In Arabian Nights (10 page)

The narrow passages of the medina swell with tourists except
in the blazing summer months, when a searing drought blows
in. I used to think the tourists were set to destroy the soul of the
city. After all, there are towering hotels, guides and restaurants
wherever you look. The tourists have certainly brought wealth
and have heralded change, but their effect doesn't penetrate.

Jemaa el Fna is the heart of Marrakech. By day it's a turbulent
circus of life – teeming with astrologers, healers, storytellers and
acrobats. And when the curtain of dusk shrouds the city from
the desert all around, the food stalls flare up, creating a banquet
for the senses. A quick glance and you might think it's all been
laid on for the sightseers. But the longer you spend there, the
more you come to see the truth. The tourists take photographs
but they don't connect.

With its outlandish customs, Jemaa el Fna is a focal point
of folklore, a borehole that descends down through the layers and sublayers
of Morocco's underbelly. A lifetime of study couldn't teach you all it represents.
To understand it, you must try not to think, but to allow the square's raw
energy to be absorbed directly through the skin.

On Thursday afternoon, I waited as the sun arched over
Marrakech. It was early November and the Atlas mountains
were already charged with snow; a more glorious backdrop
would be impossible to find. I sat at the Argana café and waited
for Murad to feel his way up the stairs. Afternoon turned to dusk
and dusk turned to night. I was wondering if the old storyteller
had forgotten the appointment, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

'"Mushkil Gusha" is the remover of obstacles,' said Murad in
his soft husky voice. 'If you have the patience to listen, you may
see the world with new eyes. But a responsibility comes with this
tale.'

'What responsibility?'

The storyteller sat down and took a deep breath.

'You must repeat the tale each Thursday night,' he said.

I smiled and choked out some sharp retort.

'Take it lightly', he snapped, 'and your obstacles will become
all the greater.'

'Do you tell the story every Thursday night?'

Murad agreed that he did.

'And do all the people who hear it go on and tell it, too?'

'Some do,' he replied; 'others sit in groups and listen. Whether
you tell the tale or hear it, the effect is the same. For "Mushkil
Gusha" must enter your ears.'

The storyteller pressed the tips of his fingers together, drew
the lids over his blind eyes and said: 'Once upon a time, long ago,
when Marrakech was no more than a hamlet, there was living in
Arabia a widowed woodcutter and his daughter, named Jamia.
Each morning, the woodcutter would leave his small cottage
before the cockerel had crowed, to search for wood in the mountains
to sell down in the valley.

'Now one night before she turned in for bed, young Jamia
begged her father to buy for her one of the pies she had seen for
sale in the town's market, and one of the frilly dresses hanging in
the tailor's window. Her father promised to leave home well
before dawn and to cut twice as much firewood as he usually did,
to make some extra money.

'So long before the cockerel had woken, the woodcutter crept
out of the house and made his way to the mountain. He cut
double the normal amount of wood, prepared it well, put it on
his back and headed for home.

'Once back at the cottage, the woodcutter found the door was
bolted shut. It was still early and his daughter was still sleeping.
"Daughter," he called "I am hungry and thirsty after so much
work. Please let me in." Jamia was so sound asleep that she
didn't wake from her slumber. The woodcutter went round to
the barn and fell asleep on a pile of hay. A few hours later he
awoke and knocked at the door again, "Let me in little Jamia,"
he cried, "for I shall have to set off for the market and I need to
eat and drink."

'But the door was bolted as before.

'Not realizing that his daughter had gone off to visit her
friends, the woodcutter struggled to lift the firewood on to his
back, and he set off towards the town, hoping to reach it before
sunset. He was hungry and thirsty beyond words, but kept
thinking about the delicious pie and the dress he would bring
home to his beloved daughter.

'After an hour or so of walking, the woodcutter thought he
heard a voice. It was the voice of a young woman, calling out to
him, "Drop your wood and follow me," it said, "and your mouth
will be rewarded." The woodcutter let the giant bundle fall to
the ground and began to trudge in the direction of the voice.
After some time, he realized he was lost. He called to the
voice, but there was no answer. Night was approaching and the
poor old man fell to the ground and wept.

'After some time he regained his senses and tried to be more
positive. To pass the time he decided to tell himself the day's
events as a kind of tale, for it was far too cold to sleep. As he got
to the end, he heard the voice again. "What are you doing?" it
said. "I'm cold and hungry, and so I am passing the time by
talking to myself," said the woodcutter. The voice told him to
stand up and to raise one foot in the air. "What do you mean?"
he asked. The voice repeated the instructions a second time. "Do
exactly as I tell you," it said, "and your mouth will be rewarded."

'The woodcutter lifted his right foot in the air and found it
was standing on something, an invisible step of some kind. He
fumbled with his hand and felt another step above the first.
"Walk up it," said the voice. Following the orders, the woodcutter
found he was suddenly transported to a deserted wasteland,
covered in dark-blue pebbles. "Where is this?" the woodcutter
asked. "The place at the end of time," the voice replied. "Fill
your pockets with the pebbles and make a promise that every
Thursday night you will recount this, the 'Tale of Mushkil
Gusha', for it is he who has saved you." The woodcutter did as
he was told and no sooner had he done so than he found himself
standing at the doorway of his own home. His daughter, Jamia,
was waiting for him.

'"Where have you been, Father?" she asked. Once they were
inside, the woodcutter told her about the invisible staircase and
then emptied his pockets. "But, Father, pebbles won't buy us
food," said Jamia. The old man put his head in his hands, but
then he remembered the extra large bundle of wood he had cut
that morning. He put the pebbles near the fireplace and went off
to bed, ready for an early start.

'Next day, he went out, found the wood easily and hauled it
down to market. The bundle sold without any trouble, for four
times its usual price. The woodcutter bought as much food as he
could carry and a pink and blue dress from the tailor's shop.

'Now,' said Murad, leaning back on his chair, 'for a whole
week, the woodcutter's fortune seemed to go from strength to
strength. The wood was abundant in the forest and his axe
seemed sharper than usual. The path down the valley wasn't
slippery as it tended to be and in the town there was a great
demand for well-chopped wood.

'A full week after his journey up the invisible staircase, it was
time to recount the "Tale of Mushkil Gusha". But being a
mortal, the old woodcutter forgot his duty and went to bed. The
next evening, he noticed the cottage had filled with a strange red
light. He soon realized that the light was shining from the
pebbles he had scooped up the week before. "We are rich beyond
our wildest dreams!" he exclaimed to his daughter.

'Over the coming weeks, the woodcutter and Jamia sold the
precious gems in towns throughout the kingdom. Within a
month or two, they were fabulously wealthy, so much so that
they built a castle opposite the palace in which the king lived.

'When asked where he came from, the woodcutter put on a
heavy accent and said he had journeyed from a country far to the
east, where he had made a fortune selling silks from Bokhara. It
wasn't long before the humble woodcutter was invited to the
palace. He wore white satin gloves to hide the roughness of his
hands and presented the king with a large diamond pendant.

'Time passed, and Jamia became close friends with the king's
own daughter, Princess Nabila. The two would go down to the
royal stream and bathe. One day, before jumping into the water,
the princess removed her golden necklace and hung it on a low
branch of a nearby tree. She forgot about it and, that night,
searched high and low for the necklace. Eventually she fell
asleep, and dreamt that the woodcutter's daughter had stolen the
necklace for herself.

'The next day she whispered to her father. Within an hour the
woodcutter's daughter had been cast into an orphanage. And
the old man was flung into the deepest dungeon in the kingdom.
Weeks passed and he grew weaker and weaker. After six
months, he was taken out in chains and tied to a pole. Every so
often, people would throw rotten food at him or laugh at his
miserable state.

'Then one afternoon, he heard a man telling his wife that it
was Thursday evening. He suddenly remembered the story of
Mushkil Gusha, the remover of obstacles. A moment later, a
kindly passer-by threw him a coin. He asked if the man might
take the coin, cross the street and buy a handful of dates for them
both. The man did so, and the woodcutter recounted the "Tale
of Mushkil Gusha".

'The next day,' Murad went on, 'the princess was bathing at
the stream when she spied her gold necklace through the water.
She looked up and saw that it was a reflection and that the actual
necklace was still hanging on the low branch where she had left
it. Without wasting a minute, she ran to her father and explained
her mistake. The king gave the woodcutter a royal pardon, compensated
him handsomely, and released his daughter from the
terrible orphanage.'

Murad stopped talking. He blew very gently into his fist.

'The "Tale of Mushkil Gusha" is very long,' he said. 'Some
people say that it never really ends. But now that you know it, or
some of it, it's your duty to retell it for yourself every Thursday
after dusk.'

I could hear the butane lamps roaring in the main square
below and smell the racks of skewers grilling over charcoal,
sending a curtain of smoke up into the desert night. The way
Murad had told his tale, the 'Tale of Mushkil Gusha', touched
me. It wasn't just another story recounted to earn a handful of
coins, but something that had come from within him.

'The story in your heart,' I said, staring into his frosted eyes,
'if I remember it, and protect it well, perhaps it can help me to
find my own story.'

Murad tilted his head back and breathed in the scent of roasting
mutton.

'I told you that if you believe,' he said very gently, 'if you really
believe, a world of incredible possibility opens up, like the stairs
in the "Tale of Mushkil Gusha". What was not visible will
become visible.' Murad bent forward and tapped my shoulder
with his long, tapered hand. 'But you must have the courage to
climb,' he said.

There was silence for a long time. Then I asked what had
happened to the eel.

The storyteller adjusted his calico turban.

'When he had finished telling the "Tale of Mushkil Gusha",'
he said, 'the great eel instructed me to value what was deep
inside. "The search for truth can lead a man around the world
and back to the point from where he took the first step," he told
me in a squeaky voice. "Always remember that the journey is
nothing more than a path that leads to a destination."

'And, without another word, the electric eel turned towards
the ocean and slipped into the waves.'

The destiny of a wolf cub is to become a wolf, even if it is reared
among the sons of men.

Ibn el-Arabi

ONE FROSTY MORNING BEFORE I LEFT FOR SCHOOL, SLIPPER FEET
was waiting for me down in the hallway. He said there was a story
he had to pass on without delay. I reminded him of my prep
school's policy on being late – six strikes with a cane. Slipper Feet
ran his claw-like nails through his long red hair and said in a
calculating voice: 'I promise you, this morning you will not be late.'
I don't remember now which story he told me that dark winter
morning, only that it was about a dragonfly and a jinn. What I do
remember is that by the time he finished, I was frozen to the bone.
It was as if the story had sucked all the heat out of my blood. I went
upstairs, took a steaming hot bath and put my uniform back on.

By the time I got to school, it was late morning. I approached
the main door in terror at the thought of being taken away and
beaten. A prefect was standing there, holding up a sign. He told
me to go home. I asked why.

'The headmaster is dead,' he said.

From that day on, I never quite trusted Slipper Feet. At night
he would come down from the attic and roam about the house.
I have no proof, but I know he used to come into my room. I
could smell him in my dreams. My mother didn't trust him,
either. She started sitting with us when he recounted his tales. I
asked her why and she said it was because she hadn't been lucky
enough to have a storyteller when she was young. Years later she
admitted it was because the red-headed man had done something
very bad.

Not long after that, Slipper Feet was gone. No one ever spoke
about him again, although the stories he told stayed inside me,
and they are still there.

A decade passed. Then, one morning, my father was opening
his mail. An envelope came with an unusual stamp from a
country in the East. He regarded the envelope for a long time,
cut it open and squinted at the lines of uneven black script. He
looked quite pale.

It was a death threat from Slipper Feet.

The Caliph's House has an agenda of its own. It's an agenda of
self-sabotage. I've never quite understood it. As soon as I leave it
for more than a moment, the building begins to destroy itself.
The window frames rot through, the bougainvillea roots push
up the courtyard tiles, and alarming patches of damp take hold
on every wall.

When I wondered aloud why the house was so self-destructive,
Zohra rushed over.

'Are you so foolish, so blind?' she cried. 'How could you not
understand?'

'Not understand what?'

'That Dar Khalifa is sick.'

'That's nonsense.'

Zohra stuck out her hands and waved them about her head.

'Believe me,' she yelled, 'I speak the truth!'

In the days I had spent down in Marrakech, a wall had
collapsed. Osman and the Bear were looking at the heap of
rubble when I arrived home. They shook their heads and cursed.

'It's because of the ants,' said Osman.

The Bear agreed. 'The ants are bad,' he said.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

'The ants?'

The guardians nodded. 'Yes, Monsieur Tahir, the ants.'

'But how could such tiny insects do so much damage?'

'Do not be fooled,' said Osman. 'They look very small, so
small you don't think of them at all. Weeks pass. Then years.
Then one day you wake up and your home has fallen down.'

The Bear pointed at the rubble.

'First a wall,' he said. 'Then the house.'

Rachana was bathing the children upstairs. I burst in, babbling
about Murad the storyteller and the 'Tale of Mushkil Gusha'.
She looked at me blankly. Ariane kissed my ear and asked me to
tell her about Mushkil Gusha.

'You will have to wait until Thursday,' I said.

Rachana said that the two maids had been at each other's
throats over Timur.

'You go away and this place is like a circus,' she said.

'Don't worry, from now on everything will be much calmer.'

My wife gave me a sideways look.

'Why?'

'Because Murad the storyteller is coming to stay.'

It wasn't more than a day or so before the guardians linked the
broken wall to the business of the chalk symbols written on
the door. I reminded them of their earlier deduction. They
looked confused.

'The ants,' I prompted.

'Yes, ants are strong,' said the Bear, 'but we see now this was
not their work.'

'It was a jinn,' mouthed Osman.

'What changed your mind?'

'When the wall fell down three days ago,' said the Bear, 'there
was the bitter smell of sulphur in the garden. And after that
came a ferocious storm and this morning we found a dead
chameleon in the hedge over there.'

'Who said sulphur, storms and dead chameleons point to a
jinn?'

The guardians looked at each other, then at me.

'Sukayna did,' they both said at once.

The day after I reached home, Murad arrived on the train from
Marrakech. I went down to Casa Voyageurs and found him
sitting on the platform, wrapped up in his patched
jelaba
, with a
home-made sack at his feet. I had been anxious about bringing
him when I discovered he was blind. But he seemed quite at ease
at the idea of following me up to Casablanca. My other worry
was how much Ottoman would have to pay him. I broached the
subject of money an hour before I left Marrakech. The old
storyteller said that hunger helped to keep his tongue moving
well.

'Give your extra money to those who have use for it,' he said,
'and give me a soft pillow for my head.'

As Murad was blind, I thought it best to put him in the guest
room on the ground floor. Located at the far end of the large
garden courtyard, it had been the room in which Qandisha the
jinn had supposedly resided. The exorcists had spent a full night
at work in there, extracting her from the walls.

Since the exorcism, the room had maintained a dampness, as
if it were on a different frequency of some kind. On the left side
of the room there had been a short flight of steps leading down
to a brick wall. We had blocked it off from the bedroom. The
guardians had taken to storing the long ladders there.

Murad moved through the house and out into the garden
courtyard, trailing his long fingers across the walls. Timur
skipped up and kissed him on the cheek. Then Ariane stepped
forward, clutching her favourite doll in one hand and her pet
tortoise in the other. She asked why the old man couldn't see.
Murad, the storyteller, leaned down and patted his long fingers
over her hair.

'My eyes have never worked,' he said.

'Why not?'

'Because they were not meant to.'

'Why were they not meant to?'

Murad touched her cheek with his hand.

'Because God wanted me to be blind,' he said.

'Why did God want you to be blind?'

'Because he wanted me to see.'

Ariane wasn't listening. She ran ahead and pushed open the
door to the storyteller's room.

As soon as Murad entered, his face twitched on one side. Then
he thanked me.

'You have given me a very special place to sleep,' he said.

Osman and the Bear were not good at keeping secrets. When
cross-questioned, they admitted that Zohra had brought her
astrologer friend while I was away in Marrakech.

'She came in the night,' said Osman in a soft voice.

'Who?'

'Sukayna.'

'And she walked up and down,' added the Bear.

'She burned incense and she killed a chicken.'

Where did she do that?' I asked.

'Out at the front door,' said Osman.

'She dripped blood all over the step.'

'What happened to the meat?'

The guardians looked sheepish.

'We ate it,' they said.

While we were talking in the shadow of the stables, Zohra
strode up and tugged my sleeve.

'You must go and see Sukayna right away,' she said.

I resisted. 'You know we had an exorcism,' I said gruffly.
'That's the end of it. We have to move on.'

An expert in dominating men, the maid tugged my sleeve a
second time.

'There are two little children living under that roof,' she said.
'If you don't go and see Sukayna, you will live to regret it.'

I cursed loudly.

'Where does this woman, this astrologer, live?'

'You have to go to Afghanistan,' said Zohra.

'What?'

'Afghanistan.'

'I thought she lives up the hill.'

'She does,' said the maid.

'Well, then, what's she doing in Afghanistan?'

'That's where she works.'

'In Afghanistan?'

'Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!' snapped Zohra. 'Yes, I told you.
Afghanistan.'

My mind was reeling.

'Am I missing something?' I asked.

Osman brushed a leaf from his shoulder.

'Boulevard Afghanistan,' he said.

That evening Murad crept out of his room at ten o'clock and felt
his way to the kitchen. Fatima had cooked him a colossal lamb
tagine, which he promptly devoured. After sucking on
lamb bones for a while, he ate three apples and a bowl of apricots.
He thanked God, kissed his knuckle and touched it to his brow.

'I shall tell you a story,' he said.

'But I'm going to bed now,' I replied.

The storyteller's face sank.

'It will help you sleep,' he said.

As far as Murad was concerned, he was more than a humble
raconteur, more than a teller of tales. He believed that his
repertoire had an intrinsic power, an ability to change the way
people feel and think, and even had the power to heal.

Before I joined Rachana and the children upstairs, he told me
a tale that will stay with me until my last breath. It was about a
little girl who learned to speak the language of fish. I put on my
pyjamas, crawled into bed and slept more soundly than I had
done in years.

The next morning, Murad was waiting for me in the kitchen.

'How did you sleep?'

I told him.

'Of course you did.'

Murad the storyteller rearranged himself on the kitchen chair.

'It was a sleeping story,' he said.

Out in the garden Osman and the Bear were polishing a pair of
brass lamps I had bought in Marrakech. They didn't like polishing
and had always forced Hamza to do it. As far as they were
concerned, polishing was woman's work, like doing the washing
and opening the front door.

Osman said the polish made him sneeze.

'It makes us both sneeze,' said the Bear.

'It didn't make Hamza sneeze, though,' I said.

'Well, his nose was always blocked up, so he couldn't smell it,'
quipped Osman.

Since we were talking about Hamza, I probed again why he
had felt it necessary to leave.

'We told you, it was because of the shame.'

'What shame?'

'Hamza's shame.'

'But why did he feel ashamed?'

'Because of his wife.'

'What did she have to do with it?'

'Everything,' said Osman.

'Can you explain?'

'Hamza's wife saw him looking at another woman. Then she
made him quit,' he said.

'Did he touch the other woman?'

'No! No!' said the Bear loudly. 'Of course not. He just looked
at her.'

'His wife is very jealous,' Osman prompted.

'Who was this other woman?'

'It was Fatima, the maid,' said the Bear.

That afternoon, I tracked down the address Zohra had given me
on Boulevard Afghanistan. Up the hill from the coast, it wasn't
far from Dar Khalifa, in an area called Hay Hassani. The place
with a thousand uses – you went there if you needed a
jelaba
to
be made, a tube of rat-catching glue, or a second-hand fridge.

Sukayna saw her clients one at a time in a small room at
the back of a mattress-maker's shop. I clambered over an
assortment of half-finished mattresses and workmen sitting
cross-legged on the floor, past a dozen bolts of bright purple
cloth, until I arrived at a torn lace curtain. It was fixed to the
ceiling with a length of barbed wire. Behind it, the astrologer
was waiting for me.

Sukayna was not as I had imagined her. She was about
twenty-five, had bottle-green eyes and a wavering smile. Her
voice was deep, more like a man's and, when she spoke, she
stretched her back straight, like a sergeant major on parade. Her
jelaba
was embroidered with a paisley motif and her fingernails
were painted bright red.

I sat down on a home-made plywood chair. We looked at each
other for longer than was comfortable and then the astrologer
mumbled Zohra's name.

'She has urged me to come and see you,' I said, 'and that is
why I am here.'

'I have been to your home,' Sukayna replied, 'and I have seen
the proof.'

She blinked twice, as if to link the bottle-green eyes before me
to her visit to the Caliph's House.