The Storyteller of Casablanca (15)
At least I don’t have to go to school every day, though. Nina doesn’t go to school at all and it’s a lot more fun spending time with her. She’s teaching me some words in Arabic, so it’s not like I’m not learning anything.
The lady teacher is called Miss Dorothy Ellis.
After I found the library and read the book of Rebecca (which is even better than the movie, in my opinion), the librarian, who is called Mademoiselle Dubois and who is very pretty and kind, suggested I might enjoy Dorothy L. Sayers books too. She was right. She’s very good at knowing about the hundreds of books in the library and recommending things. I think being a librarian could be a very interesting job. You could read as much as you liked in between checking books in and out for people.
The library is a very fine-looking building on the other side of the nouvelle ville and even though it’s a bit of a walk to get there it’s worth it. I love wandering through its rows of tall bookshelves, feeling as if I can not only hide away from the world there but even escape into other worlds between the covers of all those lovely books. It’s helped me to stop missing our home in Paris quite so much and to feel not quite so trapped here by the circumstances of the war. Mademoiselle Dubois kindly showed me where to find the books that are translated into French, so I can read those ones to Nina. She loved listening to Lord Peter et le Bellona Club and she was very good at guessing who the murderer might be.
We’ve been spending a lot of time in the courtyard and Nina can skip up to 200 times now without stopping. My record is 339. When we’re not reading Dorothy L. Sayers books, Nina tells me about her family and life in Morocco. One day I confessed to her that I have a lot of nightmares and that there are many times when I don’t sleep well and she said she has a very ancient auntie who might be able to help me. Apparently her auntie is a sort of storyteller who is very wise so people come to listen to her. Nina says she’s very good at listening to people and in her turn diagnosing what they need and then she sells them better dreams if they are troubled. I didn’t realise you could buy dreams but Nina says you can, but you can only get them from someone like her ancient auntie who has special powers. I think I would very much like to meet this ‘dreamseller’ to see if it’s true, but when we asked Kenza if we could go she shook her head very firmly and said my maman wouldn’t approve. I know she’s right about that, but I’d still like to buy some new dreams.
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.