Risky Business

Tarte Citron, the saucy neighborhood girl that we reported on several weeks ago, has beaten down our resolve with her persistence. Every day, make that many times every day, she’s at our doorbell, ring, ring, ringing with her cold little fingers. When we open the door, Shayma – her real name – always plants a chilly kiss on both cheeks before making the day’s case for food, money, a visit. For a few weeks, we’ve had her wait at the door while we hurry to the kitchen for some snack, usually an apple or some bread and cheese.

The other day, though, she begged to come in, promising to sit quietly while we worked at various projects. And she did, for awhile at least, perch patiently on a black café chair in the entryway, swinging her legs back and forth, peering at Samuel as he worked on his computer in the study and at me painting the downstairs bathroom. “You see, it’s not very interesting, here,” I said, thinking she might take it as a cue to hop on her bike and find some friends her own age. It’s a sunny afternoon in Marrakech, after all, school’s out, what’s the appeal in hanging out at our house? Oh . . . right, I remember.




After about 10 minutes, her attention becomes unnerving and I turn on some music, curiously compelled to please the little urchin. She smiles and bobs and sways on the chair in time to Bob Dylan and then The Kinks. “It’s good,” she says, of the foreign tunes with lyrics she can’t understand. There’s a gameness and a buoyancy about her attitude that is compelling; you get the feeling that she’s the kind of sprite that will give anything a try and make the best of it.

Soon, Shayma’s at my side, offering to help with the painting. She dabs solicitously at my paint smeared arms with a turpentine-soaked rag and tells me I really should visit the hammam tonight for a proper cleaning. I have images of burly women sloughing off not only the paint, but several layers of my epidermis as well. Thanks, but no thanks.



Once I’m done, I offer her a cup of hot chocolate; I’m determined to warm her up with something. She’s never had hot chocolate and watches me curiously as I add cocoa powder and sugar to a saucepan of hot milk. She offers to take a cup to Samuel, whose name she can’t get her tongue around, instead just calling him “Monsieur”. She slurps her cocoa hungrily and asks if we have any bread to go along with it. A half baguette and a few pieces of La Vache Qui Rit cheese later and she seems sated. Several times she offers to refill our mugs and jumps up and runs to the skink to wash them out as soon as we’ve finished. We tell her to stop, she’s our guest and she’s not to clean, but she’s very insistent, demanding Tide, the catch-all cleaning product here in Morocco. When I show her the liquid hand soap and Palmolive, she’s incredulous, washing her hands four times in the course of a half hour and sniffing them with pleasure.

This becomes our routine: A knock on the door around 4:30 p.m. each afternoon and a break from whatever we’re doing for hot chocolate with Shayma. Now, she asks for music herself when she arrives and she likes to have Sam pull up photos on his computer. She’s especially keen on the one of herself that we took a few weeks ago, but nods appreciatively as we tell her the names of various friends and family, which she repeats back to us as if memorizing them for an exam. Conversation is minimal, but we piece together little bits with a mixture of French, Arabic and gestures. At one point, when the two of us are alone, she gestures to me and then Sam, making an “O” with the index finger and thumb of one hand and then pushing the ring finger of her other hand back and forth through the “O”. At first I’m a bit taken aback by what I take for a rather crude sexual gesture, but then when she points to my bare ring finger, I realize she wants to know if we're married. I haven’t been wearing my wedding ring, or any jewelry for that matter, so her confusion is perhaps warranted. Marriage is a big concern for this eight-year-old, perhaps because she’s being raised by a single mum, and as we sift though the pictures on our laptops, her first question when we come to a new female face is: "Is she married?"

Today, when Shayma asked to watch a movie with us, the only thing I could come up with that seemed appropriate was Bridget Jones’ Diary, which of course isn’t appropriate at all but given that she doesn’t understand a word, all the bonking jokes went right over her head. When she tired of Bridge, we practiced counting in French until it was time for her to leave . . . with a kilo of bananas to take back to her family.

It’s almost impossible for us to leave the house without Shayma spying us and skipping along as far as the taxi stand in front of the mosque that marks the edge of our neighborhood. I’ve become accustomed to her cold little had in mine on the three-minute walk from the house to the taxi stand. It’s risky business letting this one cozy up to us, we know, and this evening, as if to illustrate the point, no sooner had Shayma closed the door on our taxi and waved good-bye than we saw her prance after the two Brits who’d just exited the cab we’d hailed. She was smiling and chattering away at them, charming them into some purchase or other, I’m sure. I can’t deny being a bit stung by her capriciousness, but what do we really know of her or her motivations. Maybe the visits to our house are a diversion from her daily life. Maybe we’re just meal tickets.