Lulu in Marrakech (7 page)

12

Fight in the cause of Allah / Those who fight you / But do not transgress limits / For Allah loveth not transgressors.

—Koran 2:190

T
wo days later, Ian, Robin, and I drove up to the site with investigators to see the useless heap of ashes and tottering, charred rafters to which the strong smell, not quite ammonia, would cling forever. An investigation, or investigations, had been mounted at once into the causes of the fire, to figure out whether it was deliberate, an accident, or an act of terrorism—there were various scenarios. Ian walked around and around the ruin, like a dog getting ready to lie down, but the investigators only took a sample of rubble and some photographs. The Moroccans were determined to find evidence of arson or terrorism, and there remained a question as to whether anyone had been inside. It began to look like that had not been the case—they were reassured so far not to have found human remains.

The principal investigator was a Commissioner Doussaq, from the OCP, Office Cherifien des Phosphates—a stout man in khakis and the white cap of a camel driver, who drove a car without license plates. “The Moroccan police are much more sophisticated and competent than I may have expected,” Ian said of Commissioner Doussaq at dinner later.

“Their history as a police state,” said Robin Crumley. “In authoritarian regimes, the police are always efficient.”

With Commissioner Doussaq I made yet another faux pas. I had come along for my own reasons and was dying to ask an expert about what they believed had detonated the ammonium nitrate. I had hastened to read up on the possibilities—it can be exploded by being mixed with fuel oil, put under pressure or confined in a close place, exposed to extremely high temperatures, or set off by a rocket or dynamite. Anyway, I asked the commissioner which he believed it was: “If the gas was only ammoniac, would anyone—as I was, in fact—be affected enough to lose consciousness?” I was saying. Standing behind the commissioner, Ian shook his head slightly, but I didn’t immediately understand this was an embarrassment. The commissioner stared at me and then looked at Ian, as if to say, do I have to answer her? But, instead of knowing enough to shut up, I persisted. “But if oxides of azote…”

“Miss Sawyer has been following our talk,” Ian said, smiling. “I’ve explained that she was probably not harmed by the ammonia smell.”

The commissioner’s expression turned almost to gladness; the little lady was only concerned for her health. Still too thick to understand that I was overstepping polite female behavior, I plunged on with questions about the storage conditions.

“Mademoiselle s’intéresse à la chimie,”
he said to Ian, approvingly, tolerantly. “They study everything these days.”

Afterward, Ian said for me to meddle in the investigation was impossible; it was improper even to talk to the Moroccan inspectors. He used a gentler word than “meddle.” He may have said “get involved.”

“No matter how modern they are, or we are, or how foreign, there would be no way he would be friendly with—well, our womenfolk.” He smiled, but it did cause me to wonder whether Ian had not absorbed some of the Muslim sense of the opposite sex (Posy and me) as being volatile and frail. Posy said later that I had blushed at Ian’s reprimand, but my true emotion was not remorse but chagrin.

I
n the days that followed, the aftermath took much of Ian’s time, with delegations of police and government officials coming to the house or convoking Ian to the prefecture almost daily. What ever I’d known of him in Kosovo—that he was there to do good works and had a caring, charitable side—I hadn’t before observed his uniformly excellent manners and consideration to everyone. Besides running his industrial park, I had learned that he did various good works; gave money to local schools, literacy projects, and public works; and was a hero to his valet. Anyway, though I say “managed,” Ian micromanaged—he would troubleshoot a burst pipe or meet a need for more chairs; he obviously enjoyed his little empire and felt it to be a contribution to this beautiful and poor country. Of course I thought this bleeding-heart side of him was a strong point.

He was polite to the investigators and to his servants, attentive to his guests—but especially to Posy, whom he did seem to regard as delicate, though she was a strapping English woman, and handed her up and down the stairs if he was anywhere near her with a sort of reverent anxiety her husband didn’t show. (Though Robin Crumley was absentminded, he didn’t seem indifferent to her; it was more that he seemed to remember her and their coming baby suddenly, from time to time, and snap into a solicitous mode. But not very often.) “Ian is very attractive,” she once remarked in a somewhat wistful tone. “He was Robin’s student when Robin was a young don at Oxford; that’s how we know him.”

There was a mechanism for my getting mail from people who would be writing me, my parents and siblings, my carefully maintained magazine subscriptions, etc., addressed to my real self, care of an address in Rabat. In Rabat, letters were opened, retyped to Lulu Sawyer, and sent to me at Ian’s, with the names of the senders disguised if necessary. The path of my replies was the same in reverse. In writing my parents in California, I had found myself saying things I didn’t know I felt, about Ian and Morocco: I loved it here, I might have met The One. Partly that was what they wanted to hear, but it was true too, as much as ever one can be sure that something is true.

O
ne day, circling the ruins, Ian rescued a very young kitten, a creature of maybe six weeks old, with its eyes stuck shut from infection, at the site of the fire, not huddled in a bush as a prudent kitten should, but standing blindly in the middle of the road, hoping for the best. It was gallant; it would stumble around and purr when you held it. When we got home, we bathed its eyes and got some antibiotics from the vet. We decided to hold off naming it—him—till we were sure he would live, like people in the olden days with their children. I found Ian’s way with it touching. “Good chap,” he told it when it ate a little bit. Some people seem to disapprove of kindness to animals, as if it distracts from kindness to people; others feel there’s nothing much to do for people, since they are so hopeless, and we should concentrate on animals. I don’t see that one rules out the other—anyway, I found this yet another reaffirmation of Ian’s excellent character. My love for him increased. So did my resolve to be better at dissembling for my job.

“I wonder what does the Prophet say,” Robin Crumley had said at dinner that night, which we ate inside in the dining room, “about stray cats, for example, and animal creation generally?” His tone held in check a note of rising aversion to cats, or to the Prophet.

“Very little, I would imagine,” said Ian. “Are there cats mentioned in the Bible?”

“I’m sure there would be the attitude that Allah, or God or Yahweh, created them for man’s use,” Robin went on. “Except, as is well-known, cats are of no use for anything.”

“
Man’s
use, that is,” said Posy. “Not woman’s. Women would fall into the same category as cats, just property belonging to men.”

I thought this was probably true, but it didn’t seem a fruitful topic. Later I Googled “cats in the Koran.” The Koran tells the story of a woman condemned to eternal hell for starving a poor pussycat, while in the Christian tradition, cats are the agents of Satan and witches.

13

Who can have conceived, in the heart of a savage Saharan camp, the serenity and balance of this place?

—Edith Wharton,
In Morocco

A
few more uneventful days passed, with Ian busy most of the time with various activities—the fire and business affairs, leading the life of a husband: He had an office, a jeep that he drove to building sites in the Atlas mountains, and a secretary—an English woman, Miss Pring, who lived in the medina and, on some mornings, if Posy and I were to be allowed the car for our excursions, picked him up in the jeep to drive him to his office in the more modern part of town. He showed up back in the Palmeraie at lunch most days and played the host each night to people he had invited, or drove me and the Crumleys to some riad to visit other expatriates.

From our cloister, however, it was hard to meet Moroccans. “I wish you knew some,” I had once said. Ian had looked puzzled, made a loose gesture around him to include the world.

“I mean socially,” I had said, and I saw from his expression that he feared this was going to be a tiresome American politically correct discussion, and was about to say, “Oh, please, this from the citizen of a country where minorities are still one step up from the slave market?” I had learned never to bring up issues of fairness or racial integration with Europeans if I didn’t want to hear about slavery, segregation, the American Civil War, Indians, Vietnam, the two Iraq wars—the whole panoply of reproaches our various leaders have let us in for. “I just wondered if you saw any socially.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll invite some for you.” After this, two plump, seriously urbane men would be included in many of the soirees—a military man and a doctor, Colonel Barka and Dr. Kadimi, who might be vying with each other for the mustache award. Colonel Barka’s was flowing silver and Dr. Kadimi’s a trim but wide reddish one. The former had an honorary title at the British Consulate, something like “Persona Grata.” Both either were unmarried or their wives did not go out, and these were our principal Moroccans. Most of Ian’s friends were other Europeans, especially other British people; even the great group of French were off our radar, except for a few, or when Ian made an extra effort to invite them. (I planned to invite my airplane companion, Madame Frank.)

I could see real Moroccans from the distance, on the road into Marrakech we traveled almost daily. Rising out of the desolate landscape were several villages, or clusters of houses of mud and tin, organized around unpaved courtyards, where children tumbled in the doorways and women, their heads covered, leaned talking to each other as they looked out at the stony ground where the goats wandered and all the little boys were always kicking soccer balls, dodging the plastic bleach bottles that rolled under their feet. I never learned what cultural practice demanded this massive quantity of bleach.

Ian’s guest Nancy Rutgers was polite but seemed to have arranged many errands and activities apart from Posy and me. She and her friend, David Someone—for I was never sure about his name (Talbot, Talcott?)—pretty much led their own lives, visiting the many people they seemed to know or taking expeditions to Fez and Essaouira, never including Posy or me. I was not sure of their status—if one or the other was an artist, it wasn’t apparent, and Ian was somewhat taciturn: “Nancy is an old friend” was the only explanation. David seemed to be staying somewhere else but was always around.

In just a few days roaming in the souk with Posy, we had nearly mastered its geography. I tried to learn all I could about my companions and wrote meticulous reports of them to Taft, in the guise of chatty notes to “Sheila,” or, more usually, I reported that I had nothing to report. Sometimes I telephoned, often to ask how to proceed, but telephoning was cumbersome, involving pay phones and absences that must have seemed mysterious to the others. I couldn’t believe that all I was expected to do was to be me, and yet that was pretty much all I was doing. Taft was probably used to people not having much to report; he ran a number of agents, and real information is rare even if you have much of an idea of what you are looking for.

As for Aladdin, my contact, I wished he would be in touch again, but as I had nothing special to communicate to him, I did nothing about contacting him. Nothing had changed in Rashid’s manner to indicate he had any understanding of the little piece of paper with Aladdin’s message on it.

Posy and I spent a lot of time together. Posy was the daughter of an English publisher, now dead, and her stepmother lived in a castle in France, or something like that. Her background was not unlike that of Ian himself, whose father I thought I had heard referred to as a “press lord,” though I was unsure if that meant he was called Lord Drumm or whether “press lord” was just a descriptive term, like “drug mule.” I had heard that pregnant women think of little else but their pregnancies—my sister was like that—but Posy seldom mentioned her clumsy shape and swelling ankles. She had read literature at Oxford or Cambridge and preferred to discuss arcane topics like water imagery in Moroccan poetry; that topic sticks in my mind because it had occurred even to me that for a country hard up for water, there was everywhere an oddly ambivalent obsession with it. There had been, for instance, the strange reluctance to expend it at Ian’s fire, yet there were fountains everywhere.

Water came up over and over in stories and poems (for, as an aspect of tradecraft, I was reading anything that would help me understand the Moroccan culture) as a distrusted force ready to overwhelm, drown, suck away, and engulf its helpless victims, beckoning the distraught to their fates, a
“mer dévoreuse,”
a metaphor for oblivion. These poems recognized that given the caprices of fate, you might be tidal-waved, rip-tided, broken in the surf: “The thirst of the sea was stronger than mine,” sang the poet, though not the Prophet—he was a desert chieftain and maybe had never seen the sea, so he says very little about it. Their fascination or aversion to water was what probably made them have fountains and gurgling, trickling water sounds everywhere. For me, a conscientious Californian from the land of periodic drought, for whom even extra toilet flushes are slightly wicked, the constant splashes of some fountain somewhere in earshot wherever you went was a little distressing.

By now I had gotten to know a few of Posy’s secrets: that she was not entirely thrilled to become a mother, and that she believed her baby had been conceived on the Eurostar—so that technically it might be either French or English—she would always wonder which. Robin Crumley, with his graying hair and pale eyes, was anyone’s idea of a distinguished poet, but it didn’t seem to me he would be a very satisfactory father, and it was certainly impossible to imagine him fucking in a train. He was always to be seen on the patio shifting cushions, looking for his pen or glasses, distracted by some poetical conundrum from the business of real life or even conversation.

Most evenings, Posy and Ian discussed books. (Robin, the professional man of letters, seemed to feel it was beneath him to join in those discussions, and I didn’t know enough to.) During the day, Robin Crumley was generally in his element, with plenty of solitude for composition; according to him, perfect monotony was somehow a precondition of art. He was never seen before lunch, and after lunch he disappeared again, ostensibly to work—actually to sleep, Posy suggested.

Sometimes Posy and I, with Ian and Robin or not, were invited out to lunch—sometimes an English lunch of roast, potatoes, and gravy at the Cotters’, sometimes American salad and quiche at Tom and Strand’s, sometimes at a Moroccan restaurant hosted by a French or Moroccan acquaintance, for instance Colonel Barka, who always paid pointed attention to me. I chalked this up to my flashy blonde hair, something of a novelty here still—as it was for me, for I am not naturally blonde, it is part of my disguise. But it seems to alter the character too, just as people think it does. Required to be blonde, I just decided to go all the way with it; it’s Hollywood pale, very showy, Swedish-starlet-colored, and I have indeed found that people react to it and treat me differently. I can’t be precise about how, but it’s that they take me for more of an adventuress than they would have with my nice-girl brown—and they aren’t wrong. I plan to keep it this way.

Moroccan dishes are somewhat monotonous, lamb and chicken, at least in the hands of Ian’s cooks. I found that I was putting more and more harissa paste, with its Mexican hotness, on all of the food I was served. Apart from this, though each new recipe or person brought the possibility of learning something, doing something, basically I learned nothing, did nothing worthy of reporting to Taft—except, of course, my cover interest in Moroccan literacy. Taft had at least seemed very interested in Ian’s fire.

“Lulu, for the moment, stay in Marrakech, don’t go to any outlying villages on your inspections,” he had said on the phone when he heard about the fire. In our line of work, you don’t challenge such orders, so I postponed a plan to go with a woman from the World Learning Project to a village in the desert to the south. Thus far I’d seen only one literacy project in Marrakech; it seemed to me an ordinary school, where girls of eight or nine bent over books in Arabic they were apparently reading. What did the books say? I couldn’t read them of course. I smiled at the children, bent to look over their shoulders, nodded as I had seen Princess Diana or Laura Bush do in newscasts. Some of the little girls wore head coverings, some didn’t.

“Oh, literacy,” said Marina Cotter. “What good does reading do them? I think our project is much more useful. We teach them not to kill their donkeys. They beat them so, they starve them, and then when the creatures die, they bewail their misfortune. They have no conception of humane treatment or that it’s in their own best interests to treat their beasts with kindness, for all that the Koran says you ought to treat animals kindly.” She and a team of Arabic and Berber speakers travel in the guise of veterinarians, offering to treat sick donkeys, which they do, then they slip in their lessons: “If he is in good health, Mohammed, he will serve you a much longer time.”

“When their donkeys die, the women have to carry the firewood,” said Posy. “You see women along the road here, little bent‐ over old ones, carrying as much as a donkey.” Both Marina and Posy pronounced the word “dunkey,” in their English way. Eventually I told one of the Moroccan literacy ladies about Marina’s donkey rescue and asked her about the cruelty. She said, piously, “I am sure it is not true. Mohammed spoke of animals as God’s creatures and said that they must be treated with kindness and care. ‘Even looking after plants and trees is an act of virtue,’ he said. That went for sparrows and camels and every animal.” I found myself thinking that the sayings of Mohammed have a way of making him a whole lot nicer than his imams seem today.