In Arabian Nights (8 page)

Time proceeded in slow motion.

Layachi sucked his fingers into his mouth and jiggled them
about. I shifted position to get a better view, squinting to make
sense of it all. With some care the guardian removed an upper set
of teeth and then a bottom set. Then, as I watched in horror, he
attacked the old mason with them, slicing and cutting, until he
had drawn blood.

A hand and a foot do not clap together.

Arab proverb

FOR A WEEK AFTER THE EPISODE WITH THE MASON AND
the teeth, Rachana, the children and I slept in the same bed.

I propped a chair against our bedroom door and kept an
Indian dagger under my pillow. I was a coward for not dismissing
Layachi right away, as he was quite obviously deranged. I
didn't know how to do it and I feared he would pull out his
dentures and strike again – at us.

On the eighth day I plucked up courage and found Osman
raking leaves.

'I have to let your brother go,' I said diplomatically. 'He
attacked the mason for no reason at all. And I just don't feel safe
with him around. None of us do.'

Osman leaned his weight on the rake and wiped a hand over
his chin.

'Since my brother Layachi was a small child,' he said, 'he's been
crazy. He's a maniac. Everyone knows it. He should be locked up.'

'But why didn't you tell me this at the start? You brought him
to me, exclaiming how trustworthy he was!'

The guardian bit his top lip.

'In our country,' he said restlessly, 'blood is thick, and
where there is thick blood there is duty.'

The days were getting shorter and I could smell winter
approaching from the north. In Morocco, you know the cool
months are drawing near because the streets fill with carts piled
high with oranges. The fruit are slightly tart at first and, each
week, they become a little sweeter.

Zohra began to spend her time hounding me through Dar
Khalifa, ordering me to seek help from her sorceress friend. The
last thing I wanted was to follow the maid's suggestion, as doing
so would have increased the power she imagined she held over
me. But at the same time, I felt I had to talk to someone about
the cryptic chalk symbols on the doors, as well as about my
recurring magic-carpet dream.

Then Ottoman called me again. Although I knew of his past
and a little of his business success, I had very little idea about his
private life. I didn't even know if he was married. He was the
kind of man whose personality gave off a scent, warding one
away from asking certain questions.

We met at a café near his home in a fashionable suburb of
Casablanca. There was the usual assortment of unshaven men in
long, billowing
jelabas
. But the café was very different for two
reasons. The first was that the coffee was delicious. I had grown
used to slurping down the ubiquitous
café noir
, a beverage the
taste buds can never quite accept. The second reason that made
the café different was that there were women, plenty of them.
And they were not the typical range of ruthless crones one found
elsewhere, but skimpily dressed blondes, pouting mouths heavy
with lipstick.

Even more unusual was that many of them were smoking.

Ottoman outlined his idea: 'We start small,' he said. 'First we'll
find a storyteller and bring him to the
bidonville
where Hicham
Harass lived. I will pay his wages and he will tell stories day and
night, rekindling the culture that's in danger of being lost.'

I nodded, making enthusiastic sounds.

'Gradually, we will hire other storytellers,' Ottoman went on.
'Before you know it, there will be dozens of them, in cafés all
over Morocco. It'll be like the old times.'

Ottoman's eyes lit up as if he was peering to make out the
detail of a mirage.

'We would not need to stop there,' he said. 'We could have
storytellers in railway stations, at bus stops, in markets, and even
in offices!'

By this point, Ottoman, who had until then struck me as a
soft-spoken man, was ranting.

'Who will pay for all the storytellers?' I asked.

'Sponsorship,' he replied. 'Companies will sponsor them. On
television you have commercial breaks, so our storytellers could
promote products as well.'

'So they would be travelling salesmen?'

Ottoman frowned. 'No, no, not at all,' he said. 'Not salesmen,
but representatives of the big brands. Coca-Cola, Pepsi,
McDonald's . . . imagine it!'

My problem in life is that I'm a victim. I get dragged into
schemes and find myself tangled up, unable to break free. I should
have shaken Ottoman firmly by the hand, thanked him for the
coffee and fled. But instead I flattered his ego and his creativity.

Then I offered to help.

Six days later I saw a man sitting in Jemaa el Fna, the vast central
square of Marrakech. He was bald, with a long tatty beard and
a single silver earring reflecting the light. I knew he wasn't a
Moroccan because of the look in his eye.

He looked as if he had seen a miracle.

I had headed south to begin the search for the story in my
heart, and to find the first storyteller for Ottoman's grand plan.
Marrakech was the obvious place to start.

The foreigner struck up a conversation. He was a German
called Kaspar. He said that he had travelled for sixteen years,
that almost every square inch of the world had passed beneath
his feet. Sapphire eyes wide with wonder, hands out, fingers
splayed, he explained that every minute until then had been
preparation – the preparation for Jemaa el Fna, the 'Place of
Execution'.

'This
is
the world,' he said in a soft Bavarian voice.

I asked him what he meant.

He smiled. 'You don't feel it?'

I didn't reply.

'You don't feel it?' he said again.

'What? Feel what?'

'The humanity,' he said.

Kaspar got to his feet and staggered away, mumbling
something about a drink of cold water. Then he was gone. I
stood there, gazing out at the square's stew of human life –
snake handlers and fortune-tellers, healers and madmen,
door-to-door dentists, witches, water-sellers, and a single
blind man waiting for a coin to be pressed into his palm.
Kaspar from Bavaria was right: there is perhaps no spot
on earth so alive, so utterly human, as Jemaa el Fna.

Like almost everyone else who has ever been there, I have
tried to understand Marrakech. I have sat in Café Argana, my
favourite haunt overlooking the square, and I have watched,
listened and wondered. Is it Africa? Is it Morocco? Or is it a
strange kind of paradise, a paradise for the senses?

The answer is that Marrakech is all of these things and it
is a great deal more.

I scoured the square for Khalil the son of Khalilullah, the storyteller
I had met a few weeks before. He was nowhere to be seen;
nor were there any other storytellers.

When I quizzed the row of orange-juice-sellers about this,
they said most of them had part-time jobs because storytelling
didn't pay.

'Why would you pay to listen to
them
,' said one of the juice-sellers,
'when you could be at home or in a café watching
television for free?'

With the light too bright for any but a Marrakchi's eyes, I
slipped into the labyrinth of the medina, which spreads out
behind the square in a vast cornucopia of life. Cool vaulted
stone, courtyards latticed with bamboo staves, casting zebra
stripes across the merchants and their stalls. Marrakech's medina
is a marketplace abundant with wares – mountains of
turmeric, paprika, salted almonds and dates, yellow leather slippers
laid out in rows, ostrich eggs and incense, chameleons in
tattered wire cages, and beef tenderloins nestled on fragrant
beds of mint.

Roam the narrow passages and you are cast back in time.

Marrakech may be prosperous these days, bolstered by
tourist wealth, but the medina is still intact, vibrant, raging
with life. There are Chinese plastic dolls on offer these days,

and second-hand TVs stacked up by the dozen, and racks of
mobile phones, but Marrakech moves to an ancient rhythm.
The decoration comes and goes, as do the wares, but the soul
stays firm.

Of all the stalls and shops, there was one in particular I
was hoping to find on my trail for a storyteller. Abdelmalik
had said there was an unusual emporium to visit, called
Maison de Meknès; that stepping into it would change
the way my eyes saw the world. He made me memorize the
directions: go to the Bab Laksour, take the third street to
the left, and then fifth to the right, turn left again at the
green mosque, and the second right at the butcher selling
horse meat. When you see a
hammam
, turn your back to it, step
two metres to the right and slip down a passage filled with
a sea of rotting bread.

For three hours I traipsed up and down, lost in lanes jammed
with people and merchandise. Then, quite suddenly, the
directions fell into place like clues on a treasure map. I found
the mosque, the butcher, the
hammam
and the rotting bread.
At the far end was a low-fronted cavern, with a crude hand-painted
sign. It read:
Maison de Meknès
.

There were steps going down, rounded by generations of
eager feet. Inside, the ceiling was low, cobwebbed, and the
shelves beneath it were cluttered with treasure. There were
ancient Berber chests, silver teapots, ebony foot stools, swords
once used by warring tribes, cartons of postcards left by the
French, Box Brownie cameras, candlesticks, silk wedding belts,
and camel headdresses crafted from indigo wool.

The proprietor was a smug-faced man with tobacco-coloured
eyes, and dried coffee spilled down the front of his shirt. He said
his name was Omar bin Mohammed. He was perched on a stool
behind a pool of light just inside the door. I didn't see him at
first, not until my eyes had become accustomed to the darkness.
Omar seemed greedy for business. But, as I soon found out, there
was one thing he enjoyed far more than loading tourists up with
loot.

He loved to tell stories.

The first thing Omar explained when I crossed the threshold
was that nothing – absolutely nothing – was for sale. However
much I wanted one of the ancient Berber boxes, or the rough
Saharan shields, or the amber necklaces, I was out of luck, he
said.

'Is it a museum, then?' I asked.

Omar bin Mohammed clawed a hand through the scrub of
grey beard on his cheek.

'My shop isn't like the others in the medina,' he said bitterly.
'The others, they're frauds. They'll eat you up, sell you their
mothers.'

'Is your merchandise of higher quality, then?'

Omar blew his nose into a voluminous handkerchief and
rubbed his thumbs in his eyes.

'No, no,' he said. 'All this stuff I'm selling is worthless.
It may look nice to you, because you don't know. The light's
bad in here. I keep it like that specially. An empty tin can
would look like treasure in here. Take something away and
the first time you'd realize it's rubbish is when you are
home.'

'I really don't understand why you're telling me this,' I said.

Omar held his right palm out in the air.

'There's a problem,' he said. 'I have put up with it since I was
a child.'

I braced myself to be petitioned for charity.

'We all have problems,' I said icily.

'You are right, we all have problems,' said Omar. 'And mine
is that I can't help but tell the truth.'

'That doesn't sound like a problem. Quite the opposite, in
fact.'

Omar the shopkeeper blinked hard.

'You have no idea. When you're a salesman here in the
Marrakech medina, lying is the first thing you learn. Generation
after generation, they pass it on. It's the secret ingredient, the
foundation for a salesman's success. Lie well and you make a
fortune every day. Your wife purrs like a kitten and your
children walk tall with pride.'

'Can't you just pretend to lie?'

'That's it,' said Omar. 'The other shopkeepers say I'm a fool,
that I should simply trick the tourists like everyone else. After
all, most of them will never come back. And what are tourists for
but for tricking?'

'
So?
'