A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (18 page)

But cement does not allow the walls to breathe in the same way that traditional plaster does. Moreover as cement contains lime, you risk creating an excessively lime-rich mixture, resulting in walls that will crumble in a few years – a bit like the ‘concrete cancer’ problems in many Western buildings more than twenty
years
old. What is the amount of cement that can be added before this happens? No one knows.

Sandy and I quickly recovered from our initial shock and were thrilled that things were happening at last. It would be months before the house returned to anything like its former glory, with a few modern adaptations like a decent kitchen, but we were on our way.

By the second day, the kitchen looked like a different room. And amazingly, the two major structural problems that we had thought would take so much time and money had evaporated. The bowed wall and the collapsing ceiling were in fact illusions. A false wall had been constructed out of cardboard to hide the top half of a storage mezzanine. And when Mustapha and his men took the plaster off the ceiling, magnificent cedar beams were revealed, completely intact. They formed a central square, the shape of a
halka
– a traditional open hole through to the room above, which at some stage had been covered in.

There was about a foot of rubble on the kitchen floor, but the room now felt twice as big. Behind the cardboard wall, we discovered not just more space but a collection of treasure and trash. We were thrilled to find a tall earthenware urn, intact and complete with sticky brown remnants of the olive oil it once stored. It looked like a Greek amphora without the handles. Then we pulled out the remains of an old crystal-set radio, a fishing rod, a rusted metal bucket with a lid, a soccer ball, an old picture of the King, and a woven basket from southern Morocco, used for collecting
dates
. There were also piles of rotten wood, which we planned on donating to the local bakery’s kilns.

As the demolition progressed over the next few days, it became clear that we were employing too many chiefs and not enough Indians. Apart from Sandy and me, in the way of overseers there were Jon, Jenny, Rachid, Zina and Si Mohamed. Only three people were actually doing the physical labour, but now that the management structure was set up it was difficult to change. On the plus side, Mustapha, whose real work would begin when the reconstruction started, spent time teaching Sandy Darija. In the meantime his two workers, Abdul Ramin and Mernissi, were the ones doing the banging, digging, hefting and carrying.

Mustapha had asked me to buy gunpowder tea, the sort that is mixed with fresh mint to create the tea Moroccans drink in copious quantities. I did this, and he seemed to have the idea that I should make it. I resisted, not wanting to get trapped in the role of tea lady to the workers. As Si Mohamed was sitting around watching the work, I palmed the job off on him.

‘Moroccan whiskey,’ said Mustapha, sipping the over-sweet brew. He claimed that with this tea they didn’t need to eat. They worked through lunch and left an hour early, at four o’clock.

Sandy had just finished washing down the steps to the front entrance, in an attempt to stop sand and lime coming inside, when another donkey train arrived with yet more sand. As the workers had left for the day, we got the drivers to deposit it outside the door. Several young boys in the alley were taking a great interest in proceedings, so Sandy asked them if they wanted to clean the
street
of the spilt sand for a few dirhams. They were keen, and he gave them a hose. Big mistake. They had a lot of fun, generating a great deal of muddy water, which ran down the hill and under the front door of a house further down the alley.

I had often seen its owner, a tiny woman, standing on her doorstep and staring along the street with vacant eyes, as though waiting for someone or something that never arrived. She ignored me whenever I greeted her, but now she popped out of her door like a jack-in-the-box, yelling and screaming at the kids, who all scarpered, leaving Sandy standing there helpless. He did not have the words to apologise to her or say he would fix the problem.

Hearing the commotion, another neighbour put his head out, and after assessing the situation, came and rescued Sandy by taking a broom and marching down to her doorstep. Sandy fetched another broom and joined him. They cleaned her steps and front entrance, the woman muttering at them all the while. When they’d finished and she’d closed her door, the neighbour pointed to his head and tapped, indicating she was crazy.

‘
Fou!
’ he said, just in case Sandy hadn’t understood.

Sick of living out of a suitcase, I resolved to find a wardrobe to keep our clothes out of the dust. My starting point was the workshop of a local carpenter, an Aladdin’s cave of old doors taken from Fassi houses. Those houses must have been very grand, for the doors were carved cedar, over three and a half metres in height. Their original owners had either decided they needed
the
money or wanted to modernise. And of course there was also the possibility that some had been stolen.

The carpenter was a young man who looked like Cat Stevens in his fundamentalist phase, with a black beard, white surcoat and skullcap.

‘Who will buy all these doors?’ I asked him.

‘God willing, we leave for Marrakesh this night,’ he said, making it sound like he was off on a voyage of many months. I understood immediately: the doors were being sold to wealthy foreigners. I suspected that many of them would end up in New York or Paris apartments – more pieces of cultural heritage lost to Fez.

Among all the gigantic doors, one set stood out. They were tiny. Made of heavy cedar, they were so small they looked like they’d been made for a race of hobbit-sized folk. But more than that, they were a technicolour blast. Layer after layer of paint had been scraped back in a haphazard fashion to reveal patches of orange, blue, yellow and various shades of green. They had the exuberance of an abstract painting, all the more interesting because the art was unintentional – the result of decades of utilitarian renewal.

Quick to spot my interest, the carpenter was at my shoulder. ‘Those come from the Mellah,’ he said.

Sandy and I had walked through the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter in New Fez, a few days earlier. Once a thriving community had lived there, but now only a couple of hundred Jewish people remained in Fez, and most had relocated to the Ville Nouvelle. Some houses in the Mellah still looked lived in and cared for, but many were in a sad state of disrepair.

One house in particular had caught our eye. It was of graceful proportions with stylishly carved window frames and balconies. Jewish houses in Fez are unusual in having their balconies on the outside, there being no need for women to be shielded from passers-by. No longer occupied, this house was sliding into an irrevocable decline. Through a shutter hanging drunkenly off a window, we glimpsed a room with beautiful plasterwork, similar to that in our
massreiya
, now exposed to the elements.

‘It’s a pity there’s not some sort of heritage organisation to restore houses like this,’ Sandy mused. ‘If they’ve been empty for, say, fifty years, they could be rented out to pay for the work. Any surplus could go back into the community.’

It wasn’t a bad idea. ‘But what if the descendants of the owners returned after a few years?’

‘It could be held in trust for them,’ Sandy said. ‘If the community has an interest in maintaining the house, then it will be conserved.’

Jews had begun to settle in Fez from its earliest days, and their fortunes waxed and waned depending on the attitudes of those in power. In the ninth century, a raft of restrictions were imposed on them, including a decree that they could only wear black clothes and sandals, no shoes. They could not ride horses and had to pay higher taxes than everybody else. When Fez was conquered by extremists in 1035, six thousand of their number were massacred.

But by the thirteenth century, when the Berber Merind dynasty ruled, Jews were protected and their businesses thrived.
The
Mellah was established in 1438, just outside Fez, ostensibly to shield Jews from the Muslim populace. The site of the Mellah had previously been known as al-Mallah, meaning ‘salty area’, and eventually the word ‘Mellah’ came to refer to Jewish quarters in other Moroccan cities as well. The explanation for the word’s origins has changed over time, and today you might be told that the Jews, in return for their protection, salted the decapitated heads of those who rebelled against the sultan, in preparation for a grisly display on the city’s walls. Although the practice of displaying heads on the walls survived into the twentieth century, I couldn’t find any evidence for the salting story.

Tolerance levels continued to fluctuate, particularly when the Merind dynasty fell, and then again at the end of the eighteenth century when the entire Jewish community was expelled from Fez and the synagogues destroyed. Two years later they were permitted to come back, but only a quarter returned.

The French ruling classes of the early twentieth century were hardly sympathetic to the Jews, as the notorious Dreyfus Affair demonstrated, and when the protectorate began in 1912 violence flared in the Mellah. Although Jews were not deported from Morocco during World War II, they suffered humiliation under the Vichy government, and many chose to emigrate when the state of Israel was created.

Nowadays, Morocco has a reputation for being the most tolerant of all the Islamic countries towards its Jewish population, which is around five thousand nationally, and many Moroccans will tell you proudly that the two groups live in harmony. Morocco
is
the only country that allows Jews to retain dual citizenship after emigrating to Israel, and many still return each year for religious festivals. Several have held high positions in business and government.

I was captivated by the doors from the Mellah in the carpentry workshop. I could see years of history in them, a multitude of stories of daily lives through the generations. But, I reminded myself, I was here to look for a wardrobe. The last thing I needed was a set of doors I had no use for.

In a corner of the shop, I spotted an old cupboard with carved front panels being used as storage for the carpenter’s tools. On closer inspection, I saw it had been damaged and badly patched in numerous places. It would do. When I asked the price I was told an astronomical amount.

‘You will see something like this in the museum,’ the carpenter murmured near my ear.

Maybe, but at that price I would be paying more for the woodworm and holes than for the actual wood. I bargained him down half-heartedly, then said I was going to fetch my husband. I was unsure about the cupboard but keen to get a photo of the doors.

When I returned with Sandy in tow he was immediately struck by the doors, in the same way I had been. I took a couple of photos of them and then showed him the cupboard. He was unenthusiastic and turned back to the doors, asking how much they were. The carpenter told him a price that would have paid for the refit of our kitchen. We smiled and shook our heads, saying we couldn’t afford them, and walked out.

.
Sandy
was already at the bottom of the hill when I made the mistake of pausing and looking back.

‘What are you thinking?’ the carpenter called, sensing a sign of weakness. ‘Is it not a pity that you do not have such doors?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It is.’

‘You say how much you will pay.’

‘Two thousand, five hundred dirhams,’ I said. I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know that Sandy had heard this and was shaking his head in disbelief at my audacity, as this was a fraction of the price quoted.

‘Seven thousand,’ said the carpenter.

‘Two thousand, six hundred.’

‘Let us be serious,’ he said. ‘Six thousand.’

This went on until the carpenter, seeing I wasn’t going to shift much further, accepted three and a half thousand dirhams and the doors were ours. Although pleased with the deal, I had mixed feelings, wondering if by buying the doors I was fuelling a market in cultural heritage that I did not agree with. I consoled myself with the thought that at least these two remarkable doors would remain in Fez.