Morocco. Picture taken by Lydia Fazio Theys

I think of the bustle of Marrakech and I see the women -- veiled, cloth-bundled women, cloaked to the wrists, often walking in groups. Pairs of gesturing hands flit against the flowing backdrop of robes like so many mocha butterflies. Dark, hesitant eyes, emphasized and enlarged by the veil, steal careful and unobtrusive glances at their surroundings. That vivid image has stayed in my mind for many years, but it has new significance for me now in our grave new world.

The trip had been a whim. One October day in 1976, my then future-husband and I were listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash. All on board the trai-ai-ain . . . Of course, the train was the song's namesake, the Marrakech Express, and suddenly, right there in our living room, we knew they were singing to us. So with a freedom known only to academics and perhaps the wealthy unemployed, we planned a January trip to a place we knew next to nothing about: Morocco. I was writing a paper -- science and Islam in the Middle Ages -- so I had learned a lot of dry, disembodied, six-hundred-year-old facts. And of course, since we'd both seen " The Road to Morocco," we had that bizarre Hope-Crosby image buried somewhere in our heads. But aside from that, plans for this trip ran on the intoxicating fumes of impossibly exotic place-names like Marrakech, Fez and Casablanca.

Morocco didn't disappoint. The sights, sounds and smells were like none we had ever experienced. Monkeys and magicians; majestic mountains and vast desert; an acre of royal medieval tombs, right in the heart of a major city, lost for over one hundred years -- all of these were part of Morocco. And we did catch the train from Casablanca going south, although I remember almost nothing about it. Except, there were no ducks, pigs or chickens; it was just a train with a lot of soldiers on board. But we were hopelessly heart smitten our first night in Marrakech when a glimmering platter of a moon rose over the pink and terracotta walls of the city.

Everywhere we went, men filled the public roles: waiters, shopkeepers, guides, snake charmers, ticket-takers. Still, it was the women who fascinated me and I began to play a game. Looking directly into the eyes of a woman walking toward me, I smiled. Nine times out of ten, she smiled back. I saw the smile in the crinkle around her eyes and the slight tilt of her head. It thrilled me to steal even such a brief glimpse of the mysterious being in there. Of course, I never was sure exactly what we were sharing. I understood so little of their culture and they so little of mine that we didn't have much to say in that fragile instant.

Wanting to see the desert, we rented a tiny Renault and drove through the snow-capped Atlas Mountains toward Algeria. As we passed through small villages, I waved and smiled at women -- many unveiled -- and children walking along the road. Sometimes, they waved or smiled back, but more often they just looked; this wasn't quite the same as woman-to-woman looks in the eye. The roads were poor and icy at times and other vehicles were rare, but as luck would have it, a passing truck threw a rock at our windshield, shattering it to bits. With the glass removed, I extended my game even further. Now, I was free to stick my hand or face right through the place where the glass should have been. That almost always got a smile, sometimes even a laugh. It was the shock of the unexpected, I suppose -- the breach of a barrier no longer there.

Back in Marrakech, at our somewhat seedy hotel -- we were, after all, academics, not the wealthy unemployed -- the owner asked a favor. Fouad, the oldest of five young brothers who ran the hotel, spoke some English, and we often sat and talked with him in the evenings. This night, he said that his brothers wanted to learn English too, since they planned to visit the States some day. They had a textbook; if he lent me his tape recorder, would I read the lessons out loud and make a practice tape for them? Returning to our room alone, I set up the tape and opened the book. I was horrified. Small, black and leather-bound, the 1930s volume spoke strictly to an old-fashioned, prim and proper, upper-crust segment of British society. Hardly a phrase in it ever had been uttered on the streets of New York. " Will there be high tea in the garden today?" " Please advise my staff when our valises reach our rooms." " Have you a Gramophone we might borrow?" The brothers seemed to know as little about us as we did about them.

Lydia and her dog Pepper

But that was in the pre-Internet, pre-CNN, pre-instant-information days of the seventies. The people leading the United States today came of age then, in something of a knowledge vacuum regarding a huge segment of the world's population. Even growing up in the ethnic tossed salad that was Brooklyn I learned precious little about the Arab world. As a Columbia University grad student, I had begun researching my paper only to find that many of the sources I needed, while in the library, were in Arabic only. This assumed lack of interest probably was correct. I think we can see where it's gotten us.

So what about now? The United States, never known for its appreciation of other cultures, has reacted to the horrible events of September 11 by retracing and deepening, again and again, the line in the sand dividing " them" from " us." Many of us don't seem to distinguish between Afghanistan and Iraq, between young men who run hotels and suicide bombers. We fail to look beyond political rhetoric, concerns about oil production and the melodramatic red herrings of " good" versus " evil" to find and understand the human beings involved. The key, I think, is to ask the right questions, then listen to the answers, and that can be difficult when you don't know what to ask. I wonder sometimes if any of those brothers ever showed up in New York or Los Angeles and asked, complete with slight Brooklyn accent, " Will there be high tea in the garden today?"

Bio:
Lydia Fazio Theys is an astronomer by training, a technical writer by necessity and a creative writer by night. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she now lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two children. Two cats, one fat and the other crotchety, a completely neurotic Italian Greyhound, and whatever else wanders in through the cat door round out the mix. She recently has begun submitting work for publication, and her pieces can be found in slush piles around the country.
You can email Lydia at lydiatheys@hotmail.com.