In Arabian Nights (13 page)

'Thanking God for leading them to the fortune, the thieves
dispatched the dervish and slipped through the crevice to lay
their hands on the treasure. The cavern was filled with sacks of
gold coins, emeralds and rubies and even surpassed the men's
greed.

'Realizing there was too much treasure to carry away on their
backs, the thieves sent the youngest one to the town to find a
horse and to bring back some food. When he arrived at the town,
the youngest thief stole a horse and then bought two kebabs,
which he poisoned. He galloped back to the cave, where his two
brother thieves were waiting to kill him, so that they could
divide the treasure between the two of them.

'As soon as the youngest thief returned, his throat was cut by
the other two. Searching through his bag, they found the kebabs,
ate them and fell down dead. Tethered outside, the horse
managed to break free and run off.

'As for the treasure, it still lies in the cavern,' said Murad,
'protected by three skeletons and by the Angel of Death.'

On the night the storyteller spoke in the garden of the Caliph's
House, I felt myself connecting with Morocco's ancient core. It
was as if I was peering into a well and was able to glimpse down
through strata and substrata, through millennia, to the nucleus
of the society.

The residents of the shantytown had been wrapped in
blankets and woollen caps. They were frozen, but their numbness
had melted away as soon as the story filtered into their ears.
Just as in other public performances I have witnessed in north
Africa, the audience stood up, wandered about, heckled and
chatted to their friends all the way through the tales.

In our society it's considered the height of rudeness to do anything
but sit rigid during a performance and then clap politely at
the end. Such prim behaviour is probably a vestige of Victorian
etiquette and is undoubtedly quite new to the West. The
Moroccan audience echoes how Europe must once have been,
until the Elizabethan age and beyond. Spectators watching
Shakespeare's plays at the old London Globe were expected to
move around, heckle and provide a constant flow of feedback.
The European audience then must have been how the Moroccan
audience is now: dynamic, overwhelming and very much a part
of the tale.

The residents of the
bidonville
were captivated by Murad's
stories. Like my sisters and me sitting on the turquoise leather
couch so long ago, they had been drawn into another world, into
a realm without limits.

My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious
heritage of mankind. When we were children, he would draw
our attention to the inner meaning of tales, helping us to tease
one layer apart from the next. 'There are some areas of the
mind,' he would tell us, 'which can only be reached with stories,
because they penetrate deep into the subconscious, like ink
dripped on to blotting paper.'

The way stories were underappreciated in the West was
something that preoccupied my father, and it sometimes dismayed
him. He could not grasp why the West had marginalized
such a powerful learning device for so long. After all, he said, the
tool was in its hands, staring it in the face.

Every man, woman and child had begged Murad to stay and
talk all night. He did so, only ending when the first rays of dawn
had chased the darkness from the shantytown. When the
audience finally slipped away, back to their homes, the garden
looked as if a herd of stampeding wildebeest had charged
through.

But it didn't matter.

What mattered was that a traditional learning tool had been
activated and had conjured a realm from pure imagination.

I had been in solitary at The Farm for a week when one of the
guards, a junior, whispered to me at dawn. He said my
colleagues and I were not the usual prisoners, that there must
have been some mistake. If I gave him a phone number, he said,
he would make a call: tell the outside world we were being held.
I asked him to get my mobile phone from the colonel's office and
look up my sister's new number.

'That's too dangerous.'

'Then get me a scrap of paper and a pen and I'll write down a
number.'

'That is too dangerous as well,' he replied. 'You have to tell
me a number now and I will remember it. It will be my duty.'

These days with mobile phones, we are used to getting
through to family and friends by pressing a couple of keys
selected from a menu. Like most people, I am hopeless at committing
long numbers to memory. Heighten the pressure by the
stress of solitary confinement, and the only number I could
remember was my sister-in-law's. I had never bothered to save
her home number and, somehow, had remembered it.

The guard memorized the number and left a message on her
home phone the next day. It said: 'Tahir Shah and his friends are
alive.' When she received the message, she could not understand
why someone would leave a message saying that we were OK,
unless it meant we had been in danger. So she called Rachana,
who had been wondering why I hadn't checked in. And
Rachana called my sister, Saira, who is known for her film about
women under the Taliban.

Saira jumped on the next flight to Pakistan and applied
pressure on the Pakistani government to reveal what they knew.
The government admitted they had arrested us, but couldn't say
which unit was holding us. It gives an idea how many torture
prisons there must be in Pakistan.

After fifteen days, Saira was informed that we would be
deported before dawn the next day. And we were. A guard cut
our fingernails so short the fingers bled. He said the samples
were for DNA. We were given our clothes, ordered to sign
documents stating we had not been mistreated, and bustled
aboard a flight to Abu Dhabi, with a connection to London. Our
luggage was all sent to Oslo, the Norwegian capital, hinting at
the Pakistani officials' faltering knowledge of European
geography.

At Heathrow Airport we were taken aside by British
Intelligence. They were in a huddle, grey-suited officers, who
spoke very quietly as if there were ears all around.

Once I got home, I tried to explain to Rachana what I had
seen and felt in Pakistan. But it was as if spoken language was
too weak a medium to pass on the depth of my sadness, my fear.

The day after being reunited, Ariane asked me where I had
been and why Mummy was so worried while I was gone. I concocted
a scaled-down version of events, because I thought Ariane
had a right to an explanation too. The next day she told her
friends at school that her daddy had been in prison. The teacher
never looked at me the same after that.

We let the dust settle and spoke very little about Pakistan. Too
much emotion had already been spent on the episode, one which
I wanted to forget. Then early one morning, when I was still
bleary-eyed in bed, I felt Rachana's shadow over me. And I
heard her voice.

'An angel is watching you,' she said.

I didn't know how to tell her that I had pledged to go back
to Central Asia, to finish the film on Afghanistan.

A few days after Murad's event, I dropped in on the cobbler to
pick up my brogues. He was gluing a stiletto heel back into
place. His eyes lit up when he saw me. I asked if the shoes were
ready. The old man tugged off his woolly blue hat, clutched it to
his chest, grabbed my hand and shook it very hard.

'I have waited for years to work on such fine shoes as these,'
he said.

The cobbler turned to a wall of pigeon-holes behind him and,
with great care, removed a crumpled brown-paper bag. He
placed it on the counter and took out the brogues one at a time.
They looked like new.

'These days no one challenges us,' he said. 'And because there
is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no
reason to work hard, we have all become lazy.' The cobbler
wrapped up the shoes and scratched a broken fingernail down
his nose. 'Lazy people are like cancer,' he said. 'They spread.
Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed. But there is
hope for us all when a man like you brings a pair of shoes like
these to a small shop like this.'

The cobbler put on his woolly hat and shook my hand a second
time.

'You have done me a great service,' he said. 'You have made
me feel proud to be Moroccan again.'

Sukayna sent a message with Zohra the next day. It was written
in red ink and asked if I would visit her at the mattress shop once
the sun had gone down. I spent the afternoon at the
hammam
with Abdelmalik, having the skin rasped from my body with a
masseur's glove. The
gommage
process was so excruciatingly
painful, I vowed aloud that I would never return. The masseur
grinned through broken teeth. He knew as well as I that, however
much you dislike it at the time, the
hammam
is an addiction
hard to shed.

Once we were lounging in the dressing room, I told
Abdelmalik about Murad. He said he had heard that in Iceland
television was banned every Thursday night. It was a way of
promoting reading and, better still, of encouraging families to
tell their epic tales.

'We should do the same in Morocco,' he said.

The astrologer was standing outside the mattress shop with a
dead chicken in her hands. She furled the bird up in a sheet of
nylon sacking and rinsed her hands clean. I didn't comment on
the sacrifice. It was someone else's medicine. We clambered over
a large double mattress being refilled with padding. Once
behind the lace curtain, Sukayna lit a candle and tipped it so that
three drops of wax splattered on the floor.

'I have been thinking about your dream,' she said.

'The execution?'

'Yes.'

'Do you think it has a meaning?'

'There's a beginning, a middle, but no end,' she said.

'The execution's the end.'

'No, no,' Sukayna urged, 'the end hasn't come yet.'

'So?'

'So, you must let the dream slip into your head once again. It's
telling you a story.'

'What story?'

'The story of your own experience.'

'But I've never flown on a magic carpet!'

Sukayna tipped the candle again, allowing a few more drops
of wax to hit the cement.

'Dreams are like fairy stories,' she said, 'and fairy stories are
like dreams. They are reflections of each other and they heal the
sleeping mind.'

Sukayna stopped because there was a commotion on the
other side of the curtain. It sounded as if the owner of
the double mattress was arguing about the price to repair it.
When the noise had died down, I asked why Dar Khalifa was
bleeding.

The astrologer looked over at me, her eyes an ocean of green.

'You don't understand it, do you?'

'No, no, I don't understand.'

'Your house is not like other houses,' she said; 'it's much more
than the walls and the roof you see. There's a spirit,
baraka
, that
touches the people inside from time to time.'

'I don't follow.'

'Dar Khalifa was once a long way from Casablanca,' she said.
'It was built where it is because it was so far from the town. And
before the shantytown was there, you would have been able to
see the ocean from the garden. It would have been tranquil.'

'It is tranquil,' I said defensively.

'It would have been much more tranquil.' She smiled.

'I still don't understand what you are leading to.'

Sukayna tightened her headscarf.

'Dar Khalifa is not just a house,' she said.

I looked at her, anxiously trying to work out what she meant.

'What more can it be than that?' I asked, losing patience.

'It's a refuge,' she said. 'The refuge of a holy man.'

Marwan the carpenter blended in well with life at the Caliph's
House. He always arrived on time for work, made everyone
laugh and became great friends with Murad. The two men were
so inseparable that Marwan pleaded with the blind storyteller to
come and stay at his own home on the far side of the shantytown.
His shack came with the added bonus that it had a small
paddock beside it that could be used for nocturnal storytelling
events.

I had been anxious that Osman and the Bear would turn on
the newcomer. After all, they were related to each other through
marriage and, unlike them, Marwan was a Berber. In Morocco,
the bond of blood is as strong as tempered steel. But to my
surprise and great relief, the existing guardians welcomed
Marwan as if he were a long-lost brother.

There was something I found even more remarkable:
Marwan's intelligence. On the surface he may have been an
unassuming carpenter, and now a guardian, but he had a
brilliant mind. He told me he had never received a formal
education, had never even learned to read.

'My grandmother was my school,' he said. 'She taught me
almost everything I know.'

'Where?'

'At Azrou, in the cedar forest. My sisters were sent to class,
but my grandmother refused to let me attend.'

'Why?'

'Because she said they would teach me to read.'

'That sounds like back-to-front thinking,' I said.

'It does because you have been to school. But, to her, reading
was a curse, a way of blocking real thinking.' Marwan broke off,
leaned on his rake. 'I'll tell you something,' he said.

'What?'

'Everything I know has come in through my ears. I've never
read a word.'

'So?'

'So I see the world in a different way.'

Oriental culture, of which Morocco is certainly a part, has at its
root a belief in selflessness. It's a subject rarely spoken of in the
West and even less frequently understood. To be selfless, you
would give charity anonymously, walk softly on the earth and
look out for others – even total strangers – before you look out
for yourself. To the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an
impediment, in humanity's quest for real progress. Life in
Morocco introduced me time and again to people who had
achieved a form of everyday selflessness. It was a quality I
respected beyond any other, a goal – perhaps unattainable –
I hoped one day to touch. I found myself wondering if the search
for the story in my heart might be a component, an element,
somehow linked to selflessness.