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.
The story no longer fired people up; it had come and gone in the flash of an eye. It was almost as though some kind of curse had afflicted people, turning Jemaa el-Fnaa Square from Shahrazad into a huge kitchen reeking of garlic and chopped onions. The only thing that managed to clear the block in his throat were the greetings he received by the door of the Mamounia Hotel — from taxi drivers to buses of tourists to travel-agent employees. When they asked him about the latest developments in the case, he emerged from his gloomy mood and started rebuilding the story with all the enthusiasm of someone who would not be deterred from finding a suitable conclusion — regardless of whatever may have actually happened.
His real task was to bring all possibilities into the story, however likely or remote they may have been. Even the authorities had declared the matter closed. Not only that, but the reports written by the archaeological experts, the official medical doctor, and the head of the Sixth District described in detail what happened and how. But he just couldn’t find any link to connect the skeleton they’d discovered to the Syrian lute player who, according to her older sister, had disappeared sixty years ago. That detail was particularly significant, since a new report had reached the procurator-general. The report claimed that a French woman named Anais had also disappeared about sixty years ago, along with a necklace with a cross that she used to fiddle with while sleeping naked in the pasha’s arms.
When Patti arrived in Marrakech some forty-five years after her first tragic visit, her intention was to use the city to salve the wound that was infecting her life. For some years, she had developed the habit of constructing a blooming garden in her memory, one where leafy trees would brush against each other and no disruptive plants would grow between them. She always reckoned that the nasty things that happened to people stayed in the places where they first occurred, but also remained in their memories the very same way. The only way to get them out was to come to terms with the places that served as their original stage, thus erasing the painful traces that are associated with them.
Patti used to recall all the moments in her life that were linked to specific places. Whenever she remembered Marrakech, the sting of that evening when the pasha took Anais into his private quarters would hurt her — and of course she had never seen either of them again. So she came back to Marrakech right after a serious heart operation, believing that a profound reconciliation with Marrakech would make all the places in her life seem like the blossoming cloud that hovered over her as she emerged from the anesthesia.
She came back to Marrakech in the midnineties, and all she could remember of the city was the huge gateway to the pasha’s palace and the painted door that was shut in her face. She could still see herself leaving on the desolate train to Casablanca Airport, feeling tense and very upset. It wasn’t because of what had happened, but rather because the pasha’s painter had insisted on giving her a painting with no artistic value. In spite of that, she had no choice but to add it to the weight of her baggage, as though she were running in the opposite direction of her dreams.