Cormorant Books

Share |

Moon Over Marrakech (Preview)

Chapter 1

TORONTO, MARCH 2007

My friends are shocked by my predicament. An illegal wedding in Morocco, my brutal exploitation by a man for whom I almost gave up my life in Toronto. My current financial woes are difficult enough. What really puzzles me are items of missing jewellery, curious items of lingerie, a missing rare first edition — Tavernier’s Travels in India with its antique maps — and an art folio of expensive prints. When my cartons arrived in Toronto, I found that even a collection of photographs along with the negatives, and bills from the wedding caterer in Morocco had also disappeared. However, everyone seems to be relieved that I have returned home.

I am standing before the wall of glass windows looking at the Rosedale Valley Ravine. Snow covers the trees, bending them out of shape, and the morning light is a band of grey. The skidding line of cars on the street below moves in a stop and start pattern, their overworked exhausts shrouding them in white fog. The complete absence of colour outside reflects my internal state as well. I have always associated colour with the movement of life and at this moment, I feel like a bird whose flight has been arrested mid-air. I hover between two worlds, unable to land safely in either one.

Although I am familiar with the capricious vagaries of April in Toronto, I have no sense of ownership or familiarity. My disconnected state brings relief only in the type of anonymity I have created on my return. My sole focus in life is the recovery of my fractured arm and gathering fragments of a life I discarded last year. I am not even certain if this life will suit me, so both tasks remain daunting.

Behind me, the new apartment close to my old neighbourhood displays all the Moroccan furnishings I designed, acquired, and shipped back. This is a home that vividly exhibited another history just as my old home, the Endhouse, did. In the bedroom, the bed from Casablanca lies flanked by the metal-embossed night tables, ivory camel-skin lamps banded with strips of metal, and a long chest of drawers draped in hammered metal. The treasures of the craftsmen of Marrakech have followed me to Canada.

I still sleep on “my” side of the bed because the other side is like the edge of an abyss. There are moments when I think I should get rid of everything Moroccan in my home but I am tired of buying and discarding furniture. When the container arrived and the cartons were unpacked, there was an odour of leather, wood, and musk I was unable to get rid of for days. The scent of Marrakech roses, dusty environs, golden sunlight, and steaming “Tajines” seemed trapped into the seams of fabrics and stitched into the lining of my soul.

But I view them coldly now and halt the roll of nostalgia with a barricade of newly acquired resistance. When a framed photograph of Khadim rolled out of the packing material, I immediately turned it on its face. Although I have organized the spacious apartment with my customary flair, down to having it painted in the rose-tinted terracotta hue of Marrakech, I have no interest in it whatsoever.

This is the fourth home I have created in nine months. I have faultlessly brought back with me an emotionally perilous ambience and its exotic flavour enchants my friends, but mocks me daily. I have a twelve-month plan for survival and beyond that, I have no other life plan.

I rejoined a health club nearby where all the exercise equipment is spread out. On the first day I go to it, I look at the weight machines and do not permit my accident at the health club in Marrakech to discourage me. It reminds me of my father placing me back on the horse I had fallen off as a child. My arm was released from its cast yesterday and I am learning not to hate the long scar, which stretches from the middle of the forearm to the elbow.

There are two metal plates in this arm, which the surgeon in Marrakech inserted, and I believe that a foreign substance has entered my body forever. This limb is suspect and unreliable. I pretend it does not exist.

To my surprise, my body exerts its own will and within weeks I develop my muscle tone and the injured arm regains all its former strength. Each month when I march into the Orthopaedic wing of the hospital and look at the new set of X-rays, I become conscious that both the gap on the fractured bone and the rip in my shredded psyche are closing.

The grotesque eight-month experience has altered my perception of the predictability of my previous life. There are times when I question whether the frequent and relentless challenge to my survival skills has introduced a new reflex into my behaviour. Will the grid of my innate personality become unfamiliar? My decision to trade a thriving metropolis for a picturesque small town in North Africa transformed me into a precarious acrobat balanced over the charm of a city’s rose-coloured antiquity and seared by the flame of failed promises.

Had I yearned for an organic solution to my technology-riddled society and chosen a partner who appeared to reincarnate a fabled mythology? Had I simply projected my vision fuelled by a powerful imagination on an unworthy ally whose utterances were simply a hashish dream?

Before i left marrakech, i only telephoned one person to say goodbye. She was a distinguished author in Rabat.

“You are leaving?” said Fatema.

“Yes,” I reply. “I think Marrakech was simply a dream and the man who brought me here has disappeared. I am going home. I have had an operation and I want my own medical system.”

“But it was your dream.”

“No, I always believed he shared it with me.”

“Rubbish. It was always your dream. He was an opportunist. He just walked into your dream.”

I am close to tears. “I think it is more than that, I have a history with Marrakech. I felt it was my city.”

“Of course Marrakech will always be your home. Finish the book and come back for a holiday whenever you want,” she says briskly.

These are days when I turn inwards. I examine my spiritual identification with Khadim. My best tool for this exercise is pragmatism.

I spend days mulling over it and realize that what he practised is not the faith I was raised in. It is the Malakite interpretation of Islam practiced in Morocco, mired in dogmatic absolutism. Lurking beneath his urbane and thinly lacquered French patina was the ferocity of a tribal code that confined women to locked homes, exercised a rapacious control over their personal assets and mobility, and then sought absolution through prayer. His daily devotion in the form of prayer is tainted, and his behaviour is both godless and suspect.

I am now able rationally to disentangle the skeins of eroticism from spiritualism and examine the guilt-ridden crevices of my own life. I have been raised by liberal Muslim parents who did not pray five times a day. I married out of my faith and only retained a symbolic association with the faith practised by my parents. Through Khadim, I intended to reclaim a spirituality that I mistakenly thought had been repressed for years. It was an unpredictable life journey and I was unable to recognize hazard when it bludgeoned me under the guise of romance. Yet the tip of North West Africa, like the handle of a Berber dagger, was plunged into me and now I must endure.

Outwardly, I embrace the flow of my sane and familiar civil society but inwardly my life is marked by the solitude of a misplaced warrior. These are emotions I cannot reveal, as I do not wish to be perceived as a victim. I intend to convert misadventure into a survival skill of sorts and am repelled by the notion that I am diminished.

Although my study was assembled within hours with the writing desk and all my familiar items, I only enter it to lie on the couch and watch television at night. Sometimes I glance at the computer lying with its lid closed but am aware that I am not ready to start. It is as though white paint has been poured over a series of vivid paintings.

There is nothing to see, so there is nothing to describe and I have convinced myself that I have lost my ability to write. A long-standing devotee of the full moon, I watch it one night coming home from a party. I park my car and gaze up at the night for a few seconds and when I return home I walk into the study and open the black fabric book bag lying at the corner of the desk.

It contains two manuscripts in separate folders and my journal. I have not opened this bag for three months. The bag was packed in Marrakech in a small carton. I labelled it with my left hand as the right was in the sling. I scrolled the Arabic word “Kitab,” which means book, and in that largely traumatized condition, post surgery, I hoped that the ship sailing from Casablanca to Montreal would capsize en route.

I now pull open the sturdy Velcro fastening and discover that the notebook with the maroon spine is missing. It was stolen by the only person who knew of its existence, location, and contents. My outrage at Khadim, followed by a searing anger, makes me hurl the bag across the room where the folders open and an avalanche of paper spills around my desk. I pick up my car keys and head for the lakeshore at the foot of the city. Here, I drive west along the boulevard and reach a familiar spot. I stand by the edge of the dark water of Lake Ontario with the skyline of my powerful city behind me. Cesar’s incommunicable spirit floats across the water and the first ray of light enters my consciousness.

This is the miracle that I am hoping for. The writer in me resurfaces. The next morning when I wake up, I call a deeply respected friend, Margaret Atwood. We meet at a neighbourhood café. She walks in bundled in a black winter jacket, her face framed in a halo of silky white curls. She embraces me and tells me that I still carry the Moroccan sun on my face. I gaze at her, pressing back the tears that threaten to spill out at her display of gentleness.

“I think I am ready to start work on my long abandoned book,” I say.

What follows is a brisk conversation about publishers and agents and my ability to deliver the manuscript in the next six months. She is familiar with the details of my experience in Marrakech and, before leaving, tells me that under no circumstances am I to return to the country that has brutalized me.

“It’s not in the cards —” I reply vaguely, looking away.

“Look into my eyes and repeat that you will not return,” Margaret’s gaze pins me down.

“I will never return to Marrakech,” I chant like an obedient child. five days before my birthday in June, the telephone rings early in the morning.

“Hello. Hello. How are you?” Khadim’s low-pitched voice rolls out of the receiver.

The line disconnects immediately. It is 6 a.m. and I sit up in bed wide-awake. I dial the number in Marrakech that I know by heart. The telephone is answered at the first ring.

“Hello,” I say.

“I was coming to surprise you for your birthday but I have just received a summons from the Ministry of Tourism in Rabat. What have you told them?”

“The Moroccan ambassador in Canada has forwarded a complaint about your behaviour,” I inform him.

“Send them a fax.” His tone is cajoling, familiar, and ultimately confident. “Tell them this is personal and not professional.”

“Did you know I broke my arm?” I ask, stunned at the conversation.

“Darling, I was not in Marrakech. I went to France, I had an operation.”

The stench of his lie rises from the coastline of Morocco and floats across the Atlantic to swirl around my bed in Toronto. I replace the receiver and leave my bedroom distraught that the power in his voice has re-awakened every dormant sentiment I discarded five months ago. I make coffee, measuring both the powder and the betrayal orchestrated by my heart.

His use of the word “darling” is sweeter than the honey I am adding to my coffee. It immediately plunges me back into the nights in Marrakech when the full moon conspired to turn a city into an unparalleled dreamscape and I felt as though love would never let me go. As the caffeine wakes me up, the warrior within me steps out, and I am fully conscious that the call is a beckoning of sorts. The destination, as in all mythologies, is to a serpent’s lair.

The telephone calls continue for four weeks. I am now practising the art of deception and my teacher is Khadim. My objective is that under the guise of a recently severed link I may be able to lead Khadim to a comfort zone where he reveals himself utterly. Although the shadow of his dishonesty emerges in each bizarre conversation where he claims not to have been in Marrakech when I had my accident, yet I still seek the confirmation of his betrayal and abandonment. I hear daily his complaints: that the grind of Moroccan investigative bureaucracy, spearheaded by an ambassador, will jeopardize his ability to practise his profession, and restrict his ability to travel and join me. His mother is on her deathbed. He is unable to sleep in my absence, he misses me terribly, and his life has become a nightmare.

“What have you done with my journal?”

“Darling, I swear to you I have never seen it,” he lies with passion.

“Step by step I will settle everything and you must tell them that.” At the end of four weeks on a clear day in July, I send him a fourline fax stating that his verbal assurance to settle matters between us fills me with hope. I never hear from him again and when I call, he never answers. This revelation of his motives finally confirms what I have known for a long time and never fully accepted.

All the theft of my personal items in Marrakech was conducted by the man who boasted that he could make things appear and disappear. He also removed the entire paper trail that could incriminate him, down to the magnifying glass in my study with which he forged my signature on my cheques.

“I do not need to see you again,” says the smiling young doctor.

“What about the steel plates?” I ask.

“They stay in forever. We would have to open your arm again to remove them. It is not advisable,” he replies firmly.

“Can I play tennis now?”

“Yes. You have amazing recuperative powers.” He shakes my hand.

“Good genes.” I smile at him, and walk away.

The two thin incision lines on my arm begin to fade. However, the longer one on the top rises in a point and then flows down again. It resembles a sand dune, I think, wondering if the Moroccan surgeon had tattooed my favourite landscape with some intimate knowledge of who I was.

Had I not broken my arm I might still be trapped in a diabolical existence ruled by the games of magic. Life, nuanced by a shoddy illusionist’s penchant for smoke and mirrors. To survive, I must immediately discard a life history that has only usurped one year from my life. I also feel a rush of anger for the foreign elements in my arm.

Phrases, sentences, and chapters mark the passage of my life now as I begin writing. Masses of paper accumulate on my desk as I edit words I wrote fifteen years ago. The outline of my book becomes redefined, and my confidence increases. I open my home, entertain my friends, and even cook Moroccan cuisine for them. It is as though

I have lived in a foreign country for a while and learned new things. Khadim’s name or any reference to him never comes up. Every photograph or object associated with him lies in the basement locker of the condominium building. Sometimes I speak to my British friends in Marrakech to find out how they are faring. It is a friendship nurtured on both sides. Our countries are irrelevant.

They are in Canada and have come to visit me.

“You look wonderful and happy,” says Robert.

“Really?”

“You couldn’t really see yourself in Marrakech. It was horrifying,” he reminds me.

“That is not entirely true.”

“He was a professional racketeer my dear. We did our own investigation after you left. You were sixth on the list of foreign women he entrapped.”

Khadim’s life flashes before my eyes. “I think it may have been a cultural barrier.”

The concept of the Arabic word “ajnabi,” meaning foreigner, had ruled Khadim’s professional world for over thirty years of his career. The most profitable industry for men of his working-class background was tourism. The second was to marry a French citizen to acquire dual nationality, which guaranteed social benefits and the ability to travel feely from Morocco.

The guide in Morocco had only one opportunity to better his lot in life and that was at the hands of the tourist in his charge. The djellaba-clad men leading lines of tourists behind them were sewn into a network of kickbacks and commissions earned from taxi drivers, restaurant owners, and shopkeepers. The race was to be outside the most expensive hotels, as their clientele was deemed the wealthiest and the easiest to dupe. Guides routinely bribed the concierges of hotels to ensure that they would be selected for work.

Commissions for guides like Khadim made shopkeepers quote prices where the profit margins soared to 500 percent. Some even paid annual retainers to guides, expecting a trail of tourists brought exclusively to their shops. Khadim had a thirty-year record of standing outside the gates of the Hotel La Mamounia and picking up an unending chain of tourists. He was successful with Cesar and me years ago. Before that, he also married a French woman, fathered a child, divorced, and returned to his country with a French nationality.

I suspect that the boundaries of our relationship had become confused. Khadim thought of me as an “ajnabi” tourist. I, in turn, had raised his status in an egalitarian sense by falling in love with him. Our combined sexual desire for each other was a powerful inducement for the bonding of two cultural polarities. His aegis was much like the history of his country under the French protectorate status.

In fact, the objective was colonization. My material advantage had become a bounty that he expected to pillage under various guises.

Ultimately, his power of seduction lay in his expert ability to gauge my spontaneity in embracing what was foreign and remote. It was tied into my adventurous and artistic nature.

I place a call to Marrakech and speak to the only colleague and friend he introduced me to in Marrakech.

“My dear, the jewellery he stole from you was pawned in France. This is a police state, and if you sneeze in Marrakech they will hear it in Rabat,” Chafiq says.

“So he continues to work as a guide?” I ask.

“Yes, at the same hotel. He is now driving a car which he brought back from France.”

I think of the bicycle-riding Khadim who claimed that his choice of transportation reflected his environmental concerns. Marrakech was in danger of heavy pollution. I had swallowed his glib assertion with admiration. It seemed to validate my choice of him as a life partner. He was an evolved Moroccan.

As the pieces of the Marrakech puzzle begin to lock into place, I send a letter to Khadim that I estimate will reach him in three weeks, at the beginning of the month of Ramadan. I simply ask that my journal be mailed back to me.

The Muslim ritual during this month prides itself on eliciting purity.

There is no response.

I finish the first two sections of the book and plan a week’s vacation in New York. There is a literary agency I have corresponded with there and I think that I will combine a bit of business with pleasure. I have not been to New York for eight years and lived there from 1973 to 1976. The cleaned up and rather benign city offers its impressive points of interest. I prowl through museums, art galleries and socialize with old friends who are all interested in Morocco.

“Is it the exotic cheap travel destination?” I am asked continually. I offer a brief sketch without any specific details. However, the break I anticipated from writing is not fully accomplished. The book sits on my shoulder because I am unable to make a critical decision. I stand on the balcony of my host’s 34th-storey penthouse apartment at Lex and 56th one evening and finally realize that there is only one way to complete my book. It is also a powerful desire to transform defeat into victory.

The next evening, I am seated at the bar in an Upper East Side restaurant with a friend when a young man sits next to me. He aims a smile at me from a pair of inquiring eyes. His hair is a mass of unruly, ebony curls and his courtesy laced with charm. I am drawn to the warmth and the sense of personal drama that he exudes.

“I am a filmmaker. Call me Heff,” he offers after a few minutes of conversation.

“What sort of films?” I ask.

“I made my first feature in Japan two years ago,” he says casually. We talk for an hour and I reveal my creative conundrum to a complete stranger. It is an act of safety, as I imagine we will never meet again.

“This is a hell of a story. I will come down and shoot a documentary short,” Heff says.

“It is not a story. This is real,” I rise to leave. “So am I! Have lunch with me tomorrow.” He tucks my arm under his elbow as I get ready to cross the street.

We meet the next day at his Wall Street hideout. Stone is one of the oldest streets in the financial district. I walk on the cobblestones and am led to a brick building that houses his office. I am utterly charmed by the environment. He works for a philanthropic foundation and continues with his film work. I see the reviews that the first screening of his film received and am impressed by both his youth and talent.

“This notebook, how badly do you want it back?” he asks.

“It is intellectual property theft, but we are dealing with a culture that is desensitized to all this,” I say wryly.

“I am fascinated by this. It’s a terrific angle for a film.”

“You mean a notebook buried somewhere in the city of Marrakech!”

“Yes, and I want you to get it back. This guy is a bad dude. I hate that.”

I fly home to toronto the next morning. He calls me a few days later and I invite him for Thanksgiving. He surprises me over the weekend by flying into Detroit, picking up a rental car, and ending up a block away from me.

“Do you always manage to find your destinations?” I laugh at him. “I have brought my trumpet, I am going to play for you,” he says lifting a small case from the car.

He sleeps in my study and plays the trumpet after dinner. I can picture him somewhere in Paris in a smoky nightclub or at the base of the Eiffel Tower playing siren songs that he is incapable of divining himself. His visit is the most healing gift I have received in months. He also brings a video of his feature film that I do not see in his presence. His work is filled with a raw yet impressive talent and he has the soul of a poet. I send him a laudatory email and he telephones me promptly.

“You are an amazing woman,” he says.

“You must continue your career in film.”

“Always,” he says.

“Never give it up, even if you have to starve,” I say.

“I want to interview you,” he responds.

“You know the story, let me finish it.” I say goodbye.

“Tell me your plans and please stay in touch,” he says.

I call my travel agent, book a flight, and arrange for a friend to collect my mail and pay bills for the next month. I make only one phone call to my destination and am assured that I will be picked up at the airport. My computer and two thirds of the completed manuscript travel with me. It is an overnight flight and there is an interesting person seated next to me so we talk the night away until the flight lands in Paris. I transfer from one airport to another and board another flight. The pilot is quite garrulous — he talks about the three countries on the flight path, and although I am seated by the window, I never look out.

When the plane lands, I collect my hand luggage and walk out rapidly. I see familiar surroundings, answer the routine questions posed by the customs official, and wait for baggage. The temperature shifts immediately and my body adjusts to it. I have come prepared. I wheel my luggage cart out of the terminal towards the exit and search groups of faces. There is no one I recognize, and the first dent in my composure surfaces. I push the luggage cart down the ramp on the walkway towards the taxis. My name is called out behind me and I stop. three months later, after the writing trip, I send the manuscript to my agent. Two weeks later, he telephones me and suggests that we meet.

I am sitting in a pleasant room facing Sam, literary agent. We share a history as he represented my last book, a food memoir.

“What do you think? Do you like the novel?” I ask him.

“Yes I do. I will not represent it as a work of fiction. This is a work of non-fiction.”

“It is a novel,” my voice has risen and I am wondering if he has gone mad.

“It is the story of your life and that is the power of this story.”

“I don’t care. I have always written fiction. The last book was different.” I feel a tide of panic and nausea.

“This is very simple. You are just converting it from third person to first,” he replies blandly.

“I don’t need this type of exposure. It works as a novel.”

“This is your life. This is real. Think about it. It should do very well. I can sell this book.”

I have stood up. “I don’t know. I am not certain.”

“I am going to work on the proposal immediately. Just a few sample chapters. I am very excited.” He rises and leads me to the door.

I am running home. The sky is grey and snowflakes swirl around my face. I am a woman wearing dark glasses who feels as though she has been stripped of her clothes. There have been deaths and burials in my life and the coffin in which I have concealed all this is my manuscript. I have done this artfully somewhere outside myself with my own techniques. I have published five works of fiction and this is my craft. As an author, my conduit to the publishing world is my agent. He is my trusted champion and I feel as though he has betrayed me. Lighting a damp cigarette on the pavement and waiting for the traffic light to change, I am simply praying for an avalanche of snow to descend on me and bury me forever.

I have spent two days circling my desk and viewing the manuscript folder with fear and a sense of failure. Once again, the sensation of being arrested mid-flight overpowers me. My act of concealment has been shredded. Three months have passed since I have completed the manuscript. A sense of urgency to embrace a new beginning hammers at me daily. I have another day left to speak to my agent as the publishing industry is ruled by seasons. I have also spoken to a few respected peers and they mirror my agent’s instincts. I am stunned and feel as though my writing life has been turned upside down. I feel at this point that it is a final act of courage that I am simply not brave enough to manifest. I think of turtles flipped on their backs with their underbellies exposed. This image of their flailing legs and arms depict vulnerability and acts of cruelty perpetrated by tyrants. I see myself as a turtle. I have been flipped over. For the first time, I cannot see the forest for the trees. I am doomed and I am ready to drown in self-pity. Am I going to join the ranks of people who are victims and become detestable?

The next afternoon I am seated by the window in the lounge of the Four Seasons Hotel. This spot is filled with memories of Cesar and a previous life. It is a dodge. I have retreated into a comfort zone where I feel like a delinquent adolescent. It is early afternoon and my computer is before me on the table. I am making an effort I say, wondering if I am clever enough to trick myself. Recklessly, I have also ordered a martini that I have never drunk before in the late morning. Yet the sips of vodka and the first line of Chapter 1 are somehow wedded to each other. All I have to do is insert one letter of the alphabet. It is the word “I.” When the index finger of my right hand connects and the word “she” disappears, a silence blankets every sound around me. There is no time to register my astonishment as I become completely oblivious to my surroundings. My fingers are moving on the keyboard and I feel as though I am the captain of a small sailing vessel turning a rudder with precision. All I can sense is that the ocean is calm and I no longer require any navigational chart. Days later when this exercise is completed, all I feel is that I have finally been introduced to myself. It is a peaceful process and easier than I imagined. Finally, I have reclaimed both my conversations and the people I have had them with. The experience is mine and the life is mine. When I look into the mirror the woman whose face glances at me is not a figment of an overworked imagination. The werewolf does not lurk in this image even though it was suggested humorously by Margaret that perhaps it did. I see Scheherazade, who was a storyteller. Like her, I must tell my stories to save my life, but in a different way. The angles of my face are no longer sharp, and a hint of character spills from my eyes. I see definition and the seasons of living etched on my face, despite the deceptively youthful genes I spring from.

How does one live with a real self? Mostly with humour, gentleness. But also with the surety that compressing a dozen lifetimes into sixteen years is that unchartered act of mystery that can neither be predicted nor controlled. Ultimately, it is not only where we imagine we are headed that counts, but also the true meaning of the mileposts along the way. Will I ever be able to alter the passion with which I invariably engage with life? Chances are I will not, because this is my true essence, and I cannot discard the notion that the perfection of the magical kingdoms where we entwine with others must remain unbroken. Perhaps the single redeeming lesson is that I now accept that caution is not a word synonymous with cowardice, but with knowledge.

It is a full moon tonight! I see it perched above the rooftop garden of the adjoining apartment building. In my mind’s eye, it is not the shrouded outlines of the storytellers of the great square Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech that I see, but myself, preparing to reveal secrets from the beginning.