Tangier (28 page)

The gamble worked. The Belgian left me alone for the rest of the summer. Thami and Omar left me for only three weeks. These were lonely. It was like losing one's pet tiger, manuscript, magnetic compass, wife, D.Phil. thesis notes, radar beacon.

It was a Sunday. I dined as usual with a friend in an inexpensive restaurant. A telephone directory revealed Sam's home address as only a few blocks away.

Daniel said he would wait outside the apartment building. It was as well he did so. Although it was only nine o'clock, in the evening the foyer door was already locked. An impoverished Moroccan, whom I took to be the
azzaz
, or watchman, rang the
portera
's bell; and she let myself and a stranger into the building. The stranger told me Sam's flat was on the third floor; then disappeared.

A maid opened Sam's door and I stepped smartly into his hall. A large blonde woman bustled forward. I apologized for the intrusion (something Sam was nor wont to do
when calling on me) and asked whether I might have a word with her husband. Sam came out of the dining room. where two fair-haired little girls were
finishing, a meal, and led me to a corner of the drawing room. Very quietly I told him of his Belgian tenant's incredible attack, expressed doubts as to the couple's sanity, let alone wisdom, and again said I hoped the children would not tell their father about the assault for the Belgian's sake. Sam, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin, declined to speak to the Belgian, evasively suggesting it was a matter not for him but for the police. Indeed it might be, I said; apologized again for disturbing him at home, and left. The visit had lasted perhaps four minutes.

As soon as Sam's door closed the Moroccan came at me out of the shadows on the landing. My first thought was that Sam retained a strong-arm man to beat up unwanted visitors. If the motive was robbery it failed. As terrorization it worked admirably. I was scared stiff: so bodily and mentally paralysed for a moment as to be unable either to move or think. The man had me by the lapels and was glaring into my eyes insanely. Why had I visited Cohen? he demanded, No, I wasn't getting into the lift: he intended I go down three flights of deserted marble stairs - precipitously, I suddenly sensed, if he could launch a kick from behind.

Somehow I got into the lift. So did he. The doors were automatic. I managed to touch the button and to keep his hands off the emergency stop. His hands were more alarmingly occupied anyway: one now held me by the tie; the first two fingers of the other were spread in a V, threatening to gouge my eyes. This is almost ritual to Moroccan fighting. I had previously only experienced it in jest. The man's splayed fingers made feints an inch from my spectacle lenses like the fangs of a snake tensely poised before striking. It was unpleasant. Meanwhile he glared madly into my eyes: One reads that a man's eyes give warning of a violent blow or move a fraction of a second before it's made. There was no conscious preparation about my holding this man's stare now; it was instinctive.

The- flashpoint where all-out violence could have occurred between myself and the Belgian that afternoon had come and gone within two seconds. This was different. We scuffled for more than five minutes and the flash-point was present all the time. I did not dare slug the man for fear of being worsted in what must ensue. He didn't lash out at me until he realized I was about to escape. Throughout this protracted hiatus fears secondary to those of bodily injury were constantly present: for my glasses and, ridiculously, for the lightweight jacket I had put on in order to feel more blimpishly British when confronting Sam. Had flashpoint been reached these fears must instantly have been forgotten.

We struggled across the foyer and I had got the door open when he launched a kick intended for stomach or groin. It missed. Now he dived at me and we rolled across the pavement into the gutter. This absurd spectacle was my re-emergence as it greeted the waiting Daniel. And thank God he was waiting! My mysterious assailant disengaged himself.

'Oh, was that your house agent, the friendly Mr Cohen?' Daniel asked with mock incredulity. The joke eased the tension.

Motive for the attack remains obscure. Failure to swipe once, hard, and snatch seemed to preclude robbery; as did the man's attitude, which was one of quivering hatred. It was interesting that friends who smoked
kif
said he must have been drunk; those who drank that he must have been
kiffed
. I suspect it was neither. The most charitable explanation seemed to be that he was someone embittered by Cohen; or else, ironically, by something he supposed Cohen and myself mutually to represent.

For me the attraction of the schoolboys was that I had had little contact with this age group of the educated class. I am a romantic. They were tomorrow's Moroccans. I had helped raise Niñ towards marriage and emigration. Meti, the similarly illiterate peasant, into a period of confused, repressed adolescence. I realized well enough that Thami, Omar and their friends represented a haven, which need only be a change, for my own mind. One could not leave a written note for Med. For four years we talked in pidgin Moghrebi. There had been mutual happiness, on my part sometimes blessed self-forgetfulness. in our attempts to accommodate even to the most basic facts about each other's worlds.

'D'you know someone called Angus Stewart?' the twelve-year-old Thami asked in French with quizzical cock of eyebrow, the first time a contemporary brought him to call.

'He's me, as you know, having just read it on the door.' In western countries, used to a degree of literacy, the simple delight inherent in this achievement is perhaps difficult to understand. It's as though a Swindon kitten were to thank the pensioner in Russian for its meal.

I was sitting on a goatpath where the land falls steeply from the Kasbah to the sea. Elizabeth Longford's biography of Wellington lay on the grass while I sought comfort from the discovery that the acid baths prescribed for the Iron Duke's skin affliction had burnt his towels. My towels were burnt too. Similarly afflicted I'd been ruthlessly soaking my hands in potassium permanganate and they were the colour of kippers. but also resembled kippers split by boiling. Over my shoulder a voice read haltingly:
'The Years
of the Sw . . . Sw . . .
' 'Sword,' I said, looking round; and pointing to one on the book's cover explained that the 'w' was unpronounced rather like the 'k' in Boukhalf, Tangier's airport, or the girl's name Khemo.

The student proved to be Bachir, a thoughtful boy of fourteen. A taxi took us to my flat, where we made coffee. When Bachir left we arranged no further date. But about 1.00 p.m. next day there was a tapping on my door. 'These,' announced Bachir, 'are my schoolfriends, Larbi, and Thami.'

All were neatly dressed. Thami carried a briefcase: it proved to be the school lunch break. They had evidently elected to use
seven flights of stairs rather than the lift, and were to continue to do so. The westerner in me metaphorically closed his eyes and groaned: the natural man automatically asked the boys in. I had no illusions about how my neighbours would regard the visit. When Thami began bringing his mystic and beautiful older brother, Omar; Bachir, a blue-eyed Spanish half-caste, Badruddin, extrovert and pretty as the sun; Thami and Omar their cousin, Abdeltif; Bachir, again, a
Soussi
with a genius for conjuring tricks . . . even the boys themselves began to suspect tabus were being violated. There was sadness about this loss of innocence. It is a truth of life that while a man may have a single mistress, lover, wife or perhaps merely friend, half a dozen or more of a species can arouse deep animosity in his fellows. This law is exacerbated where the man's neighbours are a childless colonial couple and the species indigenous but, horror, pinky-
brown
small boys.

Complaint once more spread from the Belgians to the Spanish
portera
to that much harassed businessman, Sam, agent of absentee landlords. Their common interest was the 'respectability' of the building. It was being invaded, By natives. The fact that the alien species was half a dozen quiet and (I shudder to use the word) respectful children visiting upon rightful occasion was immaterial, Among higher animals, as lower, threat to territorial sovereignty results in confrontation. Had we been lower animals, either the neighbours or myself must have cleared out; with little, probably no bloodshed. But humans, in theory, can defuse such explosive situations with intelligence. And often with humour.

'Cohen?' (I said to Sam on the phone) 'This building is obscurely numbered, and no street plaque exists.'

'Yes.'

'May I put up a brass plate below the chiropodist's reading: "Number—; Rue—; dogs, but no Moroccan children admitted"? (I'd had a trouser-leg raped by a resident poodle a couple of days previously.)

'Mr Stewart, I do not understand.'

He did. The response reflected Sam's politic evasion, rather than grasp of irony.

I thinned the ranks of Thami and Omar's schoolfriends rather brutally. Although two years younger. Thami was the leader of the brothers. 'You and Omar can come for coffee,' I said. 'Do not bring your friends and relations. I don't bring my Christian friends uninvited to visit your father's house.'

Bachir and some of his other friends compromised themselves extraordinarily. The incident made toughness easier for mc; but would have been a legitimate cause for the Belgians to complain had they not happened to be out, '
M.
and
Madame are at the cinema
’,
the note on their door read. At 10.15 one night Bachir and two companions commenced a shrill whistling in the street below. The downstairs door was by then locked; and as we emphatically had no appointment for that hour I ignored such a summons, turning out the lights. The whistles went on to be succeeded some twenty minutes later by peals of my doorbell. Suspecting the
portera
,
and by now thoroughly paranoid, I hid under the bedclothes; idiotically not realizing that only Moroccans have the patience to ring an unanswered bell for half an hour. Tiptoeing to the door, I opened it smartly. There, totally unabashed, were Bachir and his two companions. It was no time to ask them who had let them into the locked building. Angry and incredulous as any Moroccan would have been in the situation (precisely the folly I'd committed myself in the oasis at Tiznit), I told them to get the hell out. A couple of days later I ran into Bachir on the Boulevard and told him he had behaved insanely and knew it. He was not to visit my flat again: the ban was on his friends as well.

This was sad, but had to be done. Thami and Omar, temperamentally incapable of such idiocy, continued to visit. Meanwhile there had been happier times for the whole crowd. On a couple of days a week my flat became a free coffee bar during the two-and-a-half-hour school lunch break. Songs were unself-consciously recorded and played back. Cricket, with seasoned French loaf and ping-pong ball, was reintroduced on the terrace. Thami and Omar's father owned a substantial confectionery business, cousin Abdeltif’s father was 'a captain of police', Bachir's a
real-estate agent, Badruddin's a postman, and the
Soussi
's, naturally enough, a shopkeeper.

Omar's introduction was delightful. He was bashfully persuaded to pull from about his neck a Koranic text worked in enamel and silver. 'Omar loves God very much,' his friends solemnly explained. Omar blushed deeply; then curled up on the
mtarrba
with his face in his hands. He spoke little, and was awarded a ballpoint impressively stamped
The Sunday Times
,
as a result of having absent-mindedly borrowed it and equally absent-mindedly returned it. Bachir absent-mindedly borrowed a 'superball' of high-density plastic, sometime property of Meti, and allegedly gave it to his little sister. He and Thami had previously bought me three loose finger plasters so the unusual trading ethics were not usefully to be remarked upon. The
Soussi
sold me a murderously sprung bird gin for a dirham; then threw in the explanation of a conjuring trick as a bonus.

All the boys except the godly Omar had the disconcerting habit of locking themselves in my bathroom in pairs for the purpose of mutual masturbation, or other sexual entertainment. My only, anxiety was that the broken bathroom window gave on to the wing of the terrace immediately adjacent to the objectionable Belgians. Squeaks and giggles would have been unfortunate. But the
business was altogether too practised or absorbing for squeaks and giggles came there none. Sometimes impatience would have me approach the broken window from the terrace with warning, reticent coughs. The irritating truth was that I was mildly embarrassed; the boys not at all. I would poke my head briefly through the shattered window, register private games, be vaguely noticed myself, then ignored.

Inevitably this lent dryness of tone to reticence when I said 'Uh . . . look, hurry it up, would you?' before returning to my rickety chair on the other wing of the terrace; or to the bookish Omar.

And so the twice-weekly lunch hours passed until the banishment of Bachir and those who had behaved recklessly; until Thami and Omar were 'licensed' with the
portera
only to be beaten up by the Belgians, as recorded. Wretchedly one of the night-whistling exiles had been the blue-eyed Badruddin, healthily extrovert where Omar and myself were introvert, and owner of one of the mast beautifully fluid slow-motion smiles I'd ever known a boy possess. But I'd begun to wonder about that extrovert nature. One night, unobserved. I saw Badruddin cruising for hire outside the Café de Paris, walking embodiment if one wills of the wickedness of Tangier, in French short trousers and equally innocent-looking tee-shirt. I picked him up myself from confused motives of jealousy; putting him in a taxi with cinema money which would keep him off the streets until he was due home.

Before I left Tangier in midsummer Thami and Omar called on two successive days to say goodbye. Formally 'licensed' though they were with the
portera
' who was rational in respect of the boys in my presence, she trapped them on the stairs as they departed. Screams of abuse, shouts for her son Manolo echoed up the core of the six-storey building. No wonder the thirty-eight-year-old Manolo appeared repressed and had a nervous twitch. He regarded his mother's ferocity, and indeed this whole affair, with wanly amused helplessness. Calmly Thami's voice was explaining that he and his brother had been visiting Mr Stewart and that she herself had conceded this as their right. It was cool for a twelve-year-old: and the fourteen-year-old Omar would be similarly dignified, though frightened. By the time I had grabbed my keys and raced downstairs the boys had gone; my Janus-faced
portera
was in her lodge but not answering the bell.