Махи Бинбин - Marrakech Noir

“What about you?” Patti asked, a sudden frown across her face. “What do you think?”

“Me?” al-Sharqawi replied. “I don’t believe a single word of it!”

When Patti and Anais reached Marrakech in March of 1938, the city was bathed in an enchanting light; palm trees and orange all blended together. The city’s aromas were steeped in spices, coupled with roses and lemon blossoms, which made everyone glide as if their feet weren’t even touching the ground. It all imbued the city with an indefinable allure, one that made people fall in love in a heartbeat. So Patti didn’t even wait until she reached the pasha’s house before revealing her heart to him, offering it up in sacrifice to the sheer magic of the place. But things went awry, as they sometimes do.

They had arrived at the pasha’s reception hall just before sunset, attended by his personal portrait artist. The entire courtyard was teeming with European guests, a few army generals, administrative officials, and grandees; the whole meeting resembled a welcoming reception like the art openings in Paris. The salons surrounding the courtyard hosted small groups of the pasha’s most important guests. In one of the salons was the pasha himself, looking well dressed as always, with a determined glint in his eyes. Patti and Anais had moved forward to greet him on a signal from the painter; the pasha had beamed a smile and held Patti’s hand in his own, while Anais finished introducing her friend. Anais then translated Patti’s description of her work to the pasha, telling him that Patti collected European paintings for museums in New York. With that, he had grabbed ahold of Anais’s hand.

“So young?” the pasha had asked Patti.

Patti could not reply. She had stared in amazement at the pasha’s figure, as he bent over slightly to put his arm around Anais and took her on a tour of the palace — beginning with the huge cedarwood door at the entrance, then turning right toward the doors made of inlaid wood, with carved arches painted in natural extracts of saffron and anemone. Once in a while, the pasha pointed out the gilded ceilings and the way that their leafy patterns matched the geometrical shapes on the walls. He paused in front of the lions’ claws decorating the columns and the patterned mosaics that covered them. He then brought her back to the reception hall with its own splendid columns, pointing out details concealed by the wonderful structure — wickerwork, clusters, and miniature crowns, all exquisitely proportioned. From the hall, he took her out to the Andalusian courtyard, the harem rooms, and his study. Eventually, the couple reached the private quarters, where they passed through a huge engraved doorway. The pasha escorted Anais inside and two guards closed the doors behind them.

Patti and the pasha’s painter were left to wander around the palace until someone arrived to take them back to the hotel. Patti then spent an entire month in her room doing nothing but crying, eating, and sleeping. She didn’t see either the pasha or Anais again. The painter came to visit her every day. He spent long hours with her, painting her and talking to her about the pasha. As he began to seduce her, she started paying closer attention to him. Every time he tried to get her in bed, she told him to bring Anais first, and then he could have what he wanted. In response, he told her that it would be much easier to bring her a lion in a hemp sack.

And then, one steaming hot day, Patti suddenly decided to go back to Paris — and then to New York. Later, she married a young man whom she had gone out on innocent strolls with. They spent many years together, traveling to remote spots to acquire rare works of art. Patti’s only search was for those obscure feelings that had overwhelmed her on the day after the mirage. Through this marriage founded on profound mutual understanding and an equally profound misunderstanding, the couple shared the experience of enormous wealth, and collusion unaffected by the ebb and flow of life. She hadn’t told her husband about her emotional collapse in the past, until the very last day of his life, when he asked her why she always cried when looking at the ugly painting she had kept — the one that had been made by the pasha’s painter. She told him that she was actually crying for Anais, whom the pasha had snatched away from her. When her husband did not seem completely convinced, she told him the whole story.

When al-Sharqawi told Patti about the lute player from Syria, he sensed that something bad had happened. She looked flustered and angry, and terminated their session with an insulting curtness. To get rid of this bad feeling, he headed straight for the café where his closest friends would spend many hours sipping mint tea and indulging in the kind of laughter known in Marrakech as tamshkhir . They would laugh at each other, at the city that sold itself to foreigners, at those same foreigners who sold themselves to the city, at the disputes over palm trees being destroyed by apartments, at other apartments where intimate soirées took place, at Tangier — and at laughter itself; laughter being the most stubbornly historical feature of Marrakech.

Al-Sharqawi reached the café, where everyone was talking about the mummy. One of his friends asked him in a disgusted tone what all the fuss was about over some neglected bones in a wall. Al-Sharqawi told him that they were not just bones, but rather a long-forgotten crime.

“All of Marrakech is full of dead men’s bones,” his other friend said. “Just dig under your own pillow and you’re sure to find a forgotten skull, or one of the bodies that the pasha used to hang in the Old Medina’s alleyways—”

“Why dig under his pillow?” another man interrupted. “The only skull under the pillow is his own.”

“Whose?” al-Sharqawi asked.

“The person in front of you,” the man answered.

Al-Sharqawi turned to his friend. “Why do you put your head under the pillow?”

“I’m scared! All the people who were beheaded come out in the dead of night,” his friend roared, his disgust turning into hysteria. “They wander around the neighborhoods and houses while people are asleep. Bodies are looking for heads, and heads for bodies!”

“That’s all from smoking bad grass,” al-Sharqawi assured him. “You’re mixing hash with Marlboros, and it’s affecting your minuscule brain so that you’re scared to death. That’s what happens to people who abandon the old ways of clipping kif they inherited from fathers and grandfathers, and start using the kinds Christians use.”

Al-Sharqawi told them all about the woman whose body had been found in the wall, and that caused a general commotion.

“Which woman? God forgive us, and you! Were they a woman’s bones, a man’s, or a gremlin’s?” his hysterical friend inquired.

“Religious scholars will grab everything. Root and branch,” al-Sharqawi replied dismissively, “while some stray remains are involved.”

“But we’re only prepared to acknowledge flesh. So go ahead, esteemed sir, and put some flesh on those bones!”

But al-Sharqawi insisted that there was a murder victim involved. He wanted the whole of Marrakech to know of this event, and to be aware that a crime had been committed one year, or maybe even sixty years, earlier.

“It doesn’t matter,” his other friend said.

“Yes, it does matter!” al-Sharqawi protested. “Sixty years ago the pasha and others were killing people just as easily as we’re drinking tea here. Those who kill suffer an incredible, never-ending punishment for it.”

Al-Sharqawi experienced for himself the extent of people’s involvement in his stories, as he left his house the next day and walked for over an hour deliberately through the alleys and markets of the Old Medina. Two people asked him with a snide tone what God had done with the bones in the wall. He corrected them first, by saying that it was not just a few decaying bones in the wall, but rather a complete mummy, and that on its neck was a gold necklace with a cross. Secondly, he called them heretics, and told them that Marrakech had its own mighty pharaoh whose dead were embalmed. “If he had indeed survived,” he explained, “maybe you wouldn’t be so stupid and arrogant, like the mustaches on vain and ignorant people!” And with that he’d continued on his way, the notion sticking in his throat that a significant transformation had taken place in the city.