The Drifters (109 page)

‘What are you talking about?’ Joe asked.

‘You know … that great song … “As Time Goes By.” I’d sort of like to see where Claude Rains had his office … Peter Lorre … the whole bit …’

At last Joe realized that Harvey was referring to one of his old films, something made no doubt before Joe was born, so he asked, ‘You speaking of a movie?’ and Holt said, ‘We discussed it in Pamplona,’ and Joe said, ‘We discussed a lot of that old-time crap in Pamplona. Was one of the films you liked shot in Casablanca?’ and Holt said, ‘That was the name of the film. Didn’t you ever see it?’ and Joe said, ‘I never went to the movies much.’

They heard Gretchen coming up the stairs, and Joe called, ‘Mr. Holt’s here to see you,’ but when she came into the room, Holt, not wishing to risk further embarrassment, said no more about the movie, but Joe said, ‘He wants to drive to Casablanca,’ and Gretchen cried, ‘Of course! That’s where the famous Bogart movie was laid. You told us in Pamplona you liked it. Want to borrow the pop-top?’

‘Yes, but we want you and Joe to join us. Fairbanks is waiting at the hotel.’

Joe said that if you’d once seen Casablanca, there was no reason to double back, but Gretchen said she’d enjoy seeing the Moroccan plains and insisted that Joe come along, but as they were about to leave for the pop-top they saw Cato at the foot of the stairs, looking quite bereft, and Gretchen ran to him and took his hands and said, ‘You’ve got to come with us.’

Cato came, but Britta did not. At the last minute she decided to stay at the Bordeaux, saying, ‘I don’t think Monica should be left alone,’ and she remained to look after her. So our expedition consisted of four men and Gretchen, and we agreed that Casablanca was a bore, with little of the excitement that marked Marrakech and none of the mystery that had made the movie so popular. Holt said, ‘Sometimes it helps to see the facts,’ and he treated us to a good couscous, after which we prepared for the drive back to Marrakech.

But I said, ‘Since we’ve come so far, let’s go home by way of Meknès,’ and with this adventuresome crowd, no further persuasion was necessary. I had suggested Meknès because I wanted Cato to see this royal city which had been rebuilt in its present form in the late 1600s by a remarkable king of Morocco, Moulay Ismail. I particularly wanted him to meet Moulay Ismail.

But on the trip to Meknès a diversion occurred which I could not have anticipated. As we were riding past fields now barren and abandoned, Joe stopped the car and got out to inspect some unimportant ruin that had been defending itself against the weather for some hundred years. He kicked at it with his shoe, inspected how the stones had been joined together, then knelt down and pulverized some of the soil in his hands. He asked, ‘Is it true that what we now see as the deserts of North Africa were once the gardens and wheat fields of Rome?’

‘No doubt of it,’ I said.

‘What happened?’

‘Ever hear of Leptis Magna? Up on the coast?’ He said he hadn’t so I told him, ‘You ought to see it sometime. Or go way into the Libyan hills at Germa.’

‘What do I see there?’

‘Enormous cities which used to control some of the richest land in the world. Now it’s a desert.’

‘Climate change? Rainfall?’

‘We think it happened because men misused the land. Destroyed one of the best agricultural areas Rome ever possessed.’

Joe stayed at the ruins for some time, standing there and looking around as if he were trying to imagine what this part of Africa must have been like in the good days. When he returned to the car he asked, ‘What was the name
of that place?’ and I told him, ‘Leptis Magna. Once you see it, you don’t forget it.’

As we came in sight of Meknès, I asked Joe to stop the car for a moment so that I could point out something to Cato: ‘Look at those enormous walls. They hide one of the most remarkable cities ever built by one man. Of course, there had been an earlier city, but he tore most of that down and started fresh. He worked on the job about fifty years, but in the end, had himself a masterpiece.’

We circled the walls for some time so that my companions could savor the massive undertaking Moulay Ismail had attempted. Then we entered by a magnificent gate of many arches and drove through gardens and past palaces almost endless in extent, after which we parked the car and started to walk through the souk, with evidences of Moulay Ismail’s megalomaniacal building urge always at hand.

At a café overlooking one of his grandest constructions, a nest of palaces, each big enough to house all the royal families of Europe, we found a table, and as we sat with our wine, I said, ‘He was the cruelest man in African history.’ Gretchen asked what kind of administrator he had been, and I said, ‘Rather good. He had something over a hundred wives, and at one point asked King Louis XIV of France for an alliance with one of his daughters. He ruled with terrible severity and there is solid proof that he killed more than thirty thousand slaves with his own hand. Contemporary records tell how he held daily inspections of the construction, and if he detected even the slightest flaw or tardiness, he would personally isolate the blame, then with his left hand in the culprit’s hair, he would jerk the head back and with his right hand slit the man’s throat. More than thirty thousand … all Negroes.’

I was watching Cato’s face as I said all this, but he gave no sign that he was even listening.

Gretchen took up the discussion: ‘I was reading a book by a Scotsman who told about Bou Hamara. He operated in Meknés around 1908. Led a revolt against the government, so they threw him into a cage of lions, but they ate only one arm. So he was put into an iron cage and hauled around the country till he died. He had gathered his following with a magician’s trick which made him
notorious throughout Morocco—talking with the dead. In the early morning—now this was in 1908, remember—he would bury alive a slave and leave a tube projecting through the soil so the man could breathe. Then, when a crowd gathered in the afternoon, he would announce that he could talk with the dead, and he would stand near the tube and ask questions, which the buried slave would answer. After this continued for eight or ten minutes, with the man’s voice giving good clear replies, to the astonishment of the mob, Bou Hamara would grind his heel into the tube and bury it. The slave, of course, would suffocate, and after an hour, when he knew the corpse was well dead, Bou Hamara would spirit away the tube and invite his audience to dig up the dead body. He performed this trick over five hundred times.’

‘And the slaves, of course, were always Negroes?’ I suggested.

‘The book said so.’

‘Goddammit, Gretchen, you’re always throwing history at me,’ Cato finally burst out. ‘What are you trying to prove?’

‘American Negroes are making some historic decisions about Islam,’ she said. ‘I thought you ought to know what the traditional position of the Negro has been in Islam.’

‘It’s a bunch of fairy tales,’ he snorted. ‘Thirty thousand killed by one man. Five hundred buried alive by another. Ghost tales.’

‘Exactly the right description,’ I said. ‘This city is populated with ghosts—thousands upon thousands that I haven’t even referred to. An enormous percentage of them were slaves, and they were Negroes.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he cried in anger. ‘Did you set this up on purpose for my benefit?’

‘The trip to Casablanca was Holt’s idea. But I thought: If we’re going so far to see nothing, we might as well go a little farther to see something.’

‘And you wanted to be damned sure I saw it?’

‘I did. Ever since Moçambique, I’ve heard you spout a lot of nonsense about the historic relationship of Islam and the Negro. You ought to look carefully at what that relationship really was.’

‘I have been looking,’ he said quietly, ‘and I get a constant feeling that with Islam we have a future. With Christianity, none.’

I pointed to the towering walls and structures of Meknès and asked him to try to re-create what had actually happened in the fifty years of Moulay Ismail’s reign: the tortures, the slavery terminated only by death, the cruelty, the starvation, the warm corpses tossed by Moulay Ismail into the rising walls, the endless, timeless agony of slavery in those days, but at the end he said, persistently, ‘In the United States it was the same,’ and I said, ‘If you think that, you’re an idiot.’

The conversation ended there. Cato bought me a drink and we joked for a while, until he broke the mood by bringing us back to the subject that lurked in all our minds: ‘We’ve talked and we’ve talked. But now we can’t put it off any longer—we’ve got to do something drastic about Monica.’ Harvey, who had kept out of the previous conversation, said, ‘I think she ought to go into a hospital … right now,’ and Cato said, ‘I do too, but have you tried to argue with her …’ His voice trailed off and I could see that he was biting his lip. Gretchen must have seen this too, for she leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek. ‘As soon as we get back to Marrakech, we’ll drive her to the hospital.’

Holt said, ‘Britta’s very sensible on such matters. She located a hospital yesterday. That’s why she wanted to stay with Monica.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘She’s a very strong girl, Britta.’

Then, for no reason that I could explain, I said, ‘When I saw Monica this morning, shouting down into the stairwell, I had the strange feeling that she could have been one of the young girls from Germany or France in the thirteenth century who had set out with the Children’s Crusade, only to end as a slave in Meknès, or Marrakech … endless sexual abuse … death at eighteen or nineteen.’

Very quietly Gretchen asked, ‘What did you say?’

‘I was thinking of the young people of all centuries whose destiny it has been to die in Marrakech.’

Gretchen rose, left our table, walked to the great wall that had been built by the anguish of so many, and pressed her back against it, keeping her palms extended against the stones. Facing us, she asked with excitement in her voice, ‘You say that children from the Crusade got this far?’

‘You must know the story. Their Crusade reached Marseilles, where Christian ship captains took them on
board, promising to take them to the Holy Land …’

‘I know. And sold them to the Moors as slaves. You mean they got this far south?’

‘Where do you think they were sold? In Algeria and Morocco … many shiploads … they were lashed together in caravans and marched south to the good markets. Many of them must have died right here and in Marrakech. Boys and girls alike were sold as prostitutes and few of them lived into their twenties.’

Holt said, ‘A hell of a lot of crusades end like that.’

Gretchen, keeping her place against the wall, said, ‘This is what I was looking for … Portugal … Pamplona … Moçambique. It was this idea that kept eluding me. Of course! The Children’s Crusade! It’s been there all the time—and I couldn’t see it.’

One of the most exciting things that can happen to a man past the age of sixty is to see a young person of talent and character stumble upon a concept big enough to occupy him in his first absorbing test of strength. Such moments are the building blocks of meaning. Now I watched as Gretchen reacted to the sudden explosion of an idea whose ramifications were extensive enough to encompass all that she had been inchoately dreaming of; it is quite possible that in those few minutes against the wall of Moulay Ismail she saw the total structure of the extraordinary book she was to write. I am sure she saw its interrelationships, its significance for our day, its heavy thrust of meaning for our young people. For the children of each generation enlist in their own crusade; it is only the banners that change.

We should have started back, but Gretchen and Cato wanted to wander through the souks of Meknès, and as we did so we often came upon evidence of the vast city that Moulay Ismail had built, and these two young people took from the stones and the crowds whatever evidence they required for the concepts they were building. For example, it could have been mere caprice when Cato stopped before the shop of a man selling hats; more likely it was the logical next step in an as yet unplanned but surely developing pattern of life. At any rate, he took Gretchen with him into the store and enlisted her advice in selecting the red fez which was to become his trademark in Philadelphia and the east. Wearing the fez for the first time, he led us through a nest of alleyways, walking
in silence beside Gretchen, and long after I was exhausted, they kept on looking and probing.

Joe walked with Harvey, and from time to time I could hear snatches of conversation as they discussed Vietnam and ways whereby we could extricate ourselves from that imbroglio. It seemed as if they had reached some kind of understanding; Holt no longer rebuffed Joe’s arguments as idiotic, and Joe listened to Harvey’s stubborn logic.

This left me trailing, excluded from each of the dialogues, which gave me an opportunity to reflect upon the six young people I had come to know so well during the past year. As of this day Gretchen was settled; she saw ahead of her the long years of work and their fulfillment. As to what would happen emotionally from her involvement with Joe and Clive, no one could foretell, but at least a solid groundwork of self-understanding had been accomplished. Britta, God bless her open face, was locked into a course which, whether correct or not, was at least satisfying to her. Cato was on the verge of concretizing his concepts, and although I did not agree with many of them, I appreciated the fact that for him they were both necessary and inevitable. I hoped he could handle them. I had great faith in tough little Yigal and suspected that he had made the right decision on what was perhaps the gravest of all the problems faced by the six, but I doubted that I would have opted that way.

Joe remained as unsettled, as insecure, as he had been on that first day I met him at the Alamo. His love affair with Gretchen impressed me as immature, and his inability to solve his draft problem bespoke a character that was alien to mine, yet he remained the most likable of the three men, the one with whom I felt the most solid sense of identification. I felt like a father when I found myself thinking: I wish to hell he would make up his mind about things.