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you, and blush, and heave her bosom about the place in a way that says thank God, life does
have some meaning after all - if any of that strikes a chord with you, then Casablanca is going
to be a big fucking disappointment.
We had divided ourselves into two teams. Fair skin, and olive skin.
Francisco, Latifa, Benjamin and Hugo were the Olives, while Bernhard, Cyrus and I made
up the Fairs.
This may sound unfashionable. Even shocking. Perhaps you were busy imagining that
terrorist organisations are equal opportunities employers, and that distinctions based on skin
colour simply have no place in our work. Well, in an ideal world, perhaps, that s how
terrorists would be. But in Casablanca, things are different.
You cannot walk the streets of Casablanca with fair skin.
Or, at least, you can, but only if you re prepared to do it at the head of a crowd of fifty
scampering children, who call, and shout, and point, and laugh, and try and sell you American
dollars, good price, best price, and hashish likewise.
If you re a tourist with fair skin, you take this as it comes. Obviously. You smile back, and
shake your head, and say la, shokran - which causes even more laughter, and shouting, and
pointing, which in turn causes another fifty children to come and follow your pied pipe, all of
whom, strangely, have also got the best price for American dollars - and, generally, you do
your best to enjoy the experience. After all, you re a visitor, you look strange and exotic,
you re probably wearing shorts and a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, so why the hell shouldn t they
point at you? Why shouldn t a fifty yard journey to the tobacconist s take three-quarters of an
hour, and stop traffic in all directions, and just about make the late editions of the Moroccan
evening papers? This is why you went abroad, after all. To be abroad.
That s if you re a tourist.
If, on the other hand, you went abroad in order to take over an American consulate
building with automatic weapons, so that you could hold the consul and his staff to ransom,
demand ten million dollars and the immediate release of two hundred and thirty prisoners of
conscience, and then leave by private jet, having mined the building with sixty kilos of C4
plastic explosive - if that s what you nearly put in the Purpose Of Visit box on the immigration
form but didn t, because you re a highly-trained professional who doesn t make slips like that
- then frankly you can do without the staring and pointing stuff from kids on the street.
So the Olives were to work the surveillance, while the Fairs prepared for the assault.
We had taken over an abandoned school building in the Hay Mohammedia district. It
might once have been a classy, grassy suburb, but not any more. The grass had long since been
laid over by the corrugated iron house-builders, the drains were ditches by the side of the road,
and the road was something that might get built eventually. Inshallah.
This was a poor place, full of poor people, where food was bad and scarce, and fresh water
was something that old people told their grandchildren about on long winter evenings. Not that
there were many old people in Hay Mohammedia. Here, the part of an old person was usually
played by a forty-five year old with no teeth, courtesy of the achingly-sweet mint tea that
stood in for a standard of living.
The school was a large building. Two storeys high on three sides, built round a cement
courtyard, where children must once have played football, or said prayers, or had lessons in
how to bother Europeans; and round the outside there was a fifteen foot wall, broken only by a
single, iron-sheeted gate that led into the courtyard.
It was a place where we could plan, and train, and relax. And have violent arguments with
each other.
They began as small, trifling things. Sudden irritations over smoking, and who had the last
of the coffee, and who s going to sit in the front of the Land Rover today. But they seemed,
gradually, to be getting worse.
At first, I put them down to straightforward nerves, because the game we were playing
here was bigger, much bigger, than anything we d tried so far. It made Mürren seem like a
piece of cake, without marzipan.
The marzipan in Casablanca was the police, and maybe they had something to do with the
increasing tension, and the sulks, and the arguments. Because they were everywhere. They
came in dozens of shapes and sizes, with dozens of different uniforms that signified dozens of
different powers and authorities, most of which boiled down to the fact that, if you so much as
glanced at them in a way they didn t like, they could fuck up your life for ever.
At the entrance to every police station in Casablanca, for example, stood two men with
machine pistols.
Two men. Machine pistols. Why?
You could stand there all day, and you could watch these men as they conspicuously
caught not one criminal, quelled not one riot, beat off not one invasion by a hostile foreign
power - did not do, in fact, one thing that made the average Moroccan s life better in any way.
Of course, whoever decided to spend the money on these men - whoever decreed that their
uniforms should be designed by a Milanese fashion-house, and that their sunglasses should be
of the wrap-around type - would probably say  well of course we haven t been invaded,
because we have two men outside every police station with machine pistols and shirts that are
two sizes too small for them . And you d have to bow your head and leave the office, walking
backwards, because there s no dealing with logic like that. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]