Marrakech Noir

The Mysterious Painting by Fouad Laroui

Bab Doukkala

He walked through the door of the restaurant at twelve fifteen p.m., as he did every day.

Police Chief Hamdouch was a man of habit, borderline obsessive in the words of his dear departed wife, a Morocco-born Frenchwoman who’d died of a nasty case of tetanus after only a few years of marriage. Still a widower, and without any children, he ate lunch each day at Délices de l’Orient, opposite the Palais du Glaoui.

The proprietor, Driss Bencheikh, took great care to keep the chief’s table open between noon and two o’clock. If a distracted tourist or an insouciant local had the gall to sit there, Bencheikh would direct them to another table. He was, in a sense, acting in the name of the establishment, and that lent a certain brusqueness to his behavior. The establishment never asked nicely.

And so, Hamdouch sat down in the same chair, every day, at twelve fifteen p.m. A large painting hung on the wall facing him. The object had appeared in a rather mysterious manner, upon the chief’s third visit to the restaurant. He’d already grown slightly annoyed with it. Until his third visit, there’d been nothing in front of him but a dull ocher wall. He would eat his lunch staring into the middle distance, which suited him fine — he could think in peace. Then one day, without warning, this big, multicolored rectangle had materialized in front of him.

The chief was no art lover, even if he could appreciate old poems sung in dialect; in any case, he didn’t know a thing about paintings. At first, he simply noted the painting’s appearance in his field of vision, without attaching any more importance to it than was necessary. It was a small change in his routine, a tiny inconvenience. It vaguely bothered him, but it wasn’t, as they say, the end of the world. He resumed his habit of watching the street through the bay window that projected out from the center of the wall, seemingly monitoring the comings and goings of passersby — a professional tic, no doubt. But then, we all suffer from this particular pathology.

One day, he grew tired of seeing the same people coming and going on the sidewalk, mixed in with the tourists who were of little interest to him — people who were here today, clumsy and yammering, but always gone tomorrow. So he shifted his gaze slightly to the left, and, glass of tea in hand, focused on the painting. He had to squint a bit against the light, but he finally managed to make out a scene painted in garish colors — a scene containing several figures. One figure drew his attention, and he examined it more carefully. What the devil? he thought.

Hamdouch furrowed his brow and called imperiously to the proprietor: “S’si Driss!”

The man hurried over, drying his hands on a white napkin, and bowed slightly, a timid smile on his lips, ready to be of service.

The chief gestured at the object of his irritation with his right hand, which still held the glass of tea, so that he seemed to be raising a toast to who knows what — to art, perhaps?

“That... This... tableau!”

The chief used the French word, probably because he didn’t know the Arabic one, or had forgotten it.

“Yes, S’si chief?” replied the proprietor, in a tone that was equal parts cheerful and servile.

Hamdouch lowered his voice and spoke slowly, giving certain words an ominous inflection. He knew very well how to do this; he wasn’t a police chief for nothing. “Is that His Majesty the king, may God be his guide, there in the middle? The way he’s painted... it verges on disrespect!”

The proprietor threw a quick glance at the figure who occupied the center of the painting — a perfunctory glance, for his response was immediate, unhesitating: “No, no, my God! No! It’s the pasha. I mean the old pasha, Moulay Mimoun.”

“And yet, he’s in the center, a sort of grand seigneur on a handsome horse,” Hamdouch said. The chief set down his glass of tea and pointed implacably at the painting. “And behind him, someone’s holding a large white parasol. Several people are turned toward him... in fact, everyone is. You’d think it was His Majesty during the allegiance ceremony...”

“I promise you, S’si Hamdouch, it’s the pasha,” Driss repeated. “Even if his features aren’t very clear, you can certainly recognize his beloved horse.”

Reassured, the chief asked: “Well, which pasha is it? S’si Lamrani?”

“No, like I told you, it’s his predecessor, Moulay Mimoun.”

“I just wanted to be sure.” The chief nodded, took a sip of tea, and went back to examining the lively scene that stretched out before him in evocative colors.

After a few seconds, the proprietor understood that he was no longer needed and went on his way, swatting at a few imaginary flies with his napkin.

The next day, when Hamdouch sat down at his usual table, it was the painting he immediately turned to, even before glancing out at the street. Gloomy-eyed and jaw clenched, he stared intensely at it. That painting! He had dreamed of it during the night.

The chief hated dreams. Whenever he remembered one upon waking, he was furious. He felt degraded, humiliated, and suddenly unable to cope. It was as if he’d lost all control of himself during these nocturnal adventures where everything seemed possible — and that served God knows what purpose. Do cats dream? he wondered. If they don’t, then why do I?

Sitting up in bed, he would recite the traditional Muslim invocation — Cursed be Satan — but, not being totally uncultured, he wondered at the same time what a psychoanalyst might make of these absurd dreams. There were, of course, a few psychoanalysts in Marrakech — he had their information — but he wasn’t about to go consult any of them. To do so would be to admit defeat. You don’t tell a police chief to lie down on the couch. It’s his job to grill suspects, not the other way around. And what could be more suspicious than a follower of Lacan in Marrakech?

In his dream about the painting, the scene had come alive; it had engulfed him, in a sense. He’d found himself trailing after the chestnut horse on which the pasha rode, while everyone ignored him and jostled him around — what lack of respect for his rank! And in the surrounding chaos — the noise, the fury, the dust — one of the men in the painting had even tried to slip a gunnysack over his head. Yes, a gunnysack, like the secret police used in the old days, in the seventies, the dark years, when they would kidnap politicians, trade unionists, philosophy students. The shame! Him, Chief Hamdouch — gunnysacked! The world had been turned upside down! He woke up full of indignation and covered in sweat, trembling from head to toe.

And now he was eating his bell pepper — and-tomato salad, his gaze fixed on the maleficent painting as if he were trying to wrench some secret from it. In fact, a strange realization had come over him during his nocturnal intrusion into this frozen scene: everyone was looking at the pasha, which in itself was quite normal — even a dog looks at a pasha — but he’d had the impression that all these looks were... fraught. Not one of them expressed simple curiosity, admiration (What a beautiful procession!), or even the famous “reverent fear” that was the foundation on which the entire structure of state authority rested. No, these looks said something else. They were fraught, the chief thought to himself again, frustrated at his inability to come up with a more precise description of what he’d realized; his stock of adjectives was rather limited, in both Arabic and French.

He sat solemnly scrutinizing the painting with his fork in the air, a long piece of bell pepper dangling from it. “I’m opening an investigation,” he mumbled aloud.

Having caught a few indistinct sounds, the proprietor came hurrying over. “Monsieur Chief? More bread? Some water, perhaps?”

Taken aback, Hamdouch coughed, then pointed his fork at the wall, causing the piece of bell pepper to bob dangerously. “Who made this painting?” he asked.

The proprietor looked from the fork to the painting. He frowned. His forehead puckered up — he was pretending to be deep in thought — and he finally replied: “It’s a young man by the name of Brahim Labatt. He lived on a street nearby, across from the blacksmith’s souk.” Driss leaned in closer to the chief and, adopting the funereal air that precedes this type of disclosure, whispered: “He committed suicide a few years ago. God preserve us!” He uttered the macabre word so softly that it could barely be heard. “It seems to have been the last thing he painted before he...” Driss didn’t finish the sentence.

The chief registered the information and mentally opened a file under the name of Brahim Labatt, a young man who’d died under suspicious circumstances. He knew — the statistics didn’t lie — that suicide was rare on Islamic soil. And so, the case would have to be investigated. With a flippant gesture that made the piece of bell pepper, still hanging precariously from the tines of his fork, appear vaguely threatening, he dismissed Driss, who hurried off to welcome a group of Japanese tourists at the door. The proprietor could be heard bragging in his eccentric English, punctuated with little sucking noises, about his restaurant and its cuisine (The best in Marrakech, of course!).

The chief finished his meal, still unable to look away from the work of art — was it, in fact, a work of art, or something else? And in any case, what was art? He began to lose himself in a labyrinth of reflections.

Back at the station, Hamdouch called in one of his employees, Ba Mouss, who’d been nicknamed “The Computer” because he possessed a phenomenal memory, at least when it came to the crimes, misdemeanors, and other incidents of note that took place in the neighborhood. Aside from that, he didn’t know much about anything. Ba Mouss had never been transferred elsewhere, since transferring a computer would mean, in a sense, erasing all the files it contained — and what would be the point of such an operation?

Short and skinny, with big green eyes, the man-machine entered his boss’s office. The chief didn’t bother with preliminaries. “Ba Mouss, have you ever heard of a certain Brahim Labatt? A painter?”

As if Hamdouch had pressed the enter button, Ba Mouss stood to attention, cleared his throat, and recited: “Brahim Labatt, son of Abdelmoula, was a plumber. No high school diploma and the only son of the widow Halima. He lived with her on Derb Dekkak, then stayed there alone after his mother’s death. He was also an amateur painter, you might say. He painted when he was out of work, which was quite often, and showed his artwork on the street, next to the barbershop. He managed to sell a few to some German tourists.” A short sniffle announced a sad turn in the story. “Excuse me, chief... Brahim Labatt committed suicide seven or eight years ago. By hanging. May God have mercy on us!”

Hamdouch nodded his head, frowning. This was his way of thanking his subordinates. “Are we sure it was a suicide?” he asked.

“Only God knows, chief.”

“And aside from God?” Hamdouch was growing impatient. Mouss’s last response had been close to blasphemous — but then again, what kind of computer invokes the name of God? Give us facts and figures, and leave God to the faqihs.

“Your predecessor, Chief Madani, closed the case,” Mouss explained. “The poor painter had—”

“Hold on.” The chief winced. “You say it was Madani who closed the case?”

“Yes. He closed it immediately... well, very quickly,” the man-machine answered. “There was nothing suspicious about it.”

“Very good, that’ll be all. You may go.”

Ba Mouss nodded and left the office without a word.

Hamdouch began to rub his forehead frantically with the fingertips of his right hand. A raging headache was coming on, a sign that one of his many intuitions had arrived, the kind that had helped him solve particularly tough cases throughout his career. His dear departed wife, Hélène, half-mocking and half-affectionate, had called these episodes les migraines de mon Maigret. Ha!

Still, he owed much of his success to his intuition. His most recent transfer from Safi to Marrakech had been a flattering promotion. He had solved several high-profile cases, including the Hay el-Majd killings, which had been all over the newspapers and had given everyone nightmares at the time.

What was presently setting his brain on fire was a coincidence he had just become aware of: the man in his dream who’d tried to put a bag over his head...

But back up, first things first: Madani, the ex-chief, had been forced to retire over a scandalous case of corruption (or embezzlement of public funds... it had all been very confusing) in which he wasn’t directly involved, though he’d tried to cover up for the main beneficiary, who was none other than the ex-pasha Moulay Mimoun.

So, there were two exes in this story, a hanged man, plus a painting that connected all of them.

Suddenly, Hamdouch remembered the man in his dream who’d tried to put a bag over his head: it was Madani himself!

Without even knowing it, Hamdouch had recognized him in the painting — and now his predecessor had resurfaced, in the night, from the depths of his subconscious, with an air of murder about him. “The plot thickens,” he murmured.

The chief rushed out of his office, down Boulevard Fatima Zahra, rounded the corner, and walked into the restaurant. The place was nearly empty at this hour of the afternoon. A cat was asleep in a corner, curled up in a ball. Only three French tourists, three men, were lingering over their cups of coffee.

Hamdouch ignored the owner’s startled greeting and planted himself directly in front of the painting to confirm his suspicions.

Yes, it was indeed Madani there, beside the pasha’s horse. You could distinguish his hideous mug, crudely painted though it was — on the verge of caricature. But then, nature seemed to have caricatured this man as the typical corrupt brute. The painter hadn’t had to embellish much.

The chief noted another detail that aggravated his migraine. While all of the figures’ gazes were fraught, there was an exception: Madani was not looking at the ex-pasha; he was staring out at the viewer of the painting. At that precise moment, Madani seemed to be staring into the face of the man who had succeeded him — Hamdouch. The ex-chief’s expression seemed to depict a kind of confusion, a mixture of fear, arrogant disdain, and... something else. But what else could it be?

And what was more, his right hand, which at first glance looked to be stroking the horse’s neck, was in fact placed on the left hand of Moulay Mimoun. The two men, hand in hand, seemed to be bracing themselves against the crowd’s anger.

Yes, anger! That was the meaning behind the fraught gazes that Hamdouch had noticed before. That was it! The late Labatt was certainly no Rembrandt; he hadn’t always pulled off the desired effect, but it was clearly anger that he’d tried to convey on the faces in the painting, with the exception of the ex-pasha and the ex-chief.

Turning to the three tourists, Hamdouch arranged his face into a cheerful expression despite the migraine that was stabbing at his temples, and called out heartily: “Welcome to Marrakech!” He said it in French, rolling his r’s.

Surprised, the men hesitated a few seconds — long enough to reassure themselves that this elegant man, with his graying hair and dashing mustache, wasn’t a beggar, a nuisance, or Clark Gable risen from the dead — before one of them returned his greeting: “Merci, monsieur...?”

“Hamdouch, at your service.” A pause. “I’m an art collector, and I’d like to ask your opinion.” The chief gestured at the painting in a sort of invitation. “What do you think of that?”

Clearly amused, the three men got to their feet and moved toward the painting. They had polished off two bottles of Volubilia and, feeling mischievous, they spontaneously decided, without even conferring about it, to play the experts. It’d be fun — they were on vacation, they’d have a story to tell when they got back to Paris. What followed was a smorgasbord of clichés uttered in the most affected tones.

“That light, gentlemen! That light... it’s like something out of Claude Gellée, dit le Lorrain!” one of the tourists exclaimed.

“See, the way that djellaba hangs! There, in the corner... lovely as the day is long,” another added.

“That horse, the energy, the movement... pure Delacroix!” the last man in the group added. “And what a noble-looking chevalier — is that your king?”

The chief, whose migraine was wearing down his patience, said, “Gentlemen, calm yourselves! If you’ll allow me, I’d like to ask you a specific question: what do you see in the eyes of all these men? Forget the horseman, it’s the others who interest me.”

The tourists went to work, no more messing around. They examined the faces frozen in time by the painter, and the verdict was unanimous.

“Oh là là, they don’t look too happy...”

“No, no, they don’t look friendly at all...”

“I would even say they’re angry.”

Hamdouch, satisfied, pointed to the ex-chief. “And this one?”

The three men brought their faces up close, their noses nearly touching the surface of the canvas. This time, their opinions differed.

“A nasty fellow,” the first Frenchman decided.

“Arrogant,” said the second.

The third, a gangly redhead, took his time before answering. “Not quite, messieurs, not quite. I’ll tell you: he looks guilty. Like a delinquent caught in the act. Like a good-for-nothing who gives himself away just by the expression on his face.”

All four of them studied the nasty fellow’s face. There was no doubt about it. That was it: Madani looked guilty.

“Bravo, Christian!” the first tourist cheered for the redhead.

Delighted, Hamdouch thanked the Frenchmen for their observations.

“And now, are you going to try to sell us this daub?” one of the tourists asked boldly, grinning. “Not a bad technique! Bravo! We fell for it like a couple of chumps. How much?”

Hamdouch fixed the man with an icy stare. “I’m not an art dealer. And for that matter, this... this thing doesn’t belong to me. Au revoir, messieurs!”

The three men headed back to their seats, tickled with this little interlude. But just when the chief was about to leave, the redheaded Christian called out to him: “Ho there! There’s something not quite right with your daub... sorry, your painting.” The redhead stood up again, walked over, and pointed to the left-hand corner of the painting. “I’m not an expert, obviously, far from it! But I’ve never seen zellige tile on a wall. That’s zellige, right there, isn’t it?”

Hamdouch, already standing in the doorway, turned around and walked back. With his index finger, he touched the spot that Christian had pointed to. “You’re right,” he murmured, perplexed. “Yellow zellige, on the exterior side of a wall — it makes no sense.”

How had he not noticed this detail? Were his powers of observation in decline? He felt sheepish for a moment, but didn’t let it show.

Christian returned to the table where his friends gleefully teased him (“He’s got an eye, this one,” “Good work, Sherlock!”) while Hamdouch slipped away, lost in his own thoughts.

Back at his office, the chief left his door open and called for his computer: “Ba Mouss!”

His voice echoed through the station and the little man appeared almost instantly, his eyes more greenish than ever. This melancholy shade seemed to spread out over his entire face, so that he looked like a tiny Martian who’d been woken from his nap.

“I want you to tell me everything you know about the ex-pasha, Moulay Mimoun!” the chief barked. “Everything! Facts, fiction, rumors, gossip... everything!”

Ba Mouss sighed and began to drone on about the rich life of the pasha.

The chief let this flood of information flow past him, interrupting the human computer every now and then to ask for clarification. When Ba Mouss had finished, the chief was silent for a moment. Then he said: “This story about the murder of a rival. Can you tell me more about it?”

“It’s only a rumor, chief. And there’s no proof that there was any murder. A coppersmith, a certain Dadouchi, had asked for the hand of a very beautiful woman in the Kennaria District, and it was granted to him. The marriage preparations were coming along nicely, but alas! The pasha, Moulay Mimoun, had designs on this same woman. Then one day, the coppersmith disappeared. He went to see a customer and didn’t come back. In fact, he was never seen or heard from again. And so, after a few months, the pasha could add the lady to his stock of wives. But he rejected her a few months later, to the great anger and shame of her family.” Ba Mouss lowered his voice. “Word spread that it was he, the pasha, who’d made the coppersmith disappear.”

“Cui bono?” Hamdouch whispered to himself. He knew a few Latin expressions of great practical value that had circulated at the École de police, a legacy of the French.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, nothing. Go on.”

“I was saying that word spread that it was the pasha who’d made the coppersmith disappear. And there’s more: rumor had it that the evidence of his crime still existed somewhere, and that one day it would appear in plain sight.” Ba Mouss hesitated a moment, then blurted out: “It was said that the truth would be revealed by a magical bird.”

Just as Ba Mouss had expected, the chief shrugged his shoulders in irritation. “A magical bird? Why not a flying elephant? You’d think we were in The Thousand and One Nights. Could you be any more gullible? It’s up to the police, not the birds, to find evidence!”

Without entering into the debate between science and superstition — a debate the chief always won by force of his arguments and outright threats — Ba Mouss concluded: “Voilà. That’s all we know of the story.”

“Thanks. You may go.”

The computer seemed to shut off, and disappeared. The chief went to close the door, then settled in comfortably at his desk; with his chin resting on his folded hands, he began to think. This business of the magical bird annoyed him to no end, but the more he tried to ignore it, the more it refused to leave him alone. He imagined a sort of giant, multicolored simurgh that soared to the heavens, then plunged back down to earth, carrying a violently writhing snake in its talons. I’m getting all worked up about a silly legend, he thought, peeved.

Then he remembered an expression that Hélène had sometimes used: oiseau jacasseur. She’d had to explain the verb — jacasser — to him: to talk very quickly, in an annoying manner.

A talking bird?

That reminded him of something. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the image. Memories of his childhood and adolescence, things he’d read or heard, appeared in a sort of halo...

After a few minutes, he opened his eyes and shook his head. Then he picked up his telephone and, after the usual greetings, asked one of the guys from the archives: “Do we have access to a list of the assets belonging, or having belonged, to the former pasha?... Yes, Moulay Mimoun... Can we get that?... It’ll take time? I have all the time in the world!” He let out a slightly bitter laugh, thinking of his status as a childless widower. “You’ll send it to me by a trustworthy messenger?”

He hung up, lit a cigarette, and randomly opened one of the files scattered on his desk.

A few days later, Hamdouch received the list he’d asked for. He ran his finger feverishly down the page and stopped at a name — the name of a riad that had belonged to the pasha.

“Bingo,” he said out loud, smiling.

At the end of the alleyway, most passersby would turn left. Rarely did anyone turn right. On the ground, black marks left by thousands of mopeds over the years indicated only one direction: left. This was the way leading to Bab Doukkala, the main road that wove through the medina.

The chief, accompanied by his deputy Hariri, turned resolutely to the right. He knew where he was going.

In front of the riad, an old watchman was seated on a stool. The watchman saw Hamdouch and Hariri approaching and stood up straight, discreetly dusted off his clothing, and seemed to come to attention.

“Assalamu alaikum!” the chief greeted.

“Alaikum as-salaam, S’si Chief,” the watchman replied anxiously.

“Are the French people here?”

“No, sidi, they went out to buy some fruit and vegetables. But you may come in if you wish.”

“It’s fine, I’ll wait until they return,” Hamdouch told him. “And don’t ever let anyone enter a house in the absence of its owners. Not even me! The law forbids it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the owners, François and Cécile, came back from the souk. The chief greeted them with a smile and gave a sort of salute by bringing two fingers to his forehead, then introduced himself and his deputy.

“The police? Nothing serious, I hope,” François said.

“No, no,” the chief assured him. “I just wanted to take a quick look around, with your permission. This has to do with an old case that has no connection to you whatsoever. It all happened long before you bought...” Hamdouch paused, then gestured vaguely at the door to the old building.

François and Cécile exchanged a look and raised their shoulders in unison. “Well then, come in,” François said. “We can’t offer you any tea, just some fruit juice.”

“No thank you.”

The four of them entered the house while the watchman stayed outside. The chief started looking around, turning his head every which way.

“Are you searching for something?” François inquired.

“Yes, I’m looking for a part of the wall covered in zellige,” Hamdouch responded. “Yellowish zellige.”

“A little patch of yellow wall,” joked Cécile.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s nothing, just a literary reference,” Cécile said. “But there is a similar wall here. The phrase is from Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time.”

“Research? That’s my department,” the chief noted approvingly. “Your Proust, did he write about Marrakech?”

“No, no... the patch of yellow wall is in Delft, in the Netherlands, it’s the birthplace of—”

Hamdouch raised his hand and interrupted Cécile: “Forget that, the Netherlands aren’t in my jurisdiction. Where’s the wall?”

They led him to one of the side rooms, with Hariri bringing up the rear. One of the walls was covered up halfway in ocher zellige. Curiously, there were no more tiles beyond this patch, and it looked as if someone had begun to cover the wall, then changed their mind without going to the trouble of removing the tile. Hamdouch studied the wall carefully, kneeling down to examine its base, then tapped it in several spots while pressing his ear to its surface. Hariri and the French couple watched him, baffled.

“You think there’s something behind it?” Cécile asked. Without waiting for a response, she turned to her husband. “You remember the Héberts? They bought an old house in Paris, in the Marais. While they were doing some renovations they discovered a fake wall, and behind it, in a case, they found a very valuable violin. A Guarneri, I think.”

“Well then, we just might hit the jackpot,” François said.

The chief stood up with difficulty. “I don’t know if you can get rich in the skeleton trade,” he muttered. “If you can, then you’re in luck: there’s a coppersmith’s skeleton behind this wall.”

Cécile swayed and fell right onto a chair.

“What do you mean?” François asked, stunned.

Hamdouch shrugged and told his deputy to go find a bricklayer and two strapping policemen — and to bring mallets, hammers, and a large plastic bag.

While François tended to Cécile, who was hyperventilating, the chief explained: “With your permission, we’re going to make a hole in this wall to extract the corpse that’s hidden behind it. But don’t worry, we’ll seal everything back up again.”

Hamdouch went out to smoke a cigarette in the shade of an orange tree.

A few days later, Hamdouch was seated in his usual chair at his usual restaurant, in front of what was left of a chicken tagine with olives. His hunger satiated, he burped quietly and then ordered a mint tea. Finally, he agreed to rehash the case for the proprietor, who’d been hovering around him all evening.

“You know that Brahim Labatt was also a plumber? He’d probably been hired to do some odd jobs around the riad, and discreet as he was, they’d completely forgotten he was there. Without meaning to, he witnessed the coppersmith’s assassination by the pasha, or rather by the pasha’s henchmen. They must’ve lured the guy there to place an order for copper trays, or something of the sort. Poor man, I hope he was already dead when they walled him in. Otherwise, what a horrible end... Anyway, Labatt got out of there without anyone noticing him, and within a few weeks he’d finished the painting. It was, in a sense, his only way of speaking out about what he’d seen.”

“But why didn’t he just report the pasha to the police?” the proprietor asked.

“In those days, no one trusted the police, least of all a simple worker, a son of the people like Labatt. And then, to turn against the pasha... few would have dared.”

“What a vile era,” the proprietor lamented.

“But he couldn’t bear to keep such a dark secret. He must’ve told someone. He claimed to have evidence, to have gotten it all down. His confidant spoke out in turn, and the rumor spread. Chief Madani got wind of it, and since he was in cahoots with the pasha, he warned him. The painter was discreetly arrested — and tortured, no doubt — before they finished the job by hanging him and making it look like a suicide,” the chief concluded. “They searched his house from top to bottom, looking for papers that would incriminate the pasha. They were desperate to find a notebook, a letter, a few words scribbled on a scrap of paper, but no one thought twice about the paintings — the daubs that lined the walls! That’s where he’d made his accusation in the most precise detail. Even then, you had to know how to look for it.”

“But how’d you get the idea to go nosing around that riad? How did you know?”

Hamdouch smiled. “Riad Boulboul? Boulboul doesn’t ring a bell to you? The talking bird in The Thousand and One Nights? As soon as I knew that the place had belonged to Moulay Mimoun, I understood the origin of the story about the magical bird that would reveal everything one day. Labatt had mentioned boulboul, and by word of mouth, the reference to the riad had been lost; people preferred to find magic in it rather than a simple physical address. But me, I’m a rational thinker. Cartesian, my wife used to say, God have mercy on her soul.”

“So, what’ll happen to the ex-pasha? And to the ex-chief?”

Hamdouch shrugged. “Nothing. Well, not much. Moulay Mimoun has always been protected in high places, and in any case, he’s very old, he’s become senile and forgotten everything. What judge would want to reopen the investigation? You can’t send a doddering old man to prison. As for Madani, he’s retired. If Moulay Mimoun got off, there’s no reason to bother with his accomplice... an âme damnée, as the French say — a damned soul. You know that expression?”

“No,” Driss sighed. “I’m a little sad to know that justice won’t be served.”

“Ah, but in a certain sense, it has. The reputations of these two scumbags are ruined. They’ll end their lives in shame, detested by everyone, even their loved ones, waiting to go straight to hell.”

“They’re both... how did you say it? Ânes damnés.”

“Bravo! S’si Driss, you’re a quick learner. You’ve still got to work on your pronunciation, though,” the chief teased. “It’s âmes, not ânes... a matter of souls, not donkeys. Though Madani did always come off as an ass to me; one wonders how he managed to have a career. My guess is by doing favors for the powerful. Just like in this sad case.”

The chief took a long sip of his tea and then pointed at the proprietor. “There’s still one piece of this mystery I have to solve. The painting wasn’t here when I first came in. Why did you hang it in front of my table a few days later?”

Driss Bencheikh shook his head, grabbed a chair, and sat down beside the chief. “Well, you should know that Brahim Labatt was my mother’s cousin. I inherited this painting, in a sense. I knew it contained a secret because it was his last work, and nothing like what he normally painted. It couldn’t be random... it had to mean something. I never believed that Brahim had killed himself, but I couldn’t figure out what happened. When you started coming here for lunch every day, I seized my chance. A policeman’s brain like yours would surely get to the bottom of it.”

The chief remained silent for a moment, then raised his glass in the direction of the painting.

Driss did the same and, with tears in his eyes, murmured: “To the artist!”

Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef

A Noisy Disappearance in an Ill-Reputed Alley by Allal Bourqia

Looking at Mars in Marrakech by Abdelkader Benali

Other Places by Mohamed Zouhair

Tabhirt

The boy whose father was a tart chaser, who had abandoned both him and his mother when he was just a child; the boy whose only future involved skipping school, wasting his childhood with a potter; the boy who was totally uninterested in his youth or his poverty; the boy who, after his mother’s death from an asthma attack when he was a teenager, lived the life of a vagrant orphan in the wild; that same boy grew up and, at the age of twenty-five, decided that he wanted to travel. And so, responding to some obscure call, he left Safi for Marrakech in search of some other time that he had only dreamed about.

It was early summer when Najib the potter took up residence in Tabhirt, the area in Marrakech where potters and their ovens were located. The potters in Tabhirt soon discovered how skillful this newly arrived young man was, and they watched him with a mixture of admiration and envy. Merchants competed for his wares and his reputation soon spread. The master potter recommended him to Master Hasun, a wealthy merchant whose workshops were always busy, and whose ovens were never extinguished. They were always fired up, even during feast days and Ashura.

Hasun was an old man, but someone who still liked to smoke kif and pot, as well as drink strong tea all day. The master took Najib the potter to his riad in Mawqif, which ran directly parallel to Tabhirt. Najib immediately noticed the lovely figure of Badia, who was sitting in the courtyard with her maid Masuda. Badia was a woman in the prime of her youth. She was lithe, fresh-skinned, and had a beautiful figure. When Najib glanced at her, his eyes flickered, and a hot flash ran through his entire body. He assumed that she was Hasun’s daughter but felt a kind of dagger thrust at the thought that she might actually be his wife: an old ruin like him with such a luscious creature — what did they have in common? The riad was spacious enough, but it was really nothing but an old fortress, and this lovely woman would waste the best part of her life within its walls.

Indeed, Badia’s life rarely extended beyond its bounds. Only on rare occasions would she go to the bathhouse or visit her family in Bab Hailana, which was also close to Mawqif. Even then, Masuda would always accompany her: the maid was like a shadow dogging her mistress’s footsteps.

Badia gave the young man a cold reception. Once she was alone with the merchant, she upbraided him. “A potter boy in our house? Why?”

“He has no family,” Hasun explained. “He’ll come here for the night and leave in the morning. He’ll be going straight from the front door to his bed. Masuda can look after him. We need him.”

“You mean... you need him?” Badia said.

“He’s a skilled craftsman. His fingers are golden. If we don’t take him, someone else will,” Hasun responded.

She was testing his intentions; his tone of voice was that of a merchant looking for a profitable deal. So this young man would be spending his nights here, inside this riad with its abundant rooms and furniture, a place totally lacking in warmth or life. In the upper rooms, Hasun the merchant kept some rare trinkets for use on appropriate occasions; in fact, all the rooms except one were filled with those trinkets. Now that one room would be where this newly arrived young potter would rest.

“Here’s where you’ll be sleeping, and there’s the toilet.” Those were the terse words of Masuda, laced with anxiety, as though to keep some sentiment under control.

When she brought him his supper on that first night, she did not say a word. She simply put the tray down on the small wooden table, glanced in his direction, and then left. For just a moment she leaned over the banister and stared up at the sky studded with stars, their gentle gleam shimmering delicately in the heavens. It occurred to her to go back to the young man’s room and ask him if he needed anything. The door to the tiny room was still ajar, and from close by she could hear his footsteps. But she decided not to venture any farther and went down the stairs to find Hasun and his wife. The couple were passing the evening in complete silence. The coughing of the very old husband soon interrupted the quiet. Hasun had no idea what to do about her — and Badia had no idea what to do about him, either.

Some nights later, Masuda stared at Najib, admiring his powerful build, his pinkish complexion, almost clay-colored. She enjoyed his perfect proportions and his youthful energy. A powerful longing came over her. She felt as if she had been brushed by fire.

“Do you know my name?” she asked him.

“Masuda,” Najib answered. “I heard Master Hasun use it.”

“You seem to be Masud, the lucky one,” she told him.

With that, she left. All the lights on the top story were out except for the one in his room. All the other doors were closed, their secrets locked inside. Najib would later discover that they were all inhabited by pottery ware; he would develop a sense of companionship with them, even though the doors were locked.

Masuda did not go back downstairs. When she left his room, she went over to a corner directly opposite the door and stood there. Through a hole in the door, Najib watched as she took off her headscarf and threw it to the ground. Loosening her belt, she let her dress fall where it would. Removing her shoes, she started moving around like a silent dancer in the darkness. He saw her taking a few cautious steps toward his room. Pausing for a moment, she looked over the banister to the courtyard below, and then went back to the corner, put herself in order, and returned to her own room next to the kitchen.

After taking off all of her clothes, Masuda threw herself on her bed and surrendered to her powerful fantasies. Here she was, an unmarried woman, over thirty years old, olive-skinned and a bit plump, with a harsh voice, plain features, and ample breasts. Her devotion to her mistress Badia implicitly involved a silent love for the woman’s body, something that she was pursuing breathlessly in her dreams as though chasing a mirage.

Another mirage was pestering Badia in the wide courtyard below, one that gave her heart a jolt. She could not get the image of the new arrival out of her mind: it pierced the veil of darkness and besieged her dreams. A fitful sleep turned into a raging insomnia. So near, yet so far, her husband rolled over in his bed with the nasty smell of kif on his breath. Once he finished his dinner and concluded the nonexistent conversation with the woman who was a prisoner in his mansion, he got up to spread out in bed next to her like an old dried-out twig lying beside a pure, coursing spring. Was Hasun completely unaware that by bringing this young man to the house he was providing what had been missing for some time? Did he not realize that he was introducing a spark to set off other sparks? The evidence was the chronic insomnia that was having such an effect on Badia. This spark was the breath of life infiltrating her existence, held in death’s own talons. When the young man was in his room or if his image came into her mind, she would deliberately put on a show of cold indifference and even resentment toward him, all with the aim of keeping him and her conflict inside her — and what a dire conflict it was! If you place your hand on a piece of ice, it can burn you like fire, but when that ice is actually placed in fire, it melts into water.

Najib spent his days at the pottery workshop, singing of love as he kneaded clay. The clay would respond readily to his skillful fingers, which pulsated with the rhythm of his heart. Whenever he saw a lovely female body, he would be inspired by its beauty to create a statuette. Once the human eye fell on such a statuette, the heart was drawn to it and the hand was eager to purchase it.

“This is beauty’s gift to beauty,” he would proclaim each time he finished such a statuette.

“They are sources of income,” had been Hasun’s response, as he watched the statuettes fly off the shelves almost as soon as they were stocked. Rumors spread that they were possessed by good fortune; their new owners cherished them.

“Beauty’s own gift to beauty. They should be donated to beauty, not sold!” Najib had objected.

“Get me the money, and I’ll give them to whomever you please,” Hasun had compromised. He would say this whenever he was feeling relaxed and at ease, stoned on kif, otherwise he simply ignored the whole thing, as worthless as a drop of water or handful of dirt.

The young potter thoroughly enjoyed making statuettes inspired by women who appealed to his heart, and it upset him to watch as the merchant bartered over them. Najib did not like the idea at all, but the only person he could share his feelings with was Masuda. He told her about the women who inspired him to make the statuettes, and that made her pale. He conveyed to her the sadness he felt at the way Hasun was selling them, as though they were merely decorations rather than art with his very soul attached.

Masuda went downstairs tense and hurt. The next morning, she told Badia what he’d said, and that only increased the pain of Badia’s desire. Masuda felt the fire burning inside her as she listened to the stories of Najib’s statuettes, while Badia listened to the very same stories as told by her maid. The same feeling of desire brought the two women together, but it also pulled them apart. No matter how hard they tried, they could not keep their feelings a secret from each other. Every night Masuda would hear the story, and the next morning she would relate it to her mistress. The nighttime account was repeated the next day, and the wait for the next story involved both tension and desire.

“So, tell me about your statuette women today,” Masuda said to Najib one evening.

“Today, a woman came at midday when the quarter was taking a nap,” he recalled. “I was on my own in the store next to the pottery. She came in, called me by name, and let her veil drop. Her face gleamed, a gorgeous blend of pink and white; her eyes positively oozed seduction. Take a good look at my face, she’d said, and that is precisely what I did. If my face is not enough, she went on, then I’ll take off my djellaba and even my underclothes, so you can see my entire body.”

Najib paused in his tale for a second, his eyes glazing over dreamily before he continued: “Your face is quite enough, I told the woman. Don’t deceive me, my heart is soaring in the blue heavens, she said. No statuette-maker can possibly deceive a figure of such beauty, I responded. She laughed heartily. I’m going to wait for the craftsman’s product, she said. You shouldn’t wait too long, the statuette will emerge in good time, I told her. And with that, she put her veil over her face again, while I filled my soul with the vision of those black eyes. I got the impression that she was pleased at the way I looked at her, as though to acknowledge that an ineffective model — one with no inner sense of the various concepts of wine not found inside the grape — will never lead to the creation of a fine statuette. When she left, a gentle, dewy breeze imbued with the scent of lavender had cooled the heat. I will confide to you, Masuda, that at that moment I could hear the clay calling out to my very soul. I flew to it on wings of sheer desire. It responded to me with relish. That statuette is hidden now. It is intended for that lady, and I shall give it to her as a gift, expressing my heartfelt thanks for her beauty, the kind from which you can unwrap a loveliness of a different type.”

Masuda’s eyes were downcast as she listened in silence, keeping her own desires suppressed. Sometimes she shuddered a little, other times she looked up at him to hide a tear that she could not control. When he finished, she stood up without saying a word, closed the door behind her, and went back downstairs. During the nighttime darkness she burst into tears.

The next day, when Najib and his master Hasun had left, she was obliged to tell Badia the story from the previous night. Her mistress listened with her entire body on fire. By the time Masuda had finished, Badia was bathed in sweat, her breathing was short, and she was practically having convulsions.

“What’s the matter, my lady?” Masuda asked.

“Nothing,” Badia said. “I need to have a bath.”

Badia dashed to the bathroom, poured water all over her sweat-slicked body, and started screaming. Her voice was hoarse, full of longing. As Masuda listened to her cries, she too was deeply troubled, although the feeling couldn’t be expressed in words.

In the old days, an Arab poet would flirt with a woman. His ghazal poems would be objects of pride for her, a celebration of her femininity, something she craved even while her family disapproved. They would pursue the poet and prevent the two of them from communicating with each other. They would even declare war on him; they would kill him or encourage others to do so. There was no precedent for a woman rejecting her poet-lover; indeed, she might’ve been the one taking initiative. The woman’s family was supposed to take charge if someone composed a poem about a woman of their tribe. Ghazal poems transformed a piece of clay into a statuette in celebration of beauty, the very thing that Najib the potter did when he revealed his inner emotion to the clay and exchanged secrets with it.

Did the girl named Sara not discover that very fact when she spotted a statuette that looked exactly like her at the pottery store? When she visited the store, Najib was arranging some of his creations on the shelves. Those statuettes would always attract the eye and give rise to hidden emotions. However, this girl Sara pretended not to know about such things — indeed, not to like them at all. Once Najib realized that, he stole a glance at her features and figure. For her part, she stood in the sunlight and allowed him to take a long look at her as she examined others’ pieces. Soon a nonverbal conversation between them transpired, before Najib addressed her politely: “Next time you’ll see something you like.”

“I’ll wait then,” she said. “Goodbye!”

Sara did not have to wait long. Just a few days later, a statuette that looked just like her, one that she felt expressed a distinct feminine feeling, vanished from the shelves. She acquired it at the price demanded by the merchant, then put it beside her bed and admired it often.

The stories kept coming, and Badia expected to listen to them every morning. If she didn’t have to sleep with her husband, she would certainly have listened to them before the rooster crowed, like Shahriyar in a womanly form. But in this case, the young potter was Shahrazad in a masculine guise, and Masuda was the go-between. The nighttime stories came in various shapes and sizes. Were they supposed to postpone the death of Najib the potter — or hasten it? Was Masuda telling them so as to relieve her own stress or to increase Badia’s? Did Masuda tell them to prove to Badia that she was closer to the storyteller, or as a way of concealing her own despair about him? Did she sense that her role merely involved conveying the story to the person for whom it was intended? Was this intended person just the story’s subject and the story itself a rose on the statuette’s body? Yet the primary topic was operating in a different universe, distracted or seemingly so. Afraid? Hesitant? Nonchalant? Whatever the case, it was Badia who was on fire; she was further enflamed every time she heard a story about the other women.

As long as he doesn’t take the initiative with me, she told herself, I shall do it with him. And let whatever happens happen! She believed that her own story should be recorded, or else she should move to act. She had never been aware of her own femininity for a single day, or of the woman hidden inside her. Her very existence was like nothingness. As her own body opened up to its potential, she had been buried in a marriage to a frigid and inadequate husband.

Her father had been a potter working for Hasun. One of the employer’s ovens had collapsed on top of him, and her father had burned to death in its ashes. Hasun had arrived to convey his condolences and had spotted her as a teenager, having known her previously as just a child. Only a few months went by before he came back and asked her mother for her hand in marriage, in exchange for support for the widowed woman and her four children, of which Badia was the oldest. Her mother gave her to him, and so he hurriedly divorced his fifth wife, claiming that she was barren, whereas he knew full well that it was not his wife’s fault but his own — he was the sterile one. Changing wives for him was just like changing clothes. So Badia arrived at the riad of an infertile man who was older than her own father. He constantly craved money, his only obsession. She had been handed over to him at the age of seventeen, and now she was twenty-three, a prisoner in the guise of a wife, married to a man thirty-six years older. Her husband was addicted to kif, hashish, and other vices that made his sweat and breath stink. He had nightmares. What time had wrought could not be put right. He was cold in his daily contacts, and foul to be near. So, here I am, she told herself, unable to sleep, lying awake in these days of torment. She was served in her own relentless fashion by an old maid who had no purpose in her life either, but simply handed Badia over at night to a senile old merchant as though consigning her to a grave of ashes. But here you are, with heart tremors and calls to desire. Your stories hit me like so many arrows and tongues of fire. Where should I turn, and what should I do? Badia wondered.

Meanwhile, Masuda had started smoking some of the kif she prepared for her master, stealing a little for her own enjoyment. She also took some hashish. Hasun was aware of this, but chose to ignore it. He was relieved that someone else was sharing in his habit. One time when she got stoned, she raised her voice in song.

For Badia’s part, she was having her own daydream — where she was naked in front of Najib. Isn’t this spectacular display enough, using all the eloquence of my body to make even the dullest stone excited? Badia had asked the dream potter. She watched him while he stared at his delicate fingers stained with clay. He did not look at her. Masuda’s singing blended with her own daydream, and deliberately interrupted them like a planted spy. She looked on as Masuda stripped naked in front of him and kept on singing. He peered over at Masuda, but not at her. Bring me a knife! Badia yelled. So I can cut off his fingers. No, instead I’m going to kill him, and her as well. At that point, Badia woke up to hear Masuda’s shrills reverberating through the riad.

Masuda started spending more time with him and devoting more attention to his stories. The whole thing became more complicated. Did Masuda tell her his stories to uncover Badia’s secrets or her own? Every morning her ringing laughter greeted Badia as she perfumed the sleeping quarters to get rid of the stench of her decrepit husband’s body.

“Why are you laughing, Masuda?”

“Because I’ve failed,” she replied.

“Failed?”

“Yes, failed in love,” Masuda said.

“Who do you love, Masuda?”

“The summer clouds, my lady.”

“Is that a riddle?” Badia questioned.

“The whole of life is a riddle,” Masuda said.

“What do you mean?”

“I want to roll around naked in the dirt,” Masuda said. “In the end, that’s what we revert to, so our bodies need to embrace it. Fresh and warm before they’re buried beneath it... cold and stiff.”

Badia said nothing. She noticed how tall the trees inside the riad were as they opened up to the warmth of the sun and the blue sky above; dead, yellowing leaves dropping from their branches into oblivion, leaving behind fresh ones, alive. She also watched sweet basil leaves being tossed into the oven of her husband, the pottery seller with his brittle bones and feelings. Inside her, the fire burned to ashes.

That year, the summer hung around with its different moods. Sometimes the sky was clear, other times cloudy. The atmosphere was hot and steamy. Even so, the window in Najib’s room was only open a tiny crack; it looked out at the riad’s courtyard, where Hasun and Badia used to spend their summer evenings. Not a word was ever spoken, and eventually the merchant’s eyelids would sag, and his whole body would slouch with them. He would go upstairs to the bedroom followed by his solitary wife. Then, the only thing to interrupt his sleep would be a coughing fit. Badia’s heart would remain on fire, and she had trouble falling asleep. Time will always synchronize with whatever is weighing on the soul and force it to continue, like carrying a heavy rock up to the mountaintop.

Recently, Masuda’s behavior had changed. She had told her mistress, frankly, that she was unhappy about being single. She was certainly aroused by Najib’s stories, but at the same time they distressed her, like a false pregnancy. A few months before, there had been a blond cat inside the riad; the cat had an overwhelming desire to mate during the spring, and had started a feverish meow, raising her voice and turning it into a kind of chant. The cat had wandered all around the riad with her tail up, rubbing against everything. Her meowing attracted the attention of a huge gray male cat; the gray cat stared with lustful eyes at the female from all the way up on the roof. The felines started consorting with each other, but one night the female cat slunk out of the riad and disappeared, never to return. Surprisingly, the male cat kept looking down from the roof, searching all over for his mate. He called, cajoled, and waited. He went away, came back, and called again, but there was still no sign of the female cat. One night, he leaped down from the roof to the uppermost story in the riad and looked through the balcony window. Masuda smiled at him, and he stayed where he was. When she went over to him, he stood still and gave her a cautious look, seeking affection. She stroked his warm fur and he relaxed a little; he snuggled down comfortably. She took him downstairs, and looked over the balcony. Hasun and Badia were in bed.

The cat went into her room, so she gave him something to eat and drink, stroked him, and hugged him to her chest once again. He purred contentedly and pushed his head into her underarm, sniffing the scent of hair, sweat, and insomnia that nestled there. When Masuda woke up at dawn the next day, she started looking for her nighttime visitor, but found no trace. She expected the cat to come back, but he didn’t. That one night became ingrained in her mind like a flash of lightning, leaving behind a painful memory.

With the cat came a desire on Masuda’s part: she wanted a man whose very fire would impregnate her. Najib, meanwhile, kept insisting that she simply listen to his stories at night and let her tell them the next day: “Listen to me, Masuda! This morning a lump of clay refused to respond to me; I wanted to knead it, but it stayed solid between my fingers. When I poured some water on it, it went soft and then expanded. I added some more clay, and it all went solid again. I told myself that anyone who cannot sense the clay’s sensitivities is no potter. So I listened to what this recalcitrant lump of clay actually wanted. So, Masuda, do you know what this lump of clay wanted?” Najib asked.

Masuda did not reply, she simply stared at him in amazement.

“It wanted some milk from a woman’s breast!” Najib said.

“What do you mean?”

“In order to submit and be shaped, it wanted some milk from a woman’s breast,” he explained.

“Have you found any?”

“Yes, there are lots of nursing mothers in the quarter.”

“Except in this household,” Masuda pointed out. “What did you do?”

“I approached an elderly woman and asked her to get me a few drops of a nursing mother’s milk. I told her it was a cure for a worker’s eye that had been pierced by a splinter.”

“So what happened?”

“The milk arrived, and I poured it over the clay. It immediately became fully malleable,” Najib told her. “It was like a truly beautiful woman suckling a truly beautiful baby.”

“So where is that statuette?”

“I’m keeping it for myself,” Najib said. “Moments of inspiration like that don’t happen all the time.”

Masuda stared at the potter, her eyes aflame, while he was distracted and still thinking about the statuette. Then, silently, she stood up and left. In the small hallway opposite his room, she paused and exposed her breasts to the distant stars, to the sultry breeze, to the mirage... “There’s no milk in these dangling breasts of mine!” she said aloud.

Slapping her thighs, she mumbled some unintelligible words and went downstairs again. By the bottom step she leaned her head against the wall, her body quivering, as she let out a hauntingly gruesome laugh mixed with tears.

The next morning, Badia got to hear about the clay that wanted a nursing mother’s milk. Screaming like a woman in mourning, she signaled to Masuda to stop. “I’m going to kill that wretch,” Badia growled, her eyes fixed on the potter’s window, “before he kills me!”

Going up to her bedroom, she closed the door and burst into tears.

Masuda followed her to her room and opened the door, prepared to get some answers. “What’s the point of crying?” she asked. “You can drown the entire house in tears, but not a single stone in the walls will pay me any attention!”

“So what?”

“I’ll plan something to put an end to this torture,” Masuda promised.

“Won’t that be risky?”

“What am I risking?” Masuda remarked. “A life that is already lost?”

So here was Badia, battling with her own noble self. That very same night, the first phase of the plan took place. Wearing a thin dress, she sat next to her husband. As was the case every night, he was stoned. She poured him some tea and caressed him.

“You seem to be in a good mood tonight,” Hasun said.

“When it’s this fresh, it opens up the soul.”

Her soft hand clutched his veined wrist and he surrendered himself to her. The scent of her ripe body overwhelmed him, and he inhaled the entire atmosphere; he felt sated.

“It’s as though you’ve never seen me before,” Badia said.

“I’m seeing you now as I want to see you.”

“Do you know what I want?” she asked him, stroking him and whispering in his ear.

“A gold bracelet?” he asked.

“No.”

“A ring or kaftan?”

“No.”

“So, what is it you want?”

“I want to dance for you.”

Another wave of intoxication enveloped the merchant’s head. She had arranged it all so that he would beg her for this prize.

“Please dance for me, Badia, please do,” he pleaded.

“Here, in the courtyard?”

“Yes, here in this wonderful atmosphere. Before I fall asleep in your arms.”

His speech was slurred, and his legs could hardly support him. Like a white cloud, the image of Badia’s body in her thin dress floated before Hasun’s eyes — coming close, then moving away. Her clothes revealed the spectacular details of her athletic body, and her dance was white-hot, only adding to his inner fire. The dance pulsated from every part of her body; there was no need for other rhythm. Her only goal was to be seen by the eyes of the one who inspired such feelings, not the sleepy eyes of a cracked seashell. The dancer was instinctively aware that other eyes were watching her from behind the window on the top floor, and through the crack in the door of the room next to the kitchen. Only someone with no emotions could fail to be drawn to such an exuberant display...

“Oh, I’m so tired,” Hasun mumbled.

That was the inert response of the feeble old man... but the same dance penetrated the heart of the young potter and fired up his very soul. The sensation moved to Najib’s fingers, which responded positively. He wasn’t afraid, hesitant, or nonchalant. What he needed now was a truly exceptional opportunity, one he had never encountered before, but which was certainly afire at that moment. He had a pressing urge to deal with clay right then.

Once the sleeping merchant started snoring loudly, satisfied with the nighttime performance, Badia slunk out and went to the room alongside their bedroom. Wrapping herself in a brown coat, she stood there for a moment, listening. She could hear cautious footsteps. Does anyone else hear them? she wondered. She looked out into the pitch darkness outside the room but couldn’t see anything. Even so, through the total silence she managed to hear the riad’s door being opened from the inside. The hand involved knew the bolts very well and closed it carefully. Could anyone else be opening the door at this time of night? Why was he leaving his room, going downstairs, departing? Was he running away from her? Running away after such penetration of the very depths of their souls?

The potter left the riad’s alley in Mawqif and headed for the workshop in Tabhirt, followed by a shadowy figure wrapped in a coat. The streets were deserted besides a few stray night creatures. The young potter was in a hurry, like an arrow shot from a bow. He felt a pain inside him, this burning need to work with the clay, and all the while the shadow was trailing him from a distance. When he entered the shop and turned on the lights, he spotted a lump of clay that seemed ready for kneading and shaping. He bent over it with all the enthusiasm of a lover. His soul was overflowing, his fingers were poised and ready, and the picture was still shining in his heart and imagination. Just as Badia’s body had been dancing a short while earlier, so now were his fingers dancing as they gently molded the body of clay. The statuette was gently stroked into shape, as though it were being formed spontaneously from his passion. One stroke and the basic features were in place; another stroke and the gesture was there; another and the pulse of movement was added; a series of concentrated, interlinked strokes and the statuette was finally ready, enveloped in its own halo of light. The potter was so happy that he burst into song in celebration of this heavenly presence, while the watching shadow sneaked a look through a crack in the door. The statuette did not look anything like its model, since the artist had been wary about his hidden passion being revealed. This was a statuette based on an imagined conception of love, keeping the real shape ambiguous while preserving the essence. Here was the symbol that embraced every conceivable aspect of symbols without revealing the inner secret.

With the approach of dawn the potter carried his new statuette — this symbol — to the oven for heating. He finally saw the person who’d been watching him.

“This statuette doesn’t look like me at all,” the shadow muttered. “So, it’s not for me. The wretch is still ignoring me in spite of the flame that I aroused.”

Underneath her coat, this relentless shadow was clutching the hilt of a dagger. The young potter had hardly emerged from the pottery’s threshold before the blade was thrust into his chest, aimed at his heart. His blood gushed out to moisten the new statuette, which he continued to clutch to himself in the fervor of his passion, as his life exerted itself fully in its confrontation with the finality of death. Then, everything collapsed and he crashed to the floor, the clay mixing with his freshly spilled blood. The shadow now slipped away, the bloody dagger concealed under the wrap. She disappeared into the gloom of the predawn morning.

Before the sun was even up the next morning, there were loud bangs on the merchant’s riad door. When he heard the news, he quickly left the house. There were two women in the household who bewailed Najib’s death in the most intense fashion. Rumors and speculation spread like wildfire: How could Najib the potter have been murdered? Was it a jealous lover for whom he had never made a statuette? Or was it a woman who had wanted him to make a statuette, and he had not done so? Or was it another craftsman who was envious of him? Or had Hasun hatched some plot against him, spiteful because of the attentions that his beautiful wife was paying to the young man? Was it this, or that, or something else?

On the very same day, both Badia and her servant Masuda vanished separately from the riad without any prearranged plan. Neither of them spoke to the other — or even knew where the other was going.

As the murdered man was laid to rest in the Bab el-Khemis Cemetery, inquiries had not yet identified the murderer or the location of the two women. The murderer’s shadow still managed to appear at the gravesite a few days after his burial, walking between the headstones until it reached his tombstone. Leaning over the grave, close to the heart of its owner, as it listened to the groans, the murderous shadow cried out: “Najib!”

“Yes?” he replied.

“Why are you groaning? Do you need anything?”

“Why did you kill me, Masuda?”

“Because I love you.”

“Does the lover kill their beloved?” he asked.

“If the lover is desperate, and the beloved has refused to make a statuette of her.”

“You treated me badly,” Najib snapped.

“It was no worse than watching you go to someone else,” Masuda snapped back.

“You were unkind, Masuda.”

“Forgive me, Najib. Death was the only way I could see of being joined with you.”

Walking toward the edge of the cemetery by Wadi Isil, she threw herself into the deep lake and disappeared into its depths, where she was to remain.

Summer was not yet over, and its steaming heat had not relented. Najib’s fingers no longer danced over the clay. And yet a woman of faded beauty kept searching for him. For days, no one knew where she had vanished, or from where she had emerged on that searing-hot noon, shoeless, her clothes in tatters, her body weak. She was clutching a statuette with bits broken off and her tangled hair cascaded like a waterfall. She stopped by the door of the pottery shop where the dead man’s fingers had danced over the clay, looked into its empty space, and called him by name. She laughed at first, and then she cried. She made the other workers cry as well, and passersby who gathered around her.

“It’s Badia,” some of them whispered to others. “Hasun’s wife. She’s gone crazy.”

That same evening, she was placed in a hospital for especially dangerous patients, even though the only people who believed that were the very ones who’d poisoned their own perceptions.

As though nothing had ever happened, Hasun had searched all over his house when the people in his riad had disappeared, and then changed his old bed for an even bigger one. Refilling his supply of kif and his hashish pipe, he got ready to remarry.

Translated from Arabic by Roger Allen

The Mummy in the Pasha’s House by Mohamed Achaari

Dar el-Basha

Patti sat in the garden of the house in Marrakech that she had bought ten years ago — her first home. She was listening with a genuine Sufi absorption to al-Sharqawi recount the story of the mummy in the pasha’s house.

Al-Sharqawi had begun with the moment the governor’s entourage, the police, the historic buildings inspectorate, and the procurator-general had all arrived at the dwairiya — a small house that contained a kitchen, storerooms, and servants quarters on one side, with the finer and more lavishly decorated Turkish baths, lounge, and other living spaces on the other. The house also contained a lounge for female companions, which was accessible by climbing an ebony staircase from the lounge. In this velveteen area of the dwairiya, the pasha had installed a plaster mosaic of blue, yellow, and green tiles that he had specially imported from Istanbul — his own Sulaymaniyya from the Ottoman capital. He would often brag about the mosaic, even though he knew nothing at all about that particular Ottoman palace — people living in the dwairiya even called the house the Sulaymaniyya, their belief being that the use of the title implied that some demon followers of King Solomon were to be found there, all subject to the pasha’s instructions. In the dead of night, when the inhabitants could hear the sound of the pasha’s retainers and soldiers being lashed by a leather whip, they would put their fingers in their ears and their knees would knock together in horror as they listened to what the fiends were doing to the victims locked inside the vaults housed below the stables.

Al-Sharqawi confirmed that the group of delegators headed straight for the crumbling wall in the lounge, the one being rebuilt by craftsmen, since more mosaic pieces from Turkey were being imported. Inside the hole — which made itself evident as soon as they started removing the debris from the wall — was a coffin made of fine wood. The senior craftsman announced that a perfectly mummified body, still wrapped in its shroud, was inside the coffin. When the foreman asked that the coffin be brought out of the wall and opened in front of everyone so that a report could be filed on the mummy’s discovery, the workers refused to do so.

The foreman had then been forced to open his shirt, displaying to the members of the delegation the painful wounds he had suffered after opening the coffin himself. Through his sobs, he insisted that the gaping wounds on his body were the result of a savage beating, although there had been no one there to hurt him and no whip to administer such damage.

The foreman had been compelled to bring in helpers from the department of national restoration to undertake the task of transferring the coffin. They moved the casket from the wall to the police vehicle, preparing to show it to the archaeological experts whom the government had brought in from France and Egypt — these experts would examine the mummy and probe its shriveled entrails.

The next day, a helicopter transferred the foreman to a university hospital in Rabat, where they would examine the severe wounds caused by the inexplicable beating, which apparently had no human source.

Patti loved al-Sharqawi’s stories. Even though he didn’t have a regular group of listeners in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, to whom he could hold out his skullcap to receive donations after every tall tale, Patti still considered him to be the quintessential modern storyteller. She believed he was someone who deserved all sorts of gifts and recognition. Patti usually gave him something when he came to narrate one of his wonderful stories — stories that remained fresh from his time at the Mamounia Hotel, where al-Sharqawi had been a doorman ever since the seventies.

At first, al-Sharqawi had latched onto the legendary tales of the hotel itself, with its world-famous visitors: Churchill, Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, and de Gaulle (in his case, for just a single night, and they had to make a special bed that was long enough for him). Soon enough, al-Sharqawi had complete command of all the secret worlds inside the hotel — scandals, spectacular soirées, and many love affairs. From all these intimate threads he would weave his stories; he always had a role to play in their construction, even if that required him to skip or blend time frames or to mix facts with nebulous claims. Then he organized a network of hotel workers, suppliers, and taxi drivers to provide him with news about the city as a whole — sporting events, lavish weddings, Don Quixote — like confrontations, newly opened restaurants, and swank apartments. News of prostitutes, demons, gay people, sex clubs, hideaways for disobedient minors, and pornographic shoots were also welcome. He would fuse all these true details together and end up with tales about the city as it really was, and as it might be — cloaked in legend.

He had no qualms about raising the dead and dispatching them to the city’s markets and quarters; his sole purpose in doing so being that he got to meet them himself and put them willingly or unwillingly into his stories, which he wove together using dreams and illusions. Patti loved it all, and her weary eyes would tear up — her whole body would laugh with gusto. She told herself that the best thing she could do in her own life was to place her destiny into the hands of this magician. He could then incorporate it into the city’s very soil, till it became part of its reddish clay or the dark green of its palm trees. After all, the best way to be integrated into a recalcitrant city is through wonderful tales.

There was no one else in the world that al-Sharqawi loved as much as Patti. He loved her more than his own mother, who it was said gave birth to him twenty months after his father’s death. With the innate intelligence of an embryo born into sorrow, he’d sensed that life in the dusky old city without a father would be unbearable. So he’d decided to remain inside his mother’s womb till he almost turned into a piece of stone.

He didn’t love the old American woman just because she was so generous with him (she had even been thinking about buying him a house in one of the Imran Company quarters), but also because she listened to his tales so meekly. When he finished a story, she’d shed a few tears before her entire face lit up with a burst of laughter. Once in a while, he would think about the charitable acts that this good American woman did for the street kids — and she wasn’t even a Muslim. Patti also took time to teach the suburban girls. This woman has to be a Muslim, he would tell himself. If it were up to me, I would make her head of the Scientific Council of Marrakech and its precincts. Patti was unmarried, but with her good heart, she was the one who paid attention to the ancient pulpit at the Koutoubia Mosque. It was originally made in Cordoba in the eleventh century, then was transported in pieces over the sea and by camel from the north of Morocco to the south. For centuries, the Friday sermon would ring out from its iconic tower, but then, inevitably, its engraved woodwork began to fall apart. It was pushed to a remote corner of the Koutoubia Mosque, with a disconsolate jurist seated alongside it. He chipped off small bits of tracery and claimed that they were effective treatments for people who had migraines and toothaches. Patti was the one who saved it from turning into a false sort of aspirin.

She, along with the Metropolitan Museum, made a very generous donation which saved the woodwork and gave it new life — as a one-of-a-kind example of Islamic art. So, here was this sensitive lady, who continued to lay a place at her table for her life companion, who had died a quarter of a century ago. She always included his favorite meat and a glass of his most-cherished wine. She would ask, with a smile, if he was going to eat his lunch, because these days he ate hardly anything at all! Al-Sharqawi loved all this — and Patti too. And he loved Marrakech, the city that gave its inhabitants such wonderful stories and provided for its citizens, who were so sincere.

Al-Sharqawi could not believe the stories about the mummy. If it were one of the pasha’s enemies, as the gossips claimed, or one of his soldiers, or even a runaway slave, then the pasha would certainly not have gone to all the trouble of wrapping up the corpse, embalming it, and putting it in a coffin of stained wood — just to make sure that worms didn’t eat away at it inside the wall. The pasha would simply have done what Moulay Ismail did when constructing his capital city of Meknes: bury the exhausted construction workers alive inside the building itself to make them an intrinsic part of the structure’s defenses.

It was basically impossible to fabricate a mummy out of anything but the distant past, and the whole idea of murder was ridiculous. That at least was the conviction that led al-Sharqawi to make use of every means possible to get information from the research team that was examining the mummy. He even abandoned his post at the Mamounia for the first time since he had started working there to hurry over to Patti’s place in order to tell her the story of the mummy.

Patti was still in the Jacuzzi, bubbling water soothing her limbs. She immediately realized that al-Sharqawi’s early arrival implied that some urgent matter had come up, something that could not be delayed for a single instant. Much to the astonishment of her servants, she gave instructions that al-Sharqawi was to be admitted without delay. She was completely naked as she welcomed him, her aging body sagging somewhat. She paid no attention whatsoever to his total shock.

Al-Sharqawi saw that she was a woman. Yes, a woman indeed — a woman who’d been murdered by a severe blow to the base of her skull which had occurred last century — or, in other words, almost sixty-five years ago. That was all there was to it. “This is the way it has to be,” said Patti, with a devilish glint in her eye.

Al-Sharqawi went back to his post — doorman to the world, as he called it. He kept thinking about her naked body, and her flashing eyes. He told himself that when the eyes of an eighty-six-year-old woman gleamed in that way, she could still be a veritable cauldron of desire. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel any kind of revulsion toward the aged, foreign female guests at the Mamounia Hotel. He could remember well the way that they would regularly grab handsome young men by the arm, play coy, and then dance as though they had just emerged from the grave.

When Patti sat down to breakfast, she was still thinking of the news that she had heard. It disconcerted her. Her mind kept moving between her table in the present and another one far away — the one where she’d sat with her friend Anais in Paris back in March of 1938. The two girls had decided to go to Marrakech after a crazy week that had started when Patti opened an old newspaper and found a picture of the pasha riding horseback on the first page. He was wearing a white suit and staring up at the sky. He looked like a prince who had just sprung out of a fairy tale.

Patti told Anais that she was going to marry that pasha. She knew that he gazed at her in his magical way in order to seduce her. Anais had done her best to convince her friend that his violent passion was only romantic extravagance; after a noisy night in Paris it would dissolve. Still, Patti couldn’t stop herself from running all over Paris searching for details about the pasha and his life. Eventually, she learned all there was to know about his palace, his harem, his campaigns, his wealth, the nights he spent in Paris, and his piercing magical gaze, something that made him as much in vogue in Paris as jazz and cubism. No one could claim to be a man of the world if he had not sat down with the pasha at least once. Patti had gathered all these precious details, then persuaded Anais to accompany her on the scary journey into the African jungle, where the magic commander still hung severed heads on city gates, shot tigers and lions in the bush, and returned from combat to his harem of beauties, all of whom competed for his virile powers.

That evening, al-Sharqawi returned to Patti’s home, eager to see what effect his news had on her and whether his eyes had affected her when he’d encountered her in the Jacuzzi. He found her relaxed, her complexion blooming with total self-satisfaction, but the cause remained a mystery. All of which encouraged him to open his story box: The mummy was a woman whose identity remained unknown. Whoever entombed her had put a message into the coffin, which consisted of a gold necklace with a cross at its center.

At this point, Patti jumped up. She would have said that she knew the woman in question and the necklace too, had al-Sharqawi not been too distracted with telling his story: “I know the lady in question... the youngest of three sisters brought from Syria by the pasha. She played the lute, and her two sisters danced. The pasha adored the lute-playing sister and took her with him to Paris, escorted her to a soirée at the Lido, and dressed her in clothes purchased at the finest department stores. In a single week he decked her toes in ten spectacular rings from the very finest jeweler in Paris. But then she vanished, as though the earth had simply swallowed her up. No one dared ask about her, regardless of whether the pasha was present or not. The middle sister was still alive and, with the pasha’s permission, married a merchant from the old quarter. She gave birth to the most famous singer in the city. These days, she stands by Bab ’Amala, yelling at the top of her lungs that the authorities need to hand over her sister’s body, so she can be buried and her soul laid to rest, instead of hovering between heaven and earth.”

“What about you?” Patti asked, a sudden frown across her face. “What do you think?”

“Me?” al-Sharqawi replied. “I don’t believe a single word of it!”

When Patti and Anais reached Marrakech in March of 1938, the city was bathed in an enchanting light; palm trees and orange all blended together. The city’s aromas were steeped in spices, coupled with roses and lemon blossoms, which made everyone glide as if their feet weren’t even touching the ground. It all imbued the city with an indefinable allure, one that made people fall in love in a heartbeat. So Patti didn’t even wait until she reached the pasha’s house before revealing her heart to him, offering it up in sacrifice to the sheer magic of the place. But things went awry, as they sometimes do.

They had arrived at the pasha’s reception hall just before sunset, attended by his personal portrait artist. The entire courtyard was teeming with European guests, a few army generals, administrative officials, and grandees; the whole meeting resembled a welcoming reception like the art openings in Paris. The salons surrounding the courtyard hosted small groups of the pasha’s most important guests. In one of the salons was the pasha himself, looking well dressed as always, with a determined glint in his eyes. Patti and Anais had moved forward to greet him on a signal from the painter; the pasha had beamed a smile and held Patti’s hand in his own, while Anais finished introducing her friend. Anais then translated Patti’s description of her work to the pasha, telling him that Patti collected European paintings for museums in New York. With that, he had grabbed ahold of Anais’s hand.

“So young?” the pasha had asked Patti.

Patti could not reply. She had stared in amazement at the pasha’s figure, as he bent over slightly to put his arm around Anais and took her on a tour of the palace — beginning with the huge cedarwood door at the entrance, then turning right toward the doors made of inlaid wood, with carved arches painted in natural extracts of saffron and anemone. Once in a while, the pasha pointed out the gilded ceilings and the way that their leafy patterns matched the geometrical shapes on the walls. He paused in front of the lions’ claws decorating the columns and the patterned mosaics that covered them. He then brought her back to the reception hall with its own splendid columns, pointing out details concealed by the wonderful structure — wickerwork, clusters, and miniature crowns, all exquisitely proportioned. From the hall, he took her out to the Andalusian courtyard, the harem rooms, and his study. Eventually, the couple reached the private quarters, where they passed through a huge engraved doorway. The pasha escorted Anais inside and two guards closed the doors behind them.

Patti and the pasha’s painter were left to wander around the palace until someone arrived to take them back to the hotel. Patti then spent an entire month in her room doing nothing but crying, eating, and sleeping. She didn’t see either the pasha or Anais again. The painter came to visit her every day. He spent long hours with her, painting her and talking to her about the pasha. As he began to seduce her, she started paying closer attention to him. Every time he tried to get her in bed, she told him to bring Anais first, and then he could have what he wanted. In response, he told her that it would be much easier to bring her a lion in a hemp sack.

And then, one steaming hot day, Patti suddenly decided to go back to Paris — and then to New York. Later, she married a young man whom she had gone out on innocent strolls with. They spent many years together, traveling to remote spots to acquire rare works of art. Patti’s only search was for those obscure feelings that had overwhelmed her on the day after the mirage. Through this marriage founded on profound mutual understanding and an equally profound misunderstanding, the couple shared the experience of enormous wealth, and collusion unaffected by the ebb and flow of life. She hadn’t told her husband about her emotional collapse in the past, until the very last day of his life, when he asked her why she always cried when looking at the ugly painting she had kept — the one that had been made by the pasha’s painter. She told him that she was actually crying for Anais, whom the pasha had snatched away from her. When her husband did not seem completely convinced, she told him the whole story.

When al-Sharqawi told Patti about the lute player from Syria, he sensed that something bad had happened. She looked flustered and angry, and terminated their session with an insulting curtness. To get rid of this bad feeling, he headed straight for the café where his closest friends would spend many hours sipping mint tea and indulging in the kind of laughter known in Marrakech as tamshkhir. They would laugh at each other, at the city that sold itself to foreigners, at those same foreigners who sold themselves to the city, at the disputes over palm trees being destroyed by apartments, at other apartments where intimate soirées took place, at Tangier — and at laughter itself; laughter being the most stubbornly historical feature of Marrakech.

Al-Sharqawi reached the café, where everyone was talking about the mummy. One of his friends asked him in a disgusted tone what all the fuss was about over some neglected bones in a wall. Al-Sharqawi told him that they were not just bones, but rather a long-forgotten crime.

“All of Marrakech is full of dead men’s bones,” his other friend said. “Just dig under your own pillow and you’re sure to find a forgotten skull, or one of the bodies that the pasha used to hang in the Old Medina’s alleyways—”

“Why dig under his pillow?” another man interrupted. “The only skull under the pillow is his own.”

“Whose?” al-Sharqawi asked.

“The person in front of you,” the man answered.

Al-Sharqawi turned to his friend. “Why do you put your head under the pillow?”

“I’m scared! All the people who were beheaded come out in the dead of night,” his friend roared, his disgust turning into hysteria. “They wander around the neighborhoods and houses while people are asleep. Bodies are looking for heads, and heads for bodies!”

“That’s all from smoking bad grass,” al-Sharqawi assured him. “You’re mixing hash with Marlboros, and it’s affecting your minuscule brain so that you’re scared to death. That’s what happens to people who abandon the old ways of clipping kif they inherited from fathers and grandfathers, and start using the kinds Christians use.”

Al-Sharqawi told them all about the woman whose body had been found in the wall, and that caused a general commotion.

“Which woman? God forgive us, and you! Were they a woman’s bones, a man’s, or a gremlin’s?” his hysterical friend inquired.

“Religious scholars will grab everything. Root and branch,” al-Sharqawi replied dismissively, “while some stray remains are involved.”

“But we’re only prepared to acknowledge flesh. So go ahead, esteemed sir, and put some flesh on those bones!”

But al-Sharqawi insisted that there was a murder victim involved. He wanted the whole of Marrakech to know of this event, and to be aware that a crime had been committed one year, or maybe even sixty years, earlier.

“It doesn’t matter,” his other friend said.

“Yes, it does matter!” al-Sharqawi protested. “Sixty years ago the pasha and others were killing people just as easily as we’re drinking tea here. Those who kill suffer an incredible, never-ending punishment for it.”

Al-Sharqawi experienced for himself the extent of people’s involvement in his stories, as he left his house the next day and walked for over an hour deliberately through the alleys and markets of the Old Medina. Two people asked him with a snide tone what God had done with the bones in the wall. He corrected them first, by saying that it was not just a few decaying bones in the wall, but rather a complete mummy, and that on its neck was a gold necklace with a cross. Secondly, he called them heretics, and told them that Marrakech had its own mighty pharaoh whose dead were embalmed. “If he had indeed survived,” he explained, “maybe you wouldn’t be so stupid and arrogant, like the mustaches on vain and ignorant people!” And with that he’d continued on his way, the notion sticking in his throat that a significant transformation had taken place in the city.

The story no longer fired people up; it had come and gone in the flash of an eye. It was almost as though some kind of curse had afflicted people, turning Jemaa el-Fnaa Square from Shahrazad into a huge kitchen reeking of garlic and chopped onions. The only thing that managed to clear the block in his throat were the greetings he received by the door of the Mamounia Hotel — from taxi drivers to buses of tourists to travel-agent employees. When they asked him about the latest developments in the case, he emerged from his gloomy mood and started rebuilding the story with all the enthusiasm of someone who would not be deterred from finding a suitable conclusion — regardless of whatever may have actually happened.

His real task was to bring all possibilities into the story, however likely or remote they may have been. Even the authorities had declared the matter closed. Not only that, but the reports written by the archaeological experts, the official medical doctor, and the head of the Sixth District described in detail what happened and how. But he just couldn’t find any link to connect the skeleton they’d discovered to the Syrian lute player who, according to her older sister, had disappeared sixty years ago. That detail was particularly significant, since a new report had reached the procurator-general. The report claimed that a French woman named Anais had also disappeared about sixty years ago, along with a necklace with a cross that she used to fiddle with while sleeping naked in the pasha’s arms.

When Patti arrived in Marrakech some forty-five years after her first tragic visit, her intention was to use the city to salve the wound that was infecting her life. For some years, she had developed the habit of constructing a blooming garden in her memory, one where leafy trees would brush against each other and no disruptive plants would grow between them. She always reckoned that the nasty things that happened to people stayed in the places where they first occurred, but also remained in their memories the very same way. The only way to get them out was to come to terms with the places that served as their original stage, thus erasing the painful traces that are associated with them.

Patti used to recall all the moments in her life that were linked to specific places. Whenever she remembered Marrakech, the sting of that evening when the pasha took Anais into his private quarters would hurt her — and of course she had never seen either of them again. So she came back to Marrakech right after a serious heart operation, believing that a profound reconciliation with Marrakech would make all the places in her life seem like the blossoming cloud that hovered over her as she emerged from the anesthesia.

She came back to Marrakech in the midnineties, and all she could remember of the city was the huge gateway to the pasha’s palace and the painted door that was shut in her face. She could still see herself leaving on the desolate train to Casablanca Airport, feeling tense and very upset. It wasn’t because of what had happened, but rather because the pasha’s painter had insisted on giving her a painting with no artistic value. In spite of that, she had no choice but to add it to the weight of her baggage, as though she were running in the opposite direction of her dreams.

So here she was on her second visit, as her every sense soaked up the light and pungent aroma of the city. She came to realize that mankind was the tree that concealed the city’s own forest. When that handsome warrior led her to Marrakech, he was also the reason she didn’t get to see much of the city. From that moment, he didn’t constitute a wound, but instead became a distant tale, one that was almost laughable. She would devote herself to her own narrative, whether the occasion demanded it or not, if only to dazzle her companions with this romantic madness that once swept through her life like a heavy rainstorm, only to swiftly open up a space for serenity that no sense of loss could spoil.

Patti bought a number of mansions in the golf course section of Marrakech, far from the alleys of the Old Medina and all their sad mystery. Her practical instincts made her feel like she could make large profits from this Marrakech dream — a dream that offered an entire mountain covered with snow, and a desert where mirages and expansive gardens bloomed as though recently arrived from Andalusia.

From the very first day, she turned down offers from agents who were used to selling riads in the city to foreigners who imagined that The Thousand and One Nights would emerge from cracks in the mosaic. Patti termed this hankering after Old Medina riads the returning colonialist syndrome: a desire to rewrite the history of colonial occupation on the basis of touristic goodwill. But having no historical hang-ups, Patti bought five mansions linking the golf course area to the pools, palm orchards, and orange groves. She started selling her rich New York friends magical stays, without sex, soirées, or tacky folkloric performances.

During Patti’s prolonged stay in Marrakech, she herself was subjected to trickery, rip-offs, and fraud of a wide variety, but she didn’t nurse any lingering resentment about it. Sometimes she would even let herself succumb to the tricksters’ maneuvers as a kind of entertainment, regarding it all as part of the spice involved in risky ventures. When she finished repairing the pulpit in the Koutoubia and saw it on display in the Badia Palace, she had a sudden inspiration, one that occurred to her fully formed: she would donate a museum to Marrakech — where all the works of art that she had collected from China, India, South Asia, Mongolia, Turkmenistan, Bukhara, Tashkent, and elsewhere around the Orient would be put on display. This international museum seemed to be the sweetest possible gift that she could give to this city, which had been known to inspire thrilling journeys of its own.

A Moroccan government bureaucrat had suggested to Patti that she might help finance the restoration of the pasha’s palace, which could then be the site of her amazing new museum. It gave her a jolt, and she felt as though she were hovering between the earth and the sky. For the first time since her return to Marrakech, she went to take a look at the pasha’s palace. Once again, she was transported right back to that hotel room from forty-five years ago, and the tears fell. She cried because, after everything that happened, she could envision a beautiful fate being woven for her by the pasha’s own hand, like a legendary warrior who bitterly regretted the way he had treated her.

With the discovery of the remains, the restoration work on the pasha’s palace had stopped. The remains weren’t particularly significant in and of themselves, but the story made them appear that way. Since the authorities were more worried about the story than they were about the raw materials involved, the entire restoration workshop was closed down. The young engineer who was supervising the project began to imagine all sorts of provocative ideas that poisoned Patti’s life. “An interest in anything linked to the pasha,” the engineer suggested, “would get on the authorities’ nerves.” They were worried about the pasha’s reputation, which was that of a vicious southern commander who had been an agent of French imperialism, a coconspirator against the crown, and a terrible governor — whose name alone was terrifying enough to make people wet themselves.

Using a subtle strategy, the authorities had set about eradicating the pasha piece by piece. They started by sequestering all the properties he had appropriated when he had a free hand over the country and its population, and ended by erasing every vestige of his era. When the pasha welcomed European grandees to his eighteen-hole golf course — Winston Churchill being chief among them — he would drink champagne, organize soirées at the lido, and hold parties in the palace hall, at which Farid al-Atrash would sing, Samia Gamal would belly dance, and Egyptian and Syrian poets would praise him. All this happened in the thirties and forties of the last century — it was also a period when most Moroccans could barely afford to buy the most meager clothes.

When viewed through the prism of the new museum permitting the pasha to return gracefully to the city, in the form of a new artistic foundation that would once again place him on the throne in Marrakech, then the entire project became an aggressive attack on the country’s symbolic security.

When Patti heard these astute observations from the engineer, she had a sudden panic attack. She envisioned the very thing that had happened to Anais happening to her as well. But al-Sharqawi soon arrived to calm her with his daily stock of stories about the city, about the film stars staying at the Mamounia, about the pasha’s restaurant and dance hall, an international chain which obviously had no connection with their particular pasha, and about riads in the Old Medina.

“Do you love the pasha?” Patti asked al-Sharqawi as he was about to leave.

“It’s you that I love,” he replied sincerely, with a sparkle in his eye.

She guffawed loudly, and that encouraged him to go on: “You’re more remarkable than all the pashas in the world!”

Patti said she knew nothing about the pasha. She had received a number of books about him from the engineer, but had not opened even one of them. Ever since the very first time she had glimpsed him in the newspaper, she had always regarded him as a dream beyond reach.

Al-Sharqawi liked toying with this idea in particular, claiming that the pasha would emerge and visit people in their dreams. Getting out of bed, people would wander around the city’s alleyways until they passed by his silent palace. They would come to realize that he was no longer to be found, since he had died in the midfifties; all that remained was the terror that could bend people’s backs, and laughter that could make people cry.

“The pasha used to live for the love of women,” al-Sharqawi remarked. “Everything else was a swamp of illusions. He had two wives from Turkey: one was from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and the other was the daughter of al-Maqqari, the Ottoman grand vizier. When his brother died, he already had ninety-six women in his harem, and he simply added another twenty-four that he expropriated from his brother’s harem.

“He had his own hunters in Paris, Tangier, and Marrakech,” al-Sharqawi continued, “who would supply his bed with beautiful female tourists and other companions. He used to give them valuable jewels and rolls of silk. In addition to all this, he had European lovers, among them the wives of prominent diplomats who would spend days and nights in his palace. The diplomats all knew, but they received the most incredible gifts in recompense. There were so many births, both known and unknown, that hardly a day went by without a baby being seen who looked just like him. Both the elite and general populace thought the pasha was a father to enough children to fill an entire city. In every case, people looked at the child’s features and saw the pasha’s likeness. So, my dear lady, this is the man you dreamed of marrying. Had you done so, today you would be the most miserable woman in the entire world.”

“But I still have the dream, even though I didn’t win the pasha’s heart!” Patti said with a laugh.

Not even a week went by after the discovery of the remains before amazing things started to happen across town. They all emerged from stories told by al-Sharqawi. He insisted that they were fresh and came from sources whose veracity could not be doubted.

The story of the savage beating with no known assailant had now extended, and had claimed some new victims among the archaeologists and local authorities. Then the mummy escaped, and people started to see the dead corpse roaming the pasha’s palace, still wrapped in its shroud, by Bab Doukkala. The mummy vanished for a while then reappeared by the Telouet Kasbah. One of the restoration workers saw it playing golf without a club or ball at the course where dirt and dead trees were piled up. Patti and al-Sharqawi saw it in the Jacuzzi, warming its decrepit bones. Each time the rumors initially amazed people, but before long, popular enthusiasm elevated them to a level of unadulterated truth.

As part of this general fever, al-Sharqawi grew moody and unpredictable, slamming doors at the Mamounia Hotel right in the face of visiting tourists, especially after people demanded to hear some of his amazing stories. These feelings grew more pronounced when Marrakech started preparing for the crowning of Jemaa el-Fnaa as a World Heritage Site. For many years, that square had been his square. As night fell, he would establish his circle of listeners, and they would grow and grow till they became a swarm of bees buzzing around his tales. At night’s end, he would send them all away. But what happened had happened, and he was no longer who he had been, and neither was the square itself.

He used to recite from The Thousand and One Nights, from the sagas of Abu Zayd al-Hilali, Antarah Ibn Shaddad, and Sayf Ibn Dhi-Yazan; about the tales of the jinn, sorcerers, and also pious men of God. Then, a nasty worm made its way into his little mind and urged him to start including contemporary tales into his evening sessions. He discovered that the pasha was a very dynamic subject, one that the people of Marrakech listened to carefully. They were secret stories that had never seen the light of day:

The pasha, alone at night in his palace, walking around his bed, using sweeping arm gestures to dispel the sounds of legions of people fleeing his fighters as they advanced in the High Atlas, while being fired at by a 77mm Krupp gun, the only one of its kind in the entire kingdom — the one that Hasan the First had given to al-Madani al-Klawi, so that he could exert complete control over the south, as far as the edges of the Sahara.

Then there’s the pasha, left on his own and scared out of his wits in his dark room, as he goes through his daily ritual of experiencing visions of precisely the same kind of terror that people felt when thinking about his own tyrannical behavior. There would be a grisly hour of panic, weeping, and groveling as he imagined his brother al-Madani coming through a crack in the door, even though he was dead, and yelling at him: “You’re no use to anyone! France is stronger than you are and so is the tribe! The only thing bigger than you is what’s between your legs!”

The pasha would listen, as his brother spoke to the French general: “It’s just a dagger. I’ll stab him and then put it back in its scabbard.”

The pasha would prostrate himself at al-Madani’s feet and beg him to let him have just a little bit of his cunning, so he could feel something other than raw fear.

The pasha used to dress the Syrian lute player in ten jewels, one for each toe. He would ask her to dance on his chest like Samia Gamal, as though she were dancing in a demon’s palm.

The pasha frothed at the mouth in rage because the caid, Hmmu, would put on a big show of opposing the French while he was actually biding his time, never missing an opportunity to show his contempt for the pasha as an agent of colonialism.

The pasha had dreams of liberating the Telouet Kasbah from the clutches of his brother and nasty brother-in-law who stuck in his craw.

The pasha’s enormous harem consisted of Egyptian and Syrian dancers, Turkish lute players, and Chinese masseuses.

Then the pasha was involved in a parade that he’d organized to welcome Theodore Staigh, Lyautey’s deputy, with the aim of providing proof that the deputy’s predecessors had been right about the pasha, and also to convince the people that the presence of France in this difficult country was something to which he was personally committed, no matter the cost. Up to that point, it had already cost France fifteen thousand deaths, while the number of Moroccan souls lost was 400,000.

Al-Sharqawi was convinced that the pasha was one of Marrakech’s greatest miracles. He spared nothing in providing details of the huge parade, one in which Hmmu played a leading role in order to scare the newly arrived official, while the pasha’s goal was to impress him. He described the way the procession set out from Marrakech toward Mount Tichka, amid crowds of tribesmen who lined both sides of the road of melted ice. They were ready at any moment to pick up and carry the cars in the official procession across the valleys and muddy roadways. Once the French delegation reached the Tichka crossing, they found white goat-hair tents set up to receive them. Thousands of horsemen surrounded them, firing dozens of continuous shots under instructions from the pasha, as a way of greeting the newly arrived French official. The 200,000 shots fired left a cloud of smoke that lingered in the Tichka sky for a considerable time.

Al-Sharqawi used to bind the people listening to him to what he referred to as the new eternity, and yet the level of fear associated with the pasha’s name led people to ask themselves whether the authorities supported his remarkable tale.

Then one evening the authorities arrived and grabbed al-Sharqawi from the middle of his circle. For several months, he was gone. When he finally came back to Marrakech, he was a broken man — and once again the doorman at the Mamounia Hotel.

On the very first day back at his job, a shy passerby approached and asked, “Wasn’t it the pasha who killed Hmmu so the entire scenario with the French could be cleaned up?”

“Yes,” al-Sharqawi replied. “He’s the one who killed him. There’s no doubt about that. But it had nothing to do with the French. He wanted to marry Halima, the caid’s wife, and get ahold of Hmmu’s harem, which included the gorgeous Mina, al-Haddad’s daughter!”

Before the passerby moved on, al-Sharqawi stopped him. “Make very sure,” he cautioned the man, “that you don’t tell that to any other human being!”

Other stories later took over and replaced the tale of the mummy. But Marrakech never forgot stories, even though it may have pretended to do so. It left them burning in the ashes, but only in order to bring them out again at the right moment, to use them to provide warmth on chilly nights.

Work began again on the restoration of the pasha’s palace and people went back to the old stories; and, indeed, the old stories returned to the old square.

Nobody paused when Patti died. She had gone back to New York to supervise the transfer of her museum collection to Marrakech, when her heart had stopped. Al-Sharqawi shed only two tears — one for her, and the other for the apartment that she had not lived in till it was too late!

No one in Marrakech thought that Jemaa el-Fnaa would ever revert back to the days of old — the square where people used to gather around performers and storytellers, in clusters or alone, spinning in a circle around flute and cymbal players, magicians, and fortune-tellers. UNESCO did designate the square a nonmaterial World Heritage Site, but it was brought back to life because people liked to blend the serious and frivolous. Marrakech people liked to play jokes: they put harmless snakes around tourists’ necks, hid fortune-tellers under Coca-Cola umbrellas, and performed wild dances every time Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, or Rampling walked by. They were now doing things they had never done before — leaving behind the old atmosphere of turmoil and perdition and instead surrendering its spirit to globalization. So here they were, stuttering their way through disjointed tales, trying to mix accounts of Antar, the pre-Islamic poet-hero, with the movie Cotton Club — all to please UNESCO. No one had the slightest desire to sit in a dreary circle and listen to these phony narratives, of course, because any storyteller had a thousand more interesting tales crowding inside their head, which could turn into a river of laughter at any moment.

Marrakech was a truly magical city, painted by great foreigners, with rich people both old and new. However, with nightfall, the city opened its ten gates to the simple folk of the Amazigh and Hauz, to the Rehemna Bedouin and desert nomads, so that it could be reborn every day.

Jemaa el-Fnaa was a square that slept alongside its food carts. Then came the winter, when it woke up to notice the circles that had come back and clustered around experts. In a distant corner of the square, people were amazed to discover a circle they recognized, just as they did its convener, with his Meccan-style turban and camel-hair burnoose. Nothing had changed except that al-Sharqawi was no longer telling stories to an eager audience. They were there merely because of the nice lamp that the government had given him.

He was telling the story of the British girl who was a friend of the pasha, the one who used to play golf and ride horses with him. She sat down with him for hours, chatting about music, horses, women, violence, and fear. Every time the conversation became more serious, she would disappear. He desired her without touching her. This all-powerful pasha who could seize the entire world by force found himself overcome by a powerful feeling of timidity every time he wanted to touch her. This girl would be intoxicated in his presence and turn into a ruthless prison guard, one who was enraptured by his stories. She listened modestly while he unloaded all his fears and sorrows and confessed to her what he used to do to himself during his daily encounters with terror in his dark quarters. The pasha — who’d been thrilled when the Krupp gun destroyed the tribesmen’s bodies — almost prostrated himself when faced by her smile. He admitted to her how much hatred possessed him when he remembered his brother and the subtle way he could entrance people. Whenever he remembered Hmmu he would stare at her features and come to the inevitable conclusion that the English would make excellent colonialists, much nicer than the French. The British girl would blush modestly at his flirtatious efforts. The pasha drank in the sudden blush on her cheeks. But he was still unable to reach out and touch her. At this point, the pasha had bedded over two hundred women. He couldn’t even remember the features of some of them, but here was this British woman whose face had captivated him — yet he couldn’t make love to her in his bed. She spent all her time with him, and then left him wandering around his huge harem in search of someone who resembled her. Eventually he would collapse in bed with no heart. She traveled and returned. While she traveled, the pasha would become sick and go to Telouet to immerse himself in the rigors of the ascetic life in the mountains. With cloudy eyes, he observed what his successor and rival was doing with hundreds of prisoners who were crammed into cells and tethered in chains. They had all lost their minds, hearing, and sight. Some had died in his custody and fallen to pieces, with no one even aware.

In Telouet, the pasha watched the horses and fighters, and tried to read into Hmmu’s movements for signs of a secret conspiracy. Returning to Marrakech, he tried to come up with a way of removing this thorn from his foot and that of France as well. He was consumed by a sense of frustration at what was happening to him in general, and more specifically with the British girl — not to mention this foul caid who had managed to build his tiny kingdom using iron and fire. He may have been pretending to stand up to the foreigners, but all he got was a reputation as a double agent!

When the girl returned to the pasha’s palace, a set of enigmatic candles were lit inside him. He spent long hours chatting with her again, discussing the paintings he had to acquire and the interior construction, decoration, and furnishing needed at the Telouet palace. He told her what he needed to do about the Mas newspaper, which he had just taken over. The pasha’s remarks were bursting with hints, allusions, doubts, and expressions of authority. He was not by any means lacking in concubines, but he never spoke to any of them either before, during, or after intercourse. Shockingly, a thin but forceful blond girl had deeply affected this tyrant. She knew how to deal with his tongue, but only his tongue. He took her on a tour of various parts of the palace, but when she decided to leave, he said farewell with only a handshake. In a fit of uncontrollable fury, he then sent an army of spies to follow her. He was anxious to find out whether their conversations were going in a particular direction and, if so, which one. Day after day he dispatched these spies, and became sheepish when they came back with nothing worth mentioning. Until one day, when finally there was definite information: the girl had gone out in all her finery with an Italian pianist and attended a reception at the Italian Embassy. The pasha didn’t like Italy, let alone the pianist — and he didn’t like how the Italian government had occupied Ethiopia several years ago. Ethiopia was the homeland of his mother al-Zahra Umm al-Khair. The Italians had killed her family. He could never forgive Italy for the evil things it did to his mother. He couldn’t forgive Italy for coming between himself and his English girl, nor could he forgive her for going out with this entrancing pianist, who would come to lose his fingers a couple of days later.

The pasha was heated with rage like never before, not even on that day when Anais had told him: You’re just a beast. My friend knows better than you!

And what happened had happened.

Passion toppled the warrior from atop his steed and dumped him into a hellish castration from which there was no escape. The pasha was drinking alone, naked in the palace bathhouse, when he spread his huge hand over the wall where the beautiful woman had slept.

People in Jemaa el-Fnaa Square despised spicy food. They listened in confusion to a new storyteller, who used exaggerated gestures to tell the remarkable tale of Ibn Rushd. All the while, they were thinking about the mummy that restorers had removed from the palace bathhouse. Amid its shrouds, the archaeologists had found no trace of the love story that the pasha forgot to bury there.

Translated from Arabic by Roger Allen