image

LULU IN
MARRAKECH

Diane Johnson

image

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

LULU IN MARRAKECH

Diane Johnson, a two‐time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and three‐time National Book Award finalist (most recently in 1997 for Le Divorce), is the author of thirteen previous books. Le Mariage (2001) and L’Affaire (2006) are available from Penguin. Diane divides her time between San Francisco and Paris.

To the memory of Barbara Epstein,
Marie‐Claude de Brunhoff, and Pauline Abbe;
and, as always,
to John Murray

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Koranic quotations are based on a classic 1934 translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, widely available in many editions. The intelligence-related epigraphs and some of Lulu’s references to CIA practices come from papers published from a colloquium on Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s, in several volumes, edited by Professor Roy Godson, of which I found “Analysis and Estimates,” “Counterintelligence,” and “Clandestine Collection” the most helpful. Many friends helped with special expertise, observations, and criticisms, especially John Beebe, Diana Ketchum, Robert Gottlieb, Craig Phillips, Sally Shelton-Colby, Marlise Simons, and Drusilla Walsh. Grateful thanks to my editor, Trena Keating; my agent, Lynn Nesbit; and as always to my husband, John Murray.

How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones. The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little that she does understand… she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.

—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

1

International terrorism may increasingly be a problem.… Better intelligence to counter terrorist activities cannot be based on technological intelligence (e.g. photography, radio, and traffic intelligence) but must be based on clandestine agents’ activities, or what is called HUMINT.

—Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

imageDuring training for my present job, I had been particularly struck by a foundation document of tradecraft, “The Role of Self‐Deception in Prediction Failures.” It argues that Americans are especially prone to self‐deception and that our ability to fool ourselves is greater than the ability of others to fool us. History shows plenty of examples, but it’s my own that’s made me understand the author’s point. Am I myself more gullible than other Americans? Perhaps these are the very qualities I was recruited for: gullibility, and the rigidity of my belief in pragmatism—for I am determined not to let ideology, whether of love or patriotism, get the better of me again.

And when did the gullibility principle begin to work on me? Maybe not until I was on the plane to Marrakech, or even when I got the assignment to go there. Am I once again its victim? I still don’t know, even now, how much of what happened had been orchestrated, how much was the collusion of unforeseen events.

But I should explain how I came to be involved in all this. I’m Lulu Sawyer—not my christened name, but it is now Lulu even in company records.

In our organization, we have foreign intelligence (FI), counterintelligence (CI), human intelligence (HUMINT), and communications intelligence (COMMI); there’s covert, overt, clandestine, and paramilitary, and passive and aggressive in each category. I am FI/HUMINT/NOC. NOC means not officially connected to an embassy or government agency.

“Human intelligence,” said my handler, Sefton Taft, in a regretful tone—I report to an insensitive and sometimes seemingly not‐too‐friendly case officer named Taft, who is stationed in Spain. “HU‐MINT. It must still be gathered. These Arabs are so backward; things like electronic surveillance, technical collection—these are useless. Knowledge is in someone’s head, it’s recorded in the knots of a camel’s bridle, in certain passages of the Koran. The Russians, God bless them, at least had radio communications, listening stations of their own, cell phones we could intercept—those were the days.”

“Human intelligence; an oxymoron,” I remember saying.

HUMINT/FI had a basic mission in Morocco: to gather information intended to upgrade generally our database on the country, including information about the flow of money through certain Marrakech Islamic charities or, more startling, the European clubs and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It was the analysis at headquarters that it was the Moroccan NGOs, directed and mostly funded by foreigners, that formed the nexus of, or at least an important stage on, the money trail from Europe and America to various terrorist organizations, via Moroccan banking. It was important, because we had intelligence that the Islamists left over from recent crackdowns in Algeria had regrouped in the Sahara desert and were recruiting and attempting to radicalize everywhere in North Africa—Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and in the no‐ man’s‐land of the Western Sahara—and unless they could be impeded would have a powerful Al‐Qaida‐like base within easy striking distance of Europe, as the bombings in Spain had shown.

“HUMINT—it makes you long for the old days,” Taft had added. “Satellite photos, listening devices, hard targets. You’re well-placed, Lulu. No matter what happens with the boyfriend, you’ll easily find a way of staying on in Morocco—a healthy, articulate, sociable girl like you.”

Taft was briefing me: “Huge sums of money change hands in the souk, intended for jihad, never going near a bank. Who are the bankers? We think there’s a network involving domestics, car repair guys, people who interact with Europeans every day. Waiters. We need a lot more information on them.” It was from Morocco that huge sums of money were being distributed to radical Middle Eastern organizations and suicide bombers, and as reparations to their families. Terrorists were being formed there too—Moroccans had been among the bombers in Casablanca and Madrid, and were even connected to London. There is evidence that all of North Africa is home to rising numbers of fanatics.

“Remember,” Taft said, “these people depend on a network of little shop keepers, forgers, fishermen—sympathizers who can get a false passport, a train ticket, put them up for a night or a week, help them cross the water. These are people who won’t themselves be planting bombs, but who indulge their convictions or ease their consciences by supporting the bombers. That’s where we need information. Where are those passports coming from?”

I understood. I would not be Lawrence of Arabia. Mine was a frankly low-level and not very specific mission; but I was a low-level person who had happened into a potentially valuable cover, acquiring an English lover who lived in Morocco. Luckily our corporate ethic does not include celibacy, and though it was utterly unspoken, I sensed company backing for recruits who were also passable-looking and had a fair chance of going to bed with possibly useful men, and the willingness.

Beside this mission, other personal things drew me to the idea of Morocco—the warm weather, the fascination of a new culture, but especially my little love affair with Ian Drumm. I’d told my family and friends I was going to visit a lover in Marrakech, as, of course, I was, and it was a more‐than‐perfect cover for my real mission, which I couldn’t reveal to them or to him. In my first post, I’d been attached to an international aid agency in Pristina, in Kosovo, where I had met Ian, and was now being reassigned conveniently near him. To spend a few months with him at his villa in Marrakech would hardly be work.

I’d never been to North Africa but had always liked travel posters of the mosques and domes, the salmon walls, the palms and donkeys and goats, all so evocative of warm sunshine and the melodic calls to prayer, and a dionysian miasma of goat and incense layered in the air. Islam drew me and repelled me. My misgivings weren’t sectarian; part of my apprehensiveness had to do with the paradox that we are apt to fear most what we most want, in case when we get it, it turn to ashes. I wanted to succeed professionally—as predicted for the paradigmatic young person sought by the Agency (though I’m in my thirties)—and personally, with Ian, for I was kind of stuck on him.

2

Analysis may be the most important and is surely one of the most vulnerable components of the intelligence process. Analysts are required to answer difficult questions on the basis of usually limited data. Thus they are frequently tempted to accept data more or less at face value.

—Roy Godson, ed., Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s

imageThough I don’t usually talk to people on planes, I had fallen into conversation with the woman in the seat next to me, a slender, tan, and well-dressed Frenchwoman in her forties. I’d stopped in Paris for a visit between posts and was flying out of Charles de Gaulle on Royal Air Maroc. The plane was crowded with merry Parisians making for their weekend places—their riads and condos in the warm, exotic desert.

“There’s no problem in Morocco,” she said. “It’s the last place where Europe and Islam still get along.”

“No one shot there, as in Egypt, or bombed, or kidnapped like in Afghanistan. Not yet,” I said, for I had boned up on all this.

“Luckily, such things are impossible in Morocco. They are culturally very French,” she said, apparently remembering nothing about Algeria and the French experience there.

We were flying high enough that the whole contour of the northern coast of Africa was visible, a whole new continent, the dark continent, as it used to be called, though it lay beneath us as green and cheerful as one could wish—the strip along the coast at least—so lovely that I hadn’t been able to keep myself from calling her attention to it.

This led to our introducing ourselves. She was Yvette Frank, and she dealt in real estate in Marrakech, but more interesting than that to me, she told me she worked as a bénévole, a volunteer, with a group in Paris that helped young Muslim French girls escape from the murderous intentions of their fathers and brothers: On the plane with us was a girl, Suma Bourad, whose father and brother had planned to slit her throat in one of the honor killings you read about, and which actually happen.

“We help these girls menaced by their families. Some of the histoires are quite harrowing,” Madame Frank had said, and told me what she knew of Suma’s story, in a low voice so Suma couldn’t hear. The girl was sitting two rows behind us in the first row of coach. They hadn’t been able to get seats together, and I sensed that this was something of a relief to Madame Frank, who, well-meaning as she was, probably didn’t have a lot in common with a teenage Muslim victim. Or maybe the French charity wouldn’t spring for a business-class seat. Anyway, luckily for the girl, she had eluded her family; at least, no mark was visible under the sedate fastening of her foulard, though one wondered what kind of mark it must have left on her soul.

Suma was a student, eighteen or nineteen, very pretty, with almond skin and large dark eyes shadowed by a sort of plum bloom around them, not quite bruised-seeming, but you looked twice to see what it was; it brought to mind the reason for her fleeing. Madame Frank didn’t know if this was the first time she had been on a plane. She was born in France to Algerian parents, perhaps had never seen North Africa. Su‐maya Bourad, Suma. She appeared such a model of Islamic decorum, I had to remind myself that what ever her religion, she was also a French girl, educated in dialectics and Descartes, hoping to be a doctor.

“It’s not so common among Algerians, honor killing,” said Madame Frank. “It’s usually the Turks.”

Suma’s story, Madame Frank said, is not unusual among the daughters of immigrant families in Europe, when the old ways cherished by the parents conflict with what Parisian girls come to feel for themselves. For every one who accedes to the wishes of her parents concerning marriage or education, another rebels or—I don’t really know the proportion of the rebels to the dutiful— but Suma was the former. She had embarrassed her family in some way, had believed her brother was going to kill her, and had gone to the shelter.

Apart from chatting with Madame Frank, I read and looked out of the window, but I was conscious of the young woman, who didn’t seem to be doing anything. I would have expected a vibrant, rebellious girl, but she sat quietly the whole way, not reading, her hair covered in a dark blue scarf, eyes lowered, gazing at the seat in front of her. Several times I walked back through the coach section toward the toilets, which took me by her seat. She didn’t give any sign of desperation, though I supposed she must be desperate.

I was glad she had the gumption to escape. The metaphor of flying contains the idea of flight from something, from danger or constraint, and it contains the idea of freedom. I supposed these were the things this trip meant to Suma, the opposite of what it meant to me.

“The brother is a fanatic, he’s watched, the police have had him down for some time,” said Madame Frank.

“It is almost too late to buy in Marrakech now,” she went on, reverting to her favorite subject. “The beautiful old riads are mostly gone, though some remain, for a price. Currently I have a line on an especially good one, in a good location, completely à rénover, naturellement… if that should interest you.”

“What will she do in Marrakech? Suma.”

“She will work as an au pair for a very nice English family. They’ll be meeting us, of course. I will present you. The Cotters. ‘Sir and lady’!” She smiled the patronizing smile the French adopt when dealing with English titles and other vestiges of what they consider a backward political system they themselves had had the wisdom to ditch. “Maybe you know them?”

The French also always assume that all Anglo-Saxons know each other. “No,” I said, “I don’t know anyone in Marrakech except my host, Ian Drumm.”

“But I know him!” she cried. “He is very known in the community. You must surely come to us during your visit.”

I thanked her. I could see that Madame Frank, in Moroccan real estate, and Suma, positioned in a nice English family, could become useful sources for me; I hoped Suma and I would eventually become friends, and it seemed that Madame Frank and I were friends already.

3

Who stays at home during that month / Should spend it in fasting; But if anyone is ill, / or on a journey, the prescribed period should be made up by days later… and you may be grateful.

—Koran 2:185

image“What may I serve you, Miss… Sawyer?” said the flight attendant, glancing at her manifest. But when I asked for a glass of wine, she said they couldn’t serve alcohol during Ramadan. “It is our sacred period, the Muslim month of fasting,” she continued, though I knew what Ramadan was, of course. We were now at the end of September, and Ramadan had just begun. No food or alcohol all day. Could they drink water? I suddenly wasn’t sure, and this made me doubt my general preparation, though I had read works of sociology, slogged through the Koran, and learned the rudiments of the beautiful script.

The flight attendant was serving water, tea, and coffee, what ever the rule. Though most of the people on the plane were Western, drinking coffee and eating pretzels, some were sitting abstemiously. One or two hungry-looking people were standing in line before me waiting for the toilets in business class. Next before me was a beautiful, dark Middle Eastern–looking woman, her huge eyes kohl-lined, her clothes Armani. She took an inordinate amount of time in the cabine, and when she came out she was wrapped in a black chador, or abaya, as these garments are called in Morocco, an Islamic shawl over her hair, her body, the lower part of her face. I had heard that the abaya was not worn much in Marrakech, and in fact she was the only woman on the plane dressed in such a way, her black costume contrasting with the pastels and beiges of the Europeans and returning Moroccans, so that she stood out like the wicked godmother at the christening and was a powerful reminder of the strange fate of women in the place I was going.

We were flying a bit lower, so that now the cities of the northern coast were visible on the edge of the sea, arcs of settlement like white rickrack against the turquoise Mediterranean. Then we turned inland, south, toward the desert. We were too high to make out figures, but tiny towers rose here and there out of the chalky landscape. As we came down, the buildings resolved into apricot and beige, more nearly the colors of earth. Now from the sky, you were conscious of more desert lying to the south, the Sahara, a wasteland of hot sand and death, encroaching relentlessly on these human habitations and their precarious water supply.

When we landed, Madame Frank stood up to reach her carry-on, trapping me in my seat, but I could watch Suma follow the other passengers up the aisle. She carried a nice leather purse and one of those Chinese red-and-white‐striped plasticized paper carrier bags. I noted these things, but mostly now that we were here, I had fallen to thinking of Ian and about whether a month or two with him would be wonderful or unwise. Thinking of sleeping with him caused an agreeable stir, but I reminded myself that months of sunshine and what ever you ate or couldn’t drink in Morocco could also become as monotonous as the the limitless Sahara. If things didn’t work out with Ian, my orders were to attach myself to an institution that I would eventually stay on to teach in or run.

There was nothing exotic about the brisk, modern airport except the costumes of the cleaners in their washed-out cotton smocks and backless slippers, in contrast to the smart European clothing of the arriving visitors and the people waiting for them. Otherwise all was potted palms and marble terrazzo, like airports anywhere. I looked beyond the passport line and was surprised that Ian wasn’t among the group of excited locals waving to their families or Europeans waving at their guests. Instead, a man I didn’t recognize, with a pudgy, cheerful face and a day’s beard, wearing khakis and loafers, was holding up a sign that read MISS L. SAWYER. He saw my reaction, concluded I was me, waved from behind the barrier, and tapped his own chest to show he was meant for me.

I looked around for Ian again and couldn’t see him. Though my tendency is to imagine that everything is okay, my training, and perhaps a trace of the slight paranoia that renders you suitable (as ascertained by batteries of standardized tests) for this line of work, spun scary explanations through my mind: Maybe this was Ian’s driver, but he could be a kidnapper, an agent, the bearer of bad news. What should I say to him? How to get his credentials? Asking for a note from Ian was too dramatic, would suggest I had some reason to be fearful. Yet to go with some stranger would be an elementary mistake. I could refuse to go with him, I could say I preferred a taxi.

And, after all, how could Ian fail to come for me? What did this foretell? Indifference? Regret, perhaps? Yet probably neither—for him, Morocco was a normal place, with functioning taxis, well within the capabilities of a grown woman to negotiate; he would not think of kidnapping or robbery or indifference. This flood of thoughts occurred more or less simultaneously; meantime I smiled to acknowledge that I was L. Sawyer.

I found a cart and went to pick up my bags. The girl Suma had crowded close to the luggage carousel too. I held her eye for a brief instant and we exchanged the impersonal smiles of people who catch each other looking. Was there something uncertain and imploring about her glance? No lurking male relatives menaced her.

Madame Frank and Suma piled a suitcase and a box on a cart and began to push it toward the exits, it seemed without talking much to each other, but smiling, like two people of goodwill who didn’t speak a common language. Madame Frank pushed the cart, and Suma walked behind her. I assumed I was seeing her off safely into her new life. My bags were the last, as usual, or so it always seems to me, and then I went past the barrier to where the stranger waited.

“Miss Sawyer? I thought it was you. Tom Drill. I’m supposed to take you to Ian’s. He had to wait for his tree man,” he said. “I said as I was coming to the airport anyhow… are these your bags?”

Obviously they were. I still hadn’t decided whether to act on my mistrustful apprehensiveness. He seemed all right, American, familiar, but I couldn’t judge the local context, the significance of his unshaven beard and rumpled khakis. And all the tales of kidnapped agents or businessmen began like this, at the airport, with an unfamiliar emissary saying someone had sent them. He’s just near here, he wants me to bring you to him, he’s waiting, was delayed.

So far, there hadn’t been kidnappings in Morocco. But there hadn’t been any in Beirut, in Peshawar, Cairo, or Athens, until the first one. Terry Anderson. Daniel Pearl. Thus did my inner discussion go. But if you make a fuss, express hesitation, they will see you have reasons, reasons an uncomplicated girlfriend ought not to have.

It weighed with me that this guy was American, but I dawdled, hoping Ian would appear, hoping Madame Frank would present me to Suma. They were standing in the lobby, maybe waiting for their own driver. As I watched, a tall woman wearing a yellow blouse walked up to Suma, smiling, welcoming, and they shook hands. A large, handsome woman around sixty, rather glamorous in the style of Mrs. Thatcher, with wavy whitish-blonde hair and a Thatcherian purse. Before I could catch Madame Frank’s attention, Tom Drill greeted the woman in the yellow blouse, “Ciao, Marina.” This was sort of a relief, that he was known to people.

Marina’s English ness was evident from her size and clothes, and no mistaking the plummy upper-class tones. While they chatted, I smiled again at Suma and said bonjour. “Bonjour, madame,” she said. Yes, it was her first time in Morocco; yes, she was happy to be here. She would be studying and working.

“Suma will be staying with us,” said Marina, or “Lady Cotter,” in the terms of Tom’s introduction. It was clear she and Madame Frank hadn’t met before, but now they acknowledged each other enthusiastically, and Marina Cotter thanked her for the help of her group.

As we parted, Madame Frank asked me again what my last name was. “Sawyer,” I said. “I’ll be staying at Ian Drumm’s.”

“Yes, Lulu’s here to visit Ian Drumm,” Tom told Marina. Oh, how nice. Did their eyebrows raise slightly, did little smiles play across their lips?

“Yes, a charming man!” said Madame Frank. “I will invite you. I am always trying to get him to sell me his big Palmeraie tract. Maybe you will intercede for me. Au revoir! À bientôt! À bientôt!”

By now, it was starting to feel to me slightly too propitious that I should so neatly be furnished with all this local information; my arrival was sort of front-loaded with background facts, like the beginning of a play, and Tom Drill later gave me even more—that Sir Neil and Lady Cotter had a showplace riad, that there were a ton of Brits in Marrakech, that Marina Cotter was his own best pal, that she had recently been struck with tragedy: She had been saddled with her grandchildren after a daughter-in-law had died in Nepal. Their son, the father of the children, was in the military somewhere in Africa and couldn’t take care of them. The little granddaughter played with Tom’s daughter, Amelie, sometimes. Suma would be helping Lady Cotter. The Cotters thus had the satisfaction of rescuing a girl and getting a babysitter into the bargain.

Lady Cotter had given Madame Frank and me a knowing, complicit smile; we were all good people cooperating to help a girl threatened by violence. “And we’ll be seeing a lot of you—we adore Ian, he is one of Neil’s oldest friends, well, since he was a boy, Ian, I mean. Neil and Ian’s father were friends in the Second War.…” She talked on.

Ian. In general I’m not attracted to Englishmen—too pale and pink, usually, and they smoke and drink too much. Ian didn’t have these faults, but now, not coming to the airport was a fault.

4

Some qualities are directly related to the intelligence process. Curiosity is, of course, fundamental, as is a thoughtful turn of mind, matched with some humility against presumptions of infallibility.

—William E. Colby, “Recruitment, Training and Incentives for Better Analysis”

imageSoon after signing up for this life, my eye happened to fall on a manual used by Agency recruiters. It said that the type of young person they were looking for must be of above-average intelligence and intellectual curiosity, sociable and extroverted; good at both oral and written communication; have an interest in international affairs; be fluent in at least one foreign language; have “a preference for unstructured, even ambiguous job situations”; have a desire for leadership and readiness “to manipulate others to achieve legitimate goals,” sound judgment, common sense, self-discipline, some experience living overseas, and “experience and ability in relating to foreign persons and cultures”; be good at role-playing; approve of what we would be doing; and not have too many ties back home in America.

To think that I might conform to that description gave me at least a moment’s pause for self-examination and a stab of chagrin. While some of these are qualities I admire, some certainly are not, and some I know myself positively to lack. It’s true, for instance, that I speak a little French by now, but leadership is the last quality I picture myself having. I had lived overseas and was free of American ties (I had stayed awhile in France after my junior year abroad, then came back to finish college in California and got an M.A. in international relations after, let’s face it, various personal screw-ups and the terminal exasperation of my relatives). I was having fun, or thought I was, but I knew my life wasn’t leading anywhere, and then, coming to the end of my rope, almost by accident I was recruited to my present job.

Though I should be too old to be a concern to my parents, I’m aware that I am one. They believe I should have found my way before this. Will she ever settle down? Will she marry? If only she would marry. If only she were happy. Their sweetness to me (when I was younger, they were firm, even harsh, about my mishaps) reveals their fear that they have a fragile being on their hands whom they must not challenge. But this is far from true.

Role-playing, manipulating others—I knew I was doing those when I agreed to visit Ian in Marrakech. I knew I planned to stay on. Ian’s invitation was opportune—my rotation in Kosovo was finishing, it could not seem more natural that I should visit him before my next move somewhere. Of course I hadn’t told him about my affiliation, if only for reasons of tact—if he knew I had other reasons for being in North Africa, that would certainly challenge the sincerity of my attachment to him. It was the one thing no one must know. Once in Marrakech, I expected to find other reasons for staying on. It would seem natural that there would be interests and useful things in Marrakech to attach myself to—a museum or charity, certain people I would meet there.

As I said, I’d met Ian in Kosovo. After my training in Virginia, I’d been sent to work in Pristina with AmerAID, an international rescue organization. That was my first cover, but of course I also actually did AmerAID work, both overt and covert. Overtly, our office packaged the food donations, coordinated the medical volunteers from Médecins sans Frontières or the Red Cross, dispatched the bundles of cleaned and sorted secondhand clothes arriving from the World Council of Churches and American civic groups, and generally assisted things (despite the disillusioned air of apologetic self‐sacrifice in AmerAID headquarters). And covertly I had a modest success, by having a correct hunch about the whereabouts of Vlad Janovic, a prominent second‐string war criminal we’d been wanting to pick up.

Now, just as I’d worked in the aid organization in Kosovo, I had a cover mission here, evaluating and preparing a report on female literacy programs for the Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative, MEPI, an umbrella grants organization I had been working for after I was first recruited. As you would hope, in a country where only half the people can read, there were a number of recent programs devoted to women reading, and my inspection work would be expected to take some months. I expected this pursuit would in itself be interesting and useful; I’d majored in social work in college and was more than competent to do evaluations of this kind. I thus had a double feeling of self-satisfaction, serving my country and doing good too.

It had surprised my family and friends that I could stick at what they saw as drab humanitarian missions, as it surprised me. Still, as they saw it, I had little else to do, hadn’t found another path, so helping others was my path; and at one time I too had really thought the secret of happiness might indeed be a life of service (though not of self-sacrifice; I had no taste for that). Service, a preoccupation with helping others, doesn’t rule out personal happiness, and I had thought it might produce it. It doesn’t seem useful to think about whether you are happy or aren’t.

People my age were in general not brought up in a tradition of service, but I suppose I was. My father is a retired air force officer, now a professor. In his last post, he’d taught at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, and then after retirement he took a civilian job at the junior college in Santa Barbara, where my mother is from. My grandmother was a candy striper at a hospital; a docent at the museum; a member of the Red Cross, the Altar Guild, and the King’s Daughters; and an election official. My mother and stepmother both have been members of Planned Parenthood, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the League to Save Lake Tahoe, the League of Women Voters, and who knows what else? Was I not in a natural progression? (But, I have to say, most of the time, growing up, I thought all of that the most total, time-wasting, bullshit optimism.)

Strange to think that now if they knew about my real job, they would object—the danger, the distant postings, and above all the taint of patriotism and conservatism and clandestine assassinations and so on, for, paradoxically—given the military background—they were nice liberal Californians, horrified by all that. What they believed was that I had taken another job with AmerAID, and even that alarmed them with its smell of government. Californians, we lacked the links to good Eastern schools and Yale and so on that would have made a spy agency a more normal option. But AmerAID was an aid organization after all, and to some extent they were relieved that I had fallen into a respectable family pattern after those early false starts.

I actually did (do) believe in serving my country, even if I haven’t lived there recently, not counting the months in Virginia. But it was there I had also come to see that it wasn’t service I was really drawn to, it was adventure, and it was in that spirit I was off on this mission, a secret mission, as all would be, with a new name, a slightly altered biography, and, fortuitously, with Ian for cover. As to my employers, I didn’t know what they saw in me, yet I was prepared to defer to them; I expected to discover, eventually, some property in myself that I would recognize as validating their view. Meantime I just felt like me, a little skeptical but willing to learn.

We had been taught that sometimes you must forget your personal history and come to live another. Sometimes you must learn not even to respond upon hearing your real name, not even by a tiny acceleration of your pulse. On the other hand, your new name must turn your head as if you’d been hearing it from the cradle. I had been given elementary Arabic, but here also with a cautionary injunction not to seem to understand it. I would learn that this injunction was not necessary: I would understand very little.

In some other respects, I can see now, I was going to Marrakech with a negative attitude. For one thing, I was a little frightened of Islam; after all that’s happened, who isn’t? Maybe Muslims themselves are afraid of it, disconcerted to find themselves prisoners of societies where even their families and people they know might turn on them and blow them up. Maybe they are too afraid to speak out, for fear of getting fatwa’d, or even beheaded, like Daniel Pearl. I thought of the many tales of girls killed by their fathers and brothers, and of how no one speaks of, or even bothers with the names of, those poor young boys strapping on their suicide belts—surely with some ambivalence? Salvation must seem so eventual when the world is here and now—what makes them do it? I keep thinking about them. Had they said good-bye to their parents? Had they recited special prayers? Did they believe them?

So now I was thinking of this poor girl Suma, who was fleeing some of the things her religion had brought down on her, oppressed like the erring girls in a film I saw, made to do laundry for terrifying, sadistic Irish nuns. Those nuns were ostensibly Christians. After what we had seen in the Balkans, I wasn’t reassured about Christians either. At one point we were taken to see the bones of the Srebrenica victims, neatly polished and bundled to be returned to their families, Muslim boys killed by Christian men. Then there are the Hindu crazies, setting fire to trains and mosques to burn alive the nonbelievers. Are there any virtuous religions? It really doesn’t seem so. It almost seems that religion makes you wicked.

5

KATOUBIA MOSQUE, MARRAKECH

A stunning example of how the Moroccan architectural artistry is particularly reserved for religious buildings. Though the dars and riads and kasbahs and nomadic tents (even) all provide the architecture nerd with lots of eye candy.

—Photo caption on political Stew Web site

imageWhile Marina Cotter was helping Suma, Tom Drill was all helpfulness to me; he heaved my suitcase onto his cart and retrieved a few parcels of his own. “I co-run a tea shop, more or less an expat hangout, heavily patronized by Brits, so I have to send for certain things from London: demerara sugar, certain kinds of tea.” He went on with these details, amiability itself, increasing my discomfort, my rising irritation at Ian.

The woman in the black chador I had seen on the plane, I now noticed, was being met by a man in the white robes and distinctive headdress of the Saudis (for I had studied the different tribal costumes, the headdresses and fashions); this explained her un‐Moroccan way of dressing—they were not Moroccans. Possibly they were tourists like me. They were standing by the baggage carousel with a huge pile of fancy luggage—Vuitton cases and duffel bags of handwoven wool. I noticed his polished Gucci loafers.

Outside, the first gust of heat rising from the paved passenger drop-off road was agreeable. Tom Drill drove a nineties Peugeot 504 diesel. The road into the city was peopled by old beige Mercedes diesel taxis, fume-emitting buses, and carts drawn by donkeys or horses, driven by white-gowned men with skinny brown legs and dusty pink heels in heelless slippers. Of the women walking along the shoulder, some were veiled, some not.

My heart rose at the exotic beauty and inaccessibility—I was in North Africa! Mules and goats! Here were the waving palms! All buildings were of rust-colored mud or stucco, the walls polished and crenellated; the curious, beautiful color was the color, I supposed, of the local earth. There had been people walking along this road for a thousand years, or maybe two thousand.

But human history changes here only slowly. It had not been a hundred years since slavery had been abolished in this country, and it was said still to go on in covert forms in the recesses of the medina and in the camps isolated in the vastness of the desert. The black Africans from the south had been, and perhaps were still, enslaved by the lighter-skinned coastal people along the Mediterranean. Now, I had read, the king was trying to liberate women, but the women walking along the road didn’t look liberated, just lethargic and timeless, with a calm that could be stupor or could be biding and waiting.

Tom asked if I’d mind if we stopped by his daughter’s school to pick her up. We parked by a mud wall. He went on foot into a warren of stalls and buildings while I waited in the car. It didn’t seem like a good place for a school. I felt my uneasiness deepen, but he came back in a minute or two with a curly-haired, dark little girl in a school uniform with an enormous backpack across her skinny shoulders. She clung to Tom’s hand, or vice versa, and was called Amelie.

We drove back onto the main road, past the walls of the medina and the minarets of the Katoubia Mosque and the Mamounia hotel. I had studied these monuments and recognized them—the tower had been there for a thousand years and, like everything else, was a fragile pinkish ocher color, the color of white buildings seen at dawn. Islam, Islam, its beauty proclaimed, and I was thrilled to think of its permanence and grandeur. “The Katoubia dates from the twelfth century,” Tom said. “You may find it hard to keep track of their Almovarid and Almovad history. They were all Berbers, not Arabs, exactly. Berbers, Arabs, and Europeans all have a history here.”

In another fifteen minutes, we had left the main road for a narrower paved road. Now we had entered the desert. “The Palmeraie,” said Tom. In contrast to the walled city, the Palmeraie was the ugliest place I had ever seen, desiccated and bare, dotted with stunted palm trees so attenuated they couldn’t even grow their fronds, just emitted stubby shoots, or maybe these had been gnawed by animals. Gashes of dry creek, perhaps the vestiges of some primitive irrigation system, cracked open the stony ground. Plastic bags and empty containers lay in the ditches along each shoulder or clotted together in a wave rolling along in the light wind, a sea of plastic. The ugliness reanimated my fears, which had been lulled by Tom’s good-natured tour‐ guide recitation of what the buildings in the city were called and where we were.

In the distance, a couple of shanty villages could be seen, and some walls that probably enclosed nicer places, houses or hotels. Their hiddenness proposed opulence, oases in the otherwise bleak desert.

I know there are people who find the desert beautiful but I wasn’t finding it so. In a few minutes more we left this road and turned down a narrow dirt driveway, past a gated arch with a sleeping boy on the stoop of its little gate house, through thickets of bougainvillea trained up the walls on either hand, and through open gates.

Now we were inside a large compound, a garden enclosed by the thick, pink adobe walls. Ian’s house stood in the middle of this space, which was perhaps as large as an acre. It was a two-story pink structure of the same adobe material, with onion‐ shaped Middle Eastern arches along the porch, which wrapped around the two sides we could see. The driveway led past the house through rather tangled, pleasant foliage, and gardeners pottered in a bed to our left. I couldn’t help but think of the moment in Pride and Prejudice, a movie I’d liked, where Elizabeth says her love for Mr. Darcy intensified when she saw his beautiful house and grounds.

Despite my pique at Ian’s absence at the airport, I felt excited to be about to see him. I had a clear memory, perhaps now somewhat idealized by distance and longing, of him in Pristina, his tall figure, wearing khaki work clothes that gave him a somewhat military air, and a baseball hat, like those generals who give press conferences on CNN. I had known his Kosovo incarnation was temporary, that really he was a British businessman who lived in Morocco and that he would seem different in a different context, the way people always do. But his love‐making would be the same, presumably, and his ironical manner would be the same.

We parked at the apex of the driveway and got out. I wheeled one of my bags, Tom Drill took the bigger one, and Amelie carried my purse toward the house, Tom waving off attempts by one of the gardeners to help us. We stopped at a carved wooden door heavily studded with nails, and Tom pushed a button. “Don’t mind the jungle out here,” he said. “He’s still got a lot of work to do here. Inside it’s all beauty and repose.”

After a time, the door swung slowly open and a dark head, wearing a crocheted skullcap, poked out.

“Hullo, Rashid,” Tom said in English, “here’s Miss Sawyer.” The door opened the rest of the way and we went in, Amelie and I following Tom. Then Ian appeared in the dim foyer, arms outstretched. I felt a jolt of happiness.

Ian is very English‐looking—a bit heavyset, lion-colored and handsome, hair worn longish—and his roundish face with its Byronic cleft chin in repose has an expression that can seem petulant, like that of the reprimanded soccer player who turns a suave and smiling face to the camera. To me he is always suave and smiling, but I have seen him snap at a messenger or office worker. He’s well-off, or his father is, so I had extra respect for his dedication to the work in Kosovo, his zeal for it even. Despite his disguise as a soul weighed down with the tediousness of life, he’d worked tirelessly, staying up with sick people and driving long distances to get them this or that medicine.

We’d been lovers for some months. At first, by tacit agreement it was simply to sweeten our mutual exile, but since he’d gone back to Marrakech, I’d found myself thinking about him more than I had expected, and now the sudden start of joy at seeing him surprised me.