Alexandra Singer by Tea at the Grand Tazi Page A

Maia noticed, there were no historical books. Ceramic tiles lay placed in symmetrical patterns across the floor.
    He saw her looking at them. “Zellige, my dear.”
    The vividly coloured, terracotta tiles had been placed into geometrical shapes, spreading over the entire far wall. The Historian strode nimbly over to the wall and stroked the tiles. Carpets
dyed in reds and purples lay across a raised stone platform, and the windows opened with shutters of latticed wood onto the courtyard outside. Maia understood why this misanthropic man might want
to come in here and never emerge. She was warming to him. So far, she had found that the Historian’s misanthropic contempt for human nature was so strong that he wished to have as little
contact with the world as he was able.
    “When I am in here, I do ask you not to disturb me... ”
    The intimacy of earlier was all gone. Maia was discomfited. Why had he wished to display this sumptuous room to her; and then forbid her from ever visiting it? Maia dismissed this strangeness
merely as one of the Historian’s many foibles.
    Following the spontaneous tour of his abode, the Historian disappeared again without leaving word of his whereabouts. Occasionally she felt the urge to enquire about his travelling, but she knew
that she would never ask. She had already witnessed a hint of the wrath that lay dormant in the Historian, and did not desire to witness it again. Somehow he succeeded in making her feel as if she
judged him too harshly. She pitied the old man, living out the remainder of his life in isolation.
    In the Historian’s absence, Maia pushed on with the work that he had left for her and she continued to paint. Although Maia passed Ina in the corridor, the two women still never spoke, and
Maia no longer made any attempt to elicit any civility from the woman.
    Maia saw that the door of the riad was the main external feature against the blankness of the house, and savoured the privacy she found once inside. She often sat in the courtyard and worked in
a room downstairs where two sofa beds sat, and rugs were laid out across the stone floor. In the corner, a wooden platform had been constructed for the desk, where at night, she ate alone with
fresh produce she had bought in the day. She began to enjoy her solitude.
    Maia did as the Historian asked her. She executed his correspondence with the various publishers and newspaper editors from Paris to New York, she translated articles for him and the articles
which he had written upon varying medieval religious topics from French into English, and she transcribed his indecipherable notes onto his ancient computer. She could sit for hours, her hands
poised over the keys, desperately trying to understand the illegibility of the Historian’s handwriting, or looking abstractedly at the letters before her eyes, without really seeing them at
all.
    One evening she was distracted and failed to save his work on time before there was a disastrous power cut. She swore loudly, and as she looked up she saw Ina was staring straight at her. Their
eyes met and Maia refused to take her gaze away. After a few moments, the old woman withdrew, leaving Maia with an unpleasant sensation of having been spied upon.
    She looked into the shadows moving in the courtyard, at a bit of inky sky, and at the other side of the house, which was turning black in the darkness. Through the shutters she could almost
smell the heat smouldering in the night and then somewhere, not far off; she could hear the rising tremolo of a lute. Maia began to ache again for excitement. She knew that out there in the streets
below there was a party and fascinating, entertaining people, but she didn’t know how she would find it and in any case she was tied in here now. In the isolation of her self-sufficiency, her
longing for privacy and retirement from life was now morphing into loneliness.
    With no-one to amuse her, Maia painted. The houses, the city itself from