In Arabian Nights (6 page)

On the day I took Timur for a haircut, the henpecked
husbands were few and far between. So I chatted to the barber
about razors and soccer, and asked him if he knew the story in
his heart. He was about to say something, when a tall, suave man
swept through the door, sat on the chair beside mine and asked
for a shave. He wore a pair of dark glasses across his slicked-back
hair like a black plastic tiara.

While the barber sharpened the cutthroat razor on a worn out
leather strop, the man struck up a conversation. He asked me if I missed England.

'How do you know I've come from England?'

'Because you look too pale to be Moroccan and too content to
be French,' he said.

His cheeks were shaved once, then again, and were anointed
with a home-brewed cologne that smelled of cherry blossom. He
pressed a coin into the barber's hand, turned to the door and said
to me: 'I will wait for you at the café opposite.'

I had lived in Casablanca for three years, but was still unfamiliar
with all the ins and outs of Moroccan society. I
wondered if I should accept the invitation from a total stranger.
Unable to resist, I crossed the street, holding Timur in my arms,
and found the man, sipping a
café noir
topped up with milk. He
said his name was Abdelmalik. We both sketched out the broad
details of our lives – wives, children, hobbies and work. He
expressed his passion for Arab horses and his lifelong dream of
owning one. It was a love we both shared.

We chatted about horses and life for an hour or more. Then
Abdelmalik glanced at his watch.

'We will be friends,' he said firmly as he left.

From then on the suave, clean-shaven Moroccan swept into
my life. He saw it as his duty to solve every one of my abundant
problems and stressed again and again that I could ask anything
of him. As my friend, it was his duty to be there for me, he said.
At first I found it strange that someone would make such a point
about friendship, rather than just letting it develop naturally as
we do.

We would meet every three or four days on the terrace of Café
Lugano, near Casablanca's old ring road, where we always sat at
the same table, just like I did on Friday's at Café Mabrook.
At the other tables the same men were usually seated as well.

Abdelmalik, a man I hardly knew, became involved in all
areas of my life. When I needed a lawyer, he found me a good
one; when I wanted my watch repaired, he arranged it; and
when I was in urgent need of a residency permit, he handled the
paperwork. He never asked for money and always insisted that
my friendship was ample payment for his efforts.

As the weeks passed, autumn arrived, and my suspicions grew
that Abdelmalik was really out to line his pockets at my expense.

Rachana's childhood in India was framed in stories. Each night
before she slept, her maid would reveal another instalment from
one of the great Hindu classics, the
Mahabharata
, the
Ramayana
or the
Panchatantra
. The length and scope of those tales defy all
imagination.

One evening in early October, Rachana heard me ranting on
about the legacy of stories, about the responsibility, and the baton
I felt so charged to pass on. She lit a candle and slumped down
on the sofa beside me.

'You haven't got it, have you?' she said.

'Haven't got what?'

'You don't understand how it works.'

'What?'

'The tradition of storytelling.'

Rachana stretched back.

'Stories touch us even before we enter this world,' she said,
'and they continue until we go to the next world. They are in the
dreams of an unborn baby, in the kindergarten and school, in
news reports and movies, in novels, in conversations and nightmares.
We tell each other stories all our waking hours, and when
our mouths are silent we are telling stories to ourselves in the
secrecy of our minds. We can't help but tell stories, because they
are a language in themselves.'

'But, Rachu, things are changing,' I said. 'People are forgetting
the tales they were weaned on as kids.'

'How could you think that?' she replied sternly. 'Look at
Hollywood and Bollywood: they're the greatest storytelling
machines of all time. The medium may be different, but the stories
are the same. They're just being regurgitated in another form.'

'But stories are dying out.'

'They're not dying,' Rachana said, 'but morphing into something
else. Look at them carefully. The essence is the same.'

Just then, I remembered something my father once said to me.
I think we were in Andalucia, rattling south towards Morocco.
We had stopped to have a picnic in a field. It was the middle of
nowhere. My sisters and I had found a clump of dandelions and
were blowing the fluff at one another. As we played, my father
told us a story. We were only half listening.

When he had finished, I said to him: 'Baba, what would
happen if a country lost all its stories?'

My father became quite serious, touched a hand to his face.

'That could never happen,' he said.

'Why not?'

'Because stories are like a bath without a plug. You see, the
bath has a tap that can never be turned off. So it will never
empty. As the old water flows out, new water floods in. It's a
balanced system. New stories are always pouring in; some come
from near, others from far away.'

I plucked the last dandelion and blew the seeds from the top.

'Do you understand what I mean?'

'Yes, Baba, I do.'

'But there is something else, Tahir Jan, another kind of story.
It's the most powerful of all.'

'Is it like a bath, too?'

'No, it's not. You see, it's the kind of story that's lived in a place
since the beginning of time. It's always there, buried in the
culture, lying asleep. Most people don't even know it's there. But
it is.'

'When will it be told, Baba?'

'When the time is right.'

'When?'

'When people are ready to understand it.'

Winter was still a long way off, but I didn't want to be caught
out as we had been the year before. Our original architect had
forgotten to put a chimney in the main sitting room, despite
being begged time and again to do so. My dream was to
spend the long winter evenings sitting in front of a crackling
fire.

So I asked Hamza to find a mason.

He wandered out into the
bidonville
and returned an hour
later leading an old man. The man, who spoke no French, had a
long greying beard, wire-rimmed spectacles, and was dressed in
an indigo-blue laboratory coat.

Hamza pulled my ear to the side and whispered loudly,
'Monsieur Tahir, he's a good man. He's very pious.'

'Is that good?'

Hamza nodded.

'Of course,' he said. 'In Morocco you can always trust a man
with a long beard.'

I asked the mason if he could construct the fireplace. He shot
out a line of Arabic.

'What did he say?'

Hamza rocked back on his heels confidently.

'He says that God has sent him the perfect plan.'

'Oh?'

The old mason tapped his nose.

'Two nostrils,' he said.

'Nostrils?'

'God created us with two tubes instead of one. That's the key.
We will use God's blueprint.'

The next night, the mason arrived along with three bags of
cement, a hammer and his team of long-bearded Muslim
brothers. They tiptoed into the house and laboured from dusk
until dawn, only pausing to pray. The next night they toiled
again, and then a third night. Hamza insisted their nocturnal
shifts were because they studied the Qur'ān during every hour of
daylight.

After four nights the chimney was finished. I stacked up a pile
of wood, interleaving it with newspaper and twigs. Then I
touched a match to a corner of the paper. Within the blink of an
eye, the fire was burning like a furnace in Hell.

The mason moistened his upper lip. '
Allahu Akbar!
God
is great,' he said.

The next night when I tucked Ariane in bed she asked me if the
fairies would come while she was asleep.

'When your tooth has fallen out,' I said. 'That's when they'll
come.'

'Are you sure, Baba?'

I looked down, her chestnut eyes catching the light.

'Yes, I'm sure.'

'Do you promise the fairies will come when my tooth has
fallen out?'

'I promise,' I said.

'How do you know?'

'Because . . .'

'Yes, Baba?'

'Because you believe in them.'

'Is that what makes them real?'

'What?'

'Believing in them?'

'Yes, Ariane, sometimes that's all it takes.'

A popular Moroccan proverb goes: 'A man without friends is like
a garden without flowers.' It was said to me in the very first week
I arrived to live in Casablanca, by a plumber who had come to
clean out the drains. He seemed distraught that I could have
moved to a new home in a foreign land where I knew no one at all.

I told him that it felt liberating. 'I don't have to avoid people
any more,' I said, jubilantly.

The plumber wiped a rag over the crown of his bald
head.

'But how will you live if you don't have friends?'

Looking back to that first week, I now understand what he
meant. In our society friends are sometimes little more than
people we go to the pub with so we aren't there alone. We have
different expectations of them, or no expectations at all. If asked
to do a favour, we usually enquire what it is before we accept.
But in Morocco, friendship is still charged with codes of honour
and loyalty, as it may once have been in the West. It is a bond
between two people under which any favour, however great,
may be asked.

After we had known each other for a month, Abdelmalik
invited me to his apartment. It was small, cosy, and dominated
by a low coffee table. On the table there were laid at least ten
plates, each one piled with sticky cakes, biscuits and buns. I
asked how many other people had been invited.

'Just you,' replied my host.

'But I can't eat this much,' I said.

Abdelmalik grinned like a Cheshire cat. 'You must try to eat
it all,' he replied.

A few days later, he called me and announced he had a
surprise. An hour later, I found myself in the steam room of
a
hammam
, a Turkish-style bath. For Moroccans, going to the
hammam
is a weekly ceremony, one of the communal pillars
upon which the society is built. Abdelmalik taught me how to
apply the aromatic
savon noir
and the ritual of
gommage
,
scrubbing myself down until my body was as raw as meat on a
butcher's block. In the scalding fog of the steam room, he presented
me with an expensive wash-case packed with the items I
would need.

When I choked out thanks, embarrassed at the costly gift, he
whispered: 'No price is too great for a friend.'

As time passed, I braced myself for Abdelmalik's ulterior
motive. I felt sure he would eventually ask me for something big,
some kind of payment for my side of our friendship.

Then, one morning, after many coffee meetings, he leaned
over the table at Café Lugano and said, 'I have a favour to ask
you.'

I felt my stomach knot with selfishness.

'Anything,' I mumbled, bravely.

Abdelmalik edged closer and smiled very gently.

'Would you allow me to buy you an Arab horse?' he said.

A drowning man is not troubled by rain.

Persian proverb

FROM THE FIRST DAYS WE TOOK UP RESIDENCE IN THE CALIPH'S
House, I found myself in a world that lies parallel to our own.
Morocco is a kingdom overlaid with a cloak of supernatural
belief. A twilight zone, a fourth dimension, its spell touches
every aspect of life, affecting everyone in the most unexpected
way.

At first you hardly realize it is there. But as you learn to
observe, really observe, you see it – everywhere. The more you
hear of it, the more you sense it all around. And the more
you sense it, the more you begin to believe.

Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible, what at
first was hidden becomes visible.

Like everyone else who has ever moved to Morocco, we were
destined to brush with the supernatural, whether it be through
the shantytown, the workforce, or through our new friends. But
it was the purchase of Dar Khalifa itself that sucked us deep into
the Moroccan underbelly. With its legions of supposed jinns, the
house was somehow directly connected to the kingdom's
bedrock of supernatural belief.

The mere thought of spirits struck unimaginable fear into the
hearts of the guardians, our maids and all other believers who crossed the
threshold. The jinns may have plagued our lives through the belief and actions
of those around us, but for me they became an almost tangible link to the
world that created
A Thousand and One Nights
.

That collection of stories is a byword for the exotic, the jackpot
of cultural colour. Even in our society, saturated by written
information, the title is enough to raise the hairs on the back of
our collective necks. It conjures emotion, a sense of treasure,
opulence, magic and the supernatural, a fantasy within the reach
of mere mortals.

It is just over three centuries since the tales of the
Arabian
Nights
arrived in Western Europe. They appeared first in
French, translated by Antoine Galland between 1704 and 1717,
under the title
Les Mille et une nuit
. Galland had been cautious to
censor passages he felt overly lewd for sensitive French tastes; as
opposed to later translators, such as Burton, who delighted in the
abounding obscenity. According to Robert Irwin, author of the
remarkable
Arabian Nights: A Companion
, Galland's translation
was based on a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century manuscript.
There may have been an even earlier edition, perhaps dating to
the tenth or even the ninth century. As Irwin suggests, Galland
and subsequent translators added to the base manuscript,
expanding it freely with as many new characters and tales as they
could find.

Galland's translation was an overnight sensation. The salons
of polite French society swooned at the richness in storytelling
seldom seen on the Continent. The event can be compared to the
blandness of European food prior to the sixteenth century, before
spices arrived from the Orient. Granted the Latin and Greek
classics were well-known, but they lacked the mystery, the dark
layers and sublayers of the East.

The public demand for the tales led to linguists, historians,
and Orientalists struggling over translations of astonishing
complexity and scope. During the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, at least a dozen separate translations appeared in
English, the most famous by Edward Lane, John Payne, Joseph
Mardrus and, of course, Richard Burton. They ranged from the
concise to the encyclopedic and were found in the libraries of
royalty, of institutions and of gentlemen.

From the moment they reached Europe, the
Arabian Nights
were surrounded by intrigue. The anonymity of the text led to
incessant speculation. Some claimed that the stories were a kind
of tonic that could boost flagging spirits. Others asserted that no
man could ever read the entire collection without dropping dead
from the feat. That of course was hyperbole. Translators, editors
and printers, as well as scores of readers, read them from cover
to cover and lived to tell the tale.

The
Arabian Nights
are stories within stories. One character
tells a tale about a character who recounts a tale about another,
who tells a further tale. The structure leads to multiple layers,
extraordinary depth and frequent confusion.

The premise for the collection is that a fictional king, called
Shahriyar, discovers that his wife is having an affair with a
servant. Enraged, he has her executed. So as not to be betrayed
again, he marries a virgin each night and sleeps with her, before
having her beheaded at sunrise. The arrangement goes on for
some time, brides' heads rolling, until the daughter of the grand
vizier, Sherherazade, begs her father to allow her to marry the
king. With great reluctance, he agrees. Unlike the other victims,
she has no intention of meeting the executioner or his sword.

She has a plan.

Sherherazade is wedded to King Shahriyar and taken to his
quarters. Before they sleep, she begins a tale that cannot be
finished in a single night. The king allows her to live an extra
day so that her tale may be completed. The next evening, she
begins a tale inset, 'framed' within the first. Each night that
follows, the tale is left unfinished, or it links to another. The king
has no choice but to allow his bride to live another day, so that
she might complete her story.

A thousand and one nights pass.

During that time, Sherherazade reveals the greatest single
repertoire of tales ever told. And in the same span of time she
bears her husband three sons, calms his rage and remains his
queen.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
Western literature was influenced heavily by the
Arabian Nights
,
as were the arts. Oriental themes were thrown into vogue.
Paintings of scantily-clad nymphs reclining in harems became
popular, as were images of mysterious domed palaces and scenes
of Arabian courts bedecked in jewels and gold. The effect of the
stories was so profound that it touched everything from costume
to furniture, from wallpaper to architecture.

The legacy continues to be seen to this day. Anyone unwilling
to believe it need only travel to the Sussex coast and look upon
the Prince Regent's Eastern aberration, the Royal Pavilion at
Brighton.

My friend Abdelmalik had seemed crestfallen when I declined
his offer of an Arab stallion. He said that, by accepting, I would
be honouring not only him but every male member of his family
that had ever lived. The next week, when we were sitting
together at Lugano's, the conversation turned from horses to
stories once again.

Abdelmalik drew a horizontal line in the air with his finger.

'Here in Morocco, we live on a tightrope,' he said. 'It's because
of our belief. We know that God is there for us, and because He
is there we hope He will send angels to catch us if we fall.'
He slapped the table with his hand. 'If the angels do not
come,' he said, 'it's because He wants us to hit the ground.'

The waiter distributed fresh glasses of
café noir
. When he had
gone, Abdelmalik continued.

'The stories reflect our lives,' he said. 'The people in them
walk a fine line between prosperity and disaster. That's the way
it's always been and that's what makes us who we are. In a single
life a man can know wealth, poverty, thirst and hunger, as well
as satisfaction. You may describe our lives as being like a rollercoaster,
up and down. We would say that they are full, that they
are rich even though we may be poor.'

I asked him about jinns.

'They're as real to me and every other man in this café as this
glass of coffee,' he said. 'I may not be able to see them, but I
know they are right here beside me.'

'How do you know that, though?'

'Can you see clean air?'

'No.'

'But would you doubt its existence?'

I asked if he had ever searched for the story in his heart. He
pushed his sunglasses up on to his head and grinned.

'You have been talking to a Berber,' he said.

'Do you know the tradition?'

'Of course.'

'If I wanted to find out my story, where would I look first?'

'You could search near a shrine,' he said. 'But you can't start
just like that.'

'Why not?'

'You must prepare yourself first.'

'How would I do that?'

'By changing the way you see.'

Abdelmalik explained that I would have to learn to observe
with untainted senses again, like a child.

'An athlete doesn't start running until he's warmed up,' he
said. 'In the same way, you have to ready your mind if you want
it to work for you. It's a point that has been known in the East
for thousands of years, but something you're still ignorant of in
the West.'

'How do I ready my mind?'

'You must appreciate without prejudice,' said Abdelmalik. 'Only
then will you be ready to receive.'

The next day I was reading in the large garden courtyard, glancing
from time to time at the tortoises meandering through the
undergrowth. The sun was blazing gold against a cobalt sky, and
I was thankful for the peace. Out of the corner of one eye I saw
a shadow approaching fitfully and heard feet shuffling over the
rough terracotta path. I looked up and spotted Hamza edging
towards me, his favoured woolly hat stretched nervously
between his hands.

'Monsieur Tahir, you must forgive me,' he said.

'Forgive you for what, Hamza?'

The guardian didn't reply at first. He stood there, chewing his
lower lip.

'Hamza, what is it?'

'I am going to leave you and find another work,' he said.

'But, Hamza . . . you have worked here for twenty years.'

'Yes, Monsieur Tahir, twenty years.'

'What is the problem? I'm sure we can solve it.'

Hamza lowered the lids over his eyes and swung his head
from side to side in an arc.

'It is the shame,' he said.

From the outset, it seemed that the
Arabian Nights
had something
for everyone. Early on, a shrewd publisher realized that if
the language was simplified and the sexual innuendo toned
down, the books would appeal to children. The attraction to
younger readers was so widespread that our society tends to forget
the collection has strong adult content and was designed very
much as an entertainment to be kept far from children. Some
translators, like Burton, highlighted the mature content. During
decades of Victorian repression, he relied on the surfeit of
innuendo and the outright lewdness contained within the
collection to reach a vast swathe of sophisticated society eager for
such raunchy material.

One of the reasons Burton released his edition by private subscription
was to avoid censorship laws that hammered books
offered for public sale. The so-called Society for the Suppression
of Vice hunted authors contravening the strict moral code,
threatening them with hard labour. Publishers who released
their work were fined or closed down, as were the printers who
actually manufactured the books. While Burton toiled at the
translation, word of its licentious nature reached the ears of
the censorship squad. His wife, Isabel, wrote to the printer saying
she thought their London apartment was being watched.
The printing firm, Waterlow's, feared being hit with the
Obscenity Publications Act and pressured Burton to sign a
contract assuming all responsibility for his text.

In a further safeguard to avoid prosecution for pornography,
Burton announced the arrival of his forthcoming series with a clarification,
stressing that the volumes were reserved for academia alone: 'It is printed
by myself for the benefit of Orientalists and Anthropologists,' he wrote,
'and nothing could be more repugnant to me than the idea of a book of this
kind being published or being put into the hands of any publisher.'

After hearing Abdelmalik's words, I tried to do as I had been
forced as a child, to look beyond what my senses revealed. I went
down to Casablanca's old town, a place charged with a full
spectrum of life. It was Friday morning and the streets were
packed with severe-looking housewives laden with shopping.
There were street hawkers, too, touting the usual range of
pressed flowers, puppies and Shanghai bric-a-brac.

In the middle of the bustle I found an impressively
dilapidated men-only café. I strode in, ordered a coffee and sat
down near the window. The room was curved like the shell of a
snail, a counter running through it in an arch. Behind it, a man
in maroon and black was steaming yesterday's croissants on a
1930s espresso machine. At each table sat the regulars cloaked in
their
jelabas
, smoking black tobacco, staring into space.

When the waiter had deposited the c
afé noir
along with five
sugar cubes in a twist of newspaper, I took out a wad of cotton
wool. Then I shut my eyes, shoved the cotton in my ears and up
my nostrils, and closed my mouth and hands. It was as if I had
been transported back a generation.