Lulu in Marrakech Read online

  It seemed no time until the Shakespeare club began to arrive. Some of the members I had met already—Tom Drill came in with his partner, who proved to be a younger, attractive black guy named Strand Carter, with their little skinned-knee girl, Amelie, and the bony, imposing Cotters, Sir Neil and Marina, who were dressed as they might have dressed in England, in tweed and leather. They didn’t have their new employee Suma with them.

  “We have an apartment in London,” Sir Neil found an occasion to tell me at once, in a confidential tone. “But as we spend a lot of time here, we sometimes let our London place on very reasonable terms— you must tell me if you ever want a stay in London.” I was somewhat nonplussed to have this either invitation or commercial proposition put to me in Ian’s house, as if I were a paying guest here whose whims might soon require her to rent a place somewhere else. I thanked him but said I didn’t expect to get to London.

  I did have a chance to speak to Lady Cotter—Marina—about Suma. “Yes! We’re so pleased! She seems a charming girl,” she said.

  “How is it you are in touch with SOS Femmes?” I asked.

  “Actually, I’d never heard of them,” she said. “A friend in Paris knew how desperately I was looking for an au pair. It’s a godsend. Of course, I didn’t realize she’d only speak French.”

  “Does she speak Arabic?”

  “Yes, I suppose it will be good for the children to learn both, since they have to live here. My daughter-in-law…” She told me something of the story, the tragic death of her daughter-in-law in the mountains of Nepal, leaving these young grandchildren. The daughter-in-law suddenly couldn’t breathe, in her tent, lost consciousness and died before anyone could do anything, and was cremated on the spot. That sounded odd. I suppose it is what they’d been told.

  “Didn’t they try to take her down to a lower altitude?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, I imagine so,” Marina said, but looked dismayed, as if thinking they might not have. I suppose some people are more fatalistic about death than Americans are.

  “Suma seems a nice girl. I don’t think she’d done anything very shocking, dated a boy and went on his motorbike or something. She wears the head scarf. The brother tried to kill her. We forget how primitive some of these people are, even if they do live in Paris.”

  “I’ll come visit her one day, if I may,” I proposed, and Marina assured me she welcomed the idea.

  “I’m sure you speak more French than we do. We learned it at school of course, and to speak to vendors and such, but not for proper conversation; how it fades over the years.”

  A former American ambassador to Tunisia came in—I wondered if he’d turn out to be my contact. One or two of the guests were Moroccans, whose unfamiliar names I didn’t retain. I had worked on learning common Muslim names but found them elusive except for the main Koranic ones—Mohammed, Ali, and so on.

  The most unexpected arrival was the same Saudi woman I had seen on the plane and again with her husband at the airport, only now we were introduced: Gazi and Khaled bin Sultan Al‐Sayad. As they came in, she was still wearing a black veil—the abaya—though not over her face, but she whisked it off and was wearing a beige pantsuit underneath, with lots of gold chains that emphasized her dramatic sort of harem-slave beauty, like a concubine out of the Arabian Nights, maybe Scheherazade herself, and seemed to symbolize the enslavement implied by the veil. Her husband, Khaled, who had worn white robes and a red-and-white head cloth at the airport, now was wearing a Western‐style suit and was a good-enough‐ looking man of maybe thirty, though with a remarkable nose that grew like a falcon’s beak between his dark eyes. How I admired the way Ian had mastered their long string of names, laced with “bins” and “bints” like a refrain! They lived next door—that is, in the next nearest villa estate—and were apparently well-known to everyone else here and deeply admiring of Shakespeare.

  “Of course. I went to Brown University,” said Gazi to me. “And Khaled went to Yale. Not that we’re pro-American particularly, it was just the only game in town educationally, though many Saudis go to the Oxbridge colleges instead. And who else but Americans can control Israel?” She made these somewhat disconnected observations with a provocative smile that seemed to invite some response or comment, but I had no idea what to say. I wasn’t even sure she realized I was American.

  “I know you must think it’s odd for me to have a man’s name,” she said. “Gazi—it’s more or less a family joke. My real name is Ghaniyah. We go to London and Stratford every winter to see the performances,” she continued. It seemed to me that Shakespeare was as good a foundation for international understanding as any other—better, really—and I was glad to hear that educated Arabs admired him. Do we know as much about their great poets? I knew the names of two Persian poets, Hafiz and Saadi, and Omar Khayyám, but that was about it.

  Waiting to begin, the party spoke in several languages—English, French, and what I took to be Arabic, lending an air of baroque multicultural sophistication I found thrilling. We sat in a ring of chairs, I next to Gazi, so I dared to ask when and how it was that she wore the veil, even here in Marrakech, where most women didn’t appear to.

  “Always worn at home in Riyadh, naturally, but here only sometimes—when I’m out with Khaled, who prefers it on the street.

  He’s not a benighted jerk, not at all,” she said in her perfect but slightly odd English . “He went to Yale, after all. But it reduces the chance that someone from Riyadh might see me. There’s a certain amount of resentment there of people who have homes elsewhere or send their kids away to school. They all would if they could.” I assumed that Khaled must be rich, like all Saudis, but I didn’t know enough about that to ask even an oblique question about his business or profession. I admit that I also thought, What good is it to be beautiful if you have to live in Saudi Arabia?

  The guests, now fifteen in number, sat in the ring of chairs in the courtyard by the pool and studied their parts for a few minutes while a maid lit the hundreds of candle lamps that ringed the swimming pool. Ian’s servant, Rashid, passed drinks—orange juice, whiskey sodas, and white wine. The evening cool was beginning, but the air was somehow dusty. There were no mosquitoes. In the distance, from somewhere, it was just possible to hear the sonorous drone of the evening call to prayer.

  8

  A man he is of honesty and trust.

  To his conveyance I assign my wife.…

  —William Shakespeare, Othello, act 1, scene 3

  I supposed that Tom Drill’s partner, Strand, would be Othello, but I was made to face my own literal-mindedness, or what ever you would call it, to have assumed that because he was African American he would fit the part best. (Were the others mired in a retro form of political correctness that assumed it would embarrass Strand to be cast as Othello? I’ve been out of the U.S. for a while, uncertain about the changes in P.C. nuance.) After Strand, I would have picked Khaled for his fierce nose and warlike bearing. But I had forgotten that Othello is also the best part, and so it went to Ian, who I could see did have the best voice, a deep baritone, like Orson Welles, and the actorly English diction, being an English man.

  Nancy Rutgers said a few pedantic words about the sources of Othello. “From the Ecatommiti, the sixteenth-century collection of tales by Giovanni Battista Giraldi. We don’t know whether Shakespeare read the Italian or the French translation of 1584,” and so on.

  I was not Emilia, as someone had foreseen, but a courtesan, Bianca, perhaps because Bianca has less to say. There was some oblique discussion of American accents. Posy Crumley was Emilia, and Gazi was to be Desdemona, but she objected. “I’ve always hated her, so docile and trusting, stupid really,” she said. “Make Mrs. Crumley be Desdemona. I’d rather be nobody.”

  “It’s only a play, Gazi,” said Ian sternly, seconded by her husband.

  “No, no, no,” she said.

  Posy Crumley also refused, on the grounds that to be Desdemona might hurt her unborn child. In the end, Desdemo
na was played by Marina Cotter, whose incisive British upper-class tones, once she modulated them into a more pitiable sweetness, were not wrong for the part, any more than Ian’s for Othello, and the two gave the whole production a satisfying sort of professional patina.

  Wonderful it was to hear all our voices gain in resonance and confidence, reading out the immortal lines. It seemed that the theater, as a genre, fulfilled its real raison d’être in this situation, re-creating for English people, exiled from their native isle, the epitome of its genius, the language of its principal Bard. (As Americans, in Paris, get together at Christmas and defiantly sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and other songs the more dignified French don’t even know the words of.)

  Khaled, the Saudi husband, reading Cassius, said to me afterward, as we drank tea in the patio, “The language of your Bard and the language of the Prophet have something in common—could Shakespeare have been inspired by a reading of the Koran?”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” I said, not knowing if Shakespeare could have read the Koran. As Khaled spoke, I was wondering if he thought my sundress horribly immodest. I had read that Muslim men are offended by us. At the same time, I was telling myself not to be self-conscious, I am not immodest. Odd that the thought had crept in on me.

  “Yes, yes! As where the Book says, ‘Seest thou not those who turn in friendship / To such as have the wrath of Allah upon them? / They are neither of you nor of them, / and they swear to falsehood knowingly.’ Cassius might have spoken those very words to warn Othello about Iago.”

  And indeed, at moments during the reading, as the horror of the story mounted, I had been seized by a sudden bleak sense of dislocation to find myself in this unexpected, faraway corner of Islam with strangers reciting poems, without any real sense yet of the warm welcome I’d been looking forward to. As happy and excited as I was to see Ian, there was a little stab of dismay at the impossibility of what I had to do, tasks that seemed as far beyond my own powers as flying a jet would be, in a land I knew nothing of firsthand.

  A warm welcome was to follow in the night and went a long way to reassure me, though when Ian, so recently speaking in the tones of the violent, murderous Moor, came to my room wearing a red robe Othello might have worn and the lacy-patterned light from the swinging lamp shadowed his face with flickers of darkness, he was unfamiliar and disconcerting, large, even a little frightening, even for me, who am not easily scared.

  “Really, hello,” he said. “Rather stiff to plunge you into all this. Had you expected it?” Did he mean the size of his house, the trillion candles lit on the patio, Shakespeare, the other people, the general air of organization and ongoing life into which I would have to fit myself?

  “I didn’t have much of a sense of your… real life,” I said. “I thought…” What had I thought? Business interests, philanthropy.

  “Is this my real life? I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose it is. Anyhow, I hope you’ll like it here.”

  “I hadn’t expected it to be so fancy.”

  “As you’ll see, it’s relatively modest by local standards. But let me kiss you properly. I’ve missed you…” And so it went, the real welcome. We were practiced lovers by now, smoothly suited, satisfied.

  Yet there was, perhaps, a little distance between us. I told myself it was because we’d been apart for two months, since Pristina. Now Pristina was elsewhere for Ian, and he was back in a world more natural to him, where I must have seemed to him a little out of place, the way people seemed whom you had met at camp when you ran into them during the school year. He was always an ardent lover—it was something else, a tinge of formality that disappointed. Soon, though, I was made to realize yet again, if I hadn’t known already, how much our relationship meant to me, physically and psychologically, and how easily sleeping with Ian returned to me the sense of love and ease that had been missing for the last couple of months, after he had returned to Marrakech and I was alone in Pristina.

  My policy with Ian—though “policy” is not a very good word to use about someone you are in love with, too redolent of desperate ancient female calculation—my rule is never to seem more in love with him than he with me. This requires some fine calibrations: What does he mean when he says “My darling Lulu” and “You are so beautiful”? Sometimes I’m not sure and don’t know what to say back. I realize I don’t know him very well.

  9

  Those who rehearse the Book / Of Allah, establish regular prayer / and spend (in Charity) / Out of what We have provided / For them, secretly and openly / Hope for a Commerce that will never fail.

  —Koran 35:29

  When I came down in the morning, no one seemed around. The sun shone, the pink walls glowed in the matinal sun, there was a bird somewhere singing in the shrubbery as if it were in a forest. It was hard to remember that we were in the middle of a desiccated North African desert suburb. Ian’s vast house still seemed a little like a hotel surrounded by an oasis of flowering plants—the rooms on the main floor large and high, opening broadly onto the inner patio. Last night this inner courtyard had been lit by flaming torchères, though now morning calm had come over the building; a vacuum hummed somewhere, and there was the faint sound of a radio. Ian was gone.

  It was nine. I was either early or late, but I had no idea which. Posy Crumley was the only other person there. A table had been laid outside, where she was just beginning her breakfast. I sat down with her. I saw she must only be in her late twenties, growing pudgy with her pregnancy, skin flushed.

  It was reassuring and comfortable to have another woman to talk to. With the coffee and sunshine, the mood was one of friendly harmony; we admired the silent service by a house maid all in white, pants and tunic, head wrapped, feet in the noiseless slippers. We admired the charm of the silver teapot with its pointy lid and the greasy deliciousness of some thick pancakes kept warm under a straw dome.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  She sighed. “Three months. Absolute hell, actually. It’s a sort of writer’s sinecure. Ian invites writers and that sort of person to stay for a month or more, to work in ease and solitude. Robin, that is. We’re to stay a full five months. I had thought there would be others…” Her voice trailed off hesitantly, an insecure young wife. “At Charleston, in England, there were plenty of people to talk to, but here, at first, when Ian was still away in wherever it was, Robin and I were the only ones. Of course that was nice, in a way, but it must have been hard on Robin to only have me to talk to.”

  “You must have learned a lot about Marrakech by now,” I suggested, thinking that she too might turn out to be an excellent resource. I was also interested in hearing about Ian’s generosity to writers, something he’d never mentioned.

  “Not much. I wish I could admire the beauty and interest of this culture. Robin does,” she admitted. “But I can’t, because of their sexism. I know that sounds rather American—sorry, not that that’s bad—” I could almost see her blush with her sudden perception that she had been on the point of saying something jocularly rude about Americans, something others say among themselves. I suppose my normal California accent has modulated now, from years in Europe, into a less distinctive mid-Atlantic speech, so that people can forget I am one.

  “You know what I mean, Americans go on about such things. Those words ‘sexism’ and ‘racism’ are very degraded by now, but they do mean something—the way women are treated and thought of, the way the subject seems to preoccupy them up here. Of course I know they can’t help it, it’s the way they are used to thinking.…”

  She talked on about the pitfalls for women here and the boredom of life in a compound in Marrakech where there was nothing to do until nightfall, when there were parties. She seemed desperate to have someone to talk to, American or not. We sipped our tea, we talked about the hard lot of Arab women. I told her about the literacy projects I’d be looking at. I thought of Suma, wondering if in coming from Paris to a Muslim country, she’d gone from
the frying pan into the fire. I told Posy what I knew of Suma’s story, ending with how happy I was that she was being protected by the Cotters.

  “Of course Marina Cotter would need a little slave, now that she’s stuck with her grandchildren; she’s a busy woman. People who live here full-time have lives crammed with things to do, mostly silly. Marina volunteers at the British Consulate doing something; there are charities and the like. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here!” she cried. “I can’t even go out by myself—you feel funny walking alone. I don’t know if it’s safe, and we’re miles from town. And you don’t see anyone pregnant here. Maybe they stay indoors the whole nine months. But two women can walk around together. We’ll go to the souk.” This prospect seemed to cheer her so much that I agreed; of course I did want to see the souk, the lay of the land, the nature of the tasks ahead.

  “Don’t worry, things will unfold,” Taft had said. “Think of yourself as a woman in a window, watching, passive, part of the landscape. Your duty at first will be to build your cover. That will take months. Be nice to the English man.”

  “Have you seen Ian this morning?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “someone called him earlier to say there’d been an explosion, and one of his factories was on fire. Robin went with him to see.” I had a flash of irritation—we’d been sitting here for a half an hour and she hadn’t mentioned this.