‘You think I can’t start my life again? I tell you I can. I’m tough. I have a stake in this country now. I shall learn Arabic and soon I shall be more Moroccan than the Moors.’ He laughed and then stopped abruptly and said, ‘Did you see Karen?’
‘Yes.’ And I told him how she had met me at Tangier station. He had me repeat everything she had said, and when I had finished, he stood there with bowed head. ‘So my father has been arrested.’ He blinked his eyes. ‘He is an old man, so maybe they will…‘But then he gave a little shrug. ‘He was a fine man.’ He used the past tense. ‘He did much good in Prague. I’m sorry.’ He straightened up and looked at me. ‘Thank God Karen got out in time. I was afraid that perhaps … But never mind that now. Give Jan my love!’ He murmured the words to himself and then gave a little awkward laugh that was so near to a sob. ‘And she really said that? You heard her?’ And when I nodded, he smiled a little sadly and said, ‘You know, it is hard to believe that you have actually heard her voice. You’re the first person to give me actual words she has spoken in all these four years. There have been messages, of course — through the underground. But you are telling me her actual words.’ He cleared his throat briefly. ‘Come on. Let’s get some breakfast. Now you are here, I find I’m hungry.’
The difference in the man was extraordinary. He’d waited for my train in an all-night cafe near the station, but, though he was hollow-eyed, he didn’t seem tired. And without the beard he looked somehow younger. But it Wasn’t just his appearance. His whole attitude to life had changed. His mind looked forward now, not backwards, and he was no longer frightened. It was as though the ordeal of passing through the immigration check at Casablanca had destroyed all the nerves in his system. He had arrived in Morocco. His papers were in order. All the past seemed to have been swept out of his mind, except for one thing.
We had barely settled down to our breakfast in a nearby cafe when he began talking of Kasbah Foum. ‘I must go down there and see the place,’ he said, and he pulled a map from his pocket. It was Michelin Map No. 171, covering the area of Marrakech and south to the Sahara. ‘I got it last night,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t mark Kasbah Foum.’
‘I think you’d better forget all about Kasbah Foum.’ He reacted at once to the sharpness of my tone.
‘Why? Did something happen after I left? Was it Kostos?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had a meeting with him and Ali d’Es-Skhira.’
‘You mean you actually met Ali d’Es-Skhira?’ He was suddenly excited. ‘What was he like? What happened? What did they say?’ I started to tell him, but he interrupted me. ‘First, is Caid Hassan of Foum-Skhira still alive?’
It irritated me to have him thinking of nothing but this confounded Wade business. He had come out to be a doctor at Enfida. He should have been thinking about that. ‘How the devil do you know the Caid’s name? I thought you said Wade didn’t talk about his affairs?’
‘Wade?’ He sounded surprised. ‘Oh, I see. No, he didn’t talk about his affairs, but…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He hesitated and then, as though he couldn’t leave the subject alone, he said, ‘Well, is he alive?’
‘As far as I know. Why?’
‘Nothing, nothing. But go on. Tell me what they said.’
To satisfy him I gave a brief summary of that meeting in the Boulevard Pasteur. When I had finished he said, ‘So Kostos thinks I won’t be able to get out of the Zone, eh?’ He was smiling to himself. And then he looked at me, still smiling, and said, ‘What do you think he’ll do when he finds I’ve disappeared?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said shortly. ‘Nothing, probably.’
‘Yes, he must do something. Ali, anyway. I think they’ll go straight to Foum-Skhira.’ He nodded his head thoughtfully, peering down at the map. ‘Yes, that’s what I think they’ll do. Look. Here is Foum Skhira.’ He twisted the map round for me to see, pointing to a spot about 150 miles south-west of Marrakech. ‘Kasbah Foum will be quite near it, I imagine.’
‘Now just listen to me,’ I said, pushing the map aside angrily. ‘I don’t know what Wade told you. Something obviously. But whatever it was that’s got you so interested in the place, forget about it. You’re not Wade any longer. You’re Jan Kavan again. You ceased to have any connection with Wade the moment you stepped on that plane. From what you’ve told me, you’ve got quite enough worries without getting involved in another man’s affairs.’
‘But if Kostos follows me — ‘
‘Why should he? He’s not interested in you. He’s only interested in Wade. Now just try and understand who you are. You’re coming with me to Enfida to act as Mission doctor. That should be enough to occupy your mind. And your wife’s going to join you there later. Now just shut up about Kasbah Foum. Okay?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, of course. I understand.’ He folded the map up, but his eyes kept straying towards it as we ate our food in silence, and when we were on the train and steaming out of Casablanca he opened it up again and sat with it spread out on his knees, staring out of the window at the brown, rolling country where. camels and mules, harnessed together, pulled primitive ploughs across the arid landscape.
‘It’s like the Old Testament come to life,’ he said, and then added, ‘And I suppose it gets even more Biblical as you go south towards the desert.’
‘You’ll find all you want of the Old Testament in the souks of Marrakech,’ I told him.
We didn’t talk much after that and I drowsed off. When I woke we were running out of the Djebilet hills, down into the flat plain of Marrakech, and there, ahead of us, were the Atlas Mountains. An hour later we were sitting at a table, drinking coffee and looking out at the teeming mass of humanity that packed the Djemaa el Fna. The mountains and the plain had gone. We were swallowed up in the dusty hubbub of the great, red-walled Berber city. We went to the bank and then found a cheap little French hotel in the rue Bab Aguenaou.
In the late afternoon I took Jan to the roof-top of the Cafe de France. The place was full of tourists, rich people from all over the world who had come to drink mint tea on that roof and watch the sky flare to Technicolor and to look down on the seething acres of tribesmen packed into the great square of the Djemaa el Fna. The tide of humanity ebbed and flowed out of the narrow, covered alleys of the souks and the noise of it came up to us in a steady roar of sound. It was evening now and the flat, white roof tops and the red walls and the graceful tower of the Katoubia were flushed with the pink of the sunset and all the sky was an incredible spectrum of pastel shades. Away to the south the Atlas Mountains glistened like sugar icing, a towering rampart of fairy beauty.
‘And that’s where we’re going?’ Jan asked. He was staring towards the mountains.
I nodded.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ he murmured. ‘Marcel described all this to me so often. And now I am really here — ‘
‘Marcel?’
He glanced at me quickly. ‘A man I met during the war.’ He turned back towards the mountains and added, ‘It was when I was working with Krupps. I was on secret work and I was getting information out to the British. I used the French forced labour battalions and Marcel was my chief contact. He’d lived out here and he talked of nothing but this country and the people. He was a fine man. He believed in victory always, right from the beginning.’ He.paused and then added, ‘He died of pneumonia in a cellar in Essen. I was sorry when he went.’ His tone was sad as though he were speaking of somebody who had died only yesterday. ‘And now I am here and it’s all just as he described it to me. It doesn’t seem possible.’ His voice was almost awed. He hunched his shoulders and leaned forward, staring down into the huge square.
I was used to it now, but I could remember how I had felt when I first saw it. There were thousands of people down there; people from all over South Morocco — from the desert and the palmeries and from the most inaccessible villages of the Atlas. They crowded in circles round story-tellers and the snake charmers and the troops of dancers, or wandered hand-in-hand among the booths of doctors and barbers and letter-writers. Among them moved the water-boys, festooned with brass cups, their bells ringing an insistent water-note of sound. It was a shifting pattern of colour that sent up a continuous, inhuman roar. And over all the hubbub of the crowds there rose the ceaseless beat of the tam-tams — rhythmic and urgent; the sound that beats like the pulsing of the blood through the high mountains and along all the valley arteries of the south.