Moroccan Traffic: Send a Fax to the Kasbah Read online

  To reach the walled town of Marrakesh, it is necessary to pass through the wide modern streets of the French city, built during the Protectorate and sunnily Western in style. Between the palms, the orange trees and the marigold beds of the boulevards, horse- drawn victorias full of red tourists are jammed between yellow taxis and droves of snarling Motobecane Vespas Super Bleu ridden by determined veiled women in glasses. At my request, our little taxi dropped us in the shopping quarter, where my mother, before meeting Omar Sharif, required to buy modern postcards.

  The market in the Boulevard Mohammed V has not only postcards but a display of every kind of comestible likely to appeal to a middle-aged matron from Europe. My mother, who in motion resembles a baboushka on ball-bearings, rolled semaphoring from alley to alley, pausing before double-beds glaring with citrus fruit. She examined slopes of leeks, onions and radishes, passed by artichokes and wheeled round bins of walnuts and almonds, crates of strawberries and hanks of asparagus tips like embroidery. She inspected a cave of flowers packed from floor to ceiling with roses, lilies, iris, freesias. She arrived at the fish and the meat, the brass, the copper, the handbags of sewn hide and bought twelve colourful postcards, arguing over the price. Someone said, ‘You in trouble again?’

  It was Executive Director Mo Morgan, in his pigtail and a terrible T-shirt, with a shopping bag full of Kodak wallets over his forearm. My mother handed one postcard back. ‘Now I need only eleven,’ she said. ‘You finally got bored, climbing that mountain?’

  ‘Mrs. Helmann,’ he said. ‘Nothing could be as fascinating as your company, but you’re talking bullshit. Come along and have coffee, and I’ll show you some pictures of Toubkal.’

  I said, ‘Mr. Morgan. Does Sir Robert know you’re here?’

  He looked at me and smiled. His face was so narrow he had a mouth like a split in a peapod. He said, ‘Don’t worry, darling: I’m legitimate. I’m even attending the MCG meetings. At Sir Robert’s request.’

  My mother said, ‘I said to Wendy. They won’t refuse you nothing: not after that outlay. Will this coffee be safe?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ said Mr. Morgan. ‘You’re supposed to be sick, in any case.’

  Outside, it was hot. We passed the pharmacies and the jewellers, and the shops selling Dior and Chanel and really good briefcases with sensible handles which I wanted to go back and look at, for one of the things they don’t teach you on executive courses is how to manage your handbag and briefcase while you get round the door of a toilet. We then arrived at a corner café with a bright orange canopy and many white and green tables and chairs, occupied by black-moustached gentlemen. Mr. Morgan took us inside, and gave us coffee in tumblers. Then he and my mother discussed the time-switch on her washing machine while I watched the daily life of your ordinary Marrakesh citizen.

  Stout, curly haired men passed in open-necked shirts and cable-knit sweaters. There were women in heelless slippers and trousers carrying white bundles about on their heads, and boys with trays of fine pastries, and women in short skirts and fishnet tights and high heels and handbags. There were robed mothers leading small children stuffed into bright padded tracksuits. There were men in white caps and smart djellabahs with briefcases; and babies carried by children, their bare toes appearing under their elbows. There were donkeys with panniers, and pedal-bikes with bunches of gladioli riding pillion, and invalid cars, and, stationary on the other side of the road, a powder-blue exquisite Sunbeam surrounded by dozens of people. I said, ‘Look.’

  Mr. Morgan spoke. He said, ‘Now that’s a nice pair of legs.’

  He was just trying to needle me. I said, ‘I saw that car in London. It belongs to Seb Sullivan.’ I suddenly glimpsed, among the dark heads, a quantity of rippling sandy hair above a mighty pair of shoulders straining through a safari shirt. I said, ‘There is Seb Sullivan.’

  ‘Is that a surprise?’ said my mother. ‘He was to be in the vintage car rally. Three days of partying in Marrakesh. You told me.’

  Mr. Morgan was looking from my mother to me. He said, ‘I’m missing something? Who is Seb Sullivan?’

  ‘Public Relations,’ I said. ‘He and his co-driver Gerry Owen belong to Black & Holroyd, registered sneaks.’ I had got up on my chair. I got down again suddenly. ‘He’s coming here. And look who’s coming with him.’ It was not Gerry Owen.

  Mr. Morgan climbed his chair as if it were Toubkal. He said, ‘Hey, that’s the painter guy Johnson. I promised to help with his blues.’

  I pulled him down so fast he landed on the floor tiles. I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t want him to see us. Can we get out the back?’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ said Kingsley’s Executive Director. ‘We could sit under the table, but the shoeshine boy’d flush us out in a moment. You mean if they see us, the share price will fall?’

  ‘Roughly,’ I said.

  ‘I guess,’ said Mo Morgan thoughtfully. ‘Then we’d better stay where we are. Turn your chair. Mrs. Helmann, tell us what they are doing?’

  My mother sat with her robed knees apart, and gazed out to the pavement. She said, ‘That’s a beautiful man.’

  ‘Johnson?’ I said. I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t know that she had suddenly found the Red Shadow: in the world, you simply don’t think of PR in these terms.

  She said, ‘You brought up in a zoo? Has a life in business destroyed your sense of symmetry? This Colonel Sullivan is sitting down with the painter. The painter is wearing a jersey from Oxfam.’

  I had seen it. In place of the svelte suit for royal occasions, Mr. Johnson had relapsed into bags and a ruinous sweater, with an open shirt collar which someone had ironed very nicely. His watch had cost, I reckoned, a tenth of a painting. Crossing the road with Seb Sullivan he had looked browner than I remembered. His hair hadn’t been recently combed, and if once he had been at odds with Seb Sullivan, he was so no longer: they seemed extraordinarily relaxed, and even joking together. I wondered what about. I said, ‘Never mind. Go on. What are they doing?’

  My mother would have made a good boxing commentator. ‘They’ve ordered beers and a coffee. They’re talking. They’ve sent for a Figaro. That lovely man is having his boots shone.’

  They had tried to shine Mr. Morgan’s shoes too, but he wore dirty sneakers. All the same, he had tossed them a coin, and they had thanked him, smiling. A child wandered in and performed a short, spinning dance, revolving briskly so that his cap-tassels whipped. Mr. Morgan tipped him as well. I said, ‘Do you always throw away money?’

  ‘Here, I do,’ said Mr. Morgan. ‘They think alms are important. Carry some cigarettes and a purseful of dirhams, and you’ll be surprised at the difference. Also, a word of Arabic helps.’

  I remembered Ellwood Pymm’s book. I was about to mention it when an old woman tottered into the café and began to follow the beaten track to our table. Her face beneath the black drapes was creased like the top of my coffee, and she carried a polythene bag in one claw. I waited for my neighbourhood philanthropist to pull out his dirhams and fulfil the old country custom. Instead, she leaned over his shoulder and popped into her bag the wrapped sugar he’d left in his saucer. Then she moved on to the next table and did likewise.

  Twisting round, we watched her get nearer Johnson and Sullivan. We watched her stop by their table, and Sullivan detain her with a hand on her arm, and Johnson rapidly unwrap a coarse block of sugar and taking his pen, write something on the sugar paper. Then he rewrapped it and gave it to her smiling. Along with it went a packet of dirhams. I saw them. We all saw them. Mo Morgan said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to know.’

  ‘Then you follow her,’ said my mother. ‘Or you are afraid. Or you have no sense of what is necessary.’

  ‘Or we don’t want to leave you, Mrs. Helmann,’ said Mr. Morgan.

  ‘In a café? In the French quarter of Marrakesh, with taxis passing before us? You are speaking to Wendy’s mother,’ my mother said.

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sp; I saw Mo Morgan hesitate. I didn’t hesitate. I said, ‘Come on. Leave her the bill. If we don’t get out now, then we’ll lose her.’

  To his credit, he came. We slid out of the café. We mingled with the throng on the pavement, briefly held up by a heap of live turkeys. The small black figure hurried on, aiming south-west. I said, ‘That’s the way to the Assembly of the Dead and the souks.’

  ‘So what is the Assembly of the Dead?’ said Mo Morgan. He still carried his bag, in which were his holiday snapshots. He said, ‘It is just the square Jemaa-el-Fna where all Morocco comes to do business, and then spends the afternoon and evening having a ball, if you will forgive the understatement. And what are the souks to a stout-hearted woman? They are crowded, that is true. It is easy to get lost in them: that is true also. But they are no more than the quarter of the old Arab markets, where things are made and sold and bartered. She’ll exchange the sugar for something she needs.’

  ‘She’ll exchange that message for something she needs. Think!’ I said urgently. ‘Johnson is painting Sir Robert. Sir Robert is setting up an extremely sensitive deal. Seb Sullivan earns his living sussing out secrets. Don’t you see it matters who Johnson is writing to?’ As I spoke, I could hear myself panting. I was wearing a nice cotton dress and strap sandals, and my heels were blistering already.

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Mr. Morgan. ‘Mind you: it must be a very small message. Hardly room for more than a line and the Black Spot.’

  ‘Room for an assignation,’ I said. The woman, speeding up suddenly, staggered off round a corner. ‘Or he could have slipped a note in his dirhams.’

  ‘So he could,’ said Mo Morgan. He spluttered. ‘But who is he trying to meet, remembering there is such a thing as the telephone? The man who planted the bomb in the Boardroom? The guy who killed the guy who planted the bomb in the Boardroom? The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street in bed with Smith and Dow Jones, diabetics?’ He calmed and said, ‘OK. Let’s see where she goes. And then I’ll show you my pictures of Toubkal.’

  Just then we wheeled round the corner. The pavement was empty. It took a moment to spot our old woman beside a line of parked bicycles. As we strolled hurriedly forward she unlocked one, hoisted herself into the saddle, and disappeared billowing into the traffic, her sugar bag bumping the handlebars. Mo Morgan swore, for once, in genuine surprise. Then he hailed a small mustard taxi and shouted, ‘Suivez la bicyclette!’ to the driver.

  The driver stared at him. I hauled out Ellwood Pymm’s American–Arabic phrasebook and opened it. The first column said:

  My name is Joe.

  You are very beautiful.

  I love your eyes and your long hair. Would you like some Pepsi-Cola?

  There was nothing about following bicycles. Mo Morgan said patiently, in English, ‘Follow that bicycle!’ and with a grinding of gears, the taxi did.

  Chapter 5

  It is quite a long way from the high life of the French café quarter to the Place Jemaa-el-Fna. We passed the Place du 16 novembre and the Place de la liberté and then suffered the full cultural shock of two wizened water-carriers in chenille tasselled hats who blocked the path of the taxi and tried to sell us some water. We had got to the Romantic Old Town. So had our quarry, who could be seen disappearing in the distance across a paved area the size of four football pitches filled with buses and tourists.

  ‘The Assembly of the Dead,’ said Mo Morgan. ‘There they are, walking in file with their guidebooks. Come on.’ He peeled off notes for the driver and got out, spinning some coins in the air, which the water-carriers caught in their cups. Ahead, the old woman got off her bicycle, handed it to a child who seemed to be waiting, and disappeared behind hedges of tourists. We followed.

  It was extremely hot. We were cursed in French, German and Japanese and occasionally in French. We ran into, and out of, a raft of professional beggars. We attracted the attention of the proprietors of a row of ramshackle kiosks selling Cartier watches, Adidas sneakers and Lacoste sports gear. We trotted round a circle of rapt men and boys listening to a turbaned storyteller who had learned his trade in Movietone News. We passed another rapt audience around a white-bearded man sitting with one large, bare clean foot round the back of his neck. As we went by, he shot his second foot straight in the air, then crossed it over the other like scissors. Under his rucked-up shirt he wore snow-white neatly pressed trousers. Behind him, to the sound of a drum, a man was charming a snake under a canopy, his motorbike parked just behind him.

  There was a circle round two slapstick comedians knocking each other out with plastic mineral bottles, and a bodybuilding stall, and a box of monkeys, and a man selling teeth. We passed the tea-break facility, where nameless stews simmered over charcoal and market punters in robes sat in rows sucking up soups. There were Europeans on one of the benches, playing a board game with several Arabs amid a litter of shish-kebab sticks and orange juice. Among them I saw a couple of women. One of them had bright orange hair and dark glasses under a tall woollen hat clearly bought off a water-carrier. Before I could so much as mention it, Mr. Morgan said, ‘Oh ho.’

  Our old lady had come to a halt in one of the few uncrowded spots in the square. We stopped, concealed by the throng, and stood watching her. She sank to her knees.

  She wasn’t praying. She was consulting a man sitting cross- legged on a carpet with some lined paper before him. Before him also was a bottle, a ruler, some pens and two unlit candles. Crouching before him she spoke, and he answered. More than that we couldn’t see. Then she scrambled to her feet, and before we could move, darted across the square at full speed and vanished.

  This time, she had gone for good. We wasted ten minutes winding round further lines of shuffling tourists, and Mr. Morgan even took himself into a café in case, he said, she had gone to collect some more sugar. When he didn’t come out at once I went in myself, and found him in a room with eighty Moroccans watching football on TV. It turned out to be another tense game in the Africa Cup, with the Elephants of the Ivory Coast teamed against the Hearts of Oak players from Accra. Although the other viewers complained, Mr. Morgan allowed himself to be extracted quite peacefully, announcing ‘Je donne un léger avantage aux Elephants. Haven’t you found her, then?’

  I hadn’t, but I’d had a bright idea. I said, ‘That man she stopped and spoke to. Let’s ask him.’

  ‘Using your Arabic phrasebook?’ said Mr. Morgan. He had delayed for the purpose of trying on round knitted hats.

  ‘Yes, using my phrasebook,’ I said. I had the page open already. ‘Did you hear that man say Assalamou AlaiKom to you? There it is. “Assalamou AlaiKom, Hi”.’

  ‘He said “Hi”?’ said Mo Morgan. He bought the cap, and the man said ‘Hi’ in Arabic again, and Mo said it back. He said, ‘It figures. All Western culture comes from the Arabs, they say. Let’s try your man on the ground.’ We turned back.

  I thought at first that the man with the candles had gone, but he was merely surrounded by tourists. A guide with an umbrella was explaining that educated natives like this earned their living as scribes, writing letters for the illiterate. I said, ‘Listen. That’s what he was doing!’

  ‘Writing?’ said Mr. Morgan. Several tourists hissed to us to shut up.

  ‘No. Reading, of course. Whatever Mr. Johnson had written, she couldn’t read it. Such as, an address.’

  Phrases of German annoyance floated over our heads. Mo Morgan said, ‘Now that I call brainy. Let’s ask him.’ And he pushed his way forwards and said, ‘Hi!’ in Arabic. Then we tried to ask, in French and Arabic, what we wanted to know.

  We were not popular. The guide wanted to complete his dissertation. The tourists wanted to hear him and take photographs. The scribe wanted to please everybody and get paid in full for doing so. Someone seized Mr. Morgan by the pigtail, and he turned round and swung a fast punch, impeded by his knitted cap, which had been levered over his eyes. The crowd swayed, and someone kicked over the ink. The scribe wailed, and three burly men pushed their
way into the circle and stood behind him glaring, as if about to begin the Polovtsian Dances. A voice in beautiful German said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, behind you the acrobats are about to arrive to be photographed. Please come this way.’

  Even the guide with the umbrella looked bemused, and gradually everyone turned and began moving off in the opposite direction. The German speaker, addressing himself to the three burly gentlemen, said, ‘Forgive me, but I think a performance is expected. Be assured. Your friend will come to no harm.’

  I was amazed. The three men bent and spoke to the scribe who was lifting dripping papers and moaning. We waved them irritably away. The three acrobats left. The scribe was left alone with me, Mo Morgan and the German speaker, who proved to be a brown, curly haired man in dark glasses wearing a genuine Lacoste T-shirt, baggy shorts and sneakers as dirty as Mr. Morgan’s. I had seen him before. He was one of the row of Europeans who had been sitting eating along with the traders. He said, in English as beautiful as his German, ‘Hallo. I hope you don’t mind. But that sort of nonsense can develop quite quickly. Can I help you? I speak a spot of Arabic and some French.’

  Mo Morgan was quicker than I was. He said, ‘Brother, you can help me that way any time. Let me ask this fellow something, and then I’ll stand you a drink.’

  ‘Perhaps I can ask him?’ said the man. I had thought he was German, but now I wasn’t so sure. ‘What do you want to know?’

  I wouldn’t have told him, but Mr. Morgan did. He said, ‘We’re trying to contact a friend. It’s a long story, but he gave his address to an Arab lady, and a few minutes ago, we think that she asked this man to read it. If he could recall what it was, we could go there.’

  ‘No problem,’ said our rescuer fluently. He spoke fast to the scribe who, muttering, was shaking out several stained letters. At the same time, our chevalier laid on the ground a small but opulent stack of old dirhams. The scribe ceased muttering and spoke, glancing with pleasure at the donor and hatred at us. Our rescuer turned.