A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco (2 page)

It made sense as soon as he said it. The kind of place we were after was unlikely to be advertised on any website, but would be hidden deep in the Medina, where few foreigners lived.

There were obvious drawbacks, like the nuttiness of buying a house on the other side of the planet, a leg-cramping, bloodclot-inducing, 26-hour plane flight away. And just when would we actually get to spend time there? Our jobs consumed our lives – I worked on a busy metropolitan newspaper and Sandy had a national radio show, and the news does not conform to regular working hours. When exactly would we fit in a commitment to a property in another country?

Moreover we had absolutely no idea how to go about buying a house in Fez. There was no help on hand, no DIY manual, no
Morocco for Dummies
. And there was the problem of what to do with it when we weren’t there. I had come across stories about vacant
houses
being ransacked, stripped of their doors and light fittings. One old house had collapsed after thieves removed the supporting beams.

As wage slaves with major mortgage commitments, we’d be moving way out of our comfort zone. And what about the language difficulties? In most of Morocco, with the exception of the major tourist areas, English is a rarity. I spoke a bit of schoolgirl French, and Sandy could muster a dozen or so words of Darija, the Moroccan dialect of Arabic.

The arguments against were endless, but the idea refused to go away. It hung around and fermented, bubbling in shadowy corners of our minds. What eventuated was to prove utterly different to what we’d imagined. Naïve and unprepared, we stepped into the unknown, and into the most intense and exhilarating experience of our lives.

WHEN WE MENTIONED
our fantasy of buying a traditional Arab-style riad, or courtyard house, in Fez to a friend he said dismissively, ‘What a terribly nineteenth-century thing to do.’

He had a point. For most of my life I have been enchanted by tales of early European women travellers, such as Isabelle Eberhardt and Jane Digby, who broke out of the strictures of lives far more confining than my own and found another way to live, in Arab cultures. Of course, such adventures are only romantic if you ignore the fact that Eberhardt, who disguised herself as a man, contracted syphilis then drowned penniless and alone, washed away with her final manuscript.

There were other acquaintances who, post-September 11, asked, ‘Why would you want to buy a house in a Muslim country? They hate us.’

This was easier to counter; we knew it simply wasn’t true of
Moroccans
, who can be friendly and hospitable to the point of overwhelming. We were also aware that people in Western countries tend to view Muslim nations as a monolithic bloc, whereas there are many cultural differences between them, despite common elements. The present King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, has built bridges with the West, and was the first Muslim ruler to express sympathy for the United States following the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Besides, we saw our venture as an opportunity to explore Islamic culture further, and to gain a deeper insight into why the Way of the Prophet has thrived for so long.

There was a certain inevitability about my interest in Morocco. My parents had visited the country in 1961, long before it was fashionable to do so. At that time only a handful of hardy souls, forerunners of the hippies who were later to invade, made their way down from Spain, following the sun. Enthusiastic young travellers, Meg and Henry drove their Volkswagen beetle around Morocco’s few, mostly unpaved, roads, and after some hair-raising adventures ended up pitching their tent in the camping ground at Marrakesh. It appears they had a particularly convivial time there, because I was born exactly nine months later.

Being conceived in Morocco and growing up in New Zealand, I learned to walk at a shuffle in my father’s Moroccan babouches, surrounded by mementos from their visit. One of their more colourful tales was of the night they camped on the side of a road high in the Atlas Mountains. In the middle of the night, a truck came winding up from the valley below, its headlights swinging
across
my parents’ tent. They stayed in their sleeping-bags, hoping it would continue past, but when the truck drew level with their car its engine stopped.

Rocks crunched as footsteps moved towards them. My father, deciding drastic action was called for, unzipped his sleeping-bag, grabbed the tomahawk, and when he judged the moment was right, leapt out wearing only striped pyjama bottoms and swinging the tomahawk above his head, bellowing a Maori haka. ‘Ka
mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka ora, Tenei te tangata puhuruhuru …
’ (It is death! It is death! It is life! It is life! This is the hairy man …’)

He must have been a terrifying sight, because four djellaba-clad men ran to their truck and sped off into the night. I wonder if those men now tell their grandchildren about the time they stopped to help the occupants of a car they thought had broken down and were confronted by a screaming madman.

By early 2003, the idea of buying a house in Fez was sufficiently implanted for Sandy and I to start putting money aside. Forget buying a new car, clothes, or even basic house maintenance – this was our escape fund. The second part of our plan was to get ourselves back there without dipping into it.

The previous year, we had taken holiday jobs as tour managers for a small group of well-heeled tourists in France and the UK. Now we proposed Morocco as a destination. After studying and planning for months, we flew out in October and showed our group as much of Morocco as was possible in three short weeks, with the help of a local guide. It was spring and the countryside had transformed from the dry brown of our previous trip to lush
green
, liberally sprinkled with poppies, irises, daisies and other wildflowers.

Tour leading entailed a level of luxury entirely different from what we were accustomed to, and it wasn’t always for the better. Inside a four-or five-star hotel, with the exception of a few designer touches, you could be almost anywhere in the world. There was a sameness, a monotone, that irked us both, but for some of our guests such accommodation still wasn’t up to par.

‘I thought there’d be hairdryers in the hotel bathrooms,’ one wealthy woman whined.

Many people in Morocco don’t even have running water, never mind washing machines or refrigeration, so hairdryers are not considered an essential item. But to her mind they were, and she left us in no doubt that Sandy and I were negligent for not ensuring their presence.

We had gone to great lengths to give our clients a varied cultural experience, but it wasn’t always to their taste. We arranged some of our city stays in beautiful riads, which, being several hundred years old, had rooms that were not standard sizes. Nor were the bathrooms always ideal.

‘Why can’t we stay in the new part of town?’ an elderly man complained. ‘I’m tired of all this history.’

It wasn’t a sentiment Sandy and I shared. When we reached Fez we stood gazing down over the ancient walls of the Medina and the decrepit houses within, just biding their time for people with the vision, money, time and energy to restore them. We confirmed to one another that those people should include us.

During my Internet surfing, I had come across the website of an American living in Fez who claimed that, although the Medina is the best-preserved mediaeval walled city in the world, its architectural heritage is under threat. Many Moroccans cannot afford to maintain the houses they live in, let alone restore them to their original splendour. If those with the means to do so, foreigners included, were to rescue some of the significant houses, this would make a big difference to the preservation of the Medina. The key point, the website argued, was the need for proper restoration, as opposed to modernisation. And rather than gentrification, a healthy mix of rich and poor living together, as had always been the case in the past, was the ideal.

One night, Sandy and I escaped from our tour group to meet the website’s author, David Amster, over a drink. Originally from Chicago, David was in his mid-forties, amiable, intelligent, with a wonderfully dry sense of humour. His full-time job was Director of the American Language Center in Fez, and he had called the city home for seven years. He was a passionate advocate for the traditional architecture of the Medina, about which he was extremely knowledgeable, giving lectures to visitors from the Smithsonian Institute once or twice a year. He owned five houses in Fez, one of which was a ruin. It had completely collapsed, leaving only columns and mosaics, which made it resemble a Roman temple.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ Sandy asked.

‘At the moment,’ David said, ‘I have no idea. The site’s under six feet of rubble. It’ll take hundreds of donkey hours to move.’

But he didn’t appear too concerned. ‘Look,’ he continued,
pulling
out of his bag a sliver of wrought iron that looked like an oversized thumb tack and passing it to me. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? It’s a handmade nail.’

This nail, several hundred years old, was to be the prototype for those David was having made. After months of searching, he had finally found a man with the necessary skills, but there was to be one small difference: the heads of the new nails would be slightly bigger, so that future experts could tell old from new.

Sandy and I exchanged glances. This was restoration on a whole new level. It wasn’t just popping down to the hardware store and getting a bag of cheap Chinese nails and a bit of four-by-two. There was obviously more to doing up a house here than we realised.

‘Would you like to see the house I live in?’ David asked. ‘I’ve had a builder and his team working on it for four years.’

He didn’t need to ask twice. Leaving the modern quarter, we passed under the Bab Bou Jeloud – the Blue Gate – and into the Medina, then down innumerable dark alleys populated by cats who blinked at us, or slunk away on our approach. In the moonlight, one alley looked much like another and I was amazed at David’s unerring sense of direction. We finally arrived at a large doorway, and as he ushered us in the first thing I noticed was the strong, fragrant smell of freshly sanded cedarwood.

We were standing in a dimly lit courtyard with an atrium stretching high above. All around was a wealth of decoration: blue, green and white tilework – or
zellij
– intricate plaster and wood carving, and two enormous cedar doors. It was like a jewel box, its beauty so overwhelming it was hard to imagine living in such a palace.

In contrast, the furniture was surprisingly Spartan: a bed, a single chair, nowhere to cook as yet. But who needs possessions and comforts when you wake up every day to such splendour? We had never envisaged anything like this. The prospect of restoring such a house was at once daunting and thrilling.

A few days later, I farewelled Sandy and the tour party at Casablanca airport. Sandy had to return to Australia for work, but I caught the train back to Fez, with the intention of finding us a house.

FEZ WAS ONCE
the largest city on the planet. Founded in 789, it became the centre of Moroccan scientific and religious learning, a status due to the altruism of a remarkable woman named Fatima al-Fihria. One of a group of refugees who fled religious persecution in Kairouan, Tunisia, in the ninth century, Fatima was from a wealthy merchant family and used her inheritance to start a place of learning. Karaouiyine University was completed in 859 and is the oldest educational institution in the world. Classes in religion are still held at the complex, which also contains a mosque and a library.

Fatima’s act was even more altruistic than it might appear. Being a woman, she couldn’t actually attend the university herself, but plenty of men did – Muslims and Christians from all over North Africa, the Middle East and Europe. In fact Karaouiyine had a major impact on mediaeval Europe. In the tenth century, Arabic
numerals
, including the concept of zero, were taken back to France by a student who went on to become Pope Sylvester II. He used his newfound understanding to invent a more efficient abacus, the basis of modern computing. Karaouiyine University also rejuvenated and spread the Indian concept of the decimal point, for which accountants are no doubt eternally grateful.