Flashback

FIVE

Nothing can prepare you for Tangier. Nothing can ready you for the crush of men, the hands grabbing for your bags, the taxi drivers fistfighting for your fare, the poverty and hopelessness of the place. The city assaults you with the stench of desperation: the sweat of illegals from Senegal or the Ivory Coast waiting listlessly in cheap cafés for a night crossing to Spain, the wool-and-saffron reek of the black-market money changers outside the medina, the gunmetal tang of the soldiers in the Grand Socco. Everywhere, the pervasive stink of colonialism gone to rot.

It was just before sundown when we docked in Tangier. I’d gotten a visa on the boat, a rubber stamp from a young Moroccan official who hadn’t even bothered to look at my passport photo. He’d added my transit slip to a growing heap of identical scraps of white paper, some littering the ground at his feet, then waved me on my way.

The passenger deck was thick with too much humanity in too small a space, damp clothes and diapers and fried food. I was grateful when news of our imminent arrival crackled over the intercom, and we could make our way down to the car deck to wait to offload. Someone opened the chain-link cage that served as a baggage hold, and the crowd rushed recklessly forward, scrambling over the open top of the cage, fighting their way to backpacks and battered suitcases.

After a few minutes the gangway door swung open. The gangplank was lowered into place, and one by one we funneled onto the African continent, passports once again out. I had a brief moment of anxiety before I handed mine over, but there was no reason to worry. With the hundreds of bodies pressed behind me, there was time for little more than a cursory glance and a nod.

When I emerged from the terminal onto the long crumbling pier, I was immediately surrounded by some dozen local men, some in long hooded burnooses and pointy-toed babouches, others wearing Calvin Klein knockoffs and dark sunglasses, all clamoring to be of service in one way or another. I shook my head and kept walking, hands tight on the straps of my rucksack, moving forward with the crowd.

Through all the shouting and confusion, the dullest ache of recognition was beginning to form in my mind. Some part of my consciousness knew this place, the shape of the port, the rhythm of the language. I looked ahead toward the distant end of the pier, and somehow I knew there was a large gate there, and a square. Northwest of the square, where the land sloped upward, lay the labyrinth of the medina. I was certain of it.

One of the would-be guides stepped in front of me, blocking my way, and put his hand on my arm.

“This way,” he said forcefully in thickly accented English. “My taxi,” he insisted, yanking my arm, pulling me after him.

I shook him off. “No. Leave me alone.”

He stepped closer, his finger wagging in my face. “No need to be rude.” He spat as he said the words, and a droplet of saliva landed on my cheek.

“I don’t need a taxi,” I said, trying to smooth things over, but it was too late. I’d offended him, and there was no getting around it.

I moved forward, trying to get past him, but he blocked my way again. “Why so rude?” he asked, aggressively.

Shaking my head, I tried to guess at the best answer. With the crowd of passengers flowing past us, I hardly imagined I could be in danger, but still, there seemed to be no way to shake the man, and I could feel a wave of panic moving up into my chest.

I opened my mouth to say something when a voice spoke up in Arabic behind me. Sneering, my harasser spat out a response.

“Leave her alone,” the voice said, in French now.

I craned my head to see a funny little man in a long woolen overcoat and wraparound sunglasses with yellow lenses.

Reluctantly, the guide stepped aside.

“Thank you,” I said to the overcoated man.

“Of course.”

I started forward again, and my strange savior fell in step beside me.

“They’re harmless,” he said, “but a nuisance. Especially during Ramadan. I don’t think it’s the food they miss so much as the cigarettes. People tend to get a little cranky by this time of day. Is this your first trip to Tangier?”

I thought about the question for a moment. “Yes,” I said, taking in the man’s incongruous attire. The curved wooden handle of an umbrella was hooked over his right arm. His shoes were Nikes, bright orange with a metallic sheen. His features were Asian, but his English had an almost perfect British accent. “And you?”

The little man shook his head. “I live here,” he said. “I’ve just been up to Spain for a few days.” He nodded toward his suitcase, a battered leather bag. “Stocking up on paints.”

“You’re an artist?”

“Yes. I’ve come from Japan. It’s my experiment, to find cultural isolation.” He had a delicate way of speaking, an air of intense deliberation to everything he said and did.

I smiled. There was something childlike and vulnerable about the little man, something entirely unthreatening, amusing even. “Could you recommend a hotel?” I asked as we neared the port entrance. “Something relatively reasonable.”

He thought for a moment. “There’s the Continental, of course. Abdesselom will take extremely good care of you.”

“Abdesselom?”

“The manager,” the man explained. He looked down at his watch and furrowed his brow. “Of course the sun’s about to set. There’s not much to be done for the next hour or so.”

“I can wait,” I said. “If you just point me in the right direction.”

“It’s not far.” He pointed toward the jumbled hillside of the Old City. “You see that pink building?”

“Yes,” I said, picking out the rose-colored facade.

He wrinkled his nose and stopped walking for a moment. “I’m going for some dinner, if you’d like to join me. Then I can take you up there myself. I live just around the corner.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t want to trouble you.”

“It’s no trouble.” He smiled.

I hesitated a moment. I didn’t relish the idea of making my way through the medina alone. Besides, the man seemed lonely, grateful for my company, and I was hungry. “Sure,” I agreed.

He bowed stiffly at the waist, then held out his hand. “I’m Joshi.”

“Marie,” I said, taking the offered hand. It was cool and soft against my own.

We ate at the Café Africa, a well-lit establishment near the Grand Socco. The restaurant was clean and cheery, with a white-tiled floor, mirrored walls, and freshly laundered tablecloths, a slightly exotic copy of a French brasserie. The meal was like a strange dance. I had the uneasy feeling that despite his meticulous appearance Joshi had little enough money to be hungry, that the price of a meal was the unspoken fee for his guidance. Yet when I reached for the check at the end of the meal, I could sense the depth of his embarrassment.

It was raining when we left, turning the sidewalks slick with filth. We walked across the Grand Socco and in through the gates of the Old City, down the bustling Rue as-Siaghin, past the Great Mosque.

“My apartment,” Joshi said, as we neared the eastern ramparts of the medina and turned into a narrow side street. “There. Do you see the flag?”

I looked up, following his finger. There was a series of low rooftops lit now by flickering streetlights and a slightly taller building beyond. In one of the dirt-smeared windows of the taller structure was a white flag with a simple red circle in the center. I nodded. “I see.”

“And here is the Hotel Continental,” Joshi announced, directing my gaze to a plaster gate that lay just a few steps in front of us. “I’ll take you in.”

The Continental was a large colonial structure, a Western stronghold perched at the edge of the medina. Inside the gate, a stone courtyard led to a sweep of stairs. At the top of the stairs was a generous veranda with an unobscured view of the port. It was a terrace wide enough for the foregone days of cocktails and dancing and Dior dresses, though my best guess told me even in its prime the Continental had verged toward the seedy. Today, a few bedraggled tables and chairs sat empty, staring out toward the dark bay. The building’s pinkish facade was cracked, the plaster flaking.

Inside, the hotel was like a movie set, the walls richly mosaicked, trimmed with carved plaster and wood. The few guests in the lobby were a strange mix, a new breed of Western traveler, more Lonely Planet than Paul Bowles. Several members of an American film crew loitered around the front desk, hassling a gray-haired clerk about the rooms they’d been given. Two young German women huddled around the public phone, each taking turns with the receiver. A middle-aged woman in sensible travel attire, lightweight pants, hiking boots, and fanny pack, sat on a sagging couch paging through an English-language travel guide.

I stood behind Joshi, eavesdropping on the disgruntled Americans, while the clerk listened patiently, then politely explained that the rooms were the best he had to offer. The men were not easily convinced, but in the end the clerk’s implacable manner won out, and the crew retreated, grumbling, while the elderly clerk turned his attention to us.

Spend a year hoping for recognition, and you will come to know the intricacies of the human face, the delicacy of expression. In the first few months of my new life I lived in a state of constant anticipation, examining each person I passed on the street for some hint of familiarity, some clue to a shared past, however brief. And though what I saw was never the bewildered tic of the long-lost acquaintance, I saw every other possible countenance, love, despair, and even emptiness.

When the manager turned his face from Joshi’s to mine, the ripple that passed across his features was almost imperceptible, slight as the barest breeze roughing the surface of a lake, slight as a minute’s interval of light at sunset. His eyes paused for just longer than a second on mine, long enough for me to think we had met before, then he murmured something in English. “It is easy for me,” I swore I heard him say.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

He shook his head, the look I’d taken for recognition passing on. “Nothing, Mademoiselle.” Smiling genially, he turned to Joshi. “I see you’ve brought us a guest.”

Joshi nodded. “Marie’s just come in on the ferry. I promised her you’d have a room.”

The man glanced at me once more, then slipped on a pair of reading glasses and peered down at his registry. “I believe I can find something.”

I watched the side of his face, his hands sliding across the page in front of him. He was Moroccan, but not fully, his blue-gray eyes betraying whatever Frenchman or Brit lingered somewhere not far back on his family tree.

“I have a room for two hundred dirhams,” he offered, finally. “With a shared bath down the hall.”

I nodded, fishing fifty euros from my pack. “Can you change this for me?”

“Of course.”

The clerk opened a cash box and counted out a stack of dirhams, setting two hundred aside for himself, giving me the rest. He penciled something in the registry, then slid a piece of paper across the counter.

“If Mademoiselle wouldn’t mind,” he said.

I looked down at the blank registration form in front of me, the lines marked Name and Passport number. Sliding Marie’s passport from my bag, I penned in what information I could, hesitating over my home address, finally scribbling down the street number of the chocolate shop in Lyon.

When I had finished, the old clerk reached over, grabbed a key from one of the many hooks that hung on the wall beside him, and set it on the counter.

“Room two-oh-five,” he said.

I picked up the key and looked down at him, willing myself to remember if I could, my mind straining to see through the dark night of all I’d forgotten. “Do I know you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?” I pressed.

Abdesselom looked to Joshi and then again to me. “I would remember.”

I thanked Joshi for all his help, then climbed the stairs to my room. A funny little man, I thought, opening the door, setting my rucksack down on the bed, so stiffly British and Asian at the same time, so awkward in his intentions. Though I couldn’t say I hadn’t been grateful for his guidance. Leaving the lights off, I stepped to the window and peered down at the waterlogged veranda and courtyard. The hotel’s front door swung open, and a group of tourists filed out, heading for the medina. A few seconds later Joshi appeared, his orange shoes glowing unmistakably. He stopped, drew a pack of cigarettes from his coat and lit one, then opened the black circle of his umbrella. A lonely man, I told myself.

Headlights flickered outside the gate, and a little red taxi pulled into the courtyard. I watched as a figure climbed out, a man in a long raincoat. He said something to the driver, then climbed up the steps to where Joshi was standing. The taxi sat where it was, engine idling. I could see the man’s face in the veranda lights. An American, I thought, squinting to see better. Yes, he had that look: blond hair, white teeth, and an unnatural healthiness. He and Joshi exchanged a few words; then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a brown envelope, handed it to Joshi, and headed back to the waiting cab.

I went to bed early and was awakened sometime around midnight by a barrage of off-key German drinking songs. There was a chorus of drunken footsteps in the hallway, several minutes of slamming doors and water running in the pipes; then the floor fell silent, and I drifted back to sleep.

Sometime later in the night I woke again, wrangled from sleep by the quiet shuffling of another body in the room. In my half-dreaming state my first thought was that it was Heloise, come to wake me for the morning prayer. I sank down deeper under the covers, thinking it was far too early to face the cold walk to the chapel, the drone of Magdalene’s voice.

Then the person moved again, and the fog in my brain lifted. I snapped my eyes open and stared into the darkness, heart racing, body flush with adrenaline. Stiffening, I willed myself motionless.

The curtains were open, and in the bars of bluish light shining up from the veranda I could see the figure’s silhouette. It was a man, broad shouldered and tall. In his hand was my rucksack. Carefully unbuckling the little front pocket, he pulled out my passport.

Should I yell? I wondered. Surely the noise would scare him off. All the money I had in the world was in that bag, not to mention the passport. I could afford to lose neither. Then I thought of the sisters, of Heloise’s face tight with fear, and what she’d told me at the Tanes’. Was this one of the men? Had he come for me? Opening the passport, he pulled a long thin object from his clothes.

Would the Germans hear me in time? Or were they too groggy from their midnight drunk? There was a soft clicking noise, and a small circle of light sprang from the man’s hand. The thin object was a flashlight. The man shined the beam on the passport, reading, it seemed; then he snuffed the light and returned the passport to its place in the rucksack.

He hesitated a moment, then took a step toward me and another. Slowly, silently, I drew my breath in and lowered my eyelids. Yes, I thought, he could kill me now before anyone heard a thing. In the morning there’d be only someone’s sleep-warped memory of a short, thin scream. One thousand one, one thousand two. I counted out each second till, miraculously, I heard him turn.

Opening one eye, I watched him put his hand on the knob and noiselessly pull the door inward. Light blazed in from the hallway, briefly illuminating him as he slipped out of the room and closed the door behind him. He was only visible for a second, but it was time enough for me to recognize him. It was the American, the man I’d seen on the veranda with Joshi.