Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson

being tourists like us, turning confusedly at the intersections of the alleys or peering where the doors of a mosque stood open.
    At stalls suggested by Rashid, Posy bought a caftan, the ideal maternity garment, and I bought some slippers, more or less for verisimilitude, women shopping. Of course I hated to bargain, but Posy had already gotten rather good at it. Why do we hate to bargain? Westerners, I mean. I suppose because it implies that a falsehood is the basis of the transaction—the first asking price is a lie. Whereas we value candor and relying on each other’s word, which would mean you state the true price right away. And there is an unpleasant metaphor of victory and defeat embedded in the bargain—you finally defeat your adversary, yet you really know you are defeated, because he is getting the price he secretly meant to get all along.
    As we wandered the alleys of the souk, closely followed by Rashid, I began to understand even more about the limitations of my situation, a woman alone: first would be the simple difficulty of walking around unnoticed. I thought again of a discussion with Taft on the general principles of recruiting and getting to know the locals. What a poor choice he had made in me, an agent limited by social conventions. He couldn’t ever have been faced with those particular disqualifications: Without Rashid I would be, geo graphically, lost in seconds in the winding labyrinth, and the idea of establishing any sort of rapport with any of the indistinguishable men and boys crowding the indistinguishable stalls of polyester fabrics and cheap underwear was beyond imagining, let alone thinking of prying into their ancient networks and bankless financial repositories, resources existing since the beginning of time and entirely male. What had Taft and I been thinking for me to have come here?
    But of course it was not expected I would get to read the native secrets of the souk—it was the European community that was, for the moment, of interest. “Someone with Western connections is cooperating with or running the Islamists,” Taft had said. “Nobody knows to what end, but there is chatter. Something may happen.” Was it Ian’s fire, was it happening even now?

10
Is it ye who grow / The tree which feeds /
The fire, or do We / Grow it?
—Koran 56:72
    W e stopped for a cup of tea in a little tearoom overlooking the edge of the square Jemaa el Fna and gazed down at the spectacle, storytellers and snake charmers, and native people coming and going on the errands of their daily lives. When we had drunk our tea, Rashid, who had briefly disappeared, led us down to wander in the thronged square. We stopped on the fringes of a crowd around a man telling a story, with a little drum he used to emphasize the thrilling parts—of course, we couldn’t understand it, but Rashid whispered a translation.
    “It is a poor widow, she is defenseless, her children are starving, but she has found a ring, left by a stranger to whom she offered the last drops of her poor soup. It is a jewel of indescribable value, and she will sell it. It means her children will eat.
    “But soldiers have come and accused her of theft. She is dragged off to prison, and the children are left to starve. But now the story is over. People have to pay him more money. But they are walking away. Perhaps they have heard this story.”
    “Oh, no!” cried Posy bitterly. “How could they just leave it hanging?”
    “Instead I will take you to the best saffron,” Rashid said. Hoping to get to the fire, I would have said no, or “later,” but Posy fell into smiles. He had told her that most saffron is false, people are fooled and disappointed, there is a trick to telling true from false saffron, and she felt she now had the confidence to buy. Saffron was the thing everybody back in England wanted her to send them. He led us into alleys we’d just been in, to a little stall we probably had passed without noticing, lined with