Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

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 It was originally made in Cordoba in the eleventh century, then was transported in pieces over the sea and by camel from the north of Morocco to the south.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.”