THE SEARCH FOR THE SEVENTH DOOR by Josh Shoemake
1. Firstborn
Salah Chaoui was eleven when he saw his sister Touria shot twice in the head at a spot just below the ear. It was late afternoon on March 1, 1956, just hours before Independence Day, on Rue de Bergerac in Casablanca. School had let out early, so he had walked over to his father’s office at the advertising agency, where he’d sat drawing in a corner, Abdelwahed’s gleaming shoes tap dancing beneath the walnut desk, other shoes, not quite as shiny, coming and going, everybody seeming to dance that day.
Nineteen-year-old Touria had driven over to pick him up in her green Morris Minor. Now they were stuck in pre-holiday traffic on Rue du Général Humbert. Horns blared, boys scampered along crowded sidewalks setting off firecrackers – pop! pop! – getting tongue-lashings from startled grandmothers. Touria couldn’t stop grinning at the world. Finally Moroccans had their freedom. The future was theirs to create. Salah happily listened to her talk, believing it because she did, but mostly just grateful for the traffic jam, for every additional second spent with the famous pilot, his sister. Carefully he extracted a drawing from his bookbag and handed it over, a gift. A plane soared over Casablanca, and atop the city’s tallest skyscraper, the Moroccan flag, not the French. Touria looked at it for a long moment, before rubbing the back of his neck and smiling.
When finally they could turn off onto Rue de Bergerac, somewhat sheltered from the madness, she braked at number 32 without cutting the engine. She was continuing on to the Tit Mellil airfield, she said, for a meeting of the Pilot’s Club (of which she was founder and president). So Salah zipped his bag while she rolled down her window to wave up at their mother, who had stepped out onto their second-floor balcony.
A shape appeared, a shadow – a young Moroccan in a black leather jacket, slicked-back hair, arm outstretched as if to offer her another gift. Pop! Pop! More firecrackers. . . . But blood had appeared, spattered down Salah’s arm. And his mother was screaming. And his sister’s head had slumped to the wheel.
Now seventy-two, Salah sat behind a desk at his art gallery in Vichy, France, dressed in a tweed jacket and silk cravat, wearing thick glasses, watching hopefully through the display windows for prospective clients. I had taken the train down from Paris, where I had moved after fourteen years in Morocco. A marriage had ended, and my own Moroccan story now seemed like a novel consigned to a drawer. If I was no longer that person anymore, then who was I? My mistake in those days was in conceiving of a life as a story, one that might be consigned to a drawer, rather than as something more fluid and uncertain. Subconsciously I sought a story to make sense of myself, and then I had discovered Touria, Morocco’s forgotten first pilot, North Africa’s first aviatrix at the age of fourteen.
So there I was in Salah’s gallery, walls hung with dozens of his own pastel-colored paintings: fleshy hammams, gunsmoked fantasias, medina arches framing smudged mysteries. These were his memories of the country he hadn’t visited in fifteen years, but of all his memories, the one that really mattered was the one he hadn’t managed to paint: Touria, the portrait of her in the cockpit after passing her flying test. For years he had visualized that image, but he’d never been able to pick up a brush and make even a first daub of color on a canvas. Instead he’d gone on painting pleasant Orientalist fantasies, day after day, visions of a Morocco that no longer existed, if it ever had, while beneath his pastel surface he raged.
Touria was already eight when Salah was born, already all their father needed. Her birth, however – December 14, 1936 – had been a disappointment. Abdelwahed, a journalist and theater director, had wanted a son, and pouted for weeks, dumbly frustrated, sleeping alone on the sitting room couches off the riad courtyard, waking to pace circles around the silenced fountain at its center. Eventually, however, he’d been forced to acknowledge the little creature, adorable in those frilly dresses Zina had found. He couldn’t help himself, and as he began to fall in love with the child – his daughter – watching her laugh or cry, or grab his index finger, making it feel like a giant’s in her hand – as he began to engage with the idea of her existence, he hit upon a plan more attuned to his rebellious nature, and to the sort of existence he’d always sought for himself.
The dresses were folded into thuya wood chests. He would not raise some porcelain doll. Put away the frills and fripperies. His daughter’s hair was cut short like a boy’s, she grew into pants, and soon she was accompanying him everywhere, to smoky cafes where men played parchis, dice clicking across glass-topped tables, to the pungent sleeping cars of rickety trains steaming towards the southern deserts, to makeshift theaters in Rif mountain towns packed with tattooed Berber tribesmen. She loved the adventure, even the danger, all the world’s kaleidoscopic possibilities. Of course she did. She was her father’s daughter.
So in December 1944, when a son, Salah, was finally born, his role had already been written, as second to a firstborn sister. The life that would have been his was already being lived by another, and today, as much as he loves Touria, or the memory of Touria, or the idea of Touria, as much as her death is the defining moment of his life, you get the sense he’s never quite recovered from his birth.
”Circumstances didn’t encourage me,” Salah sighed from behind his desk. For hours he had been locked into a documentary voiceover, smoothly reciting the early years of Touria’s life, before his existence – it was all so much simpler then. But the narrative had now scattered into a series of miscellaneous disappointments: the international trail of failed galleries (the paintings lost in fires he suspects were arson, perpetrated by jealous rivals), his inability to give his sister her rightful due (the Moroccan Film Board, believe it or not, rejecting a pitch because her story sounded fake, he says, even after presented with a copy of her pilot’s license). These disappointments, for Salah, were not so much isolated incidences as manifestations of a malignant force that had always been aligned against him, in direct proportion to his sister’s accomplishments, culminating in the day he watched her die.
And yet her life had been glorious, as had his father’s before hers ended. Not only had Abdelwahed been the first Moroccan writing editorials in French, for the Courrier du Maroc, but he was also among the first to bring French theater to Morocco, touring classics he translated himself into darija, the local Arabic dialect. His favorite was Molière, especially the subversive Tartuffe, the one about the unwelcome houseguest who connives to steal everything from his host, including family, wife, and house itself. Delighted Moroccan audiences didn’t need to be told that their own kleptomaniacal houseguests were the colonizing French.
But some were less delighted when Touria started accompanying him on his tours, even playing small roles he especially wrote for her. Morocco was still Shakespearean in the sense that a Juliet could only be played by an Abdul in a dress, and Salah remembered one scandalized neighbor shouting: “Next will you prostitute the little degenerate? I wash my hands of you and your family!”
“Degenerate,” he muttered, as furious as the day he’d first heard the word, although it must have been from his father, since Salah couldn’t have been more than a baby at the time of the incident. In this way I glimpsed the aging Abdelwahed, after Touria’s murder, the spark extinguished, living with bitter memories, as Salah still did. “Some degenerate.”
But then, unexpectedly, his face spread into a smile, and for a moment I saw the bright-eyed boy, blissfully unaware of the future. “She also starred in a movie, you know.”
I did, and he was overjoyed, because for a bright-eyed boy, few things are more wondrous than a movie. The Seventh Door. I asked if he’d seen it, but the question didn’t appear to register. Perhaps assuming I preferred the documentary voiceover, his eyes glazed over, and it was 1946, and a French movie director named André Zwobada had arrived in Fez to scout movie locations. He was introduced to Abdelwahed, whom he engaged as his local assistant, also giving him a small role. One of Abdelwahed’s tasks was to hire the local cast, and for the young Leila, who as an adult would be played by the celebrated French actress Maria Casarès, he had just the girl in mind. Touria had auditioned, won the part, and even ended up stealing scenes from the heartthrob Georges Marchal. “She spoke perfect French, you know. Everyone said it. She could have been a movie star.”
”But have you ever seen it?” I had looked everywhere for a copy, until I had decided none still existed. Salah looked at me for a long moment, as if considering whether I was yet another of the emissaries sent by the malignant force. Then he took a key from his jacket pocket and unlocked a desk drawer, from which he removed a VHS tape. For a long moment he gazed at the tape, then turned it to show me the cover, rubbed bare of color at the corners. A turbaned man, a golden necklace, a white horse, a key. His smile returned, dreamy and distant, shorn of every disappointment. “I’d lend it to you, but well, you understand.”
And with that the tape was returned to its drawer, the lock was turned, and the key was slipped back into Salah’s pocket.
The Seventh Door
A rich old man walks into a public square in Fez, finds a wisecracking young beggar named Ali sprawled on the cobblestones, and invites him back to his palace, where they stroll through a series of leafy courtyards separated by six wooden doors. Phalanxes of liveried servants stand at attention. Rose bushes climb marble columns and blossom. Harem girls scatter from brocaded divans, squealing with delight. Eventually the men come to the seventh door, and the old man presents Ali its key, promising that he will inherit the palace, and everything in it, as long he swears never to open that door.
The old man dies, and with him Ali buries the key. But his lavish inheritance proves difficult to enjoy. Night after night, sleep eludes him in his palatial bed. The seventh door rattles on its hinges, haunting him, until finally, driven half mad by curiosity, he races out to the moonlit cemetery and digs up the key with his bare hands. And returns to the palace to open the seventh door. . . .
2. Mirages
After meeting Salah, I couldn’t get The Seventh Door out of my mind. I was driven half mad by curiosity. I had to see Touria move and speak and live – not just the legend of Touria, but Touria as she really was. Endless internet searches hadn’t turned up any copies for sale. Eventually, however, I learned that in Paris, at the cinematheque, there might be a copy, or not – nobody could say for sure. This was sufficient encouragement for me to hop on a bicycle and ride over to the cinematheque, where I presented myself at the front desk. Then I rode back home, collected my passport and residency card, printed out two copies of a letter of intention, signed and dated, and rode back to the cinematheque, where I presented myself again. Only then was I grudgingly taken back into the dusty, hand-labeled stacks, where I searched the catalogue with an archivist whose mad passion for film, I now appreciated, could only be sustained, and nourished, by walling off his Voltairean garden behind nonsensical layers of administration. Because after fifteen minutes together, this guy was as captivated by Touria as I was, prepared to go on strike and march in the streets if we didn’t find that putain de film. Angry lines formed at the front desk, supplicants without letters of intention in duplicate, but we tended our garden, and finally, fingers grimy with dust, my obsessive twin pulled a VHS from a shelf and showed me the cover: the turbaned man, the golden necklace, the white horse, the key. The Seventh Door. Without a word, we solemnly walked over to a viewing station, where he handed over the tape, and I opened the cover, my seventh door. Finally I’d found the key.
Jumpy black and white snakes charmed themselves into images of the Fez medina. A rich old man walked into a square, found a wisecracking young beggar named Ali, and invited him back to his palace. My heart pounded as I lowered myself into the chair, the archivist watching anxiously over my shoulder, at least until shouting from reception indicated that the revolution was now in full swing, and he was forced to tear himself away to defend us against the proletariat.
I watched as Ali’s houseman warned him not to open the seventh door (surely that was Abdelwahed!), as Ali brushed him aside to fling open the door anyway, stepping through it into a strange desert dream, where a white horse appeared, and on that horse, a girl. Touria. My search had so consumed me that the emotions I felt upon seeing her move, hearing her speak, took me by surprise. Elated with victory, tears filled my eyes, because finally here she was, Touria as she’d really been, the piercing voice, the determined face, entirely alive (as I was now too). I knew her then, and saw her future in the same instant, and was gutted, because she was already gone.
Salah had been right. Her French was impeccable. Dubbed? Not even – the sound was perfectly synchronized. She was also more beautiful than I had anticipated from photos, with delicate, surprisingly European features. I watched as she accompanied Ali on his journey, until in a hotel she was magically transformed into the one and only Maria Casarès, a bona fide superstar, having recently played in Les Enfants du Paradis and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Touria never reappeared, but as Casarès accompanied Ali further into the unknown, the movie began to exert its own fascination, separate from Touria yet somehow a perverse dream version of her own life. How had this lunatic movie ever been made? Eventually names were scrolling up the screen, and I hunted for hers. Marchal passed, Casarès. No Touria yet, but then she hadn’t been a star. And there was Abdelwahed! As producer, not as the houseman, so had he maybe been the hotel bartender? But before I could find the bartender, the credits had ended, and the tape had clunked to a stop, whizzing into rewind.
Pounding buttons, I found the start of the credits again and let them roll. Taking deep, measured breaths, marshalling maximum focus, my eyes clicked down the column of character names, one by one by one. I was looking for Young Leila, Young Leila, Young Leila.
And finally, just a few lines below Maria Casarès, after all, there she was!
But the name next to Young Leila wasn’t Touria Chaoui’s.
Which was odd, but not especially troubling at first. There had to be some explanation. Because Touria was in the movie. I’d seen her on the back of that white horse. For the first time, I’d heard her voice. So maybe there had been an even younger Leila, one I’d missed, maybe an infant, to really give you the full sweep of the life of Leila. Or a body double? A stunt girl? I ran the credits a third time. But there were only two Leilas, Casarès and somebody called Liane Daydé: Young Leila.
For a long moment I stared at the blank screen. Then I snatched up my phone and Googled the imposter, fully expecting to get no hits. Some production assistant had mixed up the names. Or Abdelwahed had insisted that Touria use another name. To protect her identity. Or due to some contractual peculiarity. Or for other reasons I hadn’t yet discovered, but would.
Except there she was, Liane Daydé, ballerina at the Paris Opera, youngest étoile (principal dancer) in its history at age seventeen, a beauty who had danced with the giants, from Renault to Nureyev, and every significant international ballet company. Born in 1932, that would have made her fourteen in the movie. Exactly right.
I attempted to reorient myself to this new information. After a minute or two, I could no longer deny the obvious. The girl hadn’t been Touria. Maybe there was some resemblance, but the girl in the movie was French, which incidentally explained the perfect accent. How had I missed it? Imagining myself on a clear path, I had been stumbling across a desert, nothing but sand in all directions.
More concerning, how had Salah missed it? His copy was an identical VHS. Presumably he’d watched it countless times. So had he lied? But why? Why did it matter if the first pilot in Moroccan history, a trailblazer for women and North African independence, had also starred in a movie speaking perfect French? And what about the biographies of Touria I’d found online, all mentioning The Seventh Door, and her as the young Casarès? Had Salah been the unreliable source of them all? And if he was, then could he have invented the rest of her story too? No. That possibly, at least, was one I couldn’t accept. I wanted too badly to believe.
And so, forcing myself to press the eject button, I returned the video to my former friend the archivist, who instead of sharing my disappointment, scowled suspiciously, as if he’d been a fool to trust such an obvious fake – as if I were the imposter, not Liane Daydé. Then I did what I’d been doing for months to avoid thinking about my own life: I lost myself in research. I trudged up the staircase to the cinematheque library, then deeper into archives, further afield: Algerian film magazines, shooting scripts for unmade Saharan travelogues, Cairene box office numbers, 1948–49. And eventually, late in the afternoon as attendants returned last strays to the shelves, there was a sort of breakthrough: Touria Chaoui had, in fact, been in The Seventh Door, as had Abdelwahed. But Zwobada had done something fairly unusual: he had shot parallel versions of his film, one in French, one in Arabic. And every copy of the Arabic version, by every account, had vanished.
One small consolation: I did find, in a thick dossier recuperated from the film’s producers (accounting ledgers, byzantine travel arrangements), three original stills from the Arabic version, of which I managed to obtain prints. Touria was in each of them, and I wondered whether I should tell Salah, whose mistake continued to baffle me. I kept thinking of him smiling with such tender pride as he removed his precious tape from its drawer, and I decided that he must, somehow, have believed that the girl he’d watched for years, riding horseback across the desert behind celebrated heartthrob Georges Marchal, was his own dead sister. He had needed her to be this person, this legend, this story. And what a great story.
For days I debated whether to tell him of my discovery. Finally I decided that he would want to see the photos, so I sent him a message with scans of them attached.
Over the months I’d sent him dozens of emails, typically receiving lengthy replies within the hour, but this one he never answered. From then on, whenever I brought up The Seventh Door, he would smile politely, as one might at a friend with a harmless delusion, before gently changing the subject.
The Seventh Door
Ali steps into a desert nightscape. A young girl named Leila appears riding a white horse. She tells him the horse’s name is Djinn. She has no idea where they’re going, but Djinn does. Ali mounts the horse, and they ride for hours. A bus comes along herding a flock of sheep.
”Where are you going?” Ali asks the driver.
”Get on the roof,” the driver growls, like some existentialist philosopher. “People always want to know where they’re going.”
On the roof Ali holds Leila close to keep her warm. Next to them is a woman named Aisha, who lowers her veil to leer at Ali. “A night is never lost,” she coos. “Either I sleep, or no one sleeps.”
The bus stops at a hotel. Ali gets a room, puts Leila in bed, takes off her clothes, and tells her he’s going to pay a little visit to Aisha.
Leila: Stay with me.
Ali: You have to sleep.
Leila: I’m not a little girl.
Instantly Leila transforms herself into a voluptuous woman. Ali happily rejoins her in bed.
Leila: I’m afraid. And you?
Ali: Me too, Leila. But we shouldn’t be. You’re very beautiful.
Leila: What happened?
Ali: You wanted the little girl to grow up quick so that I would love her.
Leila: You think?
After sex (“Mmm, I’m alive, I’m alive!”) Leila stares into a mirror, darkly satisfied: “C’est moi.”
Leila’s younger brother Ahmed turns up at the hotel room searching for her. Leila, still lounging in bed, purrs post-coitally: “There’s no Leila here. See?” The boy knows she’s lying. “I hate you!” he shouts, and runs out of the room.
3. The Genie in the Bottle
“In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.”
– Foucault
I had begun writing a book about Touria. Just given the facts of which I was certain, this should have been a relatively simple task, but the more I stared at the facts, the less I saw. Who was this girl other than her extraordinary accomplishments? Who were her friends, her hobbies, her favorite movies or books? Simple questions like these had seemed to exasperate Salah, as if I were completely missing the point. His sister was no ordinary girl. She was a symbol, but then you couldn’t write a book about a symbol, so as I sat there for days at my desk, moving dead facts around the page, I found myself moving out to the edges of her story, towards increasingly extraneous characters with recognizably human quirks, characters to whom I showed my love by granting them dozens of superfluous pages, until Touria became the void at the center of a story that no longer resembled a story at all.
For a time my obsession was Maria Casarès. Born in Spain, she had fled the fascists for Paris, where she enrolled in the conservatoire just half a mile from where I was now living (!), and then. . . . Every detail was a new occasion for peripheral enthusiasm. When I discovered that she had been Camus’ longtime lover, that was another few days hors piste, reflecting on The Stranger, deciding it had to be the most influential novel of the twentieth century, assuming you were considering influence on the twenty-first (who’s better at detached violence, or sooner?), studying gruesome images of his deadly 1960 car crash as if they were Zapruder films somewhere containing the ultimate mystery (Gallimard’s Facel Vega, the pristine dashboard sitting fifty feet from the body like a discarded movie prop), while blasting The Cure, who were killing an Arab – before I decided I needed to read the lovers’ entire correspondence, 1,318 pages of miniscule type, in the hopes of finding some mention of filming in Morocco, although I might as well have listened to The Cure’s greatest hits on repeat waiting for mentions of my cousin Jimbo.
My own life had become similarly centrifugal, surely no accident. I found myself popping out a series of Wyoming LLCs, having decided that besides being Touria’s celebrated chronicler, I might also be an entrepreneur with a portfolio of businesses. I was also guzzling red past a certain hour (the hour less certain daily), because I was committed to learning the French regions. I bought dinner on credit for underdressed women whose names I forgot when I ran into them at the Sunday market, where from a dubious fishmonger I chose seafood alone, lingering to talk about the weather, or anything, because I was learning to cook, but only if it was extraordinarily difficult, by which I mean doomed to failure. And then, chewing calamari till my jaw ached, I would resolve again to focus on what was really important, the life of Touria Chaoui, perfect as a fairy tale, into which my own life had spread like some invasive plant species, because I was kudzu, pointless yet indestructible.
Once I discovered Liane Daydé, however, I was two-timing Maria. Touria’s doppelganger became my parallel fascination. Two girls, one Moroccan, one French, playing the same small role in the same obscure movie, had each made historical achievements before the age of twenty. Five years after The Seventh Door, as Touria (fourteen) was beginning flight school, Liane (seventeen) was becoming France’s youngest étoile. I even found a short behind-the-scenes documentary shot by Zwobada while they were in Morocco, in which you see cast and crew driving over the mountains and down to the oasis at Aoufous, along the Ziz river near Erfoud. Setting up camp, the heartthrob Georges Marchal strips off his shirt, rolls up his shorts over sculpted thighs, and raises a sledgehammer to drive tent stakes into the ground, a gargantuan crucifix hung round his neck (both warnings to the Muslim natives, who might as well have been vampires?). Then Liane appears, bathing in the Ziz in a black one-piece suit, laughing as she holds a mirror for some greybeard to shave into. She appears again at night, pirouetting barefoot around the bonfire, dressed like a flame herself in flowing white. As she dances, the circle of assembled tribesmen seems to focus, drawing tight to marvel at this ethereal creature whirling like a dervish, entirely self-possessed, an exquisite genie freed from a perfume bottle. I watched the scene over and over. I followed Liane wherever she led me, until at the Bibliothèque Nationale I learned that she had died in 1986. So that was that. The genie went back into the bottle.
And yet I couldn’t stop. The path had been a path, and I would make it a path again. Link after link I wandered into a desolate no-man’s land where I practically ceased to exist as a functioning human being, even plugging Liane Daydé’s name into Google Maps, of all places. No stone unturned and whatnot. And yet, this unorthodox technique was vindicated when an address for the Dance Studio Liane Daydé popped up, with a phone number too, a mobile, which didn’t seem too promising, but. . . . Yes, I was dimly aware that the chances of the dance studio’s secretary, or absolutely anyone else I might reach, having heard of The Seventh Door were infinitesimal. And yes, it also occurred to me that I was now further afield from Touria than I’d been since beginning, even further from the pretense that I was a writer who was writing a book. But I picked up the phone and dialed.
A woman answered, maybe a girl, her voice musical and unguarded. So startled was I that the act of pressing a few numbers had actually produced an effect, I could only mumble something incomprehensible. It’s a miracle she didn’t hang up.
So I started again. I took a deep breath. I said I was a writer. I was writing a book. It was about a girl named Touria Chaoui, who had become a pilot, but she had also been in a movie called The Seventh Door. Madame Daydé had acted in the movie too, and so I was doing some research on her, and I was wondering if there was anyone who might know. . . . .
And she said: “C’est moi.”
The Seventh Door
The police turn up searching for the missing Leila. A charismatic detective takes them to the station, and they explain how Leila’s not missing, but transformed, into a woman. The detective lustfully appraises Leila.
”I can’t go back,” she insists. “I’ve seen too much.” Later the detective pulls her aside and begs her to stay with him. Ali kills him, and he and Leila are forced to keep fleeing aimlessly across the desert.
4. Spotting
In the mirror with the gilded frame, she held eye contact with herself, head immobile as her shoulders rotated until her body was perpendicular to the mirror. Then her head, like a spring released, snapped around a full 360 degrees, so that only the briefest possible gap in eye contact occurred. Her body continued to turn until it caught up with the head, and the spin was complete.
Now it was my turn to try the technique, she said – called spotting – which allows a dancer to spin like a top without losing equilibrium. But my eyes only wanted to watch hers, the smooth skin of her high cheekbones, the dark hair spun into a knot atop her head, a beauty in white, even the heels white, spinning and spinning as she’d once spun around a Saharan bonfire, except that now she was eighty-six.
She lived in a large stone house beside the Moldovan embassy on a gated street in Paris. Inside was a vast living room filled with flowers, settees, and squat Louis Quatorze tables gummy with decades of polish. Everywhere at hip level ran gleaming brass rails, ballerina’s bars for a prima ballerina, applauded by scores of ancient stuffed animals – doudous, the French call them – seated along the baseboards, bellies distended, eyes hazy with atmospheric residue, so many that if ever the Great Flood returned, Liane Daydé could immediately launch her stuffed ark, having successfully paired every stuffed species.
A housekeeper had showed me in, motioning for me to sit on a brocade settee. Glancing around the room, I saw diaphanous pastel portraits in tutus and yellowing programs from legendary performances. On a low table in front of me, a laminated album was open to two photos, stills from The Seventh Door. These were almost identical to the ones I had found of Touria, on the horse in the desert, except the girl in the photos was Liane Daydé. Beneath them someone had written in large capital letters: LA SEPTIÈME PORTE – 1946. I turned the page and found myself at a 1950 ballet performance. Was that all there was? A clock ticked on the wall. Maybe I blinked, and then she had appeared, a rebuke to time, hardly changed in the seventy years since I’d seen her last.
Tea was brought on a silver tray, which we sipped while nibbling at warm swirls of cinnamon, Madame Daydé on the opposite settee. “I don’t know if I can help. It was so long ago.”
But I began to work down my list of questions. No, she said, she’d never acted before or since. The part she’d gotten through a producer friend who worked with the director, what was his name? Zwobada. Yes, that was it. Strange man, but very nice. Her mother had driven her up to the stables at Chantilly so that she could learn to ride a horse, feet perfectly pointed in the stirrups, and Zwobada had been so impressed that he’d gathered the other actors to observe. That was how he wanted them to ride horses. She’d been so pleased. But other than Zwobada and her pointed toes, she couldn’t remember much else of Morocco. As I went through my questions, she made helpless gestures at the air, staring into dust motes as if they might shape themselves into minarets or palm trees. Finally she recalled that the heartthrob Georges Marchal had smoked endless cigarettes (not like a chimney, but like a fireman, the French say), so as a practical joke someone had put a scorpion in his matchbox.
I nodded encouragingly, sharing her laughter while half thinking of Wittgenstein’s beetle-in‑the-box analogy, where everyone has their own little box with their own little beetle inside. Nobody can see into anybody else’s box, so when people talk about their beetles, they naturally assume everyone else’s beetle is exactly like theirs. But those other beetles could just as well be praying mantises or sand scorpions or even plush miniature doudous. You can’t see into the box, so you’ll never know for certain. And maybe you’ll decide that their beetle is perfect, or insufferable, or swear that your beetles are soul sisters, or polar opposites unfortunately, so what are we doing here, but you’ll never know for certain. Then you’ll get together and discuss the beetles of various acquaintances – the flamboyant beetle, the boorish beetle, the bipolar beetle, the beetle lacking any moral compass – but you might as well be talking about firemen, or chimneys, because all we’ll ever know about anybody else’s beetle is how they choose to describe it, and what we choose to hear, layers upon layers of subjectivity until you might begin to wonder if the world itself isn’t merely a description of a world in a box which nobody’s ever actually seen, but in which we’ve somehow chosen to believe.
Our laughter faded. Yes, quite a practical joke played on the heartthrob Georges Marchal. But didn’t she remember anything else? How about dancing around that bonfire for those admiring tribesmen? No? She shook her head, smiling into her white sweater, nonetheless pleased about those tribesmen. Okay then, how about the second movie, the one in Arabic. Had Zwobada filmed them simultaneously, scene by scene, French then Arabic, French then Arabic, parallel movies spooling separately into overheated cans? But she had no memory of any second movie and couldn’t remember meeting any Moroccan actors. She had never even seen The Seventh Door. Was it any good?
”It’s . . . well . . . strange,” I sighed. “Yes.” But did she remember a Moroccan girl, about her age, presumably dressed in the same costume, reading the same lines in Arabic, riding the same horse?
She looked at me for a long moment with what appeared to be genuine confusion. Had she misheard me? Was it my accent? Then I began to tell her about Touria, and she listened with increasing interest, having never heard of this legend whom she’d presumably once met, finally seeming to understand why I’d come, as well as my fascination with the uncannily glorious destinies of these unknowingly twinned girls.
”Have you seen the Arabic version?” she asked. “Does she look like me?” No, it was lost, but I’d seen photographs, almost identical to the ones on the table between us, and I told her about Salah, who had been watching her in French for years, thinking he was seeing his own sister.
This fact seemed to make her uneasy, as I imagine it would have made me. She reached for her cup and adjusted it on its saucer. “I would be so pleased to meet him,” she said, now genuinely moved, I could see. “I’m afraid I can’t tell him anything about his sister, but whenever he’s in Paris, he’s welcome to come for tea.”
I imagined the sad scene. Hello. I am not who you want me to be. I never was. This time I wouldn’t tell Salah, and instead of insisting any further that Madame Daydé be who I had wanted her to be, I slipped my questions into my jacket pocket and asked to hear her story. Soon the room through which she had danced for decades seemed to fade around us, until there was only the melodious sound of her voice. Then it seemed it wasn’t the room which had faded, but me. She was merely having tea at this table as she had every afternoon for decades, looking through the spot where I might have sat if I existed, out to a lawn where a dog yapped and scampered, always digging up the flowers she planted, neatly setting the bulbs aside and leaving a clean hole. Aren’t you a little gardener! I dipped my finger into my cup, but the tea had cooled precisely to room temperature, and I couldn’t tell whether any liquid remained, or if I were stirring air.
She had been born into a Catholic family of engineers, her mother the exception, a talented pianist with genuine promise. When her father – Liane’s grandfather – had forbidden her to study at the conservatory, insisting that no child of his would ever appear onstage, she had vowed that one of her own someday would (not unlike Abdelwahed Chaoui, I stubbornly observed, another theatrical parent with multi-generational aspirations). So from an early age Liane was forced to attend ballet lessons, which she hated, wanting to be an engineer herself. When she was twelve, however, her beloved dancing instructor, Madame d’Alessandri, collapsed in her arms and pronounced her dying words: “Promise you’ll be my last étoile.”
“I’m a Catholic – practicing.” So her promise to Madame d’Alessandri had been a sacred oath, which her mother reinforced by walking her up the hill to Sacré Coeur, where they lit a candle to confirm the oath to God himself. After that Liane dedicated herself to ballet, which she still hated, completely. She skipped lunches to sprint across town to various dance studios, to any instructor who would teach her anything, with every free hour. I couldn’t imagine she had any friends, but like it or not, she had decided exactly who she was, or who she must be. The subsequent career became one of the most celebrated in dance history, and after retiring she finally fell in love with the art, discovering a more satisfying talent for teaching, as Madame d’Alessandri once had. For the past several decades she had run her own studio, where she had trained some of France’s finest ballet dancers, several of them also étoiles. She would keep teaching until she dropped dead, she said, hopefully in her studio, in the arms of another student, who would be her last étoile, and the cycle would continue . . .
Weeks later, I would find a video shot by Pathé in 1962, in which she danced with her doudous in this same living room, then sat on the same settee beside a stuffed zebra and told the same story of Madame d’Alessandri with exactly the same phrasing, a doppelganger of herself. I felt some mild chagrin, having imagined a unique personal connection, whereas perhaps I had only attended a long-running performance, albeit a charming one starring a refreshing eighty-six-year-old ingénue. Still, it occurred to me then that a story seemed less true when rehearsed to perfection, and truer when never told the same way twice, stories through which the light seems to shift. Those shifting stories were like beetles imperfectly glimpsed, and despite my desire to settle on some irrevocable self-definition, I realized that I had always doubted people who had firmly settled the question of what their beetles were like, never even considering they might be any different – those who apparently knew by heart the dappled patterns of their wings, their various beetle predilections, and could recite them with conviction, never doubting themselves, as if they had simply made the sensible choice to free their beetles from their insalubrious boxes, in order to forever maintain constant eye contact, and never lose equilibrium.
But how could I have explained any of this to Madame Daydé, or who I was, or what I really wanted, especially as a butterfly flew in from the garden to dance between us in the late afternoon light?
The Seventh Door
Soon Leila is aging at an alarming rate. She realizes that the culprit is her magic necklace, so at the next hotel, she gives it to Ali, who slips off and uses it to pay for sex with Aisha, who happens to be in a room upstairs.
Leila’s kid brother Ahmed shows up at the hotel while Ali is upstairs with Aisha. Eventually Ali comes down and Ahmed goes up to Aisha’s room, also sleeps with her, steals her necklace, is shot by the bartender, climbs on back of the bus to wave at his departing sister, falls onto the dusty road, dies. . . .
The bus drops off Ali and Leila in the desert. The white horse named Djinn appears and takes them back to the palace. Ali walks through the seventh door, slams it shut, and turns into an old man. So he goes out and finds a beggar to whom he gives the palace, on condition that he promise never to open the seventh door. . . . And the cycle continues.
5. Borderlands
“For me it seems that by advancing into unknown territories,
I enter into my life.”
– Isabelle Eberhardt, In the Shadow of Islam
I decided I needed to go to Aoufous. This was, by any estimation, crazy. Seventy years had passed since Zwobada had shot his (crazy) movie in the desert. What new clues could I possibly hope to find in Aoufous?
But I needed to reestablish direction again, or the illusion of direction, which may ultimately be indistinguishable, and so like my brilliant, confused hero Kierkegaard, I would hurl myself trustingly into the absurd, aka Aoufous. At the very least I’d have something new to say at cocktail parties. I’d been to Aoufous. Oh really? How fascinating.
So I flew into Fez and wandered the medina where Touria was born, ever deeper into the earthen maze, turning up the stones of my deadened senses, smelling woodsmoke, roses, coriander, and rot. I walked until I was lost, then kept walking as if I had been born there, until I was someplace else again, and then I got in a car and drove.
Up into the pass through the Middle Atlas, beneath the dark cedar forests of the Azrou hills, I took the route of Zwoboda’s caravan. Packs of monkeys, the Barbary macaque, strolled across two-lane switchbacks, forever threatening to toss me off a cliff. Higher into the mountains, my vision blurred, and I understood that it was snowing. This lasted no more than a minute, and then I was someplace else entirely, down into a sun-blasted valley of unending red rocks, the snow no more than a brief thought I’d had, a passing feeling. No country in the world smashes up such varied landscapes next to one another as Morocco. Pick any road and drive for half a day, and soon enough you’ll be in a dream state of jump-cuts where nothing that appears has any logical connection to what appears next. I wound down into the red valley, my rusty eyes screeching along the rails of parallel white lines. For a while every car, of every model, and every truck, was a white Dacia. What was a Dacia? Then there was a period where I kept getting stuck behind the same car, a green Renault, risking my life to pass it, then again settling into the pleasant fade of adrenaline, only to run up into the green Renault again, the same driver, a woman in a floral headscarf with two squirmy kids in the back. I couldn’t figure out her trick, but somehow there were shortcuts, or warps in the terrestrial fabric, alternative timelines. Keep driving. Aoufous. There was the hourlong stretch of camouflaged military vehicles, polyhedra hunched to the gravel, a hundred kilometers from the nearest town, a sharply uniformed soldier leaning casually against each one, helmet placed neatly on the hood. Then up ahead the road curved wildly, and my hands gripped the wheel, until I discovered that it wasn’t my road but another, broad and freshly asphalted, forking off into an expanse of absolutely nothing, no signs, a bright orange tractor sitting unoccupied next to this blank superhighway as if pleased with a job well done.
I am going crazy. If I take my eyes from the center line, the few green trees still accompanying me skew off into strange perspectives like a Hockney painting, and I’m dizzy. Hold the line. Over the High Atlas, even higher into savage peaks, sharp white teeth, still snowy in springtime, then plunging into a last endless scorched valley stretching all the way across Africa. Squadrons of French motorcyclists clad entirely in leather swarm down the mountains behind me, roaring past on all sides through shimmering heat. Within those cases they must be viscous puddles of flesh. I roll down the window further and consider my aerodynamics. Whole pieces of me are breaking off. My shape won’t hold.
But the more I broke apart, the closer I felt to myself, although it wasn’t anything like a self, what I felt, but more like its opposite, a sense that I had molted a shell, and that the world now flowed through me unimpeded. How could I possibly be merely the story of me? Happy, I would have called myself, but that would have locked me back within myself, so I just grinned, and drove, a great transparent eyeball, everything.
The Ziz trickled through the volcanic plain, tossing up plumes of green. As I drove, it gathered other rivulets from the mountains and cut deeper. Cliffs rose beside me, and the trickle became a river through groves of oranges and palms. I wove through the lush canyon until the cliffs fell to me again, and the Ziz bled out into the plain. Tongues of sand lapped the pavement, blurring the path forward. My Dacia slowed and skidded through them, and I gripped the wheel, surprised by the danger of a centimeter of sand. And then the road ran out, lost without its river twin, defeated by a sea of Saharan dunes, a massive erg, the Erg Chebbi, swept skyward by the wind.
Beyond the dunes was Aïn Séfra, where another Touria was buried: Isabelle Eberhardt, the Swiss writer and explorer who had been encouraged by her father to dress like a man, so that she might move easier through the world. One of her 1903 missions for Général Lyautey, who’d been sent by the French to conquer Morocco, had been to travel along the Morocco-Algeria border, which had always been fluid, and attempt to trace a definitive line on a map, so that the French could better see their pieces on the vast colonial puzzle, so that they would have a shape, since nothing shapeless can be governed or traded or sold. But Isabelle had failed. In a single town, on a single street, some residents would claim they were in Algeria, and some in Morocco. Faced with history’s unassuageable appetite for categorization, these people had preferred to keep their options open, to be this or that depending on circumstances, to shapeshift just as she had always done, and I imagine she must have been content with her mission failure.
That night I slept in a little room at Aoufous, back up the road in the palmery by the Ziz. At dusk I walked to the river along the earthen humps of irrigation channels and watched swallows skimming over fields of barley. I ate my tagine and sat out in a rose garden in a broken wicker chair beneath the stars, thinking of Touria, Zwobada, Maria Casarès, Liane Daydé, and their bonfires, so close to me now, but not here, nothing of them at all. Yet I was at peace. I had jettisoned my restless mind somewhere back on the roadside and did nothing more than stare up at the constellations, tracing my own celestial twins, endlessly replicating, less and less of myself, and more and more of everything else.
I slept as if I had been buried in warm sand. But when I woke and wandered out to my rose garden, the sun was already blazing, and the previous night’s contentment had evaporated. What in the world was I doing here? How could any of this possibly contribute to what I wanted to write? Was I learning anything at all about myself, or Touria, or anything else? Why was I eternally trapped by this prison of a mind?
Fed up with myself, I knocked at the kitchen and asked for coffee. Then I took my phone and sat in the wicker chair. The coffee arrived, and I sat there pulling down messages from the air, connected to everything else I was meant to be, even out here, although that life felt so distant, I could hardly make sense of anything. One message did catch my eye, however, from an unknown sender. In the preceding months, as I had hunted for The Seventh Door, I had posted on various internet forums. Nobody had ever responded, but that was no surprise. The posting had been more of a ritual, a prayer meant not so much to be heard, but to align me with some divine possibility. But here in my rose garden a poster was slowly appearing, pixel by pixel, for a film festival in Carthage, at which Liane Daydé’s Seventh Door would be shown. In a double feature. With Touria’s.
My heart skipped a beat. But I didn’t believe it. Yet another optimist had read Salah’s published accounts. They hadn’t checked the tape.
Or. Maybe this was why I had come to Aoufous. Because in tracing a line from Fez across the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara, thereby displacing a certain amount of air with my windshield, the universe would be reconfigured as predicted by chaos theory, and a lost film would suddenly materialize in Carthage. The day came into glorious focus. I would drive over the dunes to Carthage! What would I need? Special tires, probably. Any local mechanic could surely set me up. I would knock again at the kitchen door, gather contacts. Cases of bottled water, obviously. Bananas?
Then I consulted a map. Which led me to the discovery that Carthage was, in fact, a twelve-hundred-mile trip, assuming I could drive in a straight line over the shifting erg in my economy rental, with or without special tires. So, reluctantly, I abandoned that plan, and to this day I have never strolled through the Punic ruins at dawn, although I dream of Carthage now, hoping I someday will. Otherwise my trip had been a failure, like Isabelle Eberhardt’s, and yet I was somehow content with the failure, and over the coming weeks I couldn’t shake a renewed sense that Touria’s movie might still be out there, maybe in Carthage, maybe someplace else. I redoubled my efforts to find it, until I learned that at Bois d’Arcy, just outside Paris in a heavily guarded, climate-controlled bunker containing rare films from the national archives, as well as some from private collections, a single copy of the Arabic Seventh Door existed – really existed – on six highly flammable, 35‑millimeter nitrocellulose reels.
The Seventh Door Revisited
Ali walks through the seventh door into a desert nightscape. A young girl named Leila appears on a white horse. He mounts the horse, and as they ride, Ali wonders about his life, who he is, who he might have become. Stuck with a face oddly incapable of expression, maybe in another life he would have been more vivacious, even dashing, a French movie star, a heartthrob. He suspects, however, that his life would have been much the same as it is now, riding with Leila across the desert on the back of a horse named Djinn. Okay, maybe he’d hoped that squealing harem girls would populate the palace he’d inherited, and maybe a parallel Ali in a parallel life was currently enjoying their favors, but unfortunately the harem girls had been left on his cutting room floor, as if by some cosmic editor.
But this Ali’s life as it actually was could also bring wonderful surprises. One night, before he’d even considered opening the seventh door, or what might lie beyond it, he’d dreamed of riding a white horse with Leila across a desert nightscape. He’d dreamed of coming upon a ramshackle bus, of riding upon its roof, of meeting a lusty Aisha, unfortunately veiled like some cheap Orientalist fantasy. But, in his life as it actually was, when they actually came upon that bus, Aisha was unveiled, and not as vulgar, more his type, a camellia in her hair like some exotic Spanish dancer. There were other surprises too, when you least expected them: the bus driver, so grumpy in his dream, so French, now paused to step down onto the road and break into song for no apparent reason other than that he had a song to sing, and would sing it with such confidence that magically a whole orchestra would appear, like genies summoned from bottles, to accompany the singing. Ali felt lucky to have witnessed such a moment and was certain that it could never have been lived by any other Ali.
Life was a mystery, but it was a good life after all, and most of all there was Leila, his Leila, whom he would briefly love for a night when she became a woman. Although it was Leila as a girl whom he would most often remember, those big ears, that broad forehead, the stubby nose. Next to her then, riding along the Ziz together, he never doubted: this was the life he was meant to live – her eyes squinting in the sunlight, her huge teeth, the one left earring, sitting side-saddle behind him, whereas if she had been a few years older – say, fourteen – she could have straddled Djinn, toes perfectly pointed in the stirrups like a ballet dancer’s. But how could that matter? She was the one. Spoke perfect Arabic, too.
Images flickered across the screen faster than I wanted them to, but you couldn’t rewind. The nitrocellulose was too fragile for that, and so with Touria Chaoui there finally so alive and free, I saw as much as I could, once and only once, at the headlong speed of life.
Josh Shoemake is the author of Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travelers, a Book of the Month in The Sunday Times, and one of Condé Nast Traveller’s travel books. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Smart Set, Narratively, and The Threepenny Review.