Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

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

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.