Tangier July 1978
Tangier
By the time Sam reached Madame Sarah’s again, it was dark. He’d drifted through the evening streets of the casbah on a wave of good feeling, had even smiled at the kids who nearly hit him in the face with a football.
He was still smiling as he opened the door of the house.
Madame Sarah was in the kitchen. It was warm and yellow in there, filled with the crackling sound of the radio, the smell of gas from the stove and fish frying in spices.
For a moment, he wished Madame Sarah would smile at him the way she smiled at Pierre, wished she would ask him to sit down and eat with her and Aziz. But her face soured when she saw him.
‘You owe me rent,’ she said, pointing a fork at him. ‘Now.’
He nodded humbly and stepped into the kitchen to count out the money.
He didn’t blame her for being angry. He felt awful about it.
Impulsively, he added an extra few dirhams on to what he owed.
Her eyes narrowed when she saw that. No doubt she was wondering what he’d done to get the money, but he gave her his best smile.
‘Here it is.’
She gave a sniff, and folded it into her apron.
Behind her, next to the gas burner sat a stack of msemen. He could already taste them, the thick, chewy layers, rich with clarified butter, like the best pancake ever made.
‘Could I …?’ he heard himself asking, pointing to them, already knowing what the answer would be.
But to his surprise, she sighed, shook her head a little and picked a couple up.
‘No more late money,’ she said, handing them over.
He knew he must have looked like a fool, grinning and nodding at her, but he didn’t care.
He ran up the stairs two at a time, already chewing.
His room was cool and blue with its open shutters.
A breeze was blowing in from the strait, and he could see the lights from ships, port and starboard stars in the darkness.
On a rooftop somewhere near by, a man and a woman were talking softly.
Sam smiled to himself and lay back on the narrow bed.
In that moment, all of Tangier was the taste of warm flatbread and cumin and sweet mint and smoke, the musk of old leather and the worn, fine presence of the past.
The first thing he saw when he awoke the next morning was the writing case.
He groaned, remembering what it had cost him, on top of a supply of kif.
How had he spent almost a week’s rent on a piece of junk?
His parents were right, he didn’t deserve money.
But at the time it had seemed so … right.
He’d believed that the writing case had been waiting for him.
He sighed and pushed himself upright. Perhaps Abdelhamid would take it back.
It was good leather, must have been expensive, once.
How had it washed up here? It looked tattier than he remembered, the leather gouged on one side, peeling on the other, the initials A.
L. almost bare of gilt. The calendar inside was English, he remembered.
Did that make A. L. British, or American?
When he turned it over, it rattled, something tumbling inside. Perhaps he hadn’t replaced the pen properly. He swore and balanced it on his knee. Abdelhamid would never take it back if something was damaged. He worked at the rusty catch, and eased it open.
The smell came first; fusty paper and brittle leather. He opened it wider. The paper was there, yellowed but clean, the pen and pencil and ink snug in their holders. What made the noise, then?
He shook it. There was something loose, sliding and rattling about. He looked more closely. The blotter wasn’t set all the way into the case; there was an inch of space beneath.
He tried to work his fingers under the edge. It was difficult, the thing fit perfectly, and he almost gave up, thinking it was too much work for what was probably a nub of pencil.
What else do you have to do? Stare at the space where the Hermes used to be?
Finally, by holding the case upside down and poking one edge of the blotter, he was able to work it free. Gravity did the rest, sending two small objects tumbling out on to the sheet. One of them glinted silver, like sunlight on water.
He leaned forward, wondering whether he’d finally smoked too much kif.
But no, his fingers touched metal, tarnished and real.
It was a key, a small one, the type that might open a bag or a chest or a bureau.
Automatically, he looked to the front of the case, but there was no lock there, just the rusted clasp.
Stray key, he thought in delight, what do you open?
Abruptly, he was wide awake. It was as if the silver of the key had shone into his brain and illuminated a corner he had forgotten about.
It brought a shiver of excitement, the crackling sensation that came with a new idea, with the urge to write something down.
The seed of a story, a mystery. He’d always been a sucker for those, for cheap paperbacks filled with secrets and thrilling adventures, much to the disapproval of his literature professors.
Eagerly, he looked at the other item. It was dull and brown, an offcut of leather, curled like a leaf. Don’t get excited, it seemed to mumble, dead things, that’s all we are. He picked it up anyway, and turned it in his fingers.
It wasn’t an offcut at all, he found, but a rectangle, like a luggage tag. Smoothing it out, he saw a design embossed in gold, a stylized lion’s head. And beneath it, stamped into the leather, was a number:
15
*
Noon found him hurrying through the streets of the medina, the writing case clasped to his chest. In his haste, he stepped in a pile of fish heads left out for the cats and almost slipped, but he carried on, not thinking about his shoes, just trying to reach the shop before it closed for lunch …
‘Abdelhamid!’
He caught him just as he was turning the key in the lock.
‘Monsieur Hackett,’ Abdel greeted. ‘Good afternoon. You have not run out already?’
‘Not yet.’ He tried to catch his breath. ‘I was looking at the case, and I found something inside.’
‘Oh?’ Abdelhamid squinted. ‘What did you find?’
‘A key –’ Sam dug into his pocket ‘– a key for something, like a chest. Did the case come with anything else? From the same set of luggage maybe? And I found this too. Do you know what it’s for?’
He held them out, the key and the crumpled leather tag. A second later, he felt a stab of uncertainty. What if Abdelhamid thought they were important and wanted to take the case back? Sam gripped the handle tighter.
But Abdel just shook his head, turning the little silver key in his fingers. ‘No, no, it was always alone, always just …’ He looked down at the label, and shrugged. ‘Why? You think they are something?’
Yes, he wanted to insist, they are. But of course, they were probably not.
Whatever the key opened – suitcase or travelling trunk – it was no doubt long gone, crushed in some dumpster back in the States or mouldering in an attic in an English village.
Whoever A. L. was, they probably owned a dozen keys far more important than this one.
And yet, here was a piece of someone’s life, a sliver of it, from fifty years ago; perhaps, if he tried, he could find out more.
‘Could you talk to your brother Mouad?’ he asked. ‘See if he remembers where the case came from?’
Abdel’s frown transformed into a smile. ‘You are inspired by this,’ he declared, patting the case. ‘You see? I told you. Much better than a typewriter!’
Sam laughed with him. It was true, he felt inspired.
The case, the key – they itched at his brain.
He found himself speculating, imagining, eager for more.
He could get a story out of it: a mystery of the casbah, beginning with a young man who finds a key …
Either that, or he was just desperate for something to do. He shoved the thought aside.
‘So you’ll ask Mouad?’
Abdel jerked his head. ‘I will try. Come.’
Sam sat at the back of the café for twenty minutes, his feet twitching in his shoes, listening to Abdelhamid’s phone call, not able to understand more than a few words.
‘Mouad does not remember the case,’ Abdel said finally, hanging up the phone. ‘He says, if he sees it, maybe he will.’ He shook his head, seeing Sam’s disappointment. ‘He will visit soon, before Ramadan. Then we can ask him.’
‘When is Ramadan?’ Sam followed him out of the café.
‘August. The first days. You will still be here, then? You shouldn’t miss it.’
Sam tried to smile. He had enough money for another two weeks, but then … ‘I hope so,’ he said.
After saying goodbye to Abdelhamid, he wandered out into the heat of the Grand Socco.
It was busy and baking, café tables crammed beneath awnings and faded umbrellas, all occupied by people trying to cool themselves with tea or Coca-Cola.
He hadn’t eaten since the msemen Madame Sarah had given him the night before; had been filled instead with kif and excitement. Now, he found himself ravenous.
He bought a couple of crispy briwats, no idea what was in them.
Shredded chicken and cinnamon, it turned out.
A water seller ambled past, bent-backed beneath his plastic drum, brass cups clinking on the bandolier across his chest. Sam stopped him, and after a few long swallows of water, he began to feel better, more cheerful than he had for days.
An idea was forming. He’d write to his parents again; write to them properly this time, not scrawled on airmail paper, or dashed out on the Hermes. He would sit and put pen to paper and try to make them understand what he couldn’t fully explain, even to himself: that he couldn’t come home, not yet.
At a stationer’s shop he bought a bottle of ink, and asked the owner – in mangled Spanish and worse French – about a new nib for the ink pen.
The man seemed surprised, but after a few minutes of rooting through drawers, he produced a box of nibs.
They tried them out in the pen until they found one that fit.
Armed, Sam made his way to the Gran Café de Paris and chose a quiet table in the corner. He took out the ink, the new nib, and centred the leather case before him.
When his coffee arrived, he leafed through the paper to find the least yellowed sheet, and set it on the top.
His hands were trembling slightly as he dipped the pen into the ink and held it poised.
It felt egotistical to stain one of those old pages with his writing, but at the same time, the case had sat idle for fifty years, hadn’t it?
Surely it was time for it to break its silence?
He smiled, touched the nib to the paper, and began to write.
1928. That’s what the calendar in the lid said.
The clink and chatter of the café faded around him.
If only he held the pen tightly enough, wrote fast enough, he might look up and find himself back there, when living was wild and Tangier was filled to the seams with people like him; people who didn’t fit anywhere else, who had chased themselves across Europe to this city in order to turn themselves inside out with drugs and glamour and mistakes …
‘Monsieur?’
A waiter stood above him, looking expectant. Sam blinked hard. For an absurd moment, he thought an old-fashioned motorcar might drift past the window, thought he’d hear jazz on the radio and see people in the clothes of half a century before.
‘Yes?’ he asked, rubbing at his forehead, trying to pull his mind back into the present.
‘Another?’ the waiter asked, pointing at the long-emptied coffee cup.
‘Yes, yes, thanks,’ Sam mumbled. He didn’t really want another one, but neither did he want to leave the cocoon he’d created around himself.
It reminded him of the few times he’d written something good; when whole hours had been lost to the act of creating a world, spinning it into existence using nothing but the words inside his head.
It had been like that, before the waiter interrupted.
He sighed and sat back. Before him, two sheets of the thick letter paper were covered with writing, awkward and scratchy at first, but growing more fluid as he got used to the pen. He picked up the first sheet, to read it back from the beginning.
Dear A,
He stared, feeling odd. He’d intended to write to his mother, his father, but that wasn’t what had happened.
Dear A,
I have your case.
What followed was almost a confession, about how he came to buy the case at the expense of his Hermes, about his failure as a writer, a traveller, a son, as anything really.
He felt the heat rising to his face, alarmed by his own honesty.
He’d written about Tangier as it was now and how he imagined it then.
He’d written to A. L. wondering whether they were similar people, wishing he could post the letter back through time and space, and receive a reply from the past.
The letter broke off mid-sentence. He stared at the pages, thrilled and uneasy. As a piece of writing it was next to useless; it wasn’t a plea to his parents, or even a story he could sell to a magazine to make some money. And yet, it felt like a start, the beginning of something new.
It was as he was reading the letter for a second time that his neck began to prickle, as if he was being watched. He looked up into the mirror that reflected back the café: a few tables away, someone was staring straight at him.
It was an old man, his eyes concealed by semi-opaque spectacles, and by a fedora hat that would have been stylish in another decade. Slowly, the man’s mouth twitched and he nodded.
Sam turned in surprise, only to catch sight of his own face. There was a huge dark smear across his forehead; he’d managed to cover himself with ink.
What an idiot. No wonder the old man was staring.
Too embarrassed to look up again, Sam pushed himself from the table and headed for the bathroom.
In the dim light, he scrubbed the ink from his skin, staring critically at his half-open shirt, his straggling, sun-licked hair and dirty tan.
If he’d lived fifty years before, he would have been dressed smartly, elegantly.
Lost in thought, he made his way back to the table. He’d bring the letter to a close; sign it off with his name. A first chapter, maybe …
He sat down and reached for the pen, only to stop. Everything was just as he had left it, except for the letter.
The letter was gone.