‌The Crow Tree

I paused for a moment to catch my breath, and as I did the moon crested the ramparts of the medina, its light bringing the houses surrounding the Jemaa into relief. A chill came with its ascent. I put on my cloak, and some of my listeners, loosening the blankets tied around their jellabas, drew them over their heads. One of them, a heavily bearded cleric, now raised his hand and spoke quickly and with an intensity that commanded attention. He was a swarthy man of middle age. Although he wore rustic clothing, his voice was remarkably sophisticated, and I felt in him a keen and discriminating intelligence.

Of course what you say sounds reasonable, he said quizzically, but there’s a plan behind it. It’s patterned to a particular end, and that is the absolution of your brother from the crime he freely admitted to committing.

I gazed calmly at him.

If a pattern does exist, I replied, it is aimed at one thing only: the investigation of the truth – the simple, vital truth at the bottom of all experience. As for my brother, I will not conceal my hope that if each of us can be true to our memories of that evening, if we spare no pains and recount everything thoroughly, we will end by lighting on what now lies concealed. And we’ll do much better work if we return to the same starting point, if we dig deeper every time and go a bit further in understanding.

My interlocutor remarked politely and non-committally that he found my faith in imagination touching.

It isn’t as much imagination as memory, I answered.

Which is nothing but imagination, he countered, isn’t it? Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases rivers of longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.

I refused to be provoked.

I am driven by the need for truth, I replied firmly. My brother is in prison for a crime he did not commit. I want to find out what put him there. It is a difficult task, I agree, but it isn’t impossible.

His smile was sceptical.

You don’t seem to realize that your truth is a paradox, because memories can be imagined, he said. Armed with your arsenal of intentions, you are setting out to explore the events of that evening – but as fiction, not as remembered fact. Where is the centre, the point of orientation, in this game of shadows?

The centre is where the heart is, I replied determinedly.

His mouth turned down. He drew his blanket around himself.

You’re weaving a mythology around a crime. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that is how it seems to me. Faced with the terrible fact of your brother’s guilt, you are attempting to spin a web between yourself and reality. When the memory is indistinct, the imagination becomes infinite – and the beautiful illusion is always preferable to the truth, especially if it is ugly.

I am not weaving anything, I responded. If it is a spider’s web, it isn’t one of my making. My endeavour is different. I want to unravel it.

For a moment he stared at me with a disconcerting intensity. The rest of my audience might not have existed for all the sign he gave of acknowledging their presence. Abruptly he bent his body in a stiff bow and a faint smile of irony seemed to crease his lips. When he straightened up, he waved his hand and said coolly: You have great faith in language and its ability to communicate.

One must believe in something, I said quietly.

But what if the narrator is flawed and his motives unreliable?

I hesitated for an instant, aware of the danger of alienating my audience before the evening had even begun. Deciding to qualify myself, I said conciliatorily: I’m sorry. Perhaps I haven’t explained myself well. Surely the evening’s narrative will assuage your suspicions?

He did not acknowledge the apology but said instead, all the while maintaining a stand-offish tone: Inshallah, we shall see.

I returned his courtesy, my head held high.

After a short pause, I resumed speaking:

Allow me, then, to take you back to that evening. Although it seems unlikely that we should lose our way on this journey, rest assured that, given the nature of the event, we will. Our varying recollections will erase every familiar landmark: the mosques and the minarets, the souks and the qaysarias, the square speckled with pigeon droppings and the maze of alleyways leading into it. Beneath our feet, the very ground will crumble to dust, while overhead, the red sky of Marrakesh will undergo so many metamorphoses that we will consider ourselves fortunate in the end to have any sense of orientation left.

But all that is in the future. For the moment, our point of departure is the needle of the Koutoubia Mosque as it casts its shadow in the direction of the Jemaa. We commence tentatively as in a dream, following the needle as it inches across the Avenue Mohammed V and past the row of calèches that wait patiently for customers through the heat of the day and the coolness of the evening. Between the seventh and eighth carriages, in the shadowy darkness of the Place Foucauld, a noble cypress dwarfs its neighbours, mirroring, as it were, the mosque’s towering minaret. I call that cypress the Crow Tree, owing to the multitude of desert crows that nest in its branches. It was the latter that alerted me to the unusual nature of events that were to follow that evening, their agitation a sure sign that something was amiss.

There were other signs. The city smelt of ashes. The rose-carnelian moon was full, with a ring of light around it. An unnaturally damp wind blew down from the mountains, soaking the head in chill. Later, a red fork of lightning dried up the air, its splatter of light flaying the streets.

Despite all these omens on the evening of the strangers’ disappearance, I set up in my usual place, with an obtuseness that still surprises me, and prepared to begin my session of storytelling.