Crimson heat rains down on ochre landscapes, the souk stalls spilling out much more vibrant colors: plush pink pillows, yellow bananas, green afghans, orange turbans, and violet roses. Beige and mustard-colored Berber carpets and more flamboyant magic carpets reminiscent of a Scheherazade tale protect the stalls from the elements—and for the right price, you can buy such a “roof” for your foyer or living room or, if you’re really opulent, your palatial outhouse.

But I’m here in this medina quarter for something more muted. My wife’s favorite tagine has stewed its last lamb salona, no thanks to my accidentally cracking it into three pieces, and I must replace it. I don’t visit the souk often. It’s not a place for me. I love the sights and sounds, especially the oud, ney, and bendir, played together or individually, telling the traditional stories or finding space for new tunes. For will not future generations need something from my time to look back on as traditional, otherworldly, reverent? I’ve no gift to be able to leave anything like that behind. I’m just a simple instructor of mathematics—and everyone seems to outgrow that.

It’s the people here that are too much for me. I hear languages I don’t know and can’t understand. I see ethnicities and clothes that don’t fit here. Just travelers or marauders who want to look at us but not look like us. They can change no more than I can change. I’m not against people seeing the souks, the houses of worship, the ancestral sites that make Morocco a gem among the sand. But they steal, lie, and cheat to gain favor. I see through that. I abhor having to endure it for the simple purchase of a tagine. But here I am.

I notice in one pocket of the market a man with a small booth, no more than a few feet wide and deep. But he can’t be ignored because everything about him shines as bright as the sun, even though all his wares are in shadow. How long must he have spent polishing each item to make them basically blind you into reaching out for him?

As I got closer, I could see he had engraved plates of gold, silver, and color—each one etched with a verse from the Koran. Never the same one as far as I could tell, but he assuredly had some duplicates in case there was a sudden demand for a certain line. I watched while a group of determined women grilled him on his craft. He stuttered his answers, his guttural tone trying to hide something, I determined decidedly. All of them turned away, finding the price too much, except for a slightly tanned woman with a British accent to her almost perfect Arabic. She alone would have been all this market really needed in terms of foreigners. But she was as rare as I thought these plates might be.

That’s when I remembered this was quite a thing a decade ago. Lots of people had them, but there came a moment, maybe when the local supply of these precious metals became low, that people sold them to meet demands for their use in medical and educational settings. But could it have also been that they were being stolen? Who would buy such plates knowing they were likely now possessed by a thief? But there’s always a market for ill-gotten gains. Perhaps there’s even a souk somewhere, maybe in caves or even at various intervals along trade routes, where robbers exchange goods for equally stolen money. But here, if you could blend in enough, you could sell stolen property. I’m not sure this man was in the best place for that because his products were much too bright, so he couldn’t gave been selling robbed items, could he?

There was something else about these plates, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I know we had one. Maybe we still do. One of these things my wife would display that I didn’t pay much attention to. I wasn’t always in that habit, but I couldn’t grasp the beauty of the Koran being chiseled into a metal plate. No one ever ate off these plates. Nourishment for the soul, I suppose, and not a functional piece of tableware for a Sunday meal. I couldn’t wrap my head around the potential layers of metaphors and allusions.

I wandered away to haggle with a potter for a new large tagine and a couple smaller ones for emergencies. I purchased some spices from the pepperer: cardamom, cinnamon, sumac, nutmeg, and cloves—all for different recipes, I assure you. I reacquainted myself with the herbalist, who was a classmate in school, and he sold me Lebanese hashish, Yemeni dohka tobacco, and Darjeeling tea. You truly can travel the world at a souk, but as my packages prove, I’m loyal to my region of the world.

I headed back to the plate stall and I found myself face-to-face with the metalsmith, if he were indeed the one who had the talent for such an art. Everyone else had moved on and I was his sole customer, his sole audience for his monologue about the gospel of Muhammad and the good fortunes one would have if one had a plate of faith in their home. To keep with the theme, I pretended to eat up his exuberance. I nevertheless had a bitter taste in my mouth, but I never let my words or expressions give me away. He talked so much out of fear or anxiety or perhaps to distract you from discovering any truths.

As he spoke, his eyes darting everywhere, perhaps for thieves or perhaps for better customers, I gently lifted one of the plates, not wanting it to have the same fate as our faithful tagine. That’s when I saw not just the verse on the front—“Do what is beautiful. Allah loves those who do what is beautiful.”—but the etchings on the back. I had seen them once on our plate. Once was all I needed because the words had an everyday familiarity for me: They were the names of our children, which I recited when I looked toward Mecca, upon Allah, across the heavens. 

I suppose anything in the world can be duplicated: quilt stitches, recipes for tubers, metal plates, Koran verses, and the names of your three children. But there’s a sickening feeling when you read the words Farrah, Hafiz, and Rahim, penetrating soft metal for eternity, and you know this isn’t chance. You think, did the wife decide it was time to replace the plate with some other memento of faith or did someone steal it?

I tell the man that this plate in my hands is quite unusual. He stops talking, stares into my eyes, perhaps recognizing me, the man he looked for to ensure he had left his home before breaking into it, the children on their way to school, chaperoned by their mother. He asks why. I say, these are the exact names of my children, all dying three summers ago from cholera. Where did you get this plate, I inquire.

He stares a bit more, he studies my clothes, not those of an impoverished man, and he grabs all the plates he can, runs out the back of his souk and trips over coiled snakes of rope. I push through the gathering crowd, my children still in my hands, their names still on my tongue, their deaths still on my heart—also etched there for eternity—and I unceremoniously jam a foot into his back, waiting impatiently for a horse-mounted muhtasib to take him away before I kill him.

– Christopher Stolle