if I had
been transported back a generation.
I struggled to absorb the café through a kind of crude osmosis.
Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside
us all, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that
reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be
purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a
touch-paper alight.
As I sat in the café, I felt my back well with energy. It was as
if there were fireworks shooting down my spine. My eyes burst
alive with brilliant colours – vibrant reds and shocking blues. My
tongue tingled with zest and my nose sensed the fragrance of a
thousand jungle flowers.
It was raw imagination.
For three days the guardians kept to themselves. Osman and the
Bear climbed on to the roof and pretended they were sealing it
with tar. I called up, pleading for them to come down and
explain Hamza's decision to leave. Eventually, I cornered Osman
behind the stables, where he was sprinkling grains of rat poison
along a wall.
'Hamza has left and will not come back,' he said. 'There is
nothing you can do to change his mind.'
'But why? I don't understand. He's been here for decades.'
'Monsieur Tahir,' said Osman, straightening his back. 'It is
the shame . . . that is why.'
The next day, I met Dr Mehdi at our usual table at Café
Mabrook. He was wearing his pyjamas under a light grey raincoat.
His brow was glistening with sweat and he looked much
paler than usual.
I asked if he was all right.
'For three days and three nights I have had a terrible fever,' he
said. 'Only this morning when I woke up, I felt a little better,
although I'm rather weak. During the fever, I had dreadful
frantic dreams – savage tribes slaughtering each other, monsters,
ghouls and jinns. I didn't know how to get away from it all. And
the harder I tried to escape, the deeper I became trapped in the
nightmare.' Dr Mehdi paused, and wiped his wrist across his
face. 'I should be in bed now,' he said. 'My wife was screaming at
me to stay at home, but I had to come to tell you . . .'
'To tell me what?'
The surgeon cracked his knuckles one at a time.
'Well,' he said softly, 'when I was gripped by fever, I dreamed
that I was a prisoner in a cage in a palace garden. Not far from
my cage there was a magnificent fountain, and next to that a
banquet table piled with platters of couscous, dates and fruit. But
the mirage was out of reach. I was bound in the cage, trapped
like a wild animal. All over the floor were human bones, those
of other prisoners who had met the fate I was hoping to
avoid.'
'Were you alone?'
Dr Mehdi looked me in the eye. He was normally blasé almost
to the point of irritation. But the fever had rattled him.
'I was alone, yes,' he said. 'All except for a tiny bird. It was a hudhud , a hoopoe. Although it could fly in and out through the
bars, it chose to stay with me. And it's because of the bird that I
pulled myself out of bed and came to find you here.'
I didn't understand. 'What have I got to do with a bird you
dreamed about?'
'The bird told me a story,' said the doctor, 'and it asked me to
tell the story to you.'
We sat in silence for the next minute or two. The old surgeon
mopped the sweat from his head.
'What was the story?' I asked.
Again, Dr Mehdi looked over at me hard. He spoke only
when he saw my eyes locked in on his.
'It told me the story of the Indian bird,' he said.
When you hire a Moroccan maid, you imagine she will cook,
clean and generally help to run the house. You believe this
because at the first meeting she paints a vision of tremendous
comfort – the clothes washed and expertly ironed, the house
spic-and-span, delicious meals bubbling away on the stove. If
you're lucky, there's a honeymoon which lasts a week or ten
days. After that she settles into her role and the true character
burgeons forth.
Every day I was savaged by Zohra's poisonous tongue. She
barked at me for buying such cheap tea glasses.