LAYLA

“You’re lost, aren’t you? Silly Nazarene! You’re lost and you don’t know where you are!”

I had taken a bus to Fez, and in wandering through the city I’d gotten turned around, ending up far from the university area. I was sitting in a cheerless square with broken benches and small, desperate pigeons, and had been studying a map, trying to plan my next move, when a pretty Moroccan girl wandered over. She had thick brown hair that fell to her waist and deep green eyes, and in her white t-shirt and tight black jeans she looked like a mischievous schoolgirl. She sat down beside me and flicked her fingers at my guidebook, as if, with the wave of her hand, she could make it disappear.

“That can’t help you now. You’re lost and you don’t know where you are!”

“I think I took the wrong turn somewhere. I’m not sure just where I am. But it’s okay. I have a map, it’s a beautiful day. I’m happy.”

“Then you’re a fool. I always know where I am,” she boasted.

“But are you happy?”

“That is a very personal question,” she pouted. “You shouldn’t be asking that of me. For one thing, I don’t know your name.”

“It’s Brian. What’s yours?”

“Brian is a silly name. It means nothing. It’s the name you’d give to a bird or a turtle or something of no importance. I will call you Ibrahim. That has the sound of ‘Brian’, but it’s a real name from The Book, a holy name like mine. Layla. That’s a real name. Say it.”

“Layla,” I said. “Layla. In the West we have a song with that name.”

“In the West you do nothing but silly things. I don’t want to hear your stupid song. Put away the map, and I will help you find wherever it is you’re looking for, but first you have to get some proper shoes.”

“What’s wrong with my shoes?” I was wearing black Beatle boots with pointed toes and Cuban heels.

“They’re shoes that would be worn by a bullfighter or a cowboy. Not serious shoes. Besides, you look nothing like a bullfighter or a cowboy. You are only making yourself confused.”

“But they’re my shoes, and I like them.”

“Then you’ll have to get ME some shoes. At least one of us has to wear nice shoes if we go dancing.”

“I didn’t know we were going dancing.” I looked at her. “Layla, how old are you?”

“That is the wrong question.” She tossed her head back haughtily. “You have no education and no manners, but you’re a Nazarene and probably don’t know any better. I like you anyway. The proper question should be: ‘Where are we going dancing, Layla?’ Or: ‘When Layla? When can I take you out?'”

She took hold of my hand and started walking with me out of the square, toward a maze of small alleys and passageways. Her hand felt small and cool in mine, but there was nothing forward or flirtatious about her grip, and she swung our arms back and forth like a schoolgirl.

“You still haven’t answered my question. How old are you?”

“Twenty. I am twenty years old.”

“No you’re not.”

“Don’t contradict me. I AM twenty. We count time differently here. Our watches go round and round while yours just sit there.”

“How do you speak such good French?” She spoke a perfect Parisian French, absolutely free of slang or an Arabic accent. It was the way you’d expect a young girl in white gloves to speak at a turn of the century dancing school on the Place des Vosges.

“My mother lived in France for years, in Marseilles and in Paris. And my brother lives in Paris now, working on a very secret project, I shouldn’t even mention it. When he finishes, he will have a lot of money, and I’ll go and live with him.”

“You’ll like it there.”

“Of course I’ll like it there. What a silly thing to say! Everyone likes it in Paris. I will have a big house and have many, many lovers. And sometimes you will come to tea and ask me about my life and about the new clothes I’ve gotten.”

“Do you live with your parents now?”

“Are all Nazarenes stupid?” She made to take her hand away from mine, then put it back.

“We were talking about tea parties in Paris, and do you ask me where the house is or what sort of tea I’ll serve, what sort of cakes I’ll have on the tray and about all these new outfits I’m wearing? Do you ask me about all these other lovers or get jealous and worried about me? No. You want to know if I live with my parents. Yes. I live with my parents. Where else am I going to live? Idiot.”

She walked on next to me in silence, sulking, kicking stones now and then, as we stepped into a passageway leading to the medina. Vendors lined the sides of the street, hawking olives and henna and halvah and baskets of figs. One man sitting by a stall of dried fruit waved, then called after her when she didn’t respond, but she tossed her hair back and walked on. It was clear that a certain inversion had just occurred, that I’d been forgiven and he’d been summarily demoted, cast aside.

“Pay no attention to him. He is a person of absolutely no importance and he should be ashamed, calling out in the street that way when I’m going about my business. Ridiculous!”

We turned a corner, passed through an archway, and we were suddenly in the midst of the medina, the grand bazaar, a world of narrow stalls and shops and hidden enclosures, tea shops and spice vendors and one-eyed rug merchants, the sound of deals being made, prices being questioned, fingers searching out the hidden flaw, the counterfeit, the fool’s corner that can torpedo a sale, turn the price this way and that, and the air was thick with the moisture of money and promises.

Past overflowing racks of djellabas, a cassette stall blasting tinny Arab pop, an evil-looking butcher presiding over an empire of warm meat and flies, and a gathering of Mullahs, nodding quietly over a table piled with gold-leafed copies of the Koran, Layla led me through a half-drawn curtain into a tiny shop selling nothing but cookware and shoes. Copper pots and kettles and enormous pans, some with crude Islamic designs, sickle moons and eyes and fatmas–the hands of fate–beaten into the sides, hung from hooks on the ceiling; the back wall was decorated with every conceivable style of leather sandal and slipper, each pair tied together at the toes and hung from two-penny nails in the wall. It looked like a gallery in Soho.

A young man with the beginnings of a mustache came in behind us and started to show me a silver tea service, but Layla quickly took charge.

“Do you really not want some other shoes?”

“No. I really don’t.”

“Okay. Will you get me a pair of dancing shoes? So one of us will look nice?”

“Yes,” I sighed. Why not? At that moment, being hustled by this beautiful Moroccan girl seemed like one of the great pleasures in life, and—I checked my pocket—as long as my wallet was safe, I saw no real harm in it. As long as I could get to the university soon, I could just enjoy this moment.

I watched as the salesman presented her with an array of almost stylish high-heeled pumps, slutty and shiny, in black patent leather with open toes and a strap around the heel, but she fixed on a modest pair of dark blue ballet slippers, almost elegant in their simplicity. They made her feet look very small and delicate, and I noticed, for the first time, that she was wearing a thin, gold ankle bracelet.

“They are very quiet,” she reflected, “but I like that. If your shoes are too loud, I think it creates the wrong impression. You shouldn’t have to always live up to your shoes. Do you like them?”

“Very much.”

After a brief bout of bargaining (she haughtily flared her nostrils and narrowed her eyes after each price was given till he came down to what she considered a suitable sum), she got them for a little over four dollars, whatever that was then in dirhams. It wasn’t much more than what I’d paid for coffee at my hotel earlier in the day.

“Good work,” I said after we’d left the stall and were wandering through a maze of spice and fruit and onion dealers, past trays of hot, flat breads and baskets of round green melons. “You’re a good shopper.”

She kissed me lightly on the cheek and smiled.

“I could have gotten them for much less if I’d been alone,” she shrugged, a little ungraciously. “ I was with you, and it’s a Nazarene’s duty to pay more. Everyone knows that. Allah put them here so we could milk them like a cow. I told him you were my cousin, here from Egypt, otherwise it would have been twice as much. You don’t mind, do you? That I said that?”

“No. But I’m not sure I like being a cow.”

“Silly,” she said, squeezing my hand and giggling. “Some cows like it very much. It all depends upon the cow.” And then she stopped for a moment and looked angry. “Listen, if I’d wanted, I could have gotten those whore’s shoes, told him to charge you eighty, a hundred dirhams more than his highest price, come back tomorrow and split the money with him. And you would never have known, would you? But I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because if you found out, you might not come visit me in Paris,” she giggled, swinging my hand. She pulled me around the corner and through another archway, and we were back outside the medina in a strange and deeply unfamiliar part of the city. The sun was going down, the shadows starting to form in the alleys, giving the scene an ominous, otherworldly look, the dark underside of the casbah, mean and dank and hungry, where the belly dancers go when the seven veils have dropped and the music’s over. The faded laundry dripping out of windows, the tipped-over bins of spoiled vegetables, the dead dog in the doorway, the rusted ghosts that once were cars, no longer quaint or picturesque, but sad, cheap and dirty. A radio from an open window crackled with the hum of electronic prayers, a stream of ‘Allah Allah’ muttered to the wind, and the night air grew cold. I shivered, but tried to sound cheerful.

“Layla, come on. Are you hungry? I’ll buy us supper somewhere nice. You must know a little cafe someplace nearby. A tagine or pigeon bastilla. Would you like that?” My voice sounded hollow, empty, and I hoped she wouldn’t notice.

“Are you crazy?” She turned on me. “They’re crooks in those Nazarene places! They’ll charge you twenty times too much and then write it down on paper so you’ll think that it’s official. And then they’ll feed you worms and meat from dogs and from rotten pig’s bellies…”

“Layla!”

“They do,” she pleaded. “Why shouldn’t they? Because you pay them, and they smile and hold your chair? They’ll never see you again, you’re a Nazarene, why should they care?”

“Because you’ll be with me and you’ll be watching. They wouldn’t dare do anything like that with you there. You’d be protecting me.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “you’d be safe with me. But why can’t I cook for you?” She tugged at my arm as if I was a recalcitrant child. “I make good couscous. Good tagines. Good harira. I’ll show you.”

“Layla…” Her eyes were so soft and pleading that I would have done nearly anything she asked, but I had to get away from this neighborhood.

“Alright,” she sighed. “I know a cafe. Not fancy, but very nice, over near the university. They won’t cheat you, but you’ll have to let me order, and I’ll tell them you’re from Egypt. Just visiting. Okay?”

“Fine.”

“And I should maybe get a jacket or a coat and drop off these sandals. You don’t want me to walk into a restaurant dragging these along, do you?” She held up the sandals she’d been carrying since we’d left the shoe store. They seemed to have gotten progressively older, more worn.

“Layla….”

“It’s okay, it’s not a problem. I live just a few blocks from here. We can run in, it won’t take a minute.” I looked skeptical. “Really. My parents are away in Essaoura, and the only one in the house is my grandfather. He’s nearly blind, and he spends all his time listening to prayers on the radio. You don’t even have to come in, I can run in, drop these off and run right out. Simple.”

Her hand started to feel strange in mine. Down the road, a large woman in grey restrained a small child, muttering to herself and staring at me. Still staring, she spat twice into the street and went back to her incantation. It was growing darker.

“Just down here,” she said. We rounded another corner, turned down an alley, and entered a hive of tiny, interconnected houses, all sharing a common courtyard. Men sat on the steps in groups, but seeming solitary despite the company, lost in their own thoughts, stroking their beards, smoking dark, stubby cigarettes; a couple of teenage boys were trying to fix a broken bicycle; and a small, bony woman with a black mustache was staring incomprehendingly at three or four dingy nightshirts hanging on a line, as if they were a code or a language she was trying to decipher.

“Come in,” she said, “it’ll just be a second.” I hesitated. “Otherwise Lalla Aicha,” she tilted her head toward the woman by the clothesline, “she’ll want to know all about you, and we’ll get caught in a long conversation. Family business.” She pulled me inside.

The house was surprisingly cool and dark and spare. Candles burned in small plates on various tables and surfaces, mats and pillows were laid out on the floor, and there was a faint, almost comforting smell of sandalwood and shoe polish. In the stillness, there was the low whir of a cassette player and a murmur of voices. Next to the kitchen, in a tiny cubicle, Layla’s grandfather sat listening to tapes of the Koran, mumbling along to the text in a thin asthmatic whisper. He seemed oblivious to our presence, but Layla hurried me past his door.

“He’s a very holy man,” she giggled, “maybe he can smell Nazarenes. I’ll be quick.” Then there was an enormous cough from the back room, like the sound of a horse exploding; a toilet flushed; a door slammed; and a fierce-eyed woman in black clothes and veil stood looking at us, staring.

“My aunt,” Layla said very quietly. “She cooks for my grandfather sometimes.” There was a rush of nervous introduction and explanation. The aunt was looking at Layla’s shoes, and Layla was busy trying to distract her, pointing to me, pointing out the door. I heard “America” and “Bra-him” and “cafe,” in the midst of a jumble of words, and I nodded at what I hoped were appropriate moments, trying to look respectful.

“She wants to know if you believe in God,”Layla,said,no longer holding my hand but keeping a proscribed distance between us.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell her of course I do.” There was an approving look and then a long, quiet consultation.

“She wants to know then, if you do believe in God, why you put black people in chains and make slaves of them and kill them? She wants to know how people of God can do this.”

“Tell her I don’t do this. I work with many black musicians in the States, they’re my friends. Tell her I eat at the same table with black Americans, in my own home.” Again, there was an exchange of words and glances.

“She says you are not being serious with her. She says you seem like a nice boy and wouldn’t eat black people. She doesn’t believe that.”

“Of course I don’t. Didn’t you tell her what I said?”

“Yes,” Layla sighed, “but she’s a little hard of hearing, she doesn’t always understand. She wants you to come inside, she’ll make you tea.”

“Do we have to? Can’t we say goodbye and go off to the restaurant?”

“No, it’ll seem like we’re hiding something. We have to go through with the formalities. Just for a little while.” She led me into a large, dim room and seated me on a low pile of cushions.

“Can you sit with me?”

“I have to help with everything. I’ll be back,” she said, but her eyes were uncertain. The hum of the cassette seemed louder, as if the batteries were giving out, and her grandfather’s voice sounded harsh and glottal, a dull and constant rasp in my ear. Layla returned, first with several small plates of nuts and dried figs, and then with a steaming pot of mint tea. She poured the tea back and forth between the pot and a glass ten or fifteen times before she judged the color right, a deep greenish brown, and then presented it to me, eyes lowered. Her aunt stood guard in the doorway.

“She wants to know if you’ve slept with Madonna.”

“What?”

“That’s what she wants me to ask you. Don’t look at me like that! It’s not my fault,” she pleaded.

“Tell her no, I’ve never slept with Madonna.” There was much clucking and nodding, and the aunt disappeared back into the kitchen.

“She said she thought as much.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” Layla wailed. “She’s a very mysterious woman. I’m going to have to help her again.” Layla returned to the kitchen. The tea was still too hot to drink, and I sat quietly eating the almonds trying to figure out the protocol of hospitality; if I ate all the nuts, would they feel obliged to bring me more? If I didn’t eat them, would they feel insulted? I kept eating the nuts.

In the other room, the grandfather had gotten to a favorite part of the Koran, and was continually playing and replaying it. The batteries were dying, and the taped voice was noticeably slower and heavier, as if it were drowning by degrees. Layla reappeared, bearing a bowl of lentil soup and a plate of pita bread, and put them in front of me. Since returning to the house and seeing her aunt, her manner had changed; she was more subservient, her eyes downcast, the light in them hard to read or even find, her face straining to show nothing at all.

“My aunt made this,” she recited, speaking with the same mechanical tone I’d been hearing from her grandfather’s room, repetition blurring the words into a tuneless hum. She was no longer wearing the ballet slippers or, for that matter, the gold ankle bracelet, but was barefoot. “It’s from an old family recipe, with little bits of ginger and cumin.”

“Layla,” I whispered, “when can we get out of here.”

“Soon. I think. I hope.”

“Can you at least sit with me?”

“No. Guests are served and left in peace. It would be too familiar.” She retreated back to the kitchen, where there was a new slamming of doors and babble of voices. A host of new faces peered in the doorway at me: two thin-faced women with identical-looking aprons over long dresses; a dark, heavyset man with a rough beard and a smile like a scimitar; a tall, veiled woman with black-framed glasses that seemed to fill the available part of her face and who cradled a sleeping child in her arms; and the mustachioed woman we’d seen by the clothesline before. They nodded at me, made motions for me to continue eating, and nodded again before retreating back from the doorway momentarily. Then they returned, accompanied by the aunt, who stood a few feet in front of them, her arms folded authoritatively.

“Salaam aleikoum,” I called. They looked visibly shaken, as if a dog or a piece of mutton had just addressed them, and they caught each other’s eye.

“Aleikoum salaam,” one of them responded tentatively, then several others said it, as noncommittally as possible. Layla entered behind them, bringing a fresh plate of pita bread.

“Some cousins and neighbors dropped by,” she explained. “They wanted to pay their respects and to meet someone from America.” At the word ‘America,’ they nodded once again and gave each other meaningful looks.

“My aunt is honored that you would visit us this way. She wants you to know that there is no need for you to go to a hotel. We are very pleased to have you as a guest. You can stay here now, and we’ll send for your things tomorrow.” I got a cold and terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Tell her how grateful I am, but tell her I couldn’t inconvenience her. And anyway I have meetings and appointments tomorrow. With a professor from the university,” I added, as if that made my explanation more official. “I really have to get back.”

“It’s the television, isn’t it,”Layla wailed. “It’s because we don’t have a television! Lalla Aicha has one,” she pointed at the tiny woman who nodded in happy agreement at hearing her name called. “You can watch television at her house!”

“Layla, it’s not the television. I don’t even have a television in New York.” This information was conveyed to the assembled group, who looked at me even more dubiously, coming to terms with the possibility that I might be an impostor. Layla gave them a harsh look, and all, even the aunt, returned to the kitchen.

I stood up.

“My aunt wants to know how long you’ve been in love with me.”

“What?”

“That’s what she wants to know.”

“Layla….”

“Well you could be. It happens.”

“Layla. I had a lovely day. I bought you a pair of shoes. I would have been happy to take you to dinner. Now I need to go home. Can you help me find a taxi?”

“You’re married, aren’t you!”

“Layla…”

“I know you are.”

“Please, Layla. I’m not married. I’m not anything. Just help me get back to my hotel. Help me find a taxi.”

“I can’t. You see where we live. There are no taxis here. No one here takes taxis. Where’s your hotel?” I told her. “That’s miles away, the other side of the medina.”

“I can walk.”

“You won’t get far. Not now. It’s going on midnight. This is not a good section for Nazarenes, even during the day. You saw where we were. This part of town is a maze, streets within streets, like a puzzle. You wind up walking in circles. Even people from four or five blocks away get lost here, can’t find their way out. Some are eaten by djinn,” she shrugged, the old light coming back into her eyes, “others are simply brought to the mosque and offered as sacrifice. Part of the ritual. In your case, it’s just one less Nazarene, one less infidel. It’s a small matter, no?”

“Layla….?” She walked closer and took my hand.

“Look, I can’t help you right now. I can’t walk with you unescorted after midnight, not with my aunt here, especially with all the neighbors and cousins hanging round. And if you left now, even if it were safe for you to leave and you could really find your way—which you couldn’t, not in a hundred years—it would look like we’d had a falling out, it would make me look bad, and it might make trouble for you. My family would think maybe you had insulted me, and they’d be obliged to defend my honor. Things are not so simple here.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, but if you’ll just stay the night, I’ll get you back to your hotel tomorrow. I promise. And after that, if you still want to take me dancing or out to dinner, we can see.”

***

I tried to settle back on the cushions, but the shadows cast by candlelight were strange and distantly frightening. They had nothing to do with me, but were shapes from someone else’s nightmares, the images menacing but unreadable, drawn from a stranger’s private hell: the frantic beating of dark wings; hands with fingers as long and thin and indistinct as wisps of smoke stretching through doorways, reaching, clutching; a fat, hairless spider caught on its back, legs desperately kicking the air; thick black water oozing down the walls and covering the floor.

Close by, batteries still not dead, the tape of readings from the Koran droned on and on, the voice no more than a low and watery moan, interrupted, though never overwhelmed, by the snores and gasps and smacking lips of the sleeping grandfather, dreaming of sleep, of the prophet’s words, of earthly paradise, a believer’s reward of ease and oasis, cool breeze in the day, twice his weight in maidens come the blessed night; or dreaming of knives in the dark, of vengeance and retribution, the blood of infidels flowing through streets of fire, the fee-fie-fo-fum of it all.

When, after an eternity, the cassette clicked off, a practiced hand-not asleep, not awake, but someplace other-turned the tape over; the distant voice resumed where it had left off. I tried breathing in time to the strange cadence, making a music of the words, pretending they weren’t really a spell being cast on me, pretending I wasn’t really vulnerable, but the sound seemed to hang in the darkness, menacing, constant, just out of reach, a quiet and relentless howl, the voice moving, circling the room, stealing the breath from my lips, bleeding the secrets from my heart, the will from my soul.

To calm myself, I tried to count the uptown stops on the N train starting at Astor Place: Union Square, 23rd Street, 28th Street, 33rd Street, 42nd Street, and so on. As I was mentally getting off the train at the 57th Street stop, through half-closed eyes, I saw the old aunt steal quietly into the room, tiptoeing over to the cushions where I lay. There was something in her hand, a bottle or a vial, that glinted in the candlelight. I thought I could hear her breath, fast and strained and shallow, but it might have been my own.

Quietly, quietly she bent down near my head, at the edge of the cushions, and picked up my boots from where I’d placed them, by the wall. From the vial, she poured some sort of seed or herb into each boot, then, taking a bit of chalk or marker from her sleeve, she quickly drew a tiny image on the inside of one, just by the zipper. Looking to see that I was still asleep, she replaced the boots and glided out of the room and to the back of the house. There was quiet and then the soft click of a door closing.

I waited as long as I could, counting my breaths till I got to 200, 300, and then, under cover of the grandfather’s snores and tortured sighs, I gathered up my boots and stole into the kitchen. I poured out the seeds, whatever they were, onto the floor by the doorway. Mustard seeds? Gris gris? Bow-down powder? John the Conqueror root? I couldn’t tell. In the light of the deep blue candle, I could just make out the image she’d drawn, an eye with a dagger piercing it.

Bad luck to her, I thought. Bad luck to her house. I rubbed off the image with a dishrag and then, to be safe, I rubbed off the smudge.

I quietly closed the kitchen door behind me and breathed the cool night air. There was no one in the street. After twenty or twenty-five minutes of walking, staying in the shadows and keeping what was left of the moon straight ahead of me, I found a taxi and headed to the hotel. The sun would be coming up soon.

 

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician who lives in New York City.
According to the New York Post, “Cullman is as talented as he is moody.”
Mr. Cullman does not read The Post.