you know. Then I’ll go.”

  The sunlight, reflected off the white walls and the pale stone of the square, was blinding. Chemchi squinted at the wrinkled, drooping head. It was eerily quiet around them, not far from the busy souks and yet they might as well have been miles away. What was this woman doing here? Not begging, surely, despite the outstretched claw.

  The old woman finally inched her head up to look at Chemchi. It seemed to take the greatest of efforts, as though a crane were winching it slowly. She trembled. “It is you,” she said, “I’ve been expecting you too. You’re his eyes, aren’t you. His finding eyes. Show me!”

  Chemchi shone her torch at the old woman’s face. She could see nothing of the beam in the intense sun. But as it passed over her face she saw a beautiful young woman with earrings hanging by an improbable length. They were made of elaborate hoops in cascades. She was just like the girl whose photograph the old Tuareg woman had shown her when she was little. Had it been her grandmother who showed it to her?

  Chemchi suddenly wanted to throw her arms around her but didn’t know how to grasp such a frail creature. She simply placed her hand on her cheek.

  “There is a bug in reality,” the old woman said. “The son will fix it when the time comes. I’ve been expecting him. And I am the bug talking to you.”

  “You’re … the bug talking to me,” Chemchi repeated the words to see if they would begin to make sense. Of course she knew what a software bug was, when programs crashed. She took them in her stride herself but Ali would fly into a rage when the battered old laptop malfunctioned.

  But how could there be a bug in reality? Reality just worked, didn’t it? As if to answer, hot air billowed in from the desert lying just beyond the bricks of the square, and blew across her face. The dunes stopped so suddenly at the edge, it seemed they could not enter, even though that should be perfectly possible. It was as though they were caged out there, and not allowed any further, like animals. But she had walked across that sand from the gates. It was just sand, wasn’t it?

  It was true that this place was broken — a bit like a bug — compared to what Chemchi was used to. It wasn’t in a loop exactly but stuck around the same moment of noon. And then the edge, that wasn’t an edge. But it was reality, surely. Certainly not like a dream or a film. She didn’t believe in magic. That was just a way of dealing with what we couldn’t understand. True, late at night, ready to hide behind her bedclothes, she had watched films with black magic, sorcery and witchcraft, even necromancy, communication with the dead. But she knew the difference between those films and reality perfectly well, however much they affected her.

  Was this all about death, perhaps? After all, surely death was a bug in reality if ever there was one. And this could be … well not exactly paradise, despite the gates she entered by, the contentedness of the people, and the fact that it seemed as though it would go on and on with no birth or growing.

  No, she told herself, no, the world behaved according to laws. She may not have studied science but she felt that instinctively. If the reality of this fragment seemed to be broken then it was because she didn’t yet understand it. Or it was just a glitch. It needed to be mended.

  With all this rapid thinking through the possibilities, her mind reeled.

  “If you are a bug, part of the malfunction, then why should I believe anything you say?” she asked.

  The woman did not answer but Chemchi did not notice. For a moment, she forgot who she was and what she was doing here. Then, just as quickly, she came back to her senses. Perhaps that was what had happened to Akimbe. The forgetting. She had to return before it was too late.

  “You say the son will fix the bug. Where is he?”

  “Where you come from.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “The bug knows itself. And he is part of it, too. Bug and reality are one.”

  “Is he Morchid’s son? ”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s a baby.”

  “He was a baby.”

  Chemchi was tiring of these riddles. And she didn’t know whether to believe the old woman. What better way to put her off the scent than to say it wasn’t a baby she should look for, and that he wasn’t here?

  “And what will become of you, if the bug is fixed?”

  “I cannot say. Death, perhaps. Finally.” The old woman shifted by a fraction.

  “Back in Marrakech, where I come from, there is death but there are no bugs in reality.”

  “You say that,” a drop of saliva hung from the old woman’s impossibly thin lip, “because you don’t see an edge, Am I right?”

  “The edge to what?”

  “The edge to your world. To the known, the seen.”

  “No, of course not, there are only ordinary edges in my world.”

  “And you can prove that negative, can you: that there are no ‘extraordinary’ edges?”

  “The carpet!”

  “No. That’s a portal, not an edge. An opening. I don’t believe you understand me.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that in my Marrakech there are blatant edges like in this square, but that we don’t see — that we’re like these clockwork people here? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Tell me something you notice about this place.” The saliva had fallen onto the old woman’s chin.

  “Well, let me see. Not everyone is blind to th
e edge. The people just now. They saw it and crossed it.”

  “And are they from here?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps they were like me. But then where were they headed?”

  “Continue.”

  “And the people here, they are somehow like the people in Marrakech but not. And they weren’t born here. They just appeared here. Like me, I suppose. Or…”

  “Or they’ve been made real here, out of new ones’ thoughts. All those things you say are true. Another part of the bug is that there is no ‘was’ or ‘will be’, there is only an approximate present. And no one notices that time ranges over only a very narrow extent. It doesn’t repeat necessarily, but it endlessly plays with the same minute or so, a minute that nonetheless changes. There is no growth here, you see; only appearance and movement. And shopping.” She chuckled.

  “It reminds me a little of paradise. Paradise is supposed to be a perpetual blissful present. Only this is more like …. like blissful ignorance. And don’t people grow in Paradise, otherwise what’s the point of it?”

  The old woman didn’t respond. Her head had lowered an inch or two again.

  “And what of Morchid’s son? The baby who you say is no longer a baby? Morchid put him through but Morchid himself can’t come through. That’s part of the bug too, I suppose. Why him?”

  “He caused disruption.”

  “What kind of disruption?”

  “Everything here is an idea — it appears from nowhere but is. And, once it is, it always was. Thought and reality become one. But selectively. Morchid tried to tamper. His ideas became … realised. And something was wrong with them. Anyway,” she motioned tinily with her claw to the uncanny scene around them, the equivalent of another person’s sweeping arm. “It’s also real. I said it was like an idea and it is but it’s also not. This is matter. All of it. But not necessarily as you know it. It is also thought.”

  “And what did Morchid think that was so disruptive? Something to do with slavery, I’ll bet.”

  The old woman chuckled again. “Slavery and non-slavery are the same here. There are no masters but no free will, either.”

  “And you’re the bug’s mouthpiece. Why does it — whatever it is — need to explain itself to me?”

  “The bug has several — shall we say — interfaces to tell itself. It’s not a question of need. It’s lonely. It wants someone to talk to.”

  Chemchi stood up and shone her tiny torch around the square that was a triangle. Beyond, where the desert lay, were the splotchy eyelid lights. Then she swung the beam back to the old woman.

  “Are you my grandmother? Is that who gave me the picture of herself?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “My mother’s mother?”

  The old woman nodded.

  “And what of my mother?”

  “There is someone else who can tell you about her.”

  “Ali. He won’t tell.”

  “And is he the only one who can help?” The vanished lips assumed a knowing smile.

  Chemchi recalled the battered little car, the silent journey to Marrakech from where he had taken her out of the mountains, with Chemchi pressed to the window and screaming for her mother. How dare he? The anger cleared her faltering mind.

  “When is Morchid’s son going to come and fix the bug?”

  “Soon. He’ll come here. I’ll tell him where you are. But he won’t know about fixing the bug. Perhaps you’ll tell him he’s going to do that. He won’t listen to me.”

  “Oh, and where will I be?”

  “You can’t stay here, can you? You’re becoming like them. Soon you won’t be a new one anymore. You’ll be in that moment, nothing will be missing anymore. You must go back. Meet him at the portal.”

  “That gate in the desert, where I arrived?”

  “No, you must go back the way you came.”

  “The chamber — so it is here, too.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  AKIMBE AND DEOBIA passed through the same door that Chemchi had opened, into the milling crowds. Unlike Chemchi, who was working everything out by herself, Akimbe had Deobia, who seemed to know a lot about the place.

  And Akimbe had Ibtissam, for the cat had skipped through the door just before they closed it, announcing her presence by pawing at his ankles. She must have followed them through the carpet.

  “Stop, stop, just stop will you? Let me try saying what you just said.” Akimbe was getting frustrated at what he was being asked to believe. But Deobia’s account made some sense given what he could see with his own eyes, he had to admit.

  “So this is Marrakech,” Akimbe went on, “— another Marrakech? Only chopped off somehow? But it can’t be. I feel as though I’m dreaming. Yet all of this is real: if I walked out in front of all this human traffic it would part around me. Either that or trample me. And when I listen to it, smell it, those spices, the food being cooked nearby: it’s just like Marrakech. At least, it could be. I suppose there might be other cities similar to Marrakech.”

  “So you still remember the Marrakech we’ve just left,” said Deobia, “even though you couldn’t remember this place when you went back the other way?”

  “Yes, I remember Marrakech and I remember my family and the life I led before all of this befell me, including the journey to Marrakech. Life before I started visiting insane places that don’t make any sense. As though what happened before was made any sense — being dragged from our beds and taken from our homes by low-lifes with guns.”

  “When I go backwards and forwards,” said Deobia, “I remember everything. Both ways”

  “Backwards and forwards — how many times have you done this?”

  Deobia didn’t answer his question, but said, “The point is that you are still you, just as I am still me. And that is still Ibtissam, one imagines. We’re still the people who are looking for Chemchi. Like the man said: new ones are always missing something.”

  The cat hovered with them by the door. Akimbe bent down and put his hand next to Ibtissam’s nose for her to smell, to reassure her. “I miss Chemchi. And father. And mother. And even Oyo. I miss…”

  “You’re doing a lot of missing.”

  “They might be here. I would — I might — forgive you for misleading me, if we could just find them here. You know this place.”

  “I didn’t know whether I could trust you, that’s why I said nothing about knowing this place. But when I knew you had been through the carpet, I felt — I don’t know, that we had something in common. And your family might be here, I suppose. Yet how would they have found the carpet to go through?”

  “But this,” he held out his mother’s bracelet, “this was there in the chamber.”

  Deobia put his hand on Akimbe’s arm. His faraway look returned, as though he had come from the stars. It made Akimbe think of the desert, with fragments of places like this strewn around it. After a short while, Deobia’s attention returned.

  “Concentrate your mind,” he said, “on what we must do now. One thing at a time. We can return. I will show you.”

  They followed Ibtissam through the souks, Akimbe walking beside Deobia whenever he could. If he got lost in this place again he would have let go of everything he had regained.

  Ibtissam stopped and looked back to make sure they saw a turn she was about to take, expertly avoiding all the feet and wheels around her. But Akimbe stopped and said to a passer-by, “Excuse me. Where are we?”

  Deobia whispered at him, “Come on. We must go.” But Akimbe persisted, despite his fear. He wanted to know what these people thought they were doing here. “What city is this?”

  “Oh, are you new ones?” Said the man. “Where are your parents?”

  “They’re not far,” he lied. “But tell me, what city is this?”

  The man laughed, “It’s Marrakech! You’re in the souks, in the medina!”

  “And have you travelled to the other places,
across the sand?”

  “Other places? Sand?”

  “The places dotted around the desert like this one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I am always here, in the medina. I know of no sand in Marrakech.”

  “But when you were a new one, didn’t you cross the desert from the gates and see the edge, as we did? Didn’t you see that it was as though someone had taken a saw and cut the edges of the city off?”

  “But I’ve always been! The very idea — me, a new one! Now, what is it or who is it you’re missing? New ones are always missing something.” He winked.

  “Thank you for your help sir, now we will go back to our parents.”

  The stranger watched them turn the corner but didn’t see the cat they were following. He scratched his head, remembering what it was he had come to buy.

  They followed Ibtissam to what seemed to be a replica of the Rue Mouassine. And there, located exactly like its counterpart, was Morchid’s stall. A queue snaked from it but the stall was in profile and they could not see inside. The queue wasn’t moving.

  “Deobia, isn’t that Morchid’s stall?”

  “Go and look for yourself.”

  “Are you mad? He’ll—”

  “Trust me. Go and look. Or I’ll go up and you can watch me.”

  “But you work for him. It’s not the same.”

  “Let us go together.”

  “I don’t know whether I trust you. Why should I?”

  “Then let us go away from here.” Deobia started to walk off.

  “Wait!”

  “Well? Are you going to look? Are you going to let me look?”

  “You look.”

  Deobia walked calmly up to the queue. He pointed his arm to the stall and looked at Akimbe. The expression on his face did not change. The people in the queue seemed barely perturbed by his standing next to them.

  Ibtissam was sitting by the queue too, licking herself clean. Akimbe gritted his teeth and walked to where Deobia was standing.