I’m not looking forward to having lessons. They’ll get in the way of being able to spend time with Nina in the courtyard. My only hope is that Miss Dorothy Ellis will be as nice as Mademoiselle Dubois and as entertaining as Dorothy L. Sayers, then it might not be so bad. She will be starting next week.
The other big news is that the British and Australian armies have been fighting the Italians in Libya and have captured an important port called Tobruk. Annette says if they manage to make more progress then maybe the war in North Africa will be over very soon and that should make it easier to get our visas for America. Things are bad in France, though, so we still can’t go home. And Maman hasn’t heard anything at all from Uncle Joseph.
Josie’s Journal – Monday 3rd February, 1941
Miss Ellis came today and she is very nice. She makes her lessons fun and said we can read some Dorothy L. Sayers books sometimes. She also said my English is excellent, so take that, Annette! But she’s going to help me with grammar a bit and things like commas and apostrophes, which can be quite tricky. Before we started our lesson, we had a cup of tea with Maman and Papa in the drawing room. Miss Ellis seems to know Papa pretty well and it turns out she was introduced to him by one of the vice-consuls at the American consulate. It’s quite the social hub, Maman says.
Miss Ellis has a bicycle, which she calls her Steel Steed, which means a kind of horse. She left it in the hall. I was watching her from the stairs when she was leaving after my lesson. Papa came out of the drawing room to say goodbye to her and he handed her a brown envelope, which she put into her leather portfolio and then stashed that in the basket on the handlebars of the Steel Steed. I imagined at first it was payment for her teaching me, but when I thought about it afterwards it seemed a bit too big for that. It’s probably some boring newspaper article about the war. When we were drinking our tea, the adults were talking about how the Germans are sending new troops called the Afrika Korps to help out the Italians. Papa said he read about it in the papers this morning. I don’t think the British army is making so much progress after all.
At the weekend, Kenza asked Maman if she could take me and Nina to the medina, which is where they live. Maman wasn’t too sure at first, but after I begged her and promised to stick close to Kenza at all times she gave in. What I didn’t say is that Nina and I have hatched a plan to try to see the dreamseller. I won’t be breaking my promise to Maman because the ancient auntie lives in the same riad as Kenza and Nina and other members of their family.
Actually Kenza’s house isn’t all that far from ours, but the medina feels like you’ve stepped into another world. You go through an arch shaped like a keyhole and suddenly you’re in a maze of tiny streets. It would be very easy to get lost in there. Some of the walls are painted as blue as the sky and the buildings are crammed so close together that they make the streets shady, so it’s not as hot as the boulevards of the nouvelle ville. As we walked around, all sorts of people came up to say hello to Kenza and Nina and to ask about me. I was very pleased when Nina told them I’m her best friend. They all commented on my green eyes as they’re an oddity in the medina, where all the eyes seem to be dark brown.
There were so many extraordinary things to look at. A man was sitting cross-legged in front of a wicker basket and when we drew close he took the lid off to reveal a large snake. He played a tune on a strange-looking pipe and began to rock back and forth and the snake rose up to face him, swaying along in time to the music as it unfurled itself. The way the brown, scaly coils of its body slid over themselves so silently and effortlessly and its hood opened above eyes that were cold-looking and unblinking made my stomach twist with a feeling of sick fear. I was very relieved when the snake finally sank back down into its basket and the man put the lid back on, although my stomach still felt a bit queasy for quite a long time afterwards. When I put a few coins in the hat the man held out, I snatched my hand back quickly, thinking the snake might push its way out of that flimsy-looking basket at any moment and sink its fangs into me. After that, we moved on a bit and watched a juggler who could throw knives high in the air and catch them without cutting himself. My heart was in my mouth!
There was a storyteller too. Nina explained to me that in Moroccan culture they have special people who know all the old stories and it’s quite a performance when they tell them. Her auntie, the dreamseller, is too old nowadays to tell stories in public, so we would visit her in the privacy of her own home, which is Nina’s home too. But this storyteller was a very public one. First of all, a musician banged a drum to announce that the storyteller was there and the crowds started to gather. Then the story began to unfold, but the storyteller didn’t just sit quietly and say the words, he acted it out and had the whole crowd laughing uproariously or trembling in fear or gasping in amazement. I didn’t understand what he was saying as it was all in Darija, but that didn’t really matter because he was so good at expressing each of the characters that I found I could still follow the gist of it. There was a little boy and a powerful sultan and an evil djinn who was threatening everybody. The sultan and his army tried to overthrow the djinn, but in the end it was the little boy’s cunning that won the day. At the end of the story the crowd cheered and clapped and the musician came round with a hat for people to throw money into so I put in a couple of francs, which was most of the pocket money I had left, but the storyteller deserved it for his excellent and entertaining performance.